Amigaone X1000 - 3 years in.

@Srtest

People loved the Commodore Amiga because the hardware was unique. They would be interested in finding out what all the chips do, how powerful it was by accessing the hardware chips in assembler - one has lost that these days.

Just the other day a hardware engineer built a new motherboard - just to learn assembly language (68k with a VDU).

The Amiga chipset was and is Amigas GOLD, not just the hardware but the documentation, the code, the examples for generations of new programmers.

Even TODAY kids cannot learn to program easily on PCs, no magazines with programming examples, no more packman code to type into the late hours, remember the MSX games books ? the C64 code one typed with a sense of achievement - it runs.

The blitter allowed people to imagine what graphics could be created by pushing the limits. they would brag That an effect was done with such small code. That was hardware efficiency and software efficiency combined to blazing speeds never thought of.

Amiga was called 'magic' because it could to everything GFX, audio/midi/video/3D

How would you play programming notes on current AmigaOne systems in one line ?

MSX had a programmable sound generator : -

PLAY "ABCDEFG"

played musical notes, using Texas Instruments chips.

Amiga dont even have external ROBOT control interface.

Its equivalent of 90s PC.
The whole point in removing chipset was to reduce costs and easily upgrade and it has not even achieved that - to the detriment to every developer who now cannot code because the goalpost keeps changing.

How does a developer access GFX card in assembler now ?

Anyone who says "you dnot need access hardware directly" does not really have a clue. The mass evidence and developers in the world creating devices to do exactly that differ.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arduino-Start ... t-UNO-Board/dp/B009UKZV0A

http://hackaday.com/2012/10/08/stm32-driving-a-pcie-video-card/

Amiga had chance be number #1 programmable hardware devices, learning in hardware and software.

All it needed was a similar board with Amiga chipset on, bang on AmigaOS - to every school, college, university worldwide.

Fun in HARDWARE and SOFTWARE for ALL.

But more important Amiga needs people in control with VISION.

Apple sabotaged Pa Semi - thanks

Microsoft sabotaged Commodore sale (Escom investor also for Microsoft - used Guerrilla tactics - buyout to destroy a company and sit on assets) - thanks


This is the reason why indi hardware and software is the 'buzz' today its small and powerful.

But having custom chipset causes porting problems, Commodore unfortunately never thought about scripting tools that could automate conversion to new hardware.

Today for Amiga, very few make games, make music, make anything fun unfortunately.
This is not because of lack of 'users' one would be always be told, but lack of easy to program developer tools.

Hollywood is one easy to use tool, but it lacks power for professional use.

What Amiga needs is a common developer suite like Visual Studio :

Visual Basic like programming language with OOP & RAD GUI
C/C++ compiler suite with DOM/COM and web/PDF/Gaming API.

Lack of game development tutorials

There are hundreds of programming languages but not one properly integrated suite to work seamless with Amiga to develop games and apps.

SDL and other APIs dont count as you then need keep upgrading/breaking your build and then figure out how one would mix an Amiga Window with GUI and overlay usable custom SDL/GL GUI/XUL elements with it.

In Windows world people obsessed about PDF Editing & printing, but what they wont tell you is that with exactly same PDF on exactly another system the PDF would not print properly, even Microsoft staff cannot solve problem for years.

Try printing A4 page on US letter paper or vice versa.

PDF is a document format not a PRINT format.

Amiga must not follow this dreaded path. keep with Postscript printing - the universal printer language. we just need some editors.

http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/

Due to difference in driver, setting, printer accuracy

Programming has become IT, with Game makers instead of good tools, broken tool chains, incompatible apis - will it ever end ? maybe a UNIVERSAL Amiga ASSEMBLER with GPU/OpenCL access ?

Its a horrid horrid mess and a serious one.

@asymetrix

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It's not lost, you can do that, scan the PCI bus and find product ID, send crap into the PCI card, and see what it does.
But there is more elegant way to do it, use API, and let the OS and drivers, take care of differences between different hardware manufactures.
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Kids to busy playing games.

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But is was never easy to do, most kids learned AMOS or some high level Basic. Speed sucked.
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Maybe something like:

For (n=0;n<notes;n++) { for(b=0;b<(bps*SecPerNote);b++) { r+=feq[*note]; *ptr++ = sin(r)* amplitude; } note++; }

Then you add some AHI stuff, and compile it, the result should be exe file named "PLAY".


EDIT:

I just spent few hours working on command line note player.

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfil ... audio/play/noteplayer.lha

@Srtest
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A side note on Linux and graphics cards.

My X1k has a HD6850 card and in order to use that card effectivly in Linux I must rebuild the kernel with ONLY the drivers for that card, Barts-BTC-Sumo. This was also true for the 4000 series cards using kernels after vmlinux-3.4.

I do not know why building all the drivers screws things up......but it does, and I'm not about to go looking, and having to rebuild everytime a newer kernel is available (at least weekly, or so it seems.) is silly.

Anyway, that solved my slow, with no, or terrible 3D, performance.

@asymetrix
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As with Linux in my previous post, if the freakin hardware is stable then the software development can proceed more rapidly in many directions.

I think we could have really had something even without the old chips, but never on a moving target. To bad about PA-SEMI, but moving to Freescale would not have been a problem if the greater portion of the hardware were stable. How many graphics, sound, network, cards are used now?
By the time one is optimized or new ways discovered of using it, it's 2 years obsolete and too many people have bought something else "Cutting Edge" and demanding support. Sad really.

Can you imagine the mess if AOS was taken into the x86 commodity world?
Well, here we are.

The good news is the bucks I was setting aside for the next X went toward a CB500F. Now that's FUN!

I have not given up yet, but really questioning what I'm doing here.

@asymetrix

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I'm not sure how you're going to convince the universities around the world to invest in computer that works fundamentally different from most computer in the rest of the world.

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Well, commodore did not think about lots of things.

ACube-Systems how ever did.
http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=news&id=134

The GPIO port is easy way to control hardware.
Its 3 sate ouputs can be set as input or output or n/c.

@asymetrix

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Well if C programmer you have what you need, more or less. The real problem is the OS, I'm afraid, it's a bit dated, and some of the API's do suck. If you're porting Linux programs to AmigaOS, you sooner or later run into problem with TCP/IP stack, for example.

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I think Hollywood is not bad, I think it's even professionally made. The programs work, and it is cross platform.

But real professionals use C/C++, it just scales best, and is the most used languages, even today C#.

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It's more if inconvenience then a problem. Sure IntelliSense, might help speed up programming, and multi-line editing, might help format code, and speed up writing code like tables etc. color highlighting.

However, you do not need this things, it just makes things easier.

@asymetrix

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I'd say that you generally don't want to access hardware directly; especially graphics hardware. Modern graphics cards is far more complex than "classic" Amiga hardware, and it's incredibly easy to make them freeze (just one small mistake...). Debugging tends to be very frustrating when the only feedback you get is the machine locking up. It really is so much easier to simply use the APIs and drivers that other people have written.

As LiveForIt said, you can still access the hardware directly on AmigaOS if you really want to; just make sure that no driver or other software is accessing it at the same time. The RadeonHD driver started out as a test program that drove a Radeon X1300 directly.

Hans

@asymetrix

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Interesting article, thanks for the link :)