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Index Inside Out ...
Tak, ted uz je asi kazdemu jasne, ze tento projekt bude Amiga na PCI
karte, Index se spolcil s HiQ a pachaji Siamese systems. Takze bude
treba PC s Amigou nebo Alpha s Amigou.
tady je mail, ktery dosel na ICOA a jasne ukazuje, jaci jsou AI lameri.
Ale vsechno zle je zrejme k necemu dobre, jinak by tu asi nebyl Inside
Out. Nak me ale nenapada, proc tohleto. Nebude lepsi nake PowerUP nebo
PPC Boxer, nez si kupovat kartu a pak to stejne narvat do PCdla (no fuj)
nebo na alphu? Nemluve o tom, ze asi siamese nebude zadarmo ....
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n-Reply-To: <34B655AB.B6F43D6D@pantheonsys.com>
> Is it just me or does anybody else think that using the Alpha is a bad
> move at this point? Many view Intel's aquisition of the Alpha technology
> as a threat to Alpha's existence. Still others argue that Alpha
In the short term it isn't much of a problem because the InsideOut is a
PCI card and the Siamese actually runs under WinNT and therefore will
also support Intel machines and could with some effort be directed to a
Unix or similar host. We preferred the Alpha route because it fits more
with the Amiga high end market place for things like image processing
and
rendering and besides, its not an Intel 'x86.
Actually the first hardware was finished in June 1995 and we aimed it as
an AmigaOS only machine, just using cheap PC motherboards and a 486 as
an
I/O controller. Petro (I saved the Amiga, which is why its in such a
state now) Tyschsncewdhkjenko would not license source code for this
project when we had a licensing meeting in Jan 1996 (after having
already
asked for 6 months).
For some further background here is something from an email interview I
just did:
"We had made our first contact with Amiga Technologies around June 1995
at
which time we already had a working Amiga product, the first version of
the InsideOut. After we had sent several faxes, phone calls and an
initial
meeting at Computer '95 we had a license meeting in Germany to review a
draft contract with Amiga Technologies in January 1996... We were
already
planning the Access at that time, but we were also looking to get an OS
source license which we needed for the first version of the InsideOut,
however it was made clear that source code was not up for discussion."
<snip>
"As I said, we built the first version in June 1995. I looked at the
high
end market and decided that most people in this area were using graphics
cards, wanted ISA for cheap network cards, 16 bit sound cards, PCI for
fast graphics cards, Ultra-SCSI, large amounts of memory, PC keyboard,
etc. We needed 68060 performance and it must of course run Amiga OS.
Working with one of our designers, Dave Westwood, we reached the
conclusion that we could use a PC motherboard, retaining a 486 as an
intelligent I/O controller. The card was built and worked, all we
needed
was source for the Amiga OS so that we could re-write some of the
initialisation code to remove the dependence on the chip set and CIA's,
change the device drivers to use the higher performance ones on the
motherboard. All this would be 100% Amiga OS, cheap and a big leap
forward. Of course it was nearly impossible without the source code and
Amiga Technologies would not license it.
We have committed additional funds to the project and produced a
second-generation card. This new PCI card is a complete Amiga,
including
the AGA chip set and CIA's so that it boots standard Workbench 3.1, it
even has IDE, floppy, keyboard and video connectors! We are working
with
HiQ to run the Siamese software on the card. This gives us an Alpha PC
which will run Windows NT, Amiga software at very high speed and of
course
Macintosh software. We have not completed all the development work but
we
expect to achieve performance about double that of the 68060 on its own
because the host processor performs all I/O and graphics across a high
speed PCI bus."
Regards,
Mick Tinker
Index Information Ltd, England