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Re: AmigaOne X5000



Hello,


On Mar 3, 2017, at 5:07 PM, Swift Griggs wrote:

On Fri, 3 Mar 2017, Al Zick wrote:
The AmigaOne X5000 is out! In fact, I have one.

Sweet! Congrats, Al. I took a look at the deals at Amiga on the Lake and it was pretty pricey. I want to say it's like $1500 - $1900 USD depending on options, but I might be misremembering. It's just a tad too rich for my blood. However, I'm still really interested.

The less expensive version is supposed to be out soon.

Does it have an FPGA on board like the X1000 did? I've wondered if they added that so you could drop some VHDL or whatever and reproduce an "real" legacy Amiga in those gates, then funnel 68k through that layer rather than having to always resort to UAE. Is that possible with the AX5K?

I am not really sure.

It seems fast, but AmigaOS doesn't give it much of a work out.

Yeah, it's definitely a case of hardware outpacing software. The post-Commodore era has sucked. IIRC, only Escom was the last non- Commodore company able to actually produce a "real" Amiga. Everything else has turned out to be a tease or a dirty lie. So, my hat is off to the A-EON guys for the work. My only regret is that it looks like a cheap PC in a crappy case.

Mine looks really bad. I put it into an old PC case with a Dell keyboard, and monitor. I guess it would give people a real surprise if they booted it up and I wasn't there.

The other sad fact was that the M68k line sorta died. Yeah, sure Coldfire was pretty close, but still not pin or microcode compatible. Bummer. I put a lot of work into learning the 68k in the '030 era when it had become fully 32 bit. In my (albeit limited) experience, I found it to be very comfortable to program on.

This is sad. I really like 68k. It seems to me there was a was a Coldfire cpu that they based an accelerator card on for the Atari. I am not sure how well it worked, but from what I read it had a system to trap 68060 instructions and run it through an emulator.

I did try installing NetBSD on it with Bochs. Here it is in the installer: http://datazap.net/sites/14/Bochsinstall.jpg I think it is only using 1 core.

You are emulating x86 though, right? Cool screenshot. I *am* jealous.

Yes, I am emulating x86.


It looks like there maybe a new PowerPC notebook:http:// www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/

Huh, and they are made by A-Cube, too. The same folks who make the SAM460. Cool. I hope it makes it to production. If it looked halfway cool and could run AmigaOS, that'd be the culmination of a longtime dream since Commodore never produced a portable Amiga. However, it looks like those folks are concentrating on Linux.

Yes, they do seem to concentrate on Linux. I would rather see them use NetBSD.

Also, Servergy has built a new PowerPC server: http:// www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1262676

I saw that come out, too. It's hella expensive, though. I can't remember but I just remember a sharp inhalation of breath when I saw the $$$.

There maybe other PowerPC system too. I know that they plan on building 2 more versions of the X5000.

The problem is that Debian may drop support for PPC:

That's okay. I've dropped support for Debian. So have a lot of folks now that Devuan Beta 1 has been so stable and successful. Post systemd distros who downed the poison pill with a big jar of Lennart's cool aid are dead to me. Dead forever - no more chances after that fiasco.

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.ae/2016/11/debian-drops-powerpc.html The author of this article believe like me that NetBSD needs to be ported to the new PowerPC system. There must be someone who can port to this system.

Well, if it does happen to garner NetBSD support I'd probably buy one myself. I wish I was rich, and I could buy a couple of interested kernel devs their own rig to work with.

I really hope that NetBSD is ported to it. It sounds like NetBSD already supports the single core processor - the e500, but I believe the system I have has an e500mc.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy your new machine. If you happen to write up any blogs or other experiences with it, shoot them to the list or to me. I'd love to hear about your experience.

I want to try booting a NetBSD kernel with e500 support and I will let you know how it goes.

-Al



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