The next-gen mainboard designed with amigaos4 and morphos in mind | Hacker News Reader

The next-gen mainboard designed with amigaos4 and morphos in mind

mirari.vitasys.nl

79 pointstodsacerdoti19 comments

Amazing effort

Be sure to click through to the details page https://mirari.vitasys.nl/the-first-rebirth/

As someone who grew up with Amiga... I find it amazing these boards still keep coming (X1000, X5000... anyone?) - they have always been insanely expensive for specs that are decade(s) old, all in the name of... really no idea what beyond "we can".

Or in other words: I wonder what if all that time, money and effort went into say AROS[1] and/or emulation. I can imagine still using AmIRC and HippoPlayer if I could run them as any other software on Linux.

1: https://aros.sourceforge.io/introduction/

Yeah, the lack of support for off-the-shelf hardware has been the doom of the Amiga revival since day one.

The refusal to port AmigaOS to anything but dead or near-dead architectures has always amazed me -- had the resources been spent on AROS instead, we'd have a usable modern ecosystem by now, rather than multiple different options that fall back on various ways of running 30 year-old binaries.

All I want is a decent modern version of YAM and universal ARexx/datatype support! :(

> Yeah, the lack of support for off-the-shelf hardware has been the doom of the Amiga revival since day one.

The Amiga was not just an OS. It was all about the custom chips that added such interesting and powerful capabilities to an otherwise unspectacular 68000. When combined with the OS, it created a system that was truly ahead of its time.

But I don't see the appeal of AmigaOS on modern hardware. Most Amiga fans are more interested in the games and demos that didn't use the OS, and used the blitter/copper etc directly.

And if you just want a faster Amiga, the PiStorm is pretty cool.

There have been firebrands attempting a revival of the Amiga since the mid 90's, and back then it was a question of making a new and modern platform -- not watching demos.

Today is a different matter, of course. Personally, emulation is more than enough for me.

There's an AROS runtime for GNU/Linux and others.

I'm not an Amiga'n. When I was a kid in the late 1980s, a friend of mine had some Amiga, and I enjoyed a couple of games he let me play on it, and that's about the extent of my experience since then.

So, I'm finding it difficult to understand what this project actually is: Is it hardware for running original Amiga games and apps, or has there been a continuing user community and SW development effort in Amiga-world that us PC-heads are just not aware of? And that is interesting and different than copycatting advances from non-Amiga environments?

The Amiga has become a Ship of Theseus situation. After the 68000 CPU series was no longer developed, third-party expansion boards were developed to add a PowerPC CPU to existing Amigas. AmigaOS 4 was developed to run on PowerPC, and later PowerPC Amiga motherboards were developed which didn't require original Amiga hardware at all. There's also MorphOS, an Amiga-compatible PowerPC OS, and AROS, an open source OS which runs on x86.

There's a substantial Amiga enthusiast community to this day, which is the main market for this stuff. The various "new Amiga" platforms can only run original Amiga games via emulation. There has been plenty of development in the Amiga field, including new games, software and hardware expansions, though it is a niche hobbyist thing and mainly for people who love Amiga. You can find more information on YouTube.

Well, the Power architecture generally is certainly something I would have liked to see more love for. A few years back I heard about it (again) due to its supporting GPUs as "first-class citizens" w.r.t. access to system memory. Or at least, some OpenPower systems allow for that.

I'll try to look this up on YouTube, and thanks.

That's what sort of confuses me.

If you're no longer running a 680x0 and the custom chips that defined what an (original-series) Amiga was, and you can't plug in any of the historic peripherals (I don't even see a 9-pin joystick/mouse socket!) why bother with PowerPC in $current_year?

I can sort of see the story for projects like the "Denise" board where it's basically a way to create a new hardware 68k Amiga (although modern replacements for the Commodore silicon might be desirable, so we aren't just desoldering/desocketing the same 30-year-old chips again and again).

But if you've already given up the main aspects of classic Amiga hardware and chosen emulation as the road forward, cheapest commodity x86-64 or ARM products would be fast enough to emulate pretty much any mainstream 680x0 option and the custom chips. I could see a small niche for a PPC coprocessor accelerator for the small sliver of "PPC-native" software if the current emulation isn't fast enough.

It's amazing how much enthusiasm and innovation is still coming from the Amiga community! Also one of the reasons why I follow Amiga Bill on YouTube. Great show.

What puts me off the Amiga scene is how little of the 30 or 40 year old software has been released into the public domain.

I have no issue with charging for new software for retro platforms in order to support the scene but find it slightly offensive that you have to pay to acquire a legal 1.3 kickstart ROM - released and unchanged since 1988. It just feels like copyright squatting.

Yeah but that's probably because the legal blocks are a bit complicated. Most people just pirate it, I'd assume. I find all that stuff on torrents if I need.

As a fan of older Macs, I didn't know there were any 64-bit PowerPC chips made after the Power Mac G5 and the Cell processors used in the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3.

This is cool; it would be cool to play with a modern, hobbyist 64-bit PowerPC board. I will be keeping an eye on this project!

It is what powers (hehe) many IBM servers,

https://www.ibm.com/products/power

Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ISA) and PowerPC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC) have a shared history but are not fully compatible with each other.

This board is based on an NXP QorIQ SoC which is designed for networking hardware, not really intended for general purpose computers. It is to my knowledge, and has been for years, the only game in town if you need to be compatible with the PowerPC ISA (IBM POWER processors, while part of the same lineage, cannot run PowerPC code)

https://mirari.vitasys.nl/the-first-rebirth/

If anything, AROS and MorphOS urgently need a RISC-V port.

The AmigaOS world needs to move to common hardware; PPC is no better than 68k in practical terms.

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