These massive slow downs are with an enhanced didplay screen, then the swapping has major impact and even with 64 MiB it happens quite soon, but on a non enhanced screen even with 20 opened (OWB) windows all remains nicely fluent. Maybe it would be nice if enhanced display screen automatically switches to non enhanced diplay mode when VRAM gets too low.

Edit: And if play around with stuff like taht don't forget that owb may start with a saved session which includes not only tabs, but also windows. I.e. if you used OWB with more than plenty windows last time, don't forget to switch off enhenced display *before* you start up owb next time (cough)...

[ Editiert durch Zylesea 02.06.2011 - 11:29 ]

@Zylesea

The real solution is to use the AGP to do the bitmap swapping instead of the CPU. The screens cannot be switched once opened - I do however disable multibuffering in low memory conditions.

@boot_wb
1366x720 = 983,520 pixel
1920x1200 = 2,304,000 pixel

Running out of 64MB is dead easy at that res (plenty 1st hand experience).

Quote:
Maybe it should also be noted this is an issue the old AmigaOS could not get into... because once it runs out of video ram (well, chip ram), any new bitmap/window/screen allocation will just fail. Even if all the memory is used to store non displayed elements. You have plenty of fast ram and yet you run out of memory...
Where MorphOS (and CGX/P96 in the old times too) manages to re-use those, even keeping hardware acceleration as long as possible.

humantarget,
Quote:
You have to find some real WWW browser for AmigaOS 3.x first. Or you want to compare OWB with IBrowse 2.4?

> Phase V was trying really hard to get involved with AT

Yes, and it seems this attempt even resulted in an AT press release mentioning a co-operation:

"Thanks to a close co-operation between Amiga Technologies and Phase V, a German turbo board manufacturer, a full range of Power PC boards will also be available for the A1200, A3000 and A4000 series."
http://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1995/at951111.html
http://www.amigareport.com/ar320/news10.html
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/ppcrelease.html

> there were definite plans to build [...] a PowerPC port.

Considering AT in 1995 announced a Power Amiga for 1997 this only seems logical.

> MorphOS was fragmenting an already weak community by offering an Amiga clone.

As I see it, MorphOS was offering the only serious (AROS, albeit in existence, wasn't to be considered serious back then) way forward in terms of "AmigaOS" as we knew it. As you said yourself, Amiga Inc. tossed AmigaOS out for Tao's Intent/Elate. The fragmentation happened only later when OS4 was announced in March/April 2001 and more specifically end of 2001 when Hyperion restarted the OS4 project after Amiga Inc's own OS4 project as well as the negotiations to make MorphOS the new OS4 failed.

Quote:

Dunno but is there anyone using Intuition directly anymore?

Quote:

It does. Just use Amiga 600 with an internal IDE Anyway, MP3 players on AmigaOS (and MorphOS) can stutter if some higher priority task is using too much CPU time. Obviously because then there isnt enough CPU time for decoding task. You can workaround it by raising priority for decoder but other tasks can still play around with Forbid()/Disable().

That AmiNetRadio in that video is streaming so it could be just that network buffer is running out. I didnt look at that video carefully enough to check whether it does so.

> Cortex A3

Never heard of that. You mean Cortex-M3? Or Cortex-A5?

> I was the one who actually outed Merlancia as a complete fraud

Only to those who didn't know that before already ;-)

> Hyperion took longer to deliver AmigaOS 4.x than it took to write
> AmigaOS from scratch, plus 1.2 and at least 1.3.

Hyperion took 2.5 years to (pre-)release a first version of OS4. AmigaOS 1.3 was released in 1988, so I don't think your assessment reflects reality.

Quote:

Is it our fault?

And then -- we are not living in communism where you are offered only one option, one opinion and one community. Users are free to make their decision and use whatever they want to use.

Particularly I grew tired to old "buy this and that to support true Amiga" sentiment.

Quote:

Amiga really died in 1994 and never came back. It is nice hobby platform, however. Well, at least sometimes

Quote:

Once you stop worrying about Amiga only then you can start enjoying again. Ten years ago I had this strange idea Amiga should be revived, restored back to the mainstream. It is silly. Just use it when it is fun and stop using it when it is not fun anymore. No more worrying whether one should buy this and that to keep Amiga companies alive. We didnt worry about Amiga in 1990 -- why should we worry about it now?

So dont take any promises, dont believe anything, just let it flow.


[ Edited by itix 02.06.2011 - 17:10 ]

> some of the stuff Hembach did was dubious... but keep in mind, he was only
> Trustee of Commodore GmbH. He initially sold the Commodore trademark
> to ESCOM, even though he didn't have the authority:
> http://articles.philly.com/1995-03-09/business/25700886_1_commodore-s-amiga-commodore-international-sale
> The final sale was for all of Commodore's intellectual properties, and certain
> inventories. Hembach had nothing to do with it.
> http://articles.philly.com/1995-04-22/business/25686725_1_amiga-commodore-products-commodore-international

Thanks for the links. Very interesting reads.

@humantarget
Quote:

Amiga Inc ditched AmigaOS3.x for that Elate thingie. OS4 wasn't even planned. There was no future for AmigaOS users but MorphOS.

Quote:

And MorphOS would have moved even faster if some people hadn't attacked it for no reason.

Quote:

Of course missed opportunities are easier to see with the benefit of hindsight, but do think what you've highlighted shows we missed out on a truly great opportunity.

Just imagine if AROS had been taken seriously back then. There was no logical reason it shouldn't have been. Imagine an open-source AmigaOS-like operating system with polish beyond that found in MorphOS ('beyond' as development responsibilities would have been shared between MorphOS and AROS devs).

Most Amiga fans accept MorphOS is the most polished of the NG Amiga systems, but combining it with the open-source nature of AROS (and with the extra large developer pool) would have made it unstoppable. I doubt Hyperion would have even attempted to compete.

Of course this is just describing an alternate reality, and we have to live in our own reality, but perhaps we should learn lessons from our past stubbornness.

Quote:

Maybe you can explain why you felt in necessary to bring up this topic again within the last few months by posting your comments regarding the possibility of MorphOS2.x infringing on any Amiga copyrights? What was your motive, or reason(s)?

Has Dave always suffered from schizophrenia or is it a recent event?

Quote:

I can't speak for Haynie, but mine has been mostly controlled for ages now.

Quote:
I wouldn't really call it "fought in court" - didn't it end up with out-of-court settlement?

Of course the mutual settlement stands as well as a court decision would have, just pointing out it wasn't exactly "tried in justice system" - there's no telling which side would have won, and why.

amigadave,

Thanks David.
But I was referring to Haynie's weird habit of stating one opinion, then affirming a belief in a polar opposite a few sentences later.
Usually this is a sign of mental illness or political aspirations.

Jim,
Quote:

Now that's just out of order.

It's one thing to disagree with a person, even have a few jokes, but to start insinuating that Dave Haynie has political aspirations... that's just nasty man, cold.

Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:

Petro said all kinds of things that weren't true. They were talking PowerPC then, but doing absolutely nothing about it... maybe that was Petro's cozying up to Phase V to have something to sell.

But in fact, actual PPC development didn't really start until December of 1995, when Stefan Domeyer was in charge and brought Andy Finkel and I into the company in order to actually deliver on this. Which was happening, at least until Escom managed to kill themselves in the PC market.

They had made some accomplishments before that -- the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000T were back in production, and they had hired an outside firm to make the "Walker"... some good ideas in there, some pretty nutso ones as well, but it was a real project in development before we came in -- we where just there for PowerPC. And 1997 wasn't necessarily a real date, either, but it did depend on just how well they financed the software port.

A big part of Andy's plan for PowerPC AmigaOS was a complete Hardware Abstraction Layer. So Phase V could have built their own HAL and run AT's AmigaOS on their hardware. Pretty much any PPC should have been supportable.

Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:

I dunno... it was pretty close. The Gateway version of Amiga, Inc. ran from 1997 until sometime in 1999. Bill and fleecy founded their version of Amiga, Inc. that same year, but AmigaDE wasn't announced until sometime in 2000. MorphOS was started in 1999, maybe earlier... a few years before the Amiga, Inc. debacle.

By 1998, the PowerPC was already a fundamentally dead-for-desktop processor, since Apple canned the Mac Clones in August of 1997, so the best you were going to do is get Apple's sloppy seconds. Maybe MorphOS made a little better approach out of this by supporting used Macs, but really, neither was a "way forward", except for hobbyists. "Runs on old Macs" is hardly a business model, or a way to bring in a significant number of new users. That was my definition of "way forward".

And not that AROS does that either. And AROS isn't finished. But it's also something that's not going to die just because some company gets tired of it. And, much like the GNU project did for Linux, AROS has certainly helped out MorphOS, eh?

I don't currently have a problem with either one. I have no personal use for a PPC computer, but if you're happy with an old Mac running MorphOS, more power to ya. At least it's not this "X1000" nonsense, which to me anyway looks like yet another false promise to the Amiga fans.

Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:

With that said... there did seem to be "morons on our team", as the old comedy routine goes. I suppose it's possible, maybe even likely, that the documentation, the German translations, or something of that ilk got screwed up in the sale paperwork of Commodore/Amiga to Escom. But that was the end of it all... once Commodore was sold, the liquidation was complete... there was no entity other than Escom that could have retained the rights to the AmigaOS.

boot_wb,
Quote:

Damn, the secret is out.... I do intend to Mayor of Mr. D's Pub, one of these days.

When I talk on technical matters, even something like what (in the USA, anyway) might constitute copyright infringement, unless it's a very knowledgeable crowd, I do tend to supply definitions. That was not an accusation... but when I say I believe Ralph, that itself bears no technical merit.

The basis perhaps for all of this seems to be that Petro was randomly handing out snippets or perhaps whole listings of Amiga source code back in the early AT days, when he was still actually in charge. And I don't know German Law, so maybe that was just dandy. In the USA, if I wanted to see the source code, and a guy like Petro, CEO or GM of a company, handed me a listing, I'd hand it back in a femtosecond, unless it was accompanied by a written license agreement.

As CEO or GM, perhaps he has the right to make that agreement, perhaps not, but it certainly has to be vetted by company lawyers, possibly by the board of directors depending on the extent of the code release. That's a major company asset, after all. If Petro just handed you code, and you used it, say, in a product, without a license, Amiga Technologies or Escom could absolutely come after you for copyright violation (they might have to go after Petro, too, as part of that process).

Just sayin'. One reason I like FOSS... much easier rules.

@humantarget

First off I'm quite impressed that you are actually replying here, that takes guts, however there still seems to be missing the crucial component this thread originally called for...

Quote:

But that is an entirely different claim than the one you made earlier, in which you claimed that just seeing aforementioned code constitutes a copyright infringement, which is just plain silly.

When companies give outsiders access to their secrets they usually make them sign NDAs, and the reason for this is of course to legally bind them to not use this knowledge outside the scope initially intended (NDAs also usually contain an anti-competetive clause). Without such a document they would have no legal way to stop a person using this knowledge in any way (except verbatim; this is where copyright infringement comes in).

If there was reasonable doubt a person without a currently binding NDA (they all have an expiry date) had used such knowledge verbatim you could at best get a court order for a source review, you can't go around claiming copyright infringement, that would be considered libel.

Anyway, since you say you believe Ralph this should all be considered moot, there's just those three final words missing...


- CISC

humantarget,
Quote:

Escom could offcourse only get that way what did belong to C= before (doh).

The problem was that C= in it's last days had sold distribution/production rights of 3.1 to VillageTronic and that these contracts were unclear on what they really meant.

Was Escom allowed to sell new Amigas with 3.1 ?
Was Escom (or the companies that followed) allowed to sell upgrade kits containing (parts of) 3.1 (that would be 3.5 and 3.9 and even 4.x) ?

Thats what the "stupid german judge" had to decide on (but AFAIK never actually did).

> Petro said all kinds of things that weren't true. They were talking PowerPC then,
> but doing absolutely nothing about it... maybe that was Petro's cozying up to
> Phase V to have something to sell.

Now you're being unfair towards Tyschtschenko here when you make it seem like this "Power Amiga" thing was his pet idea alone. This press release is from November 1995 when Amiga Technologies still had a dual leadership consisting of both Petro Tyschtschenko and Stefan Domeyer. And it seems they had the blessing of their boss Manfred Schmitt, founder and chairman of Escom, who said only 4 days later:

"we have decided to leave the Motorola 68000 range of processors and upgrade the system with the power PC processor next year. The future machines will of course run with Amiga OS. The choice of the Power PC was made for its speed, and also because it is actually the only RISC processor that is currently used in personal computers, which will insure us that needed quantities will be available at attractive prices on a mass market. [...] we will concentrate on improving and porting Amiga OS to other processors. [...] The implementation of the Power PC processor will be a first step in that direction. Later, this processor will replace the 68000 chips in the rest of the Amiga product range. This is possible thanks to the range of versions that Motorola provides, from the 602 up to the 604."
http://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1995/at951117.txt
http://www.amigareport.com/ar320/feature9.html

> actual PPC development didn't really start until December of 1995, when
> Stefan Domeyer was in charge and brought Andy Finkel and I into the
> company in order to actually deliver on this. Which was happening

I don't think that a one month delay between a declaration of intent and actual development start is that unusual.

> they had hired an outside firm to make the "Walker"

Yes, these were MAZeT for the electronics and KS Design for the housing.

> 1997 wasn't necessarily a real date, either, but it did depend on
> just how well they financed the software port.

Yes, it's not unknown to me that press releases are usually created to represent an (sometimes overly) optimistic stance on the things supposed to come ;-) Yet it was "1997" that was announced in the press release as the target date, that's why I mentioned it.

> The Gateway version of Amiga, Inc. ran from 1997 until sometime in
> 1999. Bill and fleecy founded their version of Amiga, Inc. that same year,
> but AmigaDE wasn't announced until sometime in 2000. MorphOS was
> started in 1999, maybe earlier... a few years before the Amiga, Inc. debacle.

According to Ralph Schmidt, MorphOS development started in 1998, so midway through the Gateway-Amiga era. To quote from what you in this very thread told about that time: "Gateway wanted to basically toss AmigaOS out and replace it with Linux". Even when it was still QNX in 1998 (plans changed to Linux only in 1999), my assessment still stands that MorphOS was the only way forward in terms of "AmigaOS" as we knew it, no matter whether we talk about mid-2000 (when the first public beta of MorphOS was released) like I have done or about 1998 (when MorphOS development started).

> Maybe MorphOS made a little better approach out of this by supporting used Macs,
> but really, neither was a "way forward", except for hobbyists. "Runs on old Macs"
> is hardly a business model, or a way to bring in a significant number of new users

When MorphOS development started in 1998, it was still to take 7 or 8 years for Apple to ditch PowerPC, so I don't know why you're mentioning "old Macs" and "used Macs" when in fact we're talking about the 1998 to 2000 time frame here as that's what my assessment of "only way forward" was in reference to. It's true that Mac support didn't eventually come before 2009, but the original plan (uttered early 2002 by Ralph Schmidt) was to commence work on a Mac port end of 2002, which it seems didn't happen for various reasons.

> not that AROS does that either. And AROS isn't finished. But it's also something
> that's not going to die just because some company gets tired of it.

True. I was talking about a point in time 11 years ago. To get an impression on the state of AROS back then, here's the AROS status update from the same day the first public beta of MorphOS was released, even containing a short note to the MorphOS developers at the end:

http://www.amiga-news.de/archiv/000801.shtml

> AROS has certainly helped out MorphOS, eh?

Yes, definitely. Nobody's denying that, quite to the contrary:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:morphos-team.net+aros

> if you're happy with an old Mac running MorphOS, more power to ya.

I am, thanks.


Edit: changed MAZeT website to archived one

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 07.03.2023 - 20:10 ]