NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/programmer/568

Text File | 1996-08-05 | 10.0 KB | 202 lines

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Path: techfak.uni-bielefeld.de!isthesin
From: [e-mail] (Stephan Thesing)
Subject: Re: amiga questions.  -  riscami.txt [1/1]
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (Stephan Thesing)
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 1996 09:32:11 GMT
References:  <4cr622$[e-mail]>
Nntp-Posting-Host: moos.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Organization: Universitaet Bielefeld, Technische Fakultaet.
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Hi !

In article <4cr622$[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (NEW COLLEGE) writes:
|> I saw Amiga Report 3.21 recently, and in it there is a report
|> from a speech from escom stating that they will develop a RISC
|> amiga for 1st quarter '97, that the AAA chipset is dead and their
|> main task will be to update the OS and make it cross systems.
|> After hearing the same news from other sources I started thinking
|> (there's a first time for everything!) and a lot of what they said
|> raised more questions than answers, so I thought by posting this I
|> could get them all answered at once.
|> First about the OS porting:
|>      If they port the OS to other systems it could be disastrous
|> for the amiga in general, because although the OS is undoubtedly
|> the best I have ever used if it is ported it will lose some of
|> it's best features, most importantly because it could not longer
|> be sure that each platform had the same base config, any extra
|> features would have to be emulated in software, thus packing out
|> and slowing down the kernal extremely i.e. the new RISC amiga
|> may have a superfast 24-bit blitter (I hope! :-) but how many
|> powerMacs have you seen with one, any portable os would have to
|> emulate one which would be slow. This also raises another
|> important question, if the os has to use drivers to provide
|> emulations of some features which will be slow, any software
|> which hopes to be portable will not be able to use many of the
|> RISC amiga's feature because it would crawl like a snail with
|> arthritis on any other machine so we will end up with large
|> podgy, slow apps.

Hmmm, this would be true if any port of the OS any every machine used
the SAME OBJECT CODE. But there is no need for this. Porting the
OS only means they define interfaces to use (e.g. system functions with
fixed functionality). But the IMPLEMENTATION of these interfaces need not be
the same.
Take a look at GNU software. It runs on Sparc stations, m68k, Intel, RISCS,....
and very different OSs, but behaves nearly identical.

So in fact you could have a version of the OS on the new Amiga, which supports
the new fast blitter (if there will be one..:-) and another on a Mac that
does all the functionality in software.
The main advantage is that all programs you write are portable between the
different implementations of the OS on different machines.



|>                   Also if the OS is to be portable it will
|> immediately wipe out one of the key features of the amiga,
|> hardware bashing, if each platform is different (as it will be)
|> then the program cannot use things such a the copper or blitter
|> directly because it cannot be sure it is there, instead it will
|> have to go  through the OS which will slow it down tremendously,
|> for example if you feel like a challenge program a game like
|> stardust without using the blitter or copper and only using OS
|> calls, hard isn't it? Finally for this section the amiga OS gets a lot
|>  of its speed from the fact that most of intuiton`s buttons etc. are
|> stored in rom along with most of the major OS code, if the OS became
|>  portable all of this would have to be loaded from  disk, slowing down
|>  screen redraws ect. or it would all have to be loaded into ram, giving
|> lightening fast redraws (faster than from rom) but would swallow large
|>  chunks of memory.

This is not an important point, since the RISC chips are a lot faster
than the MC68xxx there will (hopefully) be no loss in speed.
BTW. I don't think that hardware bashing has played a very bad role on
the Amiga, since many programs doing this didn't work on later Amigas
and causing more bad than good.
Anyway I don't see why the new OS should not be stored in a ROM on future
Amigas. The implementation on other machines will load it to RAM but
since 10-12MB are quite common these days, it is not so important to give
the OS 1MB for it's code (you really don't want to know, how much memory
UN*X systems use for this (not to talk about Windowzs):-)




|>                    At present AT seem to be trying to form some
|>  kind of wierd amalgam of windows, system 7 and workbench (Maybe
|>  they should call it Windows system workbench?), if they were to
|>  release the OS as a software package, as they seem to want to do
|> it has a big chance of failing, just look at OS/2 that was a nice (sort-of)
|>  multitasking OS from IBM, one of the worlds largest computer companies
|>  but it only sold about 3 copies because of  windows.

I don't see this yet. We have to wait for the OS to decide, I assume :-).

|>    With regard to the statement that they are dropping the AAA
|> chipset and farming out the new chipset designs to a new company WHY!!!,
|> the chipset is one of the amiga`s most powerful features which the OS uses
|> extensively to give full pre-emptive (and FAST!) multitasking and dropping
|> this in favour of a cheap and nasty svga card would be the worst decision
|> ever made. Apparently for the new RISC amiga AT will farm out the design of
|> the chipset to a outside company. This is not a bad idea if the outside
|> company are any good but a far more sensible idea would be to give them the
|> designs for the AAA chipset and tell them to modify them to suit AT`s needs.
|> This is sensible because when Commodore died the AAA chipset prototype
|> was 96% complete (figures from the deathbed vigil video), dropping a chipset
|>
|> this close to completion is like shooting yourself in the foot, even tough
|> there was no proto. OS support this. In fact the lack of OS support would be
|> an advantage because it will help AT to make a fresh start and rewrite the
|> OS from the ground up. Without the tricks the chipset can do the amiga will
|> be severely limited because it will be lacking most of the things it was
|> originally designed for, for instance using present SVGA chips it will not
|> be able to overlay screens of different resolutions, so no more menus like
|> those in Dpaint, and no nice high resolution status bars in games, everything
|>
|> will have to run on the same screen, slowing things down, and no more fancy
|> chipset tricks for demo coders, everything will have to use the cpu for
|> tricks, if you want an idea of what this will be like just look at pc demos,
|>
|> boring arn`t they?.

Hmm, I personally don't like the AGA chipset... and the AAA chipset ?
Don't know. I think AT has to realise that the custom chipsets are quite
antique nowadays. For GUI you need 1200x800 points in (at least) 256
colors (without interlace). The AGA chipset is just a pain in this
regard. The blitter is to slow and limited. The sound output is to bad,
8bit resolution is not enough, etc.pp.
In fact using SVGA chipsets is as bad as using an (enhanced) AAA chipset.
No solution here from me, any suggestions ?

|> Almost finished now, just a couple more things.
|> If they are serious about porting the OS I hope that the process of writing
|> the code will not take up so much time that they will not be able to
|> significantly rewrite the OS, because it is beginning to look a little
|> dated against Win95.

True. (I don't know about W95, will never use it, but comparing it to
XWindows, Unix systems)

|> Finally if the new amiga uses PCI slots this would enable cheap PC expansion
|> cards to be used, but this raises a major problem, all amiga cards have a
|> small rom chip in them to say what they are, so that the autoconfig system
|> can work but PC cards do not have this so the autoconfig will not work for
|> them, this means that in the startup sequence a software system will have
|> to be used to recognise and mount such cards, this will be aukward and
|> slow (just look at the bodge Win95's software autoconfig does of some
|> things).
|>

Yepp. They should drop this idea as soon as possible. I don't want
to add 'fooconfig int=6, id=99, adr=890' or something to my
startup-sequence!

|> So, that's it, all of the above may seem like paranoia to some people but
|> I feel that most people will want to ask at least one of these questions
|> at some point so it would be easier to ask them all now.
|>
|>                         Jon R.
|>
|>
|> P.S. If AT release a new interim amiga (or an updated 1200) , some sort of
|> version of the present software pack but aimed at programmers would be
|> a great sell I'm sure, because a lot of people who buy an amiga want to
|> program it but at present are put off by all the different choices and
|> the expense of the software (I'm only just learning myself). The pack could
|> contain things like:
|>
|>
|> A1200/Interim Amiga
|> 250mb+ Hard Drive as an option
|> A69K + A tutorial
|> A C/C++ compiler like DICE, the new Storm Compiler or
|> otherwise something like Amiga E.
|> Includes, Autodocs and A tutorial for the above.
|> Paint Package.
|> A Gui construction system such as E's EasyGUI.
|> A version of the RKM's fo the new machine.
|>
|> If this were released next year at around the same price I think AT would
|> have a moneyspinner on their hands (I Know I'd buy it).
|>
|> P.P.S Does anyone know the E-Mail address for AT

Look at the URL http://www.amiga.de/ there you will find something, if
I remember it right.

|>
|> P.P.P.S (Last one!) Does anyone have any information on the new Storm
|> C compiler, a URl/email-address would be nice :-).

--
===============================================
=             Stephan Thesing                 =
=        AG Praktische Informatik             =
=          Technische Fakult"at               =
=         Universit"at Bielefeld              =
===============================================