Just out of curiosity, What happened to BBRV's Open Server Workstation Board or the Pegasos III based off of Freescales 8641D? Now I hear Amiga Inc. has some board coming out (that they'll prob can two days before the release date) based on PA Semi's chip. We need a decent (economical) development board!! Who's with me? The EFIKA alone doesnt cut it!

Ok I vented your turn

[ Edited by ago on 2007/9/25 0:21 ]

[ Edited by ago on 2007/9/25 3:27 ]

If bbrv wanted to tell the world that MorphOS is here. He could do it. EFIKA2 seems nice, but PegasosIII should be priority.

I love my PegasosII and I love using MorphOS.


I agree with you.

@Ago

The Pegasos was discontinued having parts which werent RoHS-compliant. Basicly parts of the Pegasos contained lead and/or some other material which couldn't be used anymore after 1.7.2006.

Quote:

Hahahaha... Are you afraid of Amiga Inc.???

you guys must stop dreaming. the ODW was cancelled because Genesi doesn't have a real opportunity to build and sell it. It costs a lot to release such hardware, especially when there are no customers (but you!) to buy it.
The business doesn't want such hardware, there's no demand for it. Who still wants to use PPC for desktop usage ? only fools, becasue intel procs are far more competitive and powerful. And fools don't make a living for a company like Genesi.
But this could change in the future, who knows ? In the meanwhile, the efika2 is coming, and that's good news.

Well there is a brand new chip by freescale the 8610. It's build around an e600 core comes with integrated gfx a very fast internal bus (and other SoC stuff like mem controller, Audio and pci & pic exprexx and so on) but smaller L2 cache than the 8641 has. It'll be cheaper than the 8641 and scales up to 1333 MHz. The 1066MHz version will draw ~15W. Samples are available now, mass production will start in 2008. It is all pached into an 783 PBGA housing.

Maybe this chip is a chance for a shrinked and simplified PegIII or an "Efika on steroids".

I guess and hope bplan will get an eval board soon.

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=9140#9140

last bbrv's post should be interesting for you

[ Edited by SoundSquare on 2007/9/25 22:25 ]

[ Edited by SoundSquare on 2007/9/25 22:25 ]

Quote:

Link to Freescale 8610

Quote:

Could be. I think it comes down to pricing, and more important, support from Freescale and/or other partners.

Quote:

Not likely IMHO. This is not what anything "Efika" is or is supposed to be...

In the "Amiga" market there is a vacuum of hardware but the problem is that the market is too small to sustain a lot of development. That's why we always get the modified reference designs or SoC approach.

I don't really understand the reluctance of MOS team to consider other architectures. AROS runs on x86 and is no more niche-ised for it. Apple realise that it's their approach that makes their product interesting; although they do have good hardware design.

"Amiga"-type systems now seem to be caught in low power only hardware. There are many of us who want to run powerful desktops but we can't.

If that's to be the case then personally, I would love to see MOS running on XScale, OMAP or even, x86 (spit). The PSP can run UAE so imagine MOS on a PS3 ?

What if MOS went over to other architectures, where does that leave the likes of Genesi ? I can imagine some hardware features that integrate with MOS ethics, so Genesi could make new hardware in the spirit of the original Amiga with it's custom chips; low power and low cost EFIKA-like boards are still desirable IMO. If Genesi put EFIKA in a cool case, similar to a Shuttle XPC/Mac Mini; they would have a very nice product at ~ $200.

Anyway, back to my original point: I prefer PPC but I don't see the point tying ourselves down to it forever.

|||

[ Edited by Velcro_SP 20.07.2011 - 06:04 ]

Quote:

I think it's only a matter of rewriting the small parts written in assembler (do they exist really), and recompile. Oh, and prepare everything for the different hardware (drivers).
It could be done, but only if a horde of developers came into scene. That only happens with open source. Look at AROS, it has always been open source, but it has taken more than a decade to come to the current usability. I fear that, if MorphOS went open source, and even more, platform agnostic, there wouldn't be a great interest to actually make it work on a "normal computer".

At least, Jacek "jacadcaps" Piscek has posted here that the MorphOS team is not adding functionality, only (ahem) chasing bugs.

Quote:

Indeed. Being different entails to certain disadvantages, sometimes unsufferable.

Quote:
So the fact that the MorphOS team is currently totally equally silent about what other (non-pegasos/efika/classic) hardware they might support as they are silent about anything related to MorphOS 2.0 in general is a solid proof that they're not considering other architectures? Ok... Thanks for telling us! After all, you must know better than the team, becouse you're announcing it in public.

Quote:
Personally I prefer having 3D acceleration, ability to change output volume "in software" etc. - features that PS3 doesn't offer for "another OS"

But of course that doesn't mean it wouldn't still be nice to have.

When switching to other architectures you need a new 68k emulation and especially when going x86 you lose 68 compatibilty completely. The endianess is the prob there*.
It is the same problem AROS x86 has...
MOS on other big endian cpus would be possible though(while not comfortable because you need binaries for ppc and #? then).

*There is the theoretical approach for MOS/OS4 on little endian systems to switch everything during run time (IIRC first suggested by Bernie Meyer), but this approach was several times refused by Laire.

@Jupp3

I never claimed to have any inside knowledge on what MOS team is doing. If people like myself speculate then it is only because we don't have a better source of information. IMHO things have been too quiet around here for a long time and I don't mean only MOS 2.0. Where are the other developers ? If MOS team gave us even a small trickle of information on stuff (anything, really), then other developers would start thinking there's a future here. But the last two years, barely one announcement from MOS team... they're really asking us users for a lot of faith.

My point regarding other architectures, I failed to make clearly. I was trying to say that if MOS is going to be targetted at low power platforms then how about MOS become THE low power/handheld OS. I'm running Linux on my PDA (XScale) but if I had MOS I would love to run that.

@Velcro_SP

The future of PPC is far from clear. My read of BBRV's summary on powerdeveloper.org is that it's likely to be SoC only and no major advancements: a dying architecture ? Who knows. Z80 is still available today.

Quote:

Sadly, if we are ever going to get software like Firefox, then we will need more power. We can't be optimising every piece of ported code. Sometimes we're just going to have to copy and paste large chunks of inefficient source.

Quote:

Don't need one, already have one :)

Quote:

Funny thing. You see, almost all developers who asked us are already using MorphOS 2.0 and develop their apps with its features in mind.

Quote:

What's a "developer"?

No, really, what does a person have to offer to the MorphOS team, to join the party? Knowledge in certain areas? A proven Amiga background? A nice existing application, that want's to get running in MorphOS 2.0? A pharaonic amount of money? 8^)

Quote:

Exactly.

for me the powerpc is very competitive in terms of cost in certain case, just see nintendo"s wii ans gcube which have cheap prices, but the only way to have a such price is to sell an high quatity of machines, supposing a cell machine (full not the cheaper one of ps3) whith a real market , a lot of money and the ppc will be back for desktop.
Sincerly i don't know if it is a problem of processor in fact.
Try to find a market and produce the hardware for it, for me the pc market is very closed ans producing a X86 pegasos more expansive the chinese pc wouldn't be a success.
The only way to survive is embeded for now, maybe not to long X86 and PPC processors will be replaced by quantics so the market will be different.

@ jacadcaps

Ok. I can see that the MOS dev club isn't totally exclusive but where does that leave mere users and would be developers for whom 1.4 isn't an option?

In the mean time, the most important things I'd like to know is price and progress. The price issue is probably a bit too contentious but, given how long it's already been, an authoritative update every three months would go a long way toward restoring the confidence of this little market segment.

There is also a point at which the silence becomes contemptuous. Even the linux crowd aren't this bad but this is the polar opposite of what used to be the spirit of Amiga. One of the best things about the Amiga was how good the whole community was at sharing it's knowledge. I really miss that.

Quote:

Hi, I don't want to get into an argument about this and/or derail the thread.

I am sure there are developers using MOS 2.0, like you say. But they aren't posting very much here either. For mere users, how do we know the future is bright ?

How about some comments from MOS team members about future PPC hardware then ? Any thoughts on preferred architectures ? What about Crusoe ? Or working on multicore CPUs ?

Quote:

Yes, that's one of the requirements of obtaining recent MOS ;)

Quote:

This won't come before 2.0 is out I belive.

Quote:

You get free beer to keep quiet ???!!

Quote:

I wasn't referring to an official statement. Just casual conversation.

Quote:

I can answer that. The future will certainly not be bright, no matter even if MOS2 was released this evening. The train went already.

Quote:
Why 1.4 isn't an option? I guess it might be a good idea to list all issues, so that it can be made sure that they will be fixed in 2.0

I did the same thing yesterday and got a confirmation, that the annoying bug (certain keys stopping working, if user opens menus with defined hotkey untill user presses RMB) is finally fixed

As annoying as it is, I don't still consider it a bug, which would make MOS1.4.5 (with all updates) "not option for me"

For myself, it's got to be MOS2 because, aside from my pc, I've only got an Efika (and linux is a bit of a bear).

I very nearly got a ready to run Peg1 system on ebay about a month ago - I was very surprised to see it as I don't think that many made there way to Australia. But I was pipped in the last seconds of the auction - too bad.

btw With the hardware and software situation the way it is I'm starting to get interested in a pimped out Classic - even a working PPC card all by itself would raise my interest.