| From: | William W. Toner II |
| Date: | 12 Dec 99 at 11:13:30 |
| Subject: | [warpup] Re: Test |
On 08-Dec-99, Sam Jordan wrote:
> Am 08-Dez-99 schrieb Kolbj�rn Barmen:
>
>>> I don't agree. Why would someone buy a POP box if not to do something with
>> it ?
>
>> Exactly.
>> And so far noone has been keen making POP-boxes, not even for linux.
>
> The POP project is pushed by both IBM and LinuxPPC Inc (a Linux port
> already exists, but isn't available yet). So you shouldn't fear that
> no boxes will come out. POP is supposed to become the home platform for
> the Linux community. Several companies already have announced to
> build computer systems based on POP.
>
>>> And the POP Box was shown on the Cologne Show, standing on the booth of
>> Amiga
>>> and H&P...
>
>> We have seen alot of boxes standing around. Very rarely see them run.
>> And who knows what this will cost, and even as it ships we will suffer from
>> the
>> same problems you fins on mac.. lack of drivers for the cool hardware.
>
> Drivers aren't that much of a problem anymore for Linux, even the
> graphics board manufacturers themselves started to write Linux drivers
> recently. And as lots of drivers are open source (XF86) it would be no
> problem to port them to AMIGA. And besides that: it should be clear,
> that an AOSPPC first would only support one or two graphics boards.
> It is absolutely important to restrict the amount of graphics cards,
> because otherwise it would take ages until the drivers are written.
> And at the time the choice has to be done, the available drivers for
> Linux are certainly one major argument.
While I understand the need to concentrate on drivers for one or two cards
just to get things going in the beginning, I don't want to see any long-term
restriction like this. I think we should be able to write P96 or CGX drivers
and Warp3d for anything we want, once a usable system is available to build
on. I'd love to see a Glaze3d or GeForce256 driver for Amiga/POP even if it's
not part of the original "lets make this function" set of drivers. (drooling
about the idea of Wipeout on that)
> Seeing the situation we have *now* we should be very happy to be able
> to use one or two decent 3d accelerated graphics boards (with fast
> bus access) with AOSPPC. I don't care if the graphics board is not
> the fastest there exists, I also don't care if the processor is not
> the fastest there exists. All I want is a modern *architecture*
> which is at least state-of-the-art, and which makes fun to plan with.
> I don't intend to join the PC-attitude by throwing away hardware
> components every 4 months and replacing them by new components.
> Instead I prefer to try to get out the max of what I have.
But certainly once AmigaOS is PPC native on a POP board, I would love to see
the fastest possible PPC with Altivec in it, with the fastest possible
graphics card in it. We certainly shouldn't have to throw away hardware every
month, but I would like to be able to if I want to to have the fastest cards
possible when I can afford them, knowing that it is at least possible for
drivers to happen by someone, somewhere, who has enough free time...
Bill Toner
bill@prodatasys.com