Well, this has been useful.
I missed the USB 2.0 port, but we still would probably need a NEC based USB 2.0 solution.
"Splitting" a PCI-e card slot isn't as simple as it sounds, but its one avenue to pursue.
Since the Talos II can run big endian Linux distros, my first target would be hosted AROS, as the code is obtainable (actually thanks to a pointer from Nik, I already have it).
Since SAM460 and X5000 emulation is under development, we'll have to see how that work on the PowerMac G5, but anything the PowerMac G5 can run ought to be able to be run on the TalosII.
And I don't have the talent, or the Amiga background to consider applying for developer access.
In fact, the last significant thing I did on a 68K platform was create a driver for Tseng Labs ET4000 based ISA video cards (and even that featured some cheats like hard coding the register addresses instead of accessing the X86 bios - this meant only about half the cards on the market would work with that driver without the creation of a modified version).
But it did work, and to this day I'm rather proud out it, as we provide it to other users of Peripheral Technology's PT68K2, K4, and K5 boards (that last board isn't well known, probably because by that time we had been working directly with the hardware designer and this '020 variant was created at our request, along with two 6809 coprocessor cards, the second of which would have featured an mmu and vdg specifically for the 6809, and a V20 card).
By the time we'd gotten to the 4, we were supplying complete end users systems, while Peripheral Technology focused on bare and populated board.
Which made sense as we had the licensing agreement with Microware for reduced cost purchases of their OS and BASIC, and we owned the rights to the GUI we'd ported from the work of a programmer who'd originally written it for Gespac.
Anyway, I digress. I can write C code, at one time I was fairly proficient with 6809 and 68000 assembly, but I don't have a good grasp of Python or MUI.
And ALL the code I wrote was designed to be reentrant.
I know that can be done under AROS and MorphOS, but I don't believe its mandatory.
The only really talented programmers outside of the MorphOS are first, Staf Verhagen from the AROS community (who has dropped out of active development to pursue an interest in ASICs) and Hans de Ruiter, who as an OS4 developer might met some resistance even if he had the time to commit to additional projects. BUT, between Mark Olsen and Hans de Ruiter, I have learned a fair amount about modern gpu architecture.
Considering my work with video display generators was limited to unaccelerated cards where the most important factor was how large the transfer rate from the cpu or memory, through the ISA bus, to the video card was.
BTW - That's what the chips were consider VDGs, then as basic accelerators where introduced VDPs (video display processors), finally evolving into the term gpus (graphics processing units)
Anyone that remembers that period will then understand why I insisted on using ET4000 based cards for our systems, in that these cards were faster than ANY other cards on the ISA market until the advent of acceleration (and frankly, were better than some of the cruder early accelerated cards).
In any case, I'm not competent enough to do much more than compile existing Linux code and make slight alterations and modifications to an OS or maintain a system.
So AROS is about my speed, especially if its hosted.
And if an emulation of a supported MorphOS platform is complete, I'm reasonable sure I can get that running on a Power 9 platform.
But contributing to or even having the hubris to suggest what the existing developers might do?
Its way above my pay grade. These guys cut there teeth on Amigas and the Amiga OS API, the 68K API's I worked under were more Linux like (the primary OS being the as that used, with modifications, as an embedded OS for DVI disc players).
Point of fact, except for the hard coded addressing of the ET4000 driver, nothing I ever did referenced specific address locations as the point of position independent code is that everything is relative.
Frankly, I used to look down on some Amiga coders as they used tricks I would never have considered, like self modifying code, and for that matter any other stunt that might get them the result they were aiming for. Almost ALL of my interaction with hardware went through driver, nothing banged the hardware.
After all, what if there were variations in the platform, or even in similar component.
I know MorphOS coding does rely on these "dirty" trick, and that MorphOS can support reentrant and position independent code, but from what I've seen, it doesn't appear to require it.
I moved from an environment certified for mission critical applications, to a general interest in 68K platforms, and then, thanks solely to MorphOS to an interest in PPCs.
Oh, and btw, Apple's use of the 68K was incredibly primitive, so I'd disregarded them from the start, and never would have considered their PPC based systems with MorphOS (and its micro kernel) to motivate my interest.
But guys, this is IT.
We are now committed to an X64 future, and frankly as fond as I am of AMD, I frickin' hate Intel (and Microsoft? My ex-wife used to contend that Bill Gates was the anti-christ).
Just this year I've experience stability issues with Win10, Win7, and Office (in particularly Excel, where I had two very weird issues that required a reboot, although that did occur in Word as well).
I didn't think I could replace Excel (Word, hey I can use Open Office for that capability), but since my primary work with Excel is statistical, I've shifted to Minitab which while not as presentation oriented as Excel, is a MUCH better product for statistical analysis.
As soon as I can coerce IBM into giving me a good price for a license, I'll be using SPSS as well.
This latter package ought to be available under Linux (considering IBM's support for the OS), I'm unsure about Minitab (I'll check right after this post).
SO, as I've said before, I'm incredibly tired of the Wintel platform, I don't want to move to MacOS and get raped on hardware pricing, so I AM going to check this out.
I've lived with Linux before, I think I can make do with it, and if I need Office (Minitab spreadsheets can be transferred to and from Excel if there is an Excel feature I HAVE to have), I can't running it an emulated X64 session on a Power 9 platform.
I can't dictate where you all are going, AND for that matter I think X64 was a pretty good idea.
I've mentioned this to Andreas, and I don't think Bill Buck would be offended if I posted this part of his last e-mail, but Bill's had recent conversations with the director in charge of the division at NXP that oversee PPCs (as well as a lot of other devices) and
the PPC IS dead at NXP.
Simply stated, there is no intention to develop that ISA any further, products that are slated for long term support will remain available.
But this is a dead end at NXP, it likely is at AMCC as well, and the only real flicker of life is in the embedded products IBM designs and Power 8, 9, and beyond.
So the latter day inheritor of Phillip's legacy (Phillips once being a licensee and second source to Motorola) has effectively pulled the plug on the last ISA that Motorola was involved in developing and Freescale continued forward with.
Face it, we knew this was inevitable when they canceled the e700 core, and while the e5500 and e6500 cored products do have some advanced features, they weren't really aimed at the desktop market (and btw, the e500v2 is REALLY unsuited for that market).
I completely support the developers decision to fork to X64 (especially if we can support AMD components), but at the same time, that is going to make us "yet another X86/X64 operating system", one of thousands dominated by two companies Intel and Apple that I frankly despise.
If the hardware support is so restrictive under MorphOS X64 that I have to buy specific X64 hardware in order to run it, I will as long as I'm not forced to buy Intel based hardware.
I have enough of that already. I am willing to commit an AMD based system to the OS, but I'm not loading Windows on it.
And I'd like to see MorphOS PPC continue, if only on the back burner. With that in mind, I'll be retaining a handful of registered Apple hardware.
And were that to occur, some backporting of MorphOS NG/X64 makes sense.
The PowerMac G5 can handle a 64 bit OS, and I've seen modification that allow memory addressing up to 64 GB (depending on the model).
And Power 9 system can do EVERYTHING that our new ISA can do, and in a few areas its BETTER.
You can't build a desktop Ryzen system with 22 cores unless you rely on the enterprise level multi-die variant.
A Talos II can be be started with one 4 core cpu that supports 16 concurrent threads (as many as the most capable single die Ryzen cpus), but that same board will accept all the other Power 9 variants right up to the 22 core version which would support a frightening 88 simultaneous threads.
And if you stick with the standard Talos II instead of the Talos II Lite, a dual cpu system could built that started out with that same single 16 thread cpu, but could be expanded to a dual cpu platform supporting as many as 176 simultaneous threads.
Know any end user boards in the X64 market that can do that?
So is Power dead? At NXP it is, and I'm still working with a team aiming to complete a T2080 based laptop design, I'd also still advocate that Aeon rethink its low end strategy and build a starter board with a T10XX cpu.
Also, I now have the full schematics and board layouts for the RDB4240, and that has a ridiculous core/thread count.
BUT, Power...its all Power 9 now really. And its affordable.
As mentioned, I can't dictate where you all go, but I'm supporting it.
And I believe it would make an excellent transition platform for the next step in MorphOS evolution, since it could run PPC variants of our OS' natively and X64 variants under emulation (just the opposite of what our future X64 platforms will have to do, MorphOS NG/X64 natively, and MorphOS PPC via qemu).
Either way, I'm not pissing on my legacy.
Intel products were dreadful during the period I worked in 68K development, just because they had an idiotic number of revisions to improve, doesn't mean that there is nothing to challenge them.
There's ARM (which we've summarily dismissed), and there's still Power (which I think will be capable enough to run any X64 code developed).
So again, am staying right HERE. I'm going to work to broaden the PPC Platforms supported under AROS, then I'm going to look at a port to Power 9.
And if there's no support for 11,2 PowerMacs or Talos II based systems, I'm still going to keep using them.
I'm kind of hard headed like that once I've reached a conclusion.
[ Edited by Jim 18.05.2018 - 17:52 ]"Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"
