Amiga 1000 Phoenix Project

https://retrohax.net/amiga-1000-project-phoenix-motherborad/

by retrohax • 6 years ago

93 24 6 years ago

dfox• 6 years ago

One thing I find fascinating about modern Amiga scene is the amount of various adapters and clever connector solutions (PLCC sockets mounted upside down and such).

unixhero• 6 years ago

Yes, such as the Vampire v2 accelerator card. http://apollo-core.com/

kiwidrew• 6 years ago

An upside-down PLCC socket? I'm having trouble picturing what exactly that would look like or how it would even work... can you link to a photo?

emptybits• 6 years ago

This may help you picture it.

"In the A600 the CPU is soldered directly to the mainboard and cannot be removed. Thus the only way to install it is to clip it over the CPU, using a PLCC socket placed upside-down. PLCC sockets are not meant to be used this way, so this is really a bit of a hack and might not even work in all cases. Space around the CPU is quite limited, hence the odd shape of this board."

https://github.com/SukkoPera/OpenAmiga600FastRamExpansion

Definitely not contemplated during the design/spec of the PLCC socket, I'm sure!

Jaruzel• 6 years ago

The problem with the graphics cards not working on a stock A500 (At the very end of the article), might be down to the Zorro adapter that's being used. The A500 edge connector is not a full Zorro II slot, and although it's easy to build/buy an adapter, not many Zorro II cards actually work. So I'm not sure that was a valid test of the cards.

LIV22• 6 years ago

From my understanding the GBAPI card is meant to work on 500's too hence the ability to snap off the end of the edge connector (some others need -5 which isn't available on the 500 connector) but afaik the ACA500 is not friendly with autoconfig devices and I'm sure when it was designed there was an assumption that there'd be no other devices in the autoconfig chain

rbanffy3• 6 years ago

I often wonder what a current Amiga would be in order to capture the qualitative jump the original offered when it was launched, and somehow preserving some of its identity.

varispeed• 6 years ago

I would expect them to do The Beatles edition at some point thanks to 4 audio channels hard panned left and right.

pornel2• 6 years ago

To me Amiga's identity was:

• stunning graphics, audio, GUI, and multitasking

• demoscene community

• platform where "indie" creativity created "AAA" games

So it was mostly an artifact of its time. I don't think you can pack exactly these things in a single device any more. Maaaybe if there was a next-gen console, but with an open OS and hackable hardware?

But graphics are reaching diminishing returns (RTX is nice, but not a leap like going from cyan-pink CGA to HAM). Audio is good enough. Hardware for games has been mostly commoditized by big game engines. If you want to reinvent UIs or games, you can do that on any hardware now.

Demoscene was cool because it was pushing limits of the hardware. For a while now the hardware has been powerful enough that these limits aren't that interesting any more. Demoscene now thrives on artificial limits, like Pico8 or 1/4/64K demos.

stinkytaco2• 6 years ago

People at the time thought computers were "good enough" as well. Part of Amiga's influence was its ability to show us what computing could do in our day to day life (games, video, etc.) that we didn't even know we wanted until it was there. So I have to think there's something that could come along and capture that essence again. I'd say the iPhone represented a similar qualitative jump, though by that time Apple had lost the identity of David to the industry's Goliath.

I lack the creativity to guess what the next thing might be, but if I was put on the spot, I'd say perhaps VR. Some device/software combo will come along and make VR accessible and sensible for the masses.

TYPE_FASTER• 6 years ago

Having grown up using a VIC-20, C64, and Amiga 500, I've had similar thoughts.

There was something magical about the innovations in the hardware and software on the Amiga platform. Seeing the bouncing ball demo running was cool, but dragging the Workbench screen down to show the ability to multitask was awesome at that time. Using Deluxe Paint to render animations and record them on VHS using a cheap genlock was fun.

It's that intersection of accessible magic that makes me nostalgic. My most recent experience of that feeling was playing Breath of the Wild on a Switch hooked up to a TV a couple years ago. The opening scenes where you look out over the Great Plateau for the first time really took me back to thinking anything is possible.

HacklesRaised2• 6 years ago

Do we really want MultiTasking? This is a question that I have been pondering for a while. What made the Amiga / ST / Archimidies special was that all that computing horse power, for the era, was dedicated to a single 'user' task. Today we have powerful hardware that doesn't seem to live up to its potential. I have no data but one wonders how many cache misses of a foreground application are the result of a background application invalidating cache lines? No, I have not totally convinced myself of the argument, but I do think, that when we look back at the golden age of the home computere, we should at least recognize that the operating systems in play were not the multi-user, multi-tasking leviathans of today; it was a simpler time and perhaps we could do with a little more simplicity in our lives.

rbanffy3• 6 years ago

Building a bit on that, I'd imagine fluid multitasking with imperceptible latencies. A unique programming model or language, say, an OS written in Rust and, relying on that, extensive multithreading and async calls everywhere.

A lot of that is in Haiku, but I'd expect more, adapted to heterogeneous cores.

FandangoRanger• 6 years ago

One more step

Please complete the security check to access retrohax.net

thesimp• 6 years ago

Like already said in this thread: the Amiga was a product of its time because it introduced some hardware and software features that were radical at that time.

If you want to make an Amiga 2020 today you will really need something that the normal PC/Apple/phone/console does not do.

For example:

The Amiga 2020 needs: a 64 core CPU in which each core or set of cores can run a fully independent&secure version of the OS. I'm thinking switching between OS's like the Amiga workbench could switch between resolutions.

The Amiga 2020 needs of course a hardware chip that does perfect speech interpretation. None of this half/half Siri or Ok Google stuff. The local AI on chip will handle that all.

The Amiga 2020 needs a hardware chip that will control any set of VR glasses easily. The OS will of course have a graphical layout that will fully use AR and VR capabilities such that the user can do cool things with it like AR augmented desktops that exist both on computer and physically on the desk in front of you. I want to have my AR rolodex as my address book.

The Amiga 2020 needs 21st century expansion to talk to external devices. Either via 4G/5G such that computer and peripheral can always talk to each other no matter how far away they are. Or something more fancy like low power led/laser beam comms so that you just have to place the peripheral next to the computer to make them sync up.

The only thing missing is the spirit of the "future of the computer". Do not underestimate how optimistic we were at that time that computers, with their endless possibilities, would solve just about any problem in the world. The 21st century is a very different place.

HacklesRaised2• 6 years ago

I could definintely get behind sets of cores and associated L3 cache being isentified as a task unit.

qubex2• 6 years ago

Core affinity and NUMA will do that for you, if I’m not mistaken.

qubex2• 6 years ago

I don’t really understand the reference (by concept, at least) to LPAR (Logical PARtitonining) and hypervisor capability. This would be a consumer machine and there’s not really much utility (that I can think of) in having many fragmented OS instances running on each core of a heavily parallelised CPU.

However... you give me the opportunity to bring up my favourite OS of the late 1990s, BeOS which was both “pervasively multithreaded” to take advantage of what they perceived as being an incipient multiprocessor revolution (“One processor per person is not enough!”), and which was also somewhat conceived as a “hobbyist system” along the lines of an Amiga successor. (And no, much as it is was pretty and performant and very pleasant and a great personal favorite, BeOS was not multiuser so had very poor innate notions of permissions and security).

TL;DR BeOS (a spiritual Amiga successor) was an early comer to the world of consumer multiprocessing, but I don’t understand why you’d want a vastly multicore machine that you can logically partition.

Amiga 1000 Phoenix Project

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