The EFIKA boards for the MorphOS-Team will ship out as soon as we have all the addresses. We would like to extend that opportunity to the broader MorphOS Developer Community. Please let us know if you have not registered at PowerDeveloper and you would like an EFIKA.

We will be starting an XGI Developer Program soon. We have the 2D and 3D sources from XGI and are working with them on supporting a complete release. This has taken nearly a year. Please indicate your interest in this Program when writing as well.

Finally, if you are interested in including *or* licensing an application in the EFIKA SuperBundle please inform us as soon as possible.

R&B

@Neko:

true.. I dunno about that two paint program thing but I'm not a graphics guy...just like coding.. so I may have Storm C running along with a few other apps but thats about it. I'm not much into 3rd person games like Q3, never really cared for it. Now Robin Hood, that looks awesome.

Btw, my apoligies for getting on you earlier in this thread. I realize what you are intending this to be used for but I'll max it out to see what its capable of doing. :)

-Alex

[ Edited by TheMagicM on 2006/11/27 21:15 ]

@TheMagicM

I'm not sure Robin Hood would run on an Efika. It played pretty poorly on a G3 up until the first patch; I have no idea how good it will be, but perhaps this is an experiment to make. MorphOS definitely needs a game or two (or a demo or two) on the Efika to show something impressive. It's capable of a lot, just.. obviously.. not a lot at once :)

We're working on the XGI mpeg decoder driver for the Linux driver right now. Once it works in Linux, MorphOS should be a cinch to port it to; Efika should be a fairly cute little DVD playing box then. Reggae I think is the key here *hint*.

Thanks for the apology.

Why is 64 MB RAM of the XBOX enough for super-hot games
that you could only dream about getting released for MorphOS?

Think about it..

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YEEESSSS... When we will see the first Efika inside an Amiga 1200 case? I've seen people putting a Via Eden inside a C-64 box, so...

@neko

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Quake3 uses virtual memory. MorphOS doesn't provide virtual memory support.

Does Dreamcast have virtual mem then? Quake 3 runs on it. All tougether, DC dosent have more than 26mb RAM etc. Maybe SegaOS got it?

@Genesi, MorphOS-team, whatever

One small question, when do you plan to delivere next version of MorphOS? If you don't have a date thats fine with me but it would be nice to know.

@robjoh

Not this year (link).

Quote:
The problem is that the board has not been designed for the desktop. And you have desktop requirements. Bbrv are trying to sell this board to people that expects a lot more than what it's supposed to do (games, more ram, faster IDE,...). While it's a good thing to have the opportunity to run MorphOS on more (exotic) hardware, is it a good one to try to sell this board to *desktop end users* ?

Well, maybe it's good to simply sell it, no matter to what kind of users...

Leo.

@Senex

thanks, then I know somewhat at least.

Yes, Quake3 will run with a lot less RAM on Windows. But this OS provide a wonderfull thing called... swap. In the Amiga land, we say that swap is useless...

Leo.

Hello!

You have Guests coming....

Do your best! Thanks. Bye.

R&B

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As soon as some docs come out on how to install Linux on this, I'll put it to the test to see what it can do. Of course Linux is just temporary until MOS is ready to rock n roll.

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Probably it's a mixture of a few things.

Most notably it probably uses less detailed models and less detailed textures to achieve lower RAM usage (and higher framerate) - in comparison the MorphOS version can have "full detail" (which can be lowered, but probably not as low as in the DC version)
Secondly, the Dreamcast version is a version ported specifically for Dreamcast, taking advantage of "how things work there", probably using custom format for data files aswell, optimized for available memory, containing lower details etc. Of course it might be possible to optimize / lower details of MorphOS version aswell, but I can't see the point becouse:
1)It runs just fine on Pegasos 1 & 2
2)Would anyone want to buy Efika to run "lowered detail version" of Quake 3? (I wonder if anyone has even tried to lower Q3 details to the lowest and see how much memory it really needs?)
3)The most important issue: Quake 3 sucks

Can we expect some XGI 2D/3D MOS-Drivers for this Graphicbords?

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http://www.efika.de/index_en.html

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Not unless someone with inside knowledge of the closed source morphos graphics driver API starts to work on drivers (which did not yet happen afaik)

@pega-1 or somebody else that can explain...
This is just pure specelation and more of a question than anything else...

isn't the MorphOS built around a micro kernel? should it not be possible just to bolt on new drivers on that as long as you know how to attach it to the kernel?

I mean shouldn't that part be possible to give away without source cod?

umm i think no :D

From what i know/think,the most parts of the "features" of the quark microkernel is hidden from the A/box side.

For now only a little of the kernel is useable from the Amiga environment.The lack of the reset option in ambient ,for example ,is because the OF and other features are disabled on the A/box.

With the new version of mos ,if I remember correctly,the reset option will be enabled (pratically the OF isn't removed from the memory and can be accessible from the A/Box)

So if U "NOW" write a gfx driver for the quark microkernel isn't automagically viewed from the amiga side

Maybe with MOS 1.5 this option will be viable (i'm only speculating) or maybe no :)

It's only depend of how muck OF&QUARK the A/Box can use.

P.S. It's only my opinion,and im not a developper nor a beta tester, so it's only IMHO.

[ Edited by raistlin77it on 2006/12/5 15:01 ]

The EFIKA really doesn't need more than 128MB in **MOST** cases. We tend to look at memory fromthe PC desktop world of running 'bloated' OSes and kernels - having to support various device drivers.

Think of EFIKA as an embedded motherboard design similar to the motherboard in the Xbox or PS2. The older Xbox only came with 64MB of RAM!!!
Plays Halo just fine and/or Quake 3. You can also have an ATI card with 128MB/256MB of video RAM (not unified) so you can keep system memory small. You can also add a 80GB-160GB notebook hard drive or 4GB USB flash drive to the EFIKA as virtual memory!!!

So, don't waste your time trying to solder more RAM on the motherboard,when you got GIGABYTES of memory available to you though other methods...

Ken Mays
EarthLink, Inc.

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...which would be extremely slow memory. The IDE of the Efika is not too fast - a maximum of ~10MB/s and that's it. Not too well suited for virtula mem IMO.

Note however, that I also think that 128 MB is quite a well fitting for that maschine, but avoid to use teh Efika in a context which requires more than those 128 MB of Ram.
Virtual mem on that board is rather a fall back solution to avoid the system running out of mem and stall. But it shouldn't be touched during normal operation.

True, the this virtual memory is 'slow' yet we do have the option of adding more mem (512MB RAM) or using the virtual memory/physical storage.

This is done with game consoles and other embedded devices to get around that issue.

~K

@ken, zylesea

A clever solution comes to mind.

Why not use the video card memory as extra memory? With 128MB on the graphics board and 128MB on main memory that's 256MB total.

Why not partition off 64MB or 96MB of the video card memory for generic system use (paging it back in and out of main memory at theoretically 266MB/s bursts.. it would not be that fast because of the overhead for protocol and also the swap subsystem itself.. but still better than nothing)

It should be a fairly rudimentary job to make a portion of video memory look like a swap disk under Linux, as the most hacky way possible of doing it (there was talk once of having the Marvell controller on the Pegasos do this with the memory >2GB, but there was very little worth in doing it). That's for a proof of concept anyway.

Under MorphOS it would be even easier; somehow notify the graphics driver that it only has the first 32MB of the graphics card memory space to use. Then just link the rest of the memory space into the memory node list; MorphOS will allocate and free it like any other memory, and with a lower priority than main memory, you would not see a performance hit until you actually had to use it. If at all!

Why not re-unify the memory architecture? Let the PCI arbiter and DMA engine do all your hard work for you? :)

A hard disk would be a last resort fallback, although a lot of PDAs (with 32MB or 64MB of real RAM inside) use CompactFlash as RAM too. The performance of CF is no better than the ATA controller that's about 1MB/s thru 10MB/s depending on the attached device. You can never tell the difference if it's coming from CF or RAM :)

Matt,

Yes, we could bank switch between the unused video memory and system memory. The other virtual storage options can be used as a fallback method.

We can do alot with what we have now.

~K

Yeah, let's do it Elbox-style!
Memtest shows reads from Peg2 AGP gfxmemory are 36 MB/s, that's faster than PS3's 16 MB/s, w00t!