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The 68060 on the daughterboard effectively disabled the Amiga's built-in 68030, but it ran in parallel with the 604e (inside the same memory space, even). You seem amazed that anyone would run two CPUs that are in the same general processor family, but there's precedent for running simultaneous processors from completely different architectures.

Gee, that's reaching deep into the bag of tricks: insult one group by insulting another that's well-known for fanaticism.

Here's Dvorak's own words about his Amiga:
http://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1996/961003-pcm ag.html

And only a few months ago, he was insulting the Mac community by comparing them to the Amiga:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1745930,00.as p

So why bring up the Amiga? Seems like Dvorak likes to drag a stick across the cages of owners of computers whose market share never exceeds five percent, then uses it as evidence that they're rabid. Puhlease! It's not as if the Linux market is a unified entity.

Good, good: Apache was ported to the amiga many years ago, via "ixemul.library", the handy amiga equivalent of cygwin (though it was generally much neater than cygwin, as cygwin is bridging to actively unix-hostile OS, while AmigaOS was at worst indifferent, just lacked some unixy features.)

Here's the announcement of the Amiga apache 1.3 port from 1997:

http://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1997/971214-apa che.html ;-)

Some guy, probably David Ingbretson if my memory serves me correctly, kept tabs on where Amigas showed up, for years. Some links: Hal Greenlee Interview
Astronaut speaks at Amiga Tradeshow
"And Satan and the antichrist will be cast into the lake of fire, the second death, also known as the Blue Screen of Death."

Some Amigas are PPC www.phase5.de

www.metabox.de



I'm still looking for a generic PCI/AGP PPC little-endian mode motherboard to port linux to (current Macs are big-endian...)


For general amiga news : www.cucug.org

This may be impractical, but it would be cool...

There's still pretty nice stuff in the AmigaOS, which could be, for example, folded into linux.

There's amiga news available on www.cucug.org

Or someone could add the CAOS specced libraries into the AmigaOS (CAOS was the DOS specification that was originally intended to be used on the Amiga, but wasn't finished in time) instead of AmigaDOS (based on TriPOS) into the amigaos. This would yield a high speed, small memory footprint OS that would possibly work well for palmtops / embedded devices. (It'd be better than PalmOS, and (initially) slightly worse than EPOC32...)

Well this job advert does lend some weight to the idea of it being MIPS based...

So... there'll be two Amiga OS'es? ERrgrgghhhh. I think it might be two different _implementations_ which will be used in different markets.

The decision to expand the project and go for a full-fledged computer (instead of a games machine) was made in 1983 - long before the release of the first Amiga, A1000, in 1985.

A1000, with its £1500 price tag, was definitely not a games machine nor marketed as one. The game aspect only came in picture with A500, a couple of years later.

Get your history facts straight here.

Amiga people tend to use the 680x0 MMU on their accelerator cards to "softkick" these days - usually, they just copy their own rom into Fast (i.e. 32-bit) RAM, but it is possible to use a different kickstart version. The best amiga ever made, the A3000, loaded the kickstart off HD anyway , and the A1000 loaded it off floppy.
Since the AmigaOS doesn't use the MMU, this is safe.

In fact, this days, if you have a 68040, 68060, or PPC accelerator, you pretty much HAVE to softkick to get optimum performance out of your machine ( that way, the entire OS is in 32-bit RAM on your accelerator card)

Actually, my last amiga was a 68060 50 MHz + 233MHz PPC 604e + 128 MByte RAM + 4 GByte HD + Permedia 2 GFX card. It rocked.

The next lot of accel cards coming out for the "classic" amiga, as opposed to the "NG" Amiga being developed by Gateway, are PPC G3's, emulating the 68060 in software.
If nothing else, they'd make a good LinuxPPC platform ( all the Amiga HW is well-documented + understood)

I only sold my amiga recently, and got a 400MHz PC running linux, but only because I had to have PC-compatibility for University, and couldn't afford to have both. Linux is still clunkier in some areas than AmigaOS - BeOS comes closest to AmigaOS ( some would say "rips off"), but unfortunately, neither BeOS nor AmigaOS are open source, although I suspect Gateway will release the "classic" amiga source to haage+partner when they finish their AmigaNG

check out

www.cucug.org/aminew.html

www.escena.de

www.phase5.de

www.haage-partner.com

Um... while gas ppc is possible, it's not incredibly pleasant.

On the amiga, at least, there is a PPC assembler included in the StormC development environment for Haage&Partner's WarpOS system. It is a Macro Assembler, with syntax and functionality simlar to Amiga 68k Macro assembler ( i.e. C-like structures)

Note that Motorola-syntax assembler for PPC defines a large number of macros that are very useful, and I find PPC assembler programming far less trying than the icky, tacked-together x86.

NOT JUST FOR AMIGAS!!!
The VBCC package includes PASM, a motorola-syntax ppc macro assembler, and is open source and written to be portable, in theory. (although vbcc is unlikely to supplant gcc in the near future).
It can produce elf ppc binaries.

PASM:

http://devnull.owl.de/~frank/index_e.html

haage-Partner

www.haage-partner.com


go to amiga pages of
www.uk.aminet.org
or

www.cucug.org/amiga.html
and search vbcc and PPC too, if you're curious.

bits that made my system:

http://www.eagle-cp.com/

http://www.phase5.de/

http://www.blittersoft.com/

http://www.powerc.com/

http://www.white-knight.freeserve.co.uk/

check out the amiga sections of

http://www.cucug.org/

http://www.amiga.org/

for american dealers

How much ? Not cheap - but it's been spread out over the years...

The hard part is trying to get anything in stock. Try National Amiga. If they don't have it they'll know someone who might. Or you can search Agnes for Amiga related articles/web sites.