| From: | Patrick Payne |
| Date: | 11 Oct 2000 at 22:21:02 |
| Subject: | Re: AMIOPEN: Re: KISS=Keep It Simple Stupid |
--- g'o'tz ohnesorge
<gohnesorge@lh-computertechnik.de> wrote:
>
> No way. Documents lost and all, they would have to
> be built completely
> new from ground zero. Years of work, and huge cost.
>
Thats intresting, bacuse in the back of the A500,
there are diagrams showing the internal schematics of
the oragenal chip set, How did they loos the docs on
the AGA chip set?
> > then trying to get a PC to be an Amiga,
> > they would have passed the compatition once agian.
> If
> > they would build a motherboard that had a special
> > video slot, that would allow for a video card to
> > become the native video port.
>
> That's what you have today with PCI and AGP. The
> kludge of a shared
> memory between the two, as used in the 1984 Amiga
> design, would just
> burden the already tight bandwidth ffrom CPU to
> memory even more.
>
> A software interface to the graphics chips is much
> more flexible than a
> hardware interface (and even that still exists in
> PCI graphics chips
> today, for the 640x480 VGA resolution - that's where
> you land when you
> boot Windoze in "safe mode", or Linux and BeOS and
> the QNX demo floppy
> without graphics configured).
>
> The fact that the Amiga didn't have this, and the
> various early attempts
> to introduce one didn't catch on, caused no end of
> misery to the
> developers at C=ommodore, and resulted in the
> stagnation of the graphics
> capabilities of the custom chips, and from there on,
> in the eroding
> attractivity of the machines to the home and gaming
> market segment. Then
> came the even darker years.
>
could there be a way to implamint this into the chips
now?
> > Add 16 bit audio to Paula
> > and theres your sound,
>
> Where's my 64 channels, the MIDI and synthesizer
> emulator, and the 3D
> sound, cries the crowd.
>
64 chanled sound is PC's sulotion to the Paula's
abelity to combind more then one sound, pushing
through one channle. If the phase dagre of one of the
sounds is off, comeing out of both speakers, while the
rest of the sound is in phase, these would produce the
3D effect of the sound. As far as synthesizer
emulation, a Puls Code Modulator would solve that
problem. Just intergrate it into the design of the
custom chip. Puls Code Moldulation is how Casio dose
thier synthesizers. MIDI? With all the new music
formats comeing out, MIDI is becomeing background now.
> > add IDE aswell as SCSII, and
> > USB. I,ve even thought of makeing the chip set
> modual.
> > So upgrade would be simplifide. The IBM archatech
> is
> > not stable enough to handle where they'er trying
> to
> > take it.
>
> Nobody's building anything based on the IBM's
> architecture from 1981. The
> PCI architecture instead, that basically everything
> today from small
> embedded stuff to mainframes is built on, is rock
> solid and high
> performance, and a great asset in systems design.
>
I'm not to familiar with what PCI is, I've heard of
it, but no info on it. Could you inform me on what PCI
is?
>
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