Workbench Replacements

[miker1264]

I'm perfectly willing to do some speed comparisons between Caffeine OS in WinUAE and Caffeine OS on Pi Storm32 on my Amiga 1200. In RTG mode prepare for WinUAE to get demolished. 

It will be very difficult to surpass WinUAE in power and compatibility, especially the latest versions that take even more advantage of powerful PC Hardware

I don't have experience with Pi Storm32, but I have a lot of experience with WinUAE, plus it is the same "sincere" Wampire and Pi Storm32 users who have always confirmed the difference in power and compatibility compared to with WinUAE.

Anyway I am glad you can demolish WinUAE, this will probably push me to buy Pi Storm32 !

There is a YouTube video demonstrating the speed and power of Pi Storm32. There is a Lightwave model that on an Amiga 4000 with 68060 it takes 10 minutes to render.

On Pi Storm32 the same rendering takes 30 seconds at 860 MIPS. The Pi Storm32 with Pi 4 is rated at 2200 MIPS.

The immense power and speed on Pi Storm is because Emu68 developed by Michal Schutz uses a partition on the SD card as a hard drive. It has a disk speed of 20MB/s. It interprets 68k code to ARM code that runs extremely fast on a 1.4 Ghz CPU.

Imagine what an Apollo accelerator with 68089 and SAGA could do when combined with a 2Ghz ARM compressor.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

You might see the difference by using for example RNOTunes and clicking on the various MP3s, VMA, FLAC, or use "FPlay" and view MP4 videos at a resolution starting from 640x480.

Or you might notice the diference by running 3D Games such as Quake3, or Warp3D Games or Applications, this is sure only WinUAE can do because of the PC Hrdware he uses !

[pixie]

And on cm4 it will also be able to use Nvme, the thing is WinUAE can also do the same thing, direct access to disk, there's no one being destroyed here sir, not today!

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Only time and facts can prove things, maybe in the future there will be an Amiga that will surpass WinUAE, I have been hoping for 30 years, theories often read on forum, let's leave them to those who just like to talk, without ever having tested anything !

[cdimauro]

It can't access Chip Ram efficiently. Maybe Pi Storm32 could remap Chip Ram to the faster DDR3 like Vampire does.

I don't think so. And wow could it be possible? The (original) chipset can only access the memory from the internal bus.

Each combination of hardware and software has it's advantages and it's shortcomings. WinUAE is great for playing some nostalgic games like Pirates or Centurion. It's also great for partitioning and formatting and for testing. Vampire accelerators are good for a fast RTG experience with Amiga modes supported as well. Pi Storn32 will provide a super fast RTG experience, much faster than Vampire 68080 + SAGA.

WinUAE does it as well.

But to play Amiga games I would remove the Pi Storm32.

You don't need so. If you can disable the "CPU acceleration" on PiStorm32 and use your Amiga 1200 as it is (I don't know if hard disk emulation, Fast Mem, RTG, etc. work: it would be very very good, in case!).

In addition to the Pi Storm32 HDMI graphics I have an Indivision AGA scandoubler that will output Amiga modes through HDMI on a different LCD monitor.

There's WiP for "redirecting" the AGA graphic to the RPi in order to use both native and RTG graphic on the same HDMI output.

I'm perfectly willing to do some speed comparisons between Caffeine OS in WinUAE and Caffeine OS on Pi Storm32 on my Amiga 1200. In RTG mode prepare for WinUAE to get demolished. 

Then be prepared for a big delusion. :-D

I also look forward to trying Amiga OS 3.2.2 but I haven't bought it yet. I bought Amiga OS 3.1.4 with ROMS and Amiga OS 4.1 FE.

I don't support Hyperion, especially for their AmigaOS 3.1.4 and 3.2.x and future 3.x products.

AROS development in general lacks motivation to attract the attention of talented programmers. Money in my opinion is a great motivator.

There are already several bounties, with good amount of money for some of them, but there's lack of talented developers working on them.

If pre-packaged AROS products such as IcarosDesktop or AROS One were offered Pre-Installed on CF card were available for sale I would buy them for the simplicity of not having to do anything especially if the profit of such sales goes to benefit AROS bounties for future development. I bought such a CF card from Amiwell with AROS One x86 Pre-Installed. I use it on my mini PC. I must say I'm very pleased.

That's what I, as I user, like: a completely configured system, which requires no tinkering.

And on cm4 it will also be able to use Nvme, the thing is WinUAE can also do the same thing, direct access to disk, there's no one being destroyed here sir, not today!

Indeed.

And BTW, a purely 68K + RTG emulator like PiStorm is possible also on PCs. I mean: without emulating the entire chipset, but just some small part to let the system work (like the Draco system). This way there's no PiStorm or Vampire that could ever reach its performances (which will outclass even the very good ones of WinUAE).

[G-linx]

Amithlon anyone?
I have to admit that I fell in love with the Amithlon over the winter and after experimenting with a core2 system I purchased a brand new (sort of) x58 mobo from our Chinese friends. I now have an i7 Amithlon! It makes me chuckle

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Amithlon is a very good Amiga operating system, which takes advantage of the hardware power of the PC, too bad there are no updates, some time ago on VM I had created "Amithlon AfA OS", see some of my attached videos


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf7oegRmBo0

https://youtu.be/0wprhfbxvw4

[G-linx]

hehe! lovely

Edit; Its great to see Bernie is on line again; https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=44854&forum=8&start=0&viewmode=flat&order=0
Although rumor has it that he's parked up his VW mico-bus in the Aussie outback and stealing opal from the local mine.. 

[miker1264]

I didn't get a chance to try Amithlon but I read a few positive reviews. That was before I became interested in Amiga again.

My first computer was an Amiga 500. It was new in the box and I bought a new 1084 monitor for it. Over the next few years I bought many games and applications all on diskettes which I still have including Pirates, Patrician and Centurion. A few years after I bought my A500 it quit working. I thought for sure there was little hope for it to run again. But having spent so much time and money on it I just put it and all the games in a closet.

Fifteen years later when I had finally accepted the PC as a daily computer I became curious about the old Amiga 500.
Having taken my PC apart many times I decided to disassemble my Amiga to find the problem. But I took off all the cables and ribbons and didn't find anything wrong. So I put everything together again. But before I put it back in the closet I decided to try one more time . Surprise! This time the Amiga worked. It must have been a loose ribbon.cable.

A few years after that for some reason I felt the need to buy another Amiga computer. There was much talk then about Amiga Inc. and Amiga OS4 and how great it would be for PPC owners. But I was only interested in Classic Amiga 68k. I had lots of old Amiga game diskettes. So I went to a place called Merlancia to buy a new old Amiga 1200 made by Amiga Technologies. I still use it today. I don't know what happened to my original Amiga 500. I bought an old A500 to use with my Vampire v2+ a few years ago.

Rather than justify the expense of another Apollo accelerator for my A1200 I spent 1/3 of that on Pi Storm32. Five years ago is when I decided to try programming for Amiga. At first I thought about contributing to ReactOS but it didn't seem very promising as an OS. It had many issues. So I discovered AROS. At first even AROS didn't seem very interesting but writing and compiling software seemed well documented. So I tried it first on AmiDevCPP just for fun. Now I use the Build Systems.

I wanted to do something that would benefit the most people in the AROS community as possible. So I decided to update picture datatypes and eventually MultiView. Work on datatypes other than TGA, PCX and TIFF is nearly complete. Save As IFF for picture.datatyoe is complete. You are using it now.  Updates to MultiView are still a work in progress. As I'm much older now I am less motivated. Sometimes I work hard every day programming for AROS then I take a few weeks off or months at a time. Then I start again.

Maybe Pi Storm32 for my Merlancia A1200 will help to keep my interest long enough to do something useful for AROS/Amiga.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

More all Amiga users have gone down the same path.

I started playing with a C16 that was given to me as a gift, then I decided to buy a C64 for my son, arrived at the store, was told that the C4 was obsolete and that the future computing was AMiGA, so I bought an A500Plus.

When I got home after assembling and testing it, I put it back in the box to take it back to the store where I bought it, reason ... was because it did not write in Italian, that is, the keys did not match the keys on the keyboard pressed.

The shopkeeper smiled and told me that I had to configure it .... in the future that shopkeeper will call me to fix all software problems on Amiga.

Having gained some experience (I was using AMiGA more than my son), I began to tinker with the floppies attached to Amiga magazines, slowly I began to create compilations of Little Games for my two sons, adding soundtracks, screenshots and titling or modifying menus found in magazines.

Soon after I bought an A600 HD and 1 A1200 HD for myself, later to become a 030, then again an A4000/060, 2 CD32s one expanded with SX32, all these Amigas and others that were given to me have been sleeping in the garage for almost 30 years.

These are my first free Games compilations 

https://youtu.be/OvQtiNDwveA

[miker1264]

AMIGASYSTEM

Thanks for sharing.

The only time I remember using Scalos was in WinUAE in AIAB (Amiga in a Box).

I'll try to get a customized Amiga OS 3.9 with gcc and maybe Scalos running in Pi Storm32 on my A1200.

My other option is to use AIAB in WinUAE. I wanted to test how Scalos and FileMaster behave in Amiga OS so that on AROS x86 or x86-64 I will know what it's supposed to do and if it is misbehaving. Of course WinUAE could be used too.

Besides with Amiga OS running full screen on real hardware I will be more likely to develop Amiga compatible applications that can also be used on AROS or other Amiga-like OS's.

Most of all I was tired of the colorless OS 3.1 with the low quality, low color icons that I was presented with each time I switched on my Amiga 1200. I wanted to run Amiga OS 3.9+ in full screen (1080p) and in full color with RTG. That would surely be more interesting for my Amiga workbench.

Additionally I have my mini PC in a Morex 557 case for AROS development. It's running AROS One x86 v1.6 so I will need to get gcc working in the shell for that along with a basic text editor with syntax highlighting.

[cdimauro]

Amithlon anyone?

It was an awesome solution which was well conceived at its time and target to squeeze absolutely the most possible from the host system, but it was (and is) also quite difficult to implement and maintain.

Nowadays we've so much computational power available that we can sacrifice a small piece of it to implement a much simpler solution like WinUAE but with one CPU core which is fully devoted to emulate the 68K and another one taking care of "bridging" host and guest plus emulating the small & minimal part of the chipset which I was talking about before.

So and to simplify, the most important thing is getting the main core out of being interrupted to handle & emulate the rest of the system.

However and to get back on topic, this would be of limited use without a modernized o.s.: the "colorless o.s. 3.1" made its time and as well the very limited Workbench.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Miker i am familiar with AIAB, among my installed systems is the latest version of AIAB + Scalos + AfA OS (see screenshot), and I must say that on WinUAE it is blazingly fast if 060 and related libraries are used, even the Scalos version is quite stable.

In any case even on WinUAE you can use a full screen and it is like being on a real Amiga.

[miker1264]

I'm not sure what version of AIAB with Scalos I was using in WinUAE. I will have to verify that. I have a Shuttle X for which I bought a newer motherboard a few months ago. I intend to use it for my new Drawbridge Floppy Drive and for running WinUAE for various AROS 68k and Amiga versions.

Amithlon seemed very interesting and fast at the time. I wonder what it could have become if it were still being developed.

As for workbench replacements AROS and to some extent Amiga OS4 will not be able to reach their full potential without modern browsers and office applications.

Wayfarer for MorphOS is showing how it can be done though it requires more resources than many OS4 boards or even Vampire accelerators can handle. Minimum 1.5Ghz CPU and 1GB Ram. More modern browsers are demanding when it comes to CPU speed and available memory.

Maybe when Pi Storm32 advances enough to use the Pi wifi, Ethernet and USB devices a newer, more modern browser will be available for Amiga-like OS's. We can use pcmcia wifi now but modern browsers aren't available.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

The versions of AIAB do not differ much from each other, there have been some updates over time between cul AfA OS integration, but it remains an obsolete OS.

https://aiab.ultimateamiga.co.uk/

Best solution on OS3 remains OS 3.9 BB4 and OS3.2, much more stable but in some ways less advanced than OS 3.9 (OS 3.2 is an update of OS 3.1)


Amithlon is not easy to run because it uses non-native OS3 software that has never been updated.

Wayfarer runs well on MorphOS, but if this OS continues to run on old MACs it will go more and more into the niche, a move to x86 could be a major breakthrough.

If I have to be honest I don't like Ambient, which is then nothing more than an evolution of Magellan.

I liked it very much OS 4.1, but then when I saw that part of the system became Linux, I lost the taste to use it.