| From: | Eyetech tech assistance |
| Date: | 23 Oct 2000 at 15:54:23 |
| Subject: | Re: Amiga announcing silly named things? ;) |
We'll try to get a decent release with full specs up tomorrow.
Ideally this would have been up on Saturday night but I was abroad last
week, Bill was in Australia and all our efforts were directed at
coordinating the Amiga release via Fleecy.
For those who can't wait that long:
The AmigaOne 1200 & 4000 have 6 x PCI slots (2 buses) + 1 x AGP + (up to)
512MB memory + a standard Mac slot for a G3/G4 upgrade module. This will be
needed for both the Classic Amiga (via cpu emulation and or OS emulation)
and for the Amiga DE. The actual board will ship with a choice of
processors/RAM - or none for those who wish to supply their own, including
possible second-user ex-Mac G3/G4 modules. The system will be dual boot. The
custom chips, kickstart etc of the original Amiga will be used for 100%
compatibility in emulation mode. As and when Classic Software can be run
under the Amiga DE the old Amiga could actually be disposed of (a few
mechanical brackets etc will be needed) and a PSU connected direct as all
the hardware functionality needed by the Amiga DE (USB, UDMA-IDE, FireWire
etc) will be on the new board.
For connection to the Amiga (A1200 Z4-compatible tower or A4000 desktop
tower conversion) the A1200 edge connector or the A4000D CPU connector will
be used. Because a G3/G4 processor is required there is no longer any need
to have a Blizzard/Cyberstorm accelerator (as is the case with the low cost
Predator-SE design) as the interfacing logic has been brought onto the main
board.
Why not an ATX board immediately?
Amiga Inc have been very keen to deliver their promise of new hardware for
the existing community 'by around Christmas 2000'. They havent got mountains
of cash and have some very significant other goals to achieve too, so they
took the view of asking (several) people who are still operating in the
Amiga business if they could help deliver this promise within more-or-less
their original timeframes.
The work on the Predator-Plus (which is not the same as the GRex BTW) means
that we can produce developer - and end user - boards MUCH more quickly than
starting from scratch. And in 1Q01 - when the AmigaOne 1200/4000 are
released - there will be very little by the way of native DE
applications/games etc, and no robust Classic Amiga 'emulator'. So by taking
this path hardware can be delivered which will both run the full DE &
applications when available and will run Classic Amiga software at G3/G4
speeds until then.This will not be everyones preferred solution but it is
deliverable and is technically robust.
And for commercial reasons any purely ATX PPC design will have to be an
all-purpose design capable of running other OS's too (eg PPC Linux) and this
requires much more in the way of compliance testing and hence cost and lead
time. The upside is that when it is eventually delivered the wider appeal
will hopefully translate to higher volumes and lower prices.
And hopefully to allay any more fears about delivery you may be relieved to
know that we are not attempting to design/produce the AmigaOne 1200/4000 in
house but are effectively project managing the efforts of some of the best
Amiga and PPC designers around.
Hope this helps
Alan
Quote carefully and read all ADMIN:README mails