Amiga38 Germany

Short summary of the event:
https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2023-10-00031-EN.html

@Primax

"special price of 1600 Euros" for me - game over. It's not retro hardware and the possibilities are meagre.... diplomatically speaking

The developing of Virtio gfx driver by AEON is really a great surprise.
Maybe Trevor was negative impressed by latest A1222 board development and now prefer concentrate on software developing for current hardware but also on virtual boards, like Pegasos 2, available for QEMU.

I hope there will be soon also other Virtio drivers for sound and networking.

Probably AEON will sell soon a special Enhancer version for QEMU with Virtio gfx drivers included and full 3d support.

I hope AEON will produce also a special Enhancer version for old generation AmigaNG systems like Pegasos 2.

About OS3.x development I think it's a subset of OS4 and in part it still relies on custom chips and m68k stuff.
Probably it will be never supported in QEMU due lack of chipset emulation. Anyway for OS3.x users, who loves old demo/games, icon packs and workbench themes, there's WinUAE and many others retro projects to continue to have fun.

1600E for a Tabor ? If anyone willing to buy this for this price, go for x5040 instead, of course! The worth of Tabor with all this fpu issues are 500e max

The A1222+ itself does not cost 1600 EUR.

You can withdraw about apx. 90 EUR for Enhancer which is included, ca 180-190 EUR for the graphics card (AFox Radeon RX550 4GB), then there is the case it comes in, the SSD, 4 GB of RAM.

Still, the A1222+ does cost, with VAT, 1199 EUR, which is expensive.

The Sam460LE costs 962.58 EUR with VAT right now.

I thought about both options, but ultimately went for the A1222+ as it is new and uncharted territory. The sale of my Flex covered part of the price and I already had savings earmarked a new AmigaOS 4 computer, but I do of course wish that it had been cheaper than this.

I have a fear many in the early adopter group will turn it down, which is probably why AAA is offering pre-orders outside of this group. It will definitely be interesting to follow the developments and the sales.

@AmigaOldskooler
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Yes, I believe you are correct. That is expensive and about twice as much as I was expecting. I already have a case, graphics card and portible display, so I'll still be getting the A1222+ board as I'm putting together a small system that will be portable.
Considering the price of the SAM 460 I think the A1222+ is a better option.

By the way, have any early adoptors received any notification that the A1222+ is available yet? I haven't received any notice yet.

Also, weren't early adoptors supposed to get a discount on the board compared to non-early adoptors? Will the price actually be less than 1199 EUR for early adoptors?

@Kas1e
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Fair point to consider but isn't the X5040 about twice the price of the A1222+ and it won't fit in a small case. Personally I have been considering buying an X5040 as well but have been hesitant due to some of the issues I've been hearing about from owners who have purchased them. Not sure it's worth the headache given that my X1000 is still running fine. Keeping my fingers crossed on that.

@ktadd
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Yeah, i also find in my tests that x5040 strangely slower in some 3d perfomance on about 30% in comprassion with x5020 for still unknown reassons. While it faster than 020 in raw power, something still wrong somewhere when its about some (not all) 3d operations.

But as you cant buy anymore x5020, then 5040 probably the way to go if one want faster and stable os4 machine where everything work at least, not like on Tabor..

Btw, i also have x1000, so can compare it with x5020 at least: x1000 sure more buggy and slower. Its like beta version of x5020 :) : slower boot times, slower power on, sometimes not fully initialising after reset (that can be my board issues of course, but i heard other x1000 users had it), cfe relly slower and more buggy than uboot, no as-it radeonrx support, slower cpu, no rs232 on board (i had to make small adapter for), etc. While x1000 have altivec: in reality is of no big use in end and little or no help mostly for those tasks we do mostly. X5020 didnt have this issues, and i assume x5040 too (except this moment with 3d).. so maybe swap x1000 on x5040 even worth of it.

But yeah, the best os4 hw of all times is 5020, for sure.

Its all just not feels nice: the board with incompatible fpu, causing all this kernel LTE emulators with its bugs and black lists, the only excuse of which were the price, now costly that much.

x1000 not initialising MIGHT be a empty clock battery. Did you check if the clock still saves time correctly ?

For me the sometimes not starting was related to that, and once I replaced the clock battery my x1000 started everytime correctly

BTW additionally to what amiga-news mentioned on their post also H2 OS4 was shown for the first time in public, at the booths of Alinea and of Hyperion/HunoPPC booth, Alinea showed it on Sam, Huno on x5000.

@MagicSN
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Good idea, will try it!

Ps. Do you have any youtube link to the heretic2 shown on huno/alinea tables ? Interesting to see how it was

@kas1e

Not sure if a Video was being made. I will ask Ben and Simon from Alinea on both demonstrations.

As to the clock battery I am pretty sure if this is the problem you will notice that if you save a different time it won't be stored. If time still gets stored after changing it, it is probably a different problem.

The clock battery of the x1000 is a bit hard to change due to how it is "fixed", I ended up letting it get changed at a Laptop/Phone-repair shop, cost me 10 EUR (at one point the system no longer booted up at all, and after clock battery was changed it boots up every time ).

Steffen

@thread

Is there a post somewhere from AAA Technology regarding the price for the A1222+ board or pre-order information generally?

-- eliyahu

What is the cost of the single A1222 board? Not full system.

@flash

About 1200 EUR.

Quote:

Perfect plan to keep the community as small as possible.
Plus virtio driver probably means OS4 with no new hw and only as emulation?

@Maijestro

Where did you see that the driver will be on Enhancer 2.3? Was it printed on the slide? I couldn't see or read that very well.Trevor certainly didn't say the driver would be in enhancer.

Just curious if this will be another paid driver, or a freebie. Since I now own OS4 hardware it's certainly a nice to have during development and for a portable solution on my laptop but not necessarily an essential purchase for me if it's a paid option.

@MartinW

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Hans writing it for AEon? Without a doubt...

@mr2

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A-EON have burnt their fingers badly with the A1222+ so it's possible they'll pull out of the OS4 hardware business in the end. It's simply not sustainable at the moment, given the cost of small-scale manufacturing and the general shortage of components. AmigaKit have already stepped in the direction of (68K) emulation with their A600GS machine, so A-EON may soon start exploring similar ways with OS4 and QEMU. In this light, investment in the virtio gfx driver makes good sense.

@trixie

Fully agreed but I'm not happy about it.
I remember Trevor said that the new hw depended how well Tabor would sell"
I can imaginee now

I don't know what their plan is with the virtio driver and maybe they don't know it yet either, it's up to them to comment on that. But I think it's easy to write that driver for Hans who already wrote 3D driver for AmigaOS so has the knowledge and sources to base this on and it seems this is proven by that he was able to do at least a frame buffer driver that's already better than the current sm501 we have now in QEMU in about a month. Not sure how difficult to add 3D and video accel to it which seems to be what he's working on now according to the slides that marked these WIP but maybe that's also not difficult and then it makes sense to do it just to test how it works. Then they can decide what they want to do with it. Hopefully they will publish at least the frame buffer part for free (or if it's payed donate a free copy to me at least ). Other virtio drivers such as network blk or scsi should be possible and others could write it if they published at least the virtio.library that hopefully is a byproduct of the virtio-gpu driver.

So if it's easy to do and there's a use for it why not do it then maybe even recover some of the costs of making hardware that otherwise probably won't be recovered. You cannot stop the world, if Hans does not do this driver somebody else will sooner or later so it makes sense for them to do it.