The A-EON Amiga X5000: An alternate universe where the Amiga platform never died | Hacker News Reader

The A-EON Amiga X5000: An alternate universe where the Amiga platform never died

arstechnica.com

114 pointssatai63 comments

I loved my Amiga 500 and, in many ways, it's still my favourite computer of all those I've owned, but I can't help feeling rather sad and wistful every time I read recent Amiga announcements and articles. There's always this sense of them trampling over my rose-tinted recollections of adolescence.

I mean, is the X5000 really an Amiga? The thing with the Amiga was that in the 1980s it was streets ahead of pretty much anything else that was available at the time, albeit only for a relatively short period. It had all this super cool custom hardware and a great OS. Whereas the X5000 is a kind of mid-tier desktop computer with somewhat interesting hardware (a point in its favour Amiga-wise, especially that loopy custom chip, granted) and a whopper of a price tag.

I like the idea of a widely available computer with a different hardware architecture and operating system than the currently available choices (which basically boils down to PCs... and expensive PCs that run OSX) but, as the X5000 stands, what would I do with it? Where is the software? How could I do my job with it? Where are the games (a big draw on the original Amiga)?

I hate to be a downer because I really loved the Amiga but, guys, it's over. It just is. It's been over for decades. And it makes me sad but it's not going to change without, for one thing, a much better capitalised company behind it, as well as an end to all the trademark nonsense.

I have similar feelings regarding today's use of the Amiga name. I still have my A500 and it's the best computer I ever had, and maybe ever will. So when I talk about Amiga, I like to specifically say "Commodore-Amiga", to emphasize that I mean the Amiga-branded hardware of that specific period only.

Where is the software?

I think you just answered your own question about whether it is really an Amiga. If you really want to relive the Amiga glory days, isn't that part of the experience?

When I bought my Microbiotics 8-Up! card from the local Amiga dealer, they rang my order up on an IBM PC that they used for accounting and inventory tracking and such. I asked if they couldn't do that on an Amiga, and they enthusiastically said they were looking forward to that "just as soon as the software is available".

Haha - yeah, I think you nailed it there. Although in the early 90s I certainly never lacked the software I needed: programming, games, music making, word processing, bitmap graphics, vector drawing and CAD, ray tracing, fractals, basic utilities, even a bit of DTP. Picked up so much stuff from magazine cover disks back in the day (I was still at school so had very little cash).

That being said, my requirements as a GCSE (and somewhat as an A-level) pupil are perhaps a bit different from what they are today. In some ways they were perhaps greater and more demanding, in others less.

The software is in AmiNet. Accounting software existed even at the time. What did not exist is the business community - by going for the consumer media market, Commodore inadvertently alienated the more boring business customers.

I feel the same way. I grew up on the Amiga, getting an Amiga 500 when I was an early teen. I was blown away the first time I saw Shadow of the Beast. Totally amazing...

I had upgraded from an Apple II. It was like night and day. A local BBSer convinced me I should get an Amiga instead of a Mac Plus, and the rest was history...

I remember being in awe just at the parallax scrolling on Shadow of the Beast on a friend's Amiga. At home we still just had a lowly C64.

I remember seeing that for the first time: I think it might have been in John Menzies. I'd never seen anything like it before, certainly not from a home computer. Totally blown away.

I had an Amiga 1000 and loved it. That said, a lot of the things we thought were so epic about it were just smoke and mirrors. The iconic bouncing ball demo, for example, was made to spin by switching the color palette and made to move by changing the address of the video buffer in memory. The same elegant system couldn't have extended to something as simple as a second ball on a different trajectory or rotating at a different speed. A modern computer, on the other hand, could render 1000 of those balls and grab coffee between frames. It's hard to imagine what you could throw together on some breadboards in your garage that would be streets ahead of the mid-range PC you're lamenting.

But that's what you have to do on limited hardware. Raycasting is awesome, but it's a hacked, inverse raytracing limited to a single ray plane.

What made the bouncing ball awesome was the fact that it could be done thanks to the planar video setup and powerful blitter compared to the chunked video system IBM-compatible's were using up through SVGA.

Most of the PC's graphical memory layouts in the 80s and early 90s were planar; the major exceptions were CGA and 320x200 MCGA 256-color. That had a lot to do with why PC gaming was so bad; without a blitter, graphics had to be drawn on-screen by shifting the bit patterns "by hand" and drawing them on the appropriate bitplanes. Many games got around this by only drawing sprites or scenery elements on 8-pixel boundaries. John Carmack figured out a way to use the EGA's scrolling registers and off-screen video memory to create smoothly scrolling backgrounds; for sprites he stored four copies of each sprite, each shifted to a different bit position so they could easily be drawn on screen.

Chunky graphics is what saved the PC, gaming-wise, and made Doom and Quake possible. Drawing an image became a matter of writing the color-table index for each pixel to that pixel's memory location. Screens of considerable complexity could be drawn with the CPU alone.

On the other hand, I distinctly remember having Imagine or Lightwave doing actual ray tracing in the background (clearly taking up 100% CPU), while I was playing some simple game in a window in the foreground.

Having set the foreground window to high priority somehow seems to have worked back then, but for whatever reason doesn't seem to work on today's typical PCs. Random things seem to make ridiculously powerful machines pause for whatever reason, even without having processes take up 100% of the CPU.

This is the difference between a real time operating system and one that is not. See BeOS for a newer take. Or MorphOS.

(X86 has a few things that can break realtime performance, such as broken firmware handling of SMI.)

What you told is probably an important reason. But another one is that modern x86 cores clock down if there is load on multiple cores (to prevent heating issues) or even clock up for a short time (e.g. Intel Turbo Boost) if only a single core gets a load peak without much load on other cores.

In practice also often insufficient cooling is a reason why the computer gets "slower/sluggish" if there is a high load in particular on multiple cores. The cooling of practically every laptop available is in my opinion undersized (to save space) and if dust gets into the fan (it will gradually) this will get even worse. Luckily most gamers ("PC Master Race") know how important a sufficiently dimensioned cooling is for their self-built PCs.

I long for an alternate universe where tired and stupid Amiga trademark battles are ancient history. A universe where the Amiga OS and tech is open-sourced and cared for by the community itself.

The "mysterious" XMOS part looks like this:

http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xcore-200

If it had a DDR3 interface, it'd be cool if it were the CPU. It'd be more Amiga-like.

The XMOS devices are simply multicore microcontroller-level parts. Basically, you're going to be using them for low-latency, highly deterministic functions like audio processing. Possibly enough throughput for video tho @500MHz.

> up to 32 logical cores

Wait, are there a bunch of real, independent cores on this thing, or are they doing heavy amounts of SMT?

The specific chip in use here has two actual cores each with up to 8 hardware threads ("logical cores" in current XMOS marketing parlance). The hardware executes instructions from the active threads in a round-robin fashion. Due to pipelining, there has to be at least 4 clock cycles between two instructions from the same thread, so maximum per-thread speed is 1/4 the overall clock speed and you can execute up to 4 threads on each core with no further slowdown. Also, the hardware cores don't share memory and communicate only via message passing, and the threads generally communicate in the same way. It's an interesting architecture which no-one's really made any use of on AmigaOne hardware for the whole 5 years it's been shipping with it.

Yes. There are a bunch of cores, plus SMT. The datasheets for their parts give equivalent performance depending on how many threads you have. XMOS chips are in that category of Neat and Weird, which is perfect for an Amiga type system.

I think the Vampire 2 FPGA acceleration card for the Amiga 600 deserves to be mentioned: https://youtu.be/8S3B8a8N83k?t=871 It seems a lot of fun and is much cheaper (250 Euros).

I've always thought stuff like this is cool, and I love the fact there's still this fairly big retro scene around, well, not just the Amiga, but lots of old systems. But what do people do with hardware like this? I mean, after you've set it up and played around with it, and realised it makes your machine loads faster, what do you use it for?

Play games, explore and use simpler software, and lots of "maker"-y things. Using brand new WiFi 232 boards to get back onto the re-growing BBS scene is a lot of fun, too. Everyone there is totally into it.

You use it how ever you want.

Much of what we like to do (except the internet as we know it today) is right there. If you like retro gaming and productivity software, it retro-computing can be a ton of fun. For many, just getting the hardware maxed out in various ways is very rewarding.

Example: I have an Amiga 1200 that uses a 4GB CF IDE hard drive. It also has a mild CPU upgrade. I also have an Amiga 2000 with 8GB of RAM and a torqued CPU (25 Mhz, which is more than 3X faster than the day the computer was born) and 2GB chip RAM. That all sounds laughable, but it boots in about 14 seconds. How about yours? If it didn't have the hard drive it would only take a couple of seconds. And as soon as I'm looking at the desktop (Workbench) I can launch a program off its new 4GB SCSI HD in a couple of seconds and jump right in. And this is all off the original OS, 1.3.

It's a passion and a hobby. "What do you use it for?" I use it for fun and entertainment, and I connect now to BBSes more than Facebook. It's just so much more interesting.

I'll take my machine(s) over these new hybrids any day. I don't need emulation except in a worst case scenario (like, if I'm traveling). But to each his/her own. There's no "right way". Just your way.

FWIW I don't use the Vampire cards. I mostly use accelerators that were available in the late 80s and early 90s.

Thanks, that's interesting. I think part of me just wishes I had the time to tinker, but my tinkering tends to be writing new versions of old arcade games, and that's pretty time-consuming on its own. I do often have videos like 8-Bit Guy's stuff on in the background when I'm working - he's become one of my favourite YouTubers, actually. I find it sort of gets me in the zone and can be quite motivating when I don't feel like doing much.

I do like the idea of getting back into the BBS scene though. Certainly to me that's a lot more interesting than, as you mentioned, facebook - I imagine the people involved are a lot more self-selecting so plenty of interesting stuff going on rather than the bland diet of shared posts on FB.

> but my tinkering tends to be writing new versions of old arcade games, and that's pretty time-consuming on its own.

Well, frankly that sounds bad ass. Next to my 2000 is a mint C64. I use it almost daily for PETSCII specific BBSes. In any case, there is still a very interesting game dev scene for it. My most recent favorite is Bear Essentials, by Graham Axten. You can read more about it here, if you're interested. https://amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=238

Disclaimer: I wrote the article, and it's my commodore shrine/site.

Haha - thanks, that's kind, but whilst it might sound bad ass what it actually means is I spend as much time performance optimising game loading so people don't click off the page before they've had a chance to play, or doing SEO [1], as I do writing the games (which is by far the most fun bit).

No disclaimer needed either: I really enjoyed the Bear Essentials post, so thanks for sharing. I found the comment about pixel perfect movement particularly resonated with me. I find most web games, and particularly Flash games (I used HTML/JS/CSS), fail quite badly in this sense, with characters/sprites often feeling quite detached from the backgrounds they're running or flying over.

[1] If I didn't do these rather soul sucking tasks nobody would ever play the games, so whilst they're kind of a drag, this does keep my motivation to do them reasonably high.

Writing new versions of old arcade games, very cool!!

Out of interest, have you played with Cannonball before? It's an improved Outrun engine:

https://github.com/djyt/cannonball/wiki

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV9BZbk7C-E

There's a port for Vampire-enhanced Amigas, so any new content could find its way onto an Amiga too. ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yVqB13EtZg

I haven't, although I watched the video about it just the other day.

The original Outrun port for the Amiga has to be one of the most disappointing conversions for the platform: truly dreadful, especially when you compare it to games like Lotus and Lotus II, which really show how good arcade-style racers on the Amiga could be.

Cannonball, on the other hand, looks absolutely fantastic. It's this sort of thing that makes me want to pick up some hardware and start tinkering with it again - I got rid of my A500 back in 2002 and have regretted doing so many times since.

Also Vampire A500 V2+. I got myself one :)

How does the protected-mode version of the OS do interprocess communication? The original non-protected version passed pointers from one process to another.

I have no idea in truth but, if I had to guess, I'd say that this could be made transparent to existing applications using a decent abstraction layer in between. You'd still pass something around that looks like a pointer, and you could use it the same way, but the OS would know it's not really. Of course, that's still potentially open to all kinds of abuse, not to mention a turtles-all-the-way-down counter-argument, so it really is just a guess.

Apparently AmigaOS 4.1 (2008) doesn't have memory protection between processes, despite what the parent article says. No good way to make it backward compatible.[1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/09/amiga...

Interesting, and also somewhat ironic that both articles are by the same guy. Either he forgot some of the limitations [1], or maybe there are additional improvements in the 4.1 release shipped with the X5000?

[1] Granted, nearly 9 years have passed, so I don't think it's really fair to give him too hard a time for that.

IIRC in the late pre-10 macos days, there was some kind of memory protection retrofitted to the platform, with some kind of permissions system allowing certain programs to break out of this when it really was required.. that could still presumably be done.. unless e.g. there are hardware restrictions (software expects processor to run in some 'mode', which it is not still in).. even then, that could probably be soft-faulted to an emulation shim in a modern full-featured CPU

The AmigaOS did, and does, interprocess communication by passing pointers across process boundaries. Access to the transmitted data is a simple memory access. The OS has no idea what data is supposed to be visible to the other process.

The original MacOS didn't do that. Originally it only ran one program at a time, with some hacks to allow "desk accessories" to steal some cycles.

The history of computing might have been quite different if the Motorola 68000 had correct instruction continuation after a memory access fault. (This was fixed in the 68010, 3 years later.) Then an MMU would have been possible sooner. Motorola was very late in producing a good MMU for the 68K line, and it wasn't until 1990 that they had an on-chip MMU.

The 68030 had a great on-chip MMU in 1987, three years after the 68020 and its off-chip 68851 (which added a wait state).

You're thinking of the 68040, which brought the FPU on-chip as well.

> The history of computing might have been quite different if the Motorola 68000 had correct instruction continuation after a memory access fault. (This was fixed in the 68010, 3 years later.)

Can you give more details, in particular on details of the problem and how it was solved?

Windows S announcement and a new Amiga X ... let me drag up this http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom seven year old blog post of mine. Especially because:

> Microsoft can [...] make it so that any new app needs to be sanctioned.

which came to be true with Windows S.

The other half of my prediction where free PCs become "cool, obscure and expensive" computers like the Amiga X series has not yet come to pass. Not yet.

That's a nice post, thanks for the link. Some may point to various coding apps available in walled gardens, but that means allowing 3rd parties to define what the general-purpose computer is and set its limits. Who are they to say where curiosity begins and where it should end? I want the freedom to run native code on the CPU, and the freedom for others to easily run what I make without jumping through any hoops.

I'd like to hear your opinions about the Raspberry Pi and other cheap computer boards where you can load Linux and just plug in a keyboard and screen. I see a future iteration of that as my next PC in a few years. The Raspberry Pi 3 is good enough to run Ubuntu MATE (I was blown away), and if it had more than 1GB of RAM I would start using it full-time today and save myself some money on the power bill while I'm at it :-)

Want to hear the doom and gloom version? All it takes is one of these to be found in a terrorist backpack and they will be banned. Consider that 16 years ago one guy tried to smuggle a bomb in his shoe and to this day hundreds of millions of passengers take off their shoes in answer.

IMO, util someone does some kind of "qemu+wine"-like for running Amiga applications and disk images as normal Linux desktop applications, the periodic "new Amiga hardware" will never end :-)

Doesn't MAME run Amiga ROMs?

Well, there's UAE: http://amiga.technology/

TFA argues that the experience of running emulated software on this new "Amiga" is substantially better than running it via UAE on Linux/Windows/whatever, though. (For what they're charging for the new hardware, I would say it'd better be.)

Since MESS was merged in, it should indeed.

You have a couple of alternatives: UAE, which in its various incarnations runs pretty much everywhere, to run M68k AmigaOS apps, or AROS to run recompiled system-friendly apps. AROS runs on pretty much anything, hosted under Windows, OS X, Linux, as well as native on a wider range of architectures (including on some original Amigas).

AROS can get you most of the way there, in that you can do graphics backends for it that run "rootless" on a Linux desktop, but the problem with that is still that there is no direct equivalent to the Amiga concept of screen's in X. Desktops is almost but not quite there, in that an application expects to be able to open them and place windows there. To get that to work smoothly you'd probably at a minimum need a special window manager and patching AROS to talk to one.

But the people buying this hardware are those who are not interested in / satisfied with emulation.

I know UAE since its beginning. My point was about desktop integration, e.g. using clipboard between Linux desktop applications and Amiga applications, window resizing using host window manager, etc.

As vidarh said, what you want is AROS. You can host AROS on Linux. The only thing that would be missing is clipboard sharing, but that could be developed.

There are even 'AROS on Linux' distros:

https://www.aeros-os.org/

http://vmwaros.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/native-or-hosted-on-li...

AmiKit does something of a similar consequence (though with an opposite approach) via Rabbit Hole: https://www.amikit.amiga.sk/ .

If you don't mind paying for a distro (basically for the packaging):

https://www.amigaforever.com/

This badly needs the A1200/A500 form factor to be even worth considering. That and a lower price. :-)

Those two options are at odds.

Right now they are reusing a bunch of PC parts, thanks to following the basic ATX formfactor.

Without that the price would likely be even higher...

There's a lower end motherboard in the works, "Tabor" (which will be released as the A1222). It's still a PC form factor, but much smaller (mini ITX afair) so it could potentially be put in an box not unlike the A1200.

I'd expect it won't be available until next year, but they've said that the cost of the motherboard will be around 450€ which is pretty nice.

The problem with Tabor, as I understand it, is that its instruction set is not compatible with the existing PowerPC Amiga code and hardware because for some reason they used a chip which doesn't support the standard PowerPC floating point instruction set at all.

Sounds like something a guy could make some money printing with a 3D printer.

Has there been a device like the Amiga since it came out? A device that was so far ahead of the competition, yet completely overwhelmed by that competition into obsolescence?

The original iPhone?

Only for those that never had a Nokia 7710 on their hand.

Perhaps the Atari ST for MIDI devices.

The SGI computers come to mind. Completely blew everything out of the water through the mid 90s, then couldn't compete once high end graphic cards were available for the PC.

I'm an Amiga fan, but the X68000 was released 2 years after the A1000 and was definitely a step up in power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000

For comparison, here's the Amiga port of Super Street Fighter 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNTcG4OvqE

Here's the X68000 version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYmQCbBpLTc

To be fair to the Amiga, there are fighting games with better graphics than the SSF2 port, but I'd say sacrifices were probably made to improve the gameplay speed.

I can't believe I never heard of this computer. Very interesting though.

Every Unix workstation. The Acorn Archimedes. The PC Engine. The Newton.

The BeBox running BeOS in the mid-1990s.

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