@matthey

Quote:

THEA500 Mini came along with a nostalgic Amiga illusion that showed there is an Amiga market even when the hardware is just "good enough", for a "deadend" toy. History tells us that emulation/virtual CPUs and machines are the end of a platform and not "good enough" to build a user base because native compilation is much more efficient. Even Retro Games Limited wanted to do better with a toy in respect of the original hardware but at least they gave us a good illusion. The Amiga spirit has been gone for a long time and we forget about the visionaries who believed "we can do better".

Everything you said is true! THEA500 Mini is simply "Good enough" and in the same way a cheap good enough A600/A300 would have provided a point of entry to the Amiga ecosystem, so does THEA500 Mini. The boost in our numbers could be sustained if the Amiga retailers provided support and Mods for THEA500 Mini with a "we can do better" mentality. Instead, they try to reinvent the wheel and I honestly don't believe anyone can do better at that price point! All we really have left is incremental improvements to 68k. Nostalgia feeds that IMHO!

Last edited by BigD on 30-Aug-2023 at 08:28 AM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
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@BigD

The “problem” with THEA500 Mini, is that it’s not “amiga”, it’s just another embedded Linux ARM device. All the modding going on is also in the “linux space”.

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As for “we can do better” - yes, go ahead and do it already, the tools and components are all available, all you need to do is to get involved.

An affordable Minimig/AGA FPGA system with PiStorm/Emu68 running AROS/68k.

Don’t be surprised if it suddenly exists.

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@kolla

Quote:

kolla wrote: @BigD The “problem” with THEA500 Mini, is that it’s not “amiga”, it’s just another embedded Linux ARM device. All the modding going on is also in the “linux space”.

It's "Amiga enough" for casual ex-Amigans and people that want to dabble! They can use Workbench, catch up on games that they missed and get an introduction to WHDLoad and ADFs. I honestly would not expect too much from the 'alternatives'! However, I own Classic machines already so a stand alone machine more advanced than THEA500 Mini is not necessary for me!

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

The THEA500 Mini is just one the many great options that ex-amigans have to chose among. Ex-amigans also have UAE variants for their games consoles, computers, handhelds, phones, whatever. All these options well within “good enough”.

I was writing about the “we can do better”, which for me means first and foremost - no software emulation of hardware that produces audio and graphics. So, Amiga chipset in hardware, FPGA to be pragmatic and practical. In my view, there isn’t an audience big enough for an ASIC run of 68k+AGA, and there certainly aren’t anyone ready to say that they are ready for it - ALL FPGA implementations are in state of evolving, NONE are ready for ASIC - bugs are present and features are missing in both CPU and chipset implementations, priorities are on what’s practical and achievable by whoever is working on it.

Last edited by kolla on 30-Aug-2023 at 09:20 PM.

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@kolla

Talk is cheap. Stack 'em high and sell them to the masses not the classes. THEA500 Mini was the community's best opportunity to do that! It's a shame none of the Amiga retailers that attend Amiga shows actually sell THEA500 Mini, as the user groups demo it and people ask if they can buy one but there are none available!!! IMHO the ex-Amigans aren't going to buy a FPGA based machine or necessarily faff around with Win-UAE! Wasted opportunities!

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Quote:

BigD wrote: @kolla Talk is cheap. Stack 'em high and sell them to the masses not the classes. THEA500 Mini was the community's best opportunity to do that!

Which community? The THEA500 Mini _HAS_ a community, so what's missing for you? There is also an awesome MiSTer community, partly overlapping MiST/SiDI/UnAmiga community, again overlapping Minimig and PiStorm/Emu68 community... which partly overlaps "Amiga hardware" community, not to mention Apollo Core community, OS4 community, MorphOS community, AROS communities... what do you want? Us all to throw everything else we are doing behind and jump on the THEA500 Mini thing just because... the possibility of using the same device as tons of ex-amigans? What for? So we can offer free support or what?

Quote:

It's a shame none of the Amiga retailers that attend Amiga shows actually sell THEA500 Mini

Why would they? Anyone interested can just buy from a local stores, no need to bother Amiga stores that already struggle enough with fulfilling orders etc. Just like back in the day - I bought my first A1200 at a bookstore, that also did a little bit of home computers on the side.

Quote:

as the user groups demo it and people ask if they can buy one but there are none available!!!

How hard is it to tell them where to buy one? Just ask google on your phone... mine says - right now - that I can get it from several Elkjøp stores all within 4 km range.

Quote:

IMHO the ex-Amigans aren't going to buy a FPGA based machine or necessarily faff around with Win-UAE! Wasted opportunities!

Wasted how? What opportunities? What do you want from "the Amiga community"? Praise? Enthusiasm? It is already there! Specialized OS designed for the THEA500 Mini? Already exists! Games collections that don't care about licensing issues? Already exists! So what?!

Last edited by kolla on 30-Aug-2023 at 09:36 PM.

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@kolla

Impulse buys are a thing! All this elitist rubbish isn't going to wash with the general public. If RetroPassion or AmigaKit for example had brought some units to the shows this Summer they WOULD have boosted OUR community right there and then! Simple statement.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Boosted how? Doesn’t the mini sell in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands? Isn’t that great already? I don’t get who exactly you include when you say “OUR community”? Us here on AWN? If minis had been for sale at the event and sold a few hundreds, so what? Would it change anything for the stuff we care about? Not really?

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@BigD

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=7022

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@kolla

I honestly don't know what you care about but having people to share fun experiences with and both collaborate on creative projects and play both old and present Amiga indie games being developed is MY aim. The point is, if you manage to make a connection and they want to buy an Amiga they should be able to especially at an Amiga event. A1222+ and Vampires are sold like Eagle version E-Type sports cars but for once we don't have to play this elitist game and our retailers just shrug their shoulders and reinvent the wheel with A600GS type projects.

Last edited by BigD on 31-Aug-2023 at 08:56 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

agami Quote:

The enemy of the excellent or the very good is indeed the good enough. Seeing the OG Amiga in this perspective is showing me just how much of a “moonshot” it was, and how Motorola’s own 68000 moonshot was the only natural choice for such a mission.

I'm glad I was able to convey my feelings about the Amiga enough for someone else to understand. I debated about pressing the submit button but it is an interesting perspective. Jay Miner deserves more recognition as a visionary. He was a knowledgeable and skilled man on a mission but a meek mellow guy isn't as flashy as a fruity guy that passes on the Amiga saying, "too much hardware". If only Amiga Corporation could have controlled their own destiny, the future may have been different. The Amiga initially suffered from "too far ahead of its time" syndrome where people didn't understand it or what they could do with it. It had an unreel mythological aura about it where people waited to see if the bugs could be worked out and what other people could do with it which was often disappointing at first considering the potential. C= management certainly didn't understand the Amiga technology and didn't know how to equip or market it (they pushed 8088 PC compatibility, refused to market the Amiga game potential and failed to make hardware comparisons with the competition). One of the last conflicts Jay won was requesting 512kiB of memory as standard while C= wanted 128kiB (like the C128 and first Mac) and were willing to compromise on 256kiB but the Amiga was more like a dynamic Sun Workstation than any PC before it (the Los Gatos software guys got ~$30,000 68k Sun workstations from C= and Sun tried to license Amiga hardware for low end 68k Sun workstations). The 256kiB addon board made the Amiga 1000 more expensive and blocked further memory expansion but Jay's push for memory expansion soon became useful. Jay didn't settle for "good enough" for the Amiga and with his own initiative created the Ranger chipset with VRAM that doubled the memory bandwidth enabling higher resolutions with more colors but C= said no even though it would have likely only been for high end Amigas at first. Commodore only saw one model of the C64 Amiga until Thomas Rattigan decided to make a cost reduced Amiga 500 and higher end Amiga 2000 although the high end only had expandability without any performance upgrade. Jay and the original Amiga Corporation team were frustrated by Commodore and their "good enough" attitude. Despite C= being helpful with some hardware issues, the famous, "We made Amiga, they fucked it up" ROM Easter Egg ended the remaining skeleton crew at Los Gatos after layoffs as C= was in deep financial trouble. C= looked likely to fail further decreasing demand for the Amiga as potential customers were reluctant to buy a high tech work in progress they thought would be orphaned and all advertising had stopped. The cheaper Amiga 500 competed much better against the Atari ST and saved C= and the Amiga though. Jay had been pushing for a more expandable cost reduced Amiga 1000 as well but C= had a different vision of the Amiga 500 becoming "good enough" to be a C64 replacement.

The 68000 was on the expensive side for a game console at the Amiga's development inception but it was out for long enough that Jay could likely predict it would get cheap enough as he did with DRAM, VRAM and Amiga chip integration when C= management was blind. Most of the 16 bit CPUs available, which were commonly upgrades of 8 bit CPUs, would likely mean even Amiga emulation would not be as popular today. The 68k is mostly modern for a 32 bit ISA even by today's standards. It is a cleaner and more orthogonal design than x86(-64), has better code density and has fewer instructions to execute in most cases with similar code. SuperH was a popular simplified RISC take on the 68k by Hitachi who produced the 68000 under license from Motorola and licensed it to ARM for their Thumb encodings but SuperH can have nearly 50% more instructions and Thumb2 more than 20% more instructions to execute in similar code compared to the 68020 ISA. Is it just a coincidence that ARM's newest AArch64 ISA which is trying to improve performance is the first major ISA I'm aware of to finally reduce the number of instructions needed to less than the 68k and only by about 5% using 68k like CISC addressing modes. ARM would likely say Thumb2 surpasses the 68020 in code density, which is likely true when using newer compilers, at the cost of more than 20% increase in instructions while AArch64 finally reduced instructions needed by 5% but at the cost of about 50% larger code. It appears that both these metrics are important to ARM yet the 68020 has a better combination of both with minimal complexity increase compared to an AArch64 ISA and CPU. Technology doesn't necessarily disappear because it is outdated but can disappear for political reasons and old silicon making the technology look bad which I believe is the case for the 68k Amiga. Oh, there was one other CPU ISA option that wouldn't have been too bad for the Amiga which was the National Semiconductor 32000 also using a 32 bit ISA influenced by the PDP-11. The NS68000 was a true 32 bit CPU (32 bit data bus where 68000 was 16 bit) but it only came out in 1982, had only 8 GP integer registers instead of 16 and had more bugs than the 68000 (the 32 bit 68020 launched in 1984). Most customers stayed with Motorola providing them economies of scale for cost reductions and they were known for their professional CPUs even though they were slow to get them out but eventually the NS32k family of CPUs turned out to be good CPUs with a clean 32 bit ISA.

agami Quote:

Alas, it also reminded me how after most moonshots comes the age of complacency. No one deemed it necessary to fit rear-view mirrors on the proverbial rockets. That return to the “good enough”, drawn in by the gravity of greed, has been the bane of my existence. The moonshots show us what’s possible when we have the will to act. When our mission is not the amount of money we will make, rather the lasting imprint we will leave on people’s lives.

The "good enough" mentality isn't always caused by just greed but can include other factors as well like ignorance and laziness. The Amiga Corporation Amiga spirit was perhaps a bit of a moonshot but Jay knew what was possible on the technology side. The financial and investment side was more difficult and the "Padre" likely resorted to praying a few times when everything he owned was mortgaged and the deadline for repayment of the $500,000 loan from Atari was imminent. The Amiga Corporation guys were clearly not in it for the money as the talent likely could have made more money elsewhere. They looked at the Amiga design and said to themselves this is exciting and we can be a part of this to do better. I would have worked for free to be a part of that. I just wish there was an Amiga project that exciting. The Natami project was almost there (Natami MX Bringup thread had 761,487 views at one point backing up the mass production potential of rumored THEA500 Mini sales) which had people lined up to help out for free including me but lack of leadership, stress, financial worries and Amiga lawsuits and roadblocks derailed the project. The prospects for financial success are much higher today as there are nostalgic 68k and Amiga fans which Amiga Corporation never had. RJ Mical estimated it would take $49 million to take the Amiga from design to market if starting over which is something like $110 million today adjusted for inflation. Development costs and ASIC costs have decreased precipitously though and the original ~$7 million investment would go a long way today. Also, it's much easier to market, promote and sell a computer online today as the Raspberry Pi Foundation has shown.

agami Quote:

I have not forgotten, nor can I ever forget. I know that in this regard, among those that frequent this forum and others like it, I am an outlier. My surveys of this demographic reveal a greater interest in nostalgia than that of a new moonshot. They’ve resigned themselves to short lasting moments of joy, through the dregs served up by those who share their hopelessness.

The Amiga doesn't need a moonshot where a telescope can barely see. We need to go where a microscope can barely see. Jay Miner understood that integration, going smaller, cost reducing and enhancing the Amiga's capabilities were the keys to the Amiga success. This hasn't changed. It's practically part of the Amiga philosophy along with elegance and CPU offloading. Emulation is brute force with perpetually high CPU loads. Some 40 years of integration and technology finally allows a 1990s Amiga to be emulated at low power even when using brute force on a weak CPU but that is ignoring the Amiga design philosophy of Jay Miner. Maybe it's acceptable for a quick to market "deadend" toy into an Amiga market being killed off by "deadend" bastard hardware that ignores the Amiga philosophy and has lost the Amiga spirit but "we can do better", at least without Amiga road blocks who claim their products are not "deadend"? That circles back around to the question of "good enough" roadblocks being driven by greed, ignorance or laziness but I digress.

Last edited by matthey on 31-Aug-2023 at 09:18 PM.

@Hammer
I believe I have put the other CPU related arguments to rest by explaining that the 68060 was just an overachieving embedded CPU that just happened to compete with high performance and much better supported desktop x86 Pentiums. I expect over 90% of Amiga CPUs were embedded CPUs so blame C= for Motorola designing them lower performance embedded CPUs, especially after the 68040 when Apple left the 68k desktop market. To C= management, Jay Miner created the wonderful CPU offloading chipset so they could save money on CPUs which was "good enough" for C= while Jay wanted a 68k CPU upgrade with the Ranger chipset.

Hammer Quote:

TheA500 Mini package includes other items besides SoC and PCB.

I've mentioned the tank mouse and CD32 like controller add value to THEA500 Mini. The nostalgia effect is spot on for those paying for the experience. I would prefer a rare C= 3 button prego mouse and a Competition Pro CD32 style joypad but they are likely not as recognizable or cheap.

Hammer Quote:

Commodore leadership list and exits. Jack Tramiel, exited in early 1984. Marshall Smith, exited in 1986. Thomas Rattigan, exited in 1987(?). Max Toy, exited in late 1998-1989(?). Mehdi Ali became Commodore International's president early in 1989. "Read My Lips, No New Chips" memo during Amiga 3000's development seems to be under Max Toy and into Mehdi Ali.

As I recall, Mehdi arrived in 1986 as a consultant, likely to look at the financial sheets and try to turn around the nearly bankrupt C= (rumors are they defaulted on some debt but creditors thought they had enough potential at that point with the Amiga that they didn't force them into bankruptcy) and he ascended to the board of directors before becoming CEO. He seemed to have Gould's favor and likely some power before he ascended to CEO. I believe he was also the guy who hired the disastrous PC Jr. guy Bill Sydnes who shut everything Amiga related down and set the Amiga back 1-2 years. At a similar time, C= x86 related funding and employment increased as Bill brought in PC cronies. I suspect they were trying to kill the Amiga and switch to PC clones only to find the bottom dropped out of the saturated PC market and the Amiga market became more profitable and resilient due to its uniqueness.

Last edited by matthey on 31-Aug-2023 at 08:58 PM.

kolla Quote:

hm, TG68 was primarily 68000 - 68020 was implemented later. I don't know of any 68020 cores available for licensing (only several 68000 cores).

Early in the 68k family, Motorola was very protective of their baby after the Hitachi 68000 licensing dispute. There were other 2nd source 68000 3rd party producers but I don't know of early 68020+ producers. However, after Motorola threw their baby out with the bathwater (and the 88k) for political and marketing advantages with the "desktop standard" PPC that was killed off on the desktop by an inferior x86 CISC to their baby they threw out, they were not nearly as protective of their abandoned baby. Some 68020 cores were developed later by 3rd parties including the Fido CPU32 core, Natami/Apollo Core, D68000-CPU32 and Tekmos tk68020 cores (CPU32 to full 68020 ISA primarily requires bit field instructions, double memory indirect addressing modes, CAS/CAS2 instructions not allowed on Amiga and rarely used PACK/UNPK BCD instructions).

https://www.dcd.pl/product/d68000-cpu32/
https://www.tekmos.com/products/microprocessors/tk68020-microprocessor

Most of these have been marketed as CPU chips but licensing of cores is possible for some of them. The original Motorola/Freescale/NXP cores may be licensable too. Even C= was looking at licensing the 68k for a single chip Amiga SoC not that they were good at closing licensing deals or integrating the Amiga chipset to reduce costs for that matter. Lets just say that NXP is probably not making much money off the 68k family and current management may not even remember the abandoned baby that did the most to make it all possible. How much should it cost to license an abandoned and forgotten baby? The 68k cores should be in a museum right? Maybe we could help with preservation? It can only be good for PR, right? IBM has opened some of their less old cores, right?

kolla Quote:

No, the FleaFPGA Minimig isn't AGA, only OCS and (limited) ECS, and defaults to 68000, though an early and quite buggy 68020 implementation is also present (noone updated it yet).

I stand corrected then. I had recalled reading about the effort to squeeze everything in but remembered it as 68020+AGA instead of 68020+ECS. I guess he went a little too small on the FPGA. The original 68000 at 68k transistors is less than half the size of the original 68020 at 200k transistors (the 256 byte ICache is 12,288 transistors).

Ideally, it would be nice to have an FPGA large enough to fit a 68000, Z80 (NeoGeo andSega Genesis) and the largest 68000 based chipset which is likely the NeoGeo or x68000. It would be better to have a 68020+ as an ASIC for the Amiga, Atari ST, Mac and x68000. It may be possible to use eFPGA blocks on an ASIC and avoid the FPGA depending on cost. This would pretty much cover all the retro 68k market and 8 bit systems before it for the ultimate retro device up to and including the 68k and should be significantly cheaper than a MiSTer if mass produced and potentially more reliable without all the modular connections. It would be nice to have the Amiga chipset in ASIC as well for controlling the retro FPGA device but it would be more work to get it ready. Smaller FPGAs are reasonably cheap and give lots of flexibility. A high performance CPU doesn't fit in a reasonably priced FPGA and so far that is the performance stopper for 68k Amigas so it should be tackled first if at all. Some say not at all but I believe you understand the Amiga philosophies of elegance and CPU offloading in a small package better than most of the emulation is "good enough" crowd. There is plenty of room in an ASIC for that MMU you want too. The world needs more open and cheap small footprint computers like the Raspberry Pi which the 68k Amiga could easily beat in fun factor with major retro appeal.

kolla Quote:

But with ASIC, you are locked and can no longer bugfix the cores. Not like the FPGA cores are bug free and not regularly updated, rather the contrary, there are typical a good handful of updates every year. With ASIC this would be a costly affair.

That's why ASICs have extensive verification and testing done by professionals. Small samples can be made before full production but sometimes it takes a few revisions to get everything right. Some bugs can be worked around in firmware and software as well.

kolla Quote:

The “problem” with THEA500 Mini, is that it’s not “amiga”, it’s just another embedded Linux ARM device. All the modding going on is also in the “linux space”.

Yea, I expect the same for most of the ARM emulation hardware. Just good enough stuff for the Amiga or deadend stuff for the Amiga?

Last edited by matthey on 31-Aug-2023 at 11:53 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 31-Aug-2023 at 11:41 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 31-Aug-2023 at 11:33 PM.

@Thread

NEWSFLASH! Internet enabled on THEA500 Mini!

Quote:

AMiNIMiga and Pandory team brings you Internet on your A500Mini 🙂 (And Amiberry 5! Yeah you heard right 🙂 ) Here is Pandory Teams AMiNIMiga Teaser: https://youtu.be/Ri7JKFFkm_U?si=C2oqvGUPp7bL86uf An amazing feat in bringing networking to the Mini! AMiNIMiga v210 Update will give you the chance to surf the web like its 1995! Stream Music Modules while chatting with other enthusiasts. Connect your A500Mini to your local PC for easy file transfers to and from AMiNIMiga. Chat with friends and foes over IRC with AmIRC. Amongst MANY other useful and fun things. Here is a incomplete changelog for AMiNIMiga v210, and this will grow more for the release, which will happen in the coming weeks.

Great news! Hopefully it will usher in a webstore and extra web functionality!

Last edited by BigD on 11-Sep-2023 at 12:14 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Web store? What for? Everything is for free already.

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@kolla

Because money generate interest, and free generate indifference?

_________________
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The Illusion of Choice | Am*ga

@kolla

Quote:

kolla wrote: @BigD Web store? What for? Everything is for free already.

And because NEW software and games is being developed with THEA500 Mini in mind. At the moment you are encouraged to donate online to the software/games but it could now develop to be a webstore from the unit itself!

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Quote:

because NEW software and games is being developed with THEA500 Mini in mind.

Such as? For Amiga/68k or for Linux/ARM?

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@kolla

Such as the recent THEA500 Mini version of Turrican 2 AGA (I know the licensing wouldn't allow payment), The Renegades, Castlevania (again licensing problematic) and I expect Metro Siege will probably have a THEA500 Mini version!

Why not get people to buy The Mini versions direct off a webstore?

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios