Hehe, yes they are very talkative (and sarcastic, makes me homesick :)

How can any other computer community talk MORE than (ex-)amigans? :-)



So you are actually british? Man that explains a lot! ;-)

@Neko

I used to use old Acorn Archimedes computers at school, and then go home to my A500, so I kind of grew up on RISC OS and AmigaOS.

It would certainly be fun to have a RISC OS box at home.

Hehe yeah I remember the BBC Micro in the labs and then the one, almost holy 305 sitting in the corner... :}

I still preferred my A500, though, it had better games :D

What was that "305"?

I now understand your evangelism for ARM technology. It's british technology! The closest I've been to it is when I owned a Psion REVO. Amazing little computer!

An Acorn Archimedes A305. Like the A310 but with 512KB of RAM instead of 1MB. INFO.


Yep, the Acorn RISC Machine! (Originally. ;) )

Yup. Basically an Amiga 500, only 5 times faster CPU and not as good graphics :D

I remember Zarch and E-Type being pretty impressive. :)

I remember Zeewolf far more fondly (albeit 10 years later :)

http://www.lemonamiga.com/?mainurl=http ... 3Fid%3D361
http://www.lemonamiga.com/?mainurl=http ... 3Fid%3D363

Archimedes didn't have HAM modes though, or the animation capability, etc. :)

But yeah. Sometimes I wish Amiga had chosen ARM, but the chips were really far more expensive than the m68k at the time, not as mature, and of course Acorn was kind of a competitor to Commodore :)

Right, the VIDC1a didn't have HAM mode, and it had no blitter or copper, but it was able to run in 256 colors without resorting to any tricks. And, I'm pretty sure it could palette swap to get 4096 colors on the screen at once.

The question is whether the 8 MHz ARM2 could keep up with the combo of the 7 MHz 68000 and Agnus. (Obviously, if we were just comparing the CPUs, it'd be an embarrassingly easy win for the ARM.) If so, then the Archimedes could have better graphics in certain situations. :)

(And, on the whole palette swapping thing, correct me if I'm wrong, but it certainly appears to me that the VIDC20 (as used in the RiscPC) can palette swap mid-scanline if the application in question has a palette other the system palette, so that each window can have its own palette, even if the window isn't the width of the screen. I run my RiscPC at 1600x1200 256 colors, so it's a nice feature to have.)

I'd definitely like to get my hands on an early Archimedes, though, just to play around with. (Unfortunately, shipping isn't cheap from the UK to the US, and I lucked out when getting my RiscPC, found one in California. An A3000 or A3020 is my best bet, due to the much smaller case with integrated keyboard, for shipping reasons. And, an A3000 would get me the original hardware generation, maybe just the MEMC1a instead of MEMC1, just in a smaller package. )

256 colour "chunky" mode was the holy grail on the Amiga by the end of it's life - that's something the Archimedes (and any PC with later versions of VGA with a linear framebuffer) could do by default. While we still played Monkey Island in 32 colours, the PC version had 256.



Indeed, similar architecture on the Amiga enabled screen dragging. You could change a colour at any point too - with some penalty (HAM fringing or a noticable border where the video cut out - drag a screen in a high resolution mode and the black bar at the top of the screen bar gets bigger).

Both were as quirky as each other, but the Amiga architecture offered more "fun" things to do, and weirder hacks you could play that weren't meant to happen just by the architecture (this is both cool, and absolutely horrible hardware design, and why it took so long to emulate it properly or complete a clone chipset). The Archimedes was far more reliable.. just like a PC with a VGA card did exactly what you told it, but nothing more.

Hello, I have some Efika MX Open Client related questions.

1. What is the maximum supported display resolution? Is it able to work with 1280x1024 or 1440x900 DVI monitor in native resolution? I find WXGA description very vague. Pixel clock limit would be more interesting.

2. Is 3D accelerator in Efika MX open source friendly? Does Efika MX have any binary blobs in the kernel? In userspace? Are there open specs for the hardware?

3. Any chances for CPU clock frequency higher than 800MHz (in some newer device revisions)? :)

edit:

4. Open MX Client does not have serial RS232 port according to the list of features. Any chance of having something like IDC10 connector hidden somewhere inside of the box? Being able to debug the linux kernel can be handy sometimes.

Over VGA the resolution is only 1366x768 or thereabouts; over HDMI it can support 1920x1080i but this puts a heavy load on the system bus and performance does suffer slightly. In any case the video decoders can only support 720p video decoding.



The Freescale BSP includes binary modules (compiled against a kernel) and binary userspace libraries. Our solution is a little more opensource friendly but it's not ready for public consumption yet.



The iMX515 will be validated up to 1GHz in the near future (sometime next year) and we will evaluate whether this makes any perceivable impact on system performance. There is far, far more going on inside the chip than raw CPU speed can account for.



Yes, and it has a JTAG connector too. The developer edition comes with this board, the Open Client does not, but we can provide it on request.