Are you a MICROA1 Owner? (Calling A1SE Owners!)

Hello all.

Well, sadly, with the newest releases out there, it now seems that it won't be long before our Beloved Micro's will not be of much use soon.

We have 2 choices, junk them or perhaps sell them on, (but the price will now drop dramatically) or

Try and see how much interest there is in the following proposal I have.

1: See how many MicroA1 owners there are out there. - See if there is enough interest to approach an Amiga company to make PCI risers for the MicroA1's to allow PCI Graphics cards to be added

2: If Step one is sucessful, try and raise a bounty for someone to port over a driver for a PCI RADEON card (Don't care which as long as its better than what we have now and get it working, WITHOUT having to sacrifice the loss of DMA or USB)

Obviously, if the response is luke warm, or not high enough we may as well accept the inevitable that the Micro's will eventually be as effective as a door stop. (That is my opinion, yours may vary in milage)

So, If you are a MicroA1 owner. Are you interested?

@Mikey_C

Even if someone came up with a riser card that worked (and there have been a couple of attempts in the past), and a Radeon 9250 could be plugged in (which /should/ work with atiradeon.chip), there is still the matter of the firmware update in order to get the riser to be seen correctly. As I understand it, the reason DMA and USB have to be disabled is only down to an (as yet) unreleased UBoot version which sees the card in the slot.

Whether this is purely just a firmware problem, or whether there are hardware issues to overcome, I don't know. I would say don't hold your breath.

The Micro A1 was at the very bottom limit of useablity when it was released TBH, the choice of graphics chip and memory limitation basically sealed it's fate from the word go. Now that the OS includes features that require more GFX ram, the micro is becoming more and more obsolete with each update.

Yes, it's a shame, but that's the cost of progress. The AmigaOne boards were stepping stones to the future, and now the tide is coming in fast.

Simon

Oh, how Windows.

Perhaps someone will port MorphOS or AROS onto the Micro A1 to allow MicroA1 owners, who parted with a lot of cash for their products in most cases to continue to use an AmigaOS that gets updated.

Prepare for it everyone, it sounds like you'll need to throw away your Sam 440, your AmigaONE XE and SEs and part with 1,000-1,500 to continue to use and buy AmigaOS4.x.

Thankfully AROS runs on the Sam 440.

@Mikey_C

Hi Mikey,

I still have the Micro uA1 I won at BB3 and it's running fine on AOS ver 4.1 ATM.

So I would support it to keep it going with a riser card etc.

Not just for usability but for the future, after all it's a development machine which lead the way.


Kind Regards, Michael

aka rockape

I have no intention to sell my sam440ep, i think that 64 mega are enough for an operatying system.. you can always disable things like shadow and transparency and you still have amiga os

For gaming yes it's not enough, but at the moment our graphic system doesn't push our graphic boards to their limits so i don't see the problem to sell a nice and good hardware like the sam440

@nubechecorre

Exactly, I was talking only about micro owners. If they are happy to turn off graphical effects and run 16 bit screens (although not too many), then there is no reason why they shouldn't keep enjoying their systems.

I fail to see why AmigaOS shouldn't progress just because an old machine with hardware limitations is struggling to keep up though.

The Sam440 series with it's 64MB should keep going for a long time yet.

Simon

And I fail to see why the very people whose early adoption even made this limping effort possible should get discarded.

Perhaps you should ware making such dramatic all encompassing statements like:

"Yes, it's a shame, but that's the cost of progress. The AmigaOne boards were stepping stones to the future, and now the tide is coming in fast."

Because as far as I know the X1000 is also an AmigaOne board, but given you are talking in the past tense you must be referring to the SE, XE, and Micro.

Some kind of statement of end-of-life would be welcome for those looking to keep using their about to be washed away by this fast incoming tide and those of us looking to ditch kit for an idea they no longer think is workable.

Of course you may be referring to the "multicore" supporting 64bit version of AmigaOS which won't run on any of the current systems. However, I won't hold my breath because it won't have the applications support for some time. It will need to support a 32bit mode and benefit from 32bit developers for a few years.

Those that paid for their boards will perhaps want to sell them, those that didn't pay for them might make a tidy profit.

Gents

I would rather this thread did not deteriorate into a flamefest. I am sure that there is a way to upgrade the graphics of a MicroA1 and extend its life without having to resort to compromises such as those that have been mentioned already.

This has at the moment, nothing to do with Hyperion-Entertainment (unless the time comes for helping out with the sources for UBOOT)

It is purely a MicroA1 owner's driven effort. Providing there are enough MicroA1 owners left to do something about it.

Cheers.

Mikey C

@Mikey_C

I am an owner of a MicroA1 too. While CPU is good enough to run many OS4.1 applications with 512MB ram, (For example (Afxgroup's Homeworld and Freespace 2 ports are running very well with 32MB VRAM), but modern stuff like Aquaria runs at 2-3 fps with R7000). Yes R7000 and 32MB VRam is becoming limited everyday.

However I am not sure if a PCI Riser card and a bounty will make sense.

Perhaps selling MicroA1s and investing to SAM460 and X1000 will be very a better choice for us and for the tiny Amiga market...

@Mikey_C

There are no flames here, its a frank discussion. However perhaps you should invite Rigo to explain his statement "Yes, it's a shame, but that's the cost of progress. The AmigaOne boards were stepping stones to the future, and now the tide is coming in fast." in less scaremongering tones on another thread so you can move on.

@Rigo

@Sinan

You won't get a good price for it., I'm sure.

@DaveP

The statement requires no explanation as far as I can see. It's obvious that progress is going to overtake the older hardware we have. Holding up that progress for the sake of a few old machines will get AmigaOS nowhere.

Most likely the majority of micro AmigaOne boards will be faulty by the time they are obsolete anyway.

You are correct that support for 32bit machines will have to continue, there are simply too many of them around to drop it, but that should not hamper moving onwards and upwards.

Simon

@Mikey_C

The problem with pci risers/graphics seems to be, at least from what information I've been able to gather, mixed and varied as it seems to be, that uboot doesn't "correctly" initialise the pci system making it impossible for graphics.riser cards to work, id kind of hoped someone would have figured out a work around by now but that seems unlikely, I did find a thread suggesting that there are people more than willing to work on the issue but they lack the source + documentation to make it happen!

Of course, if a simple enough hardware solution where an option for the riser issue it could, potentially, be applied to an off the shelf riser card, but this also seems unlikely :(

@DaveP

This happens every day in the pc marked. Macines gets old and outdated. It's just how it is,and will be. So i fail to see your reasons here. I'm with rigo on this one.

@Antique

What reasons you fail to see escape me. Perhaps you could elucidate on another thread.

@DaveP



As i told,old hw gets outdated,and if one wants to allways support old hw,how can the os evolve? And this is quite normal in the pc world. Do people moan about that aswell?? It's just nature.

@Antique

Tell me what other similarities you see with the PC market here? I assume high volume of sales and low manufacturing costs and easily accessible hardware would name but three?

@Antique

Read the whole post.

How will os4 mature if you allways must support all hw even outdated for years???
it uses electricity for one.

Quote:

@Antique

......

I read the whole post, it contained a false premise. I'm pointing it out to you. I don't particularly care what the truth is, if the truth is that the early adopters and those who PAID for their ua1 are getting stiffed soon (And shortly thereafter the XE and SE owners) then if it was the PC market I'd expect some statement of service/support end period rather than just "the tide is rushing in".