Domain: softhut.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to softhut.com.
Comments · 12
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3DLabs permedia?
sure I had one these (or similar) for my Amiga back in the day (yeah, the amiga in its sunset years had some 3d-capable addon gfx cards released for it here in europe. warp3d.library was the de-facto standard opengl subset API used on the amiga).
It was just a PC 3D accelerator chipset with a slightly different interface, I presume most permedia cards were for PCs not Amigas.
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Get a CatWeasel MK IV so you can read any floppy
Get a CatWeasel MK IV so you can read any floppy disk format.
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Re:CatWeasel
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Re:Wrath of the Windows Users!
Altough we're getting offtopic here, you could use a cheap box called grafitti on any amiga. It basically gave the amiga "chunky pixels". it could only be used with 50hz though. As you can see you put it on the rgb port. Very nice little device. I programmed some cool stuff for it a decade years ago...
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Re:AmigaOS -- Disks
Or spend some money on a CatWeasel ISA or CatWeasel PCI Disk drive controller
http://www.softhut.com/cgi-bin/test/Web_store/web_ store.cgi?page=catalog/hardware/accelerators/io_in dex.html -
Seehund, you troll youSeehund,
I know you don't like the "exclusive hardware" concept and that is fair enough, but you've told a few lies in this post that counts as going so far as trolling.
1. Only Eyetech have been granted such a license
Eyetech is the only one who applied for a license. It's a support and anti-piracy measure; if you don't like that, then fine. Hyperion/Amiga, Inc. have stated repeatedly that there is no reason why a 3rd party PPC mfg. cannot apply for an OEM AmigaOS4 license. Some have said that piracy killed the Amiga (I at least think it contributed significantly), do you not think a small developer like Hyperion can justly ask for some restrictions on the use of their software which they can only hope in their wildest dreams to at least break even on non-labour costs?
2. and are now (well, since two(?) years) selling the Teron boards mentioned above with an extra 60% on the price as "AmigaOne SE",
The AmigaOne SE is no longer available from eyetech.
3. "AmigaOne PX"
There is no such thing, perhaps you mean the AmigaOne XE, a G4 PPC based motherboard that sells for $829 USD at the American store I just linked?
This is a lot cheaper than the $3,900 quoted on mai's Teron CX page, isn't it? How do you get "60% more" out of that! An AmigaOne is 80% cheaper than a Teron CX evaluation board!!!
4. "Micro AmigaOne", respectively.
Show me where these are available to the public... these are targeted at embedded markets? and are not available to the public
5. Thereby suitable Macs (otherwise a pretty damn obvious target for a PPC "consumer" OS), Terons sold by anybody else regardless of trademarks, Pegasoses, and whatever you could possibly think of in the future, are all out of the question by default. No licence/licencee, no new hardware base for AmigaOS.
Yeah, right. You know very well the complicated politics behind the Pegasos support. You know very well that Bill Buck (Genesi/Thendic "relations") is not the easiest person in the world to do business with, especially when he doesn't like the idea of going to effort to license an OS on his own platform that competes with his own baby?
And about the macs, that IS debatable, but I think you have over-simplified the situation there too. -
Re:always leaving out Atari...
There are some more modern GUI toolkits available on the Atari which possibly could be hooked into Mozilla's GUI system, but developer documentation is sparse, AFAIK. I've looked around for decent docs on GEM & NVDI programming, and have found maybe two or three documents on the web.
MiNT seems to provide a decent UNIX-like environment on the Ataris, though last I checked most of the tools were sorrowfully out of date.
Plus, most Atari computers to have a decent resolution must run in monochrome mode, which naturally severely limits the browsing experience. That's why Atari browsers such as CAB (and some newer one that I haven't tried) thrive, is that they are aware of the limitations on stock Atari computers, and compensate adequately.
I have a hunch (as I frequent both Atari forums and Amiga forums) that there are a lot more graphics-card-equipped Amigas out there, and a lot more beefy Amigas out there, than there are Ataris. Though machines like the Hades '060 Atari with PCI graphics would be great for running Mozilla, there's gotta be -- what -- less than 4,000 of those machines in existence. And that's probably a GROSS overestimate.
Yeah the Falcon would be great, but as you say those are rare too. The Falcon and the TT would be the only stock Atari machines capable of running Mozilla, and even these would be long-shots as the TT can only be upgraded to ~18MB RAM ... the Falcon I'm not sure about.
The machines are also difficult to equip with ethernet (at least in the United States). Some VME-Bus "Riebl" ethernet card is available (used, and in Germany), but the native TOS TCP/IP stacks are apparently buggy with the hardware drivers. I could, on the other hand, eBay a $18 PCMCIA ethernet card for my Amiga 1200 or an Amiga 600 and be on the net in no time. Likewise, for a big-box Amiga I could just call up Software Hut and buy an Ethernet card for my Zorro bus, for in the neighborhood of $120. And it would come with drivers and software and all sorts of goodies. -
Genesi FUD?
Uh, you can still buy an AmigaOne from Eyetech . (The AmigaOne uses the exact same reference design as the Teron, and is more or less the same thing, although the firmware chip has some different stuff on it for running AmigaOS).
There are also various resellers who will sell you one if you do a little searching.
Supplies are a little bumpy (shipment stopped for a little while while waiting for a newer board revision that fixed some issues with the northbridge), but I know people who have AmigaOnes already. (Regular people, not just people in developers like Hyperion (us)) -
Re:Amiga&FloppyYou heard correctly. The standard PC floppy controller is incapable of reading an Amiga diskette. Furthermore, the FDD controller on an Amiga computer can't use standard floppy drives. There is a product called the CatWeasel controller, which comes in several flavors. There are several versions which allow the various Amiga architectures to use a standard floppy drive, and can read & write almost any known floppy format. There is also an ISA Catweasel which will let you read Amiga disks from an x86 machine. It's a fairly expensive piece of hardware ($100 or more). CatWeasel is made by a German company; I believe the US distributer is www.softhut.com
It's probably cheaper to find a used Amiga on ebay. Last time I checked, the going price for an A500 was around $20 + shipping. An Amiga is capable of reading & writing to 720K MS-DOS floppies - you can copy your amiga software over to 720k floppies and sneakernet it over to your PC. Another approach is to build yourself a null modem cable to connect your Amiga and PC via SLIP, PPP, or PLIP (if you want to use the parallel port). You will have to make the cable yourself - the Amiga uses a non-standard pinout on it's serial and parallel ports (Don't forget to hook up the ground!). I used a null-modem SLIP connection to copy floppy images over to my PC and burn them to a CD-ROM; it took a while but I only had to spend about $15 on the parts to make the cable.
For amiga emulation under Linux (and BSD, and BeOs, etc.), use UAE or WinUAE if you are running Windows. If you want legal Amiga ROM images (and a lot more), get Amiga Forever from Cloanto. Illegal (or at least questionable) ROM images can be found easily enough with a Google search. (The proof is left as an exersize for the student.)
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Re: Modern Video Production on Amiga
If you have no limit to your spending, you're going to want the best. Using an Amiga would only be a solution if you're happy with 640x480 video and can afford acceleration boards (if they're still available). Jurassic Park was --not-- done on Amigas. Some of the dinosaur rough-up proof-of-concept animations were done on an Amiga with Lightwave, but all of the final work was done on high-end workstations and edited the old fashioned way on film.
An Amiga equipped to do desktop video with a Video Toaster can do full broadcast-quality resolution (784x492 or whatever) in 24bit color. Lightwave on the Amiga can also render to that resolution or better.
If one were to purchase a Video Toaster-equipped Amiga in this modern world, he would want it to be an Amiga 4000 with a Video Toaster 4000. Any _new_ VT/Amiga system is exactly that. The Amiga 4000 has the updated AGA graphics chipset which can do higher resolutions at more colors (compared to the OCS/ECS chipset in earlier Amiga models such as the A500, A2000, and A3000). The VT4000 takes advantage of the AGA chipset, so it can do some neat things the old original Toaster can't.
There's also the Video Toaster Flyer, which has a spider-like 6-way (?) SCSI controller on-board. It does high-speed on-disk video editing. Remember that the old Video Toaster and VT4000 are not for editing video clips stored on disk, they switch between video sources and fade and grab video and genlock and change colors and render text and apply 3D graphics and all sorts of other neat things -- and it's all done in hardware, so it's blazing fast.
I have never seen the Video Toaster Flyer in action, but I hear it is neat. Seems that it can do almost all the things that its big-name competitors have implemented, while perhaps requiring more creativity. That is to be expected, though, since it is a product on the Amiga, the choice for creative professionals.
;)And yes, accelerators are still available, both used and new, for all Amiga models. A few places to check would be Software Hut and Compuquick Media Center. They seem to be two of the leading Amiga dealerships these days.
Check out Newtek's website, they have had a number of deals lately on their Video Toaster line.
The only problem with getting into Amiga production these days is researching all the software available. A lot of it still sits on shelves at the older Amiga dealerships, waiting to be bought and used. When combined well, the old software packages all mingle to form one really powerful system (again, when used creatively). Remember that the Amiga was years ahead of its time, so though a program may have a (C) date of 1993, it could still be very useful and productive. Also, most decent Amiga applications can talk to each other (and the Toaster / Switcher) through ARexx scripting. Combining the Toaster with the kick-ass ImageFX package and a modeller like Pixel3D can really melt an audience's mind.
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Re:Amiga again?
You're probably talking about the same thing here. Opera allows you to have a user defined CSS override the document CSS so you can define how each page you visit appears.
Well, not quite. The feature I'm referring to allows you to disable images, GIF animations, and much more on a page-by-page basis. You can see a screenshot here (link to Software Hut's website).
And a PC browser too.
Opera is a damn good browser, I haven't had much experience with it because I don't have the money to purchase it :) I have checked out the time-limited version, and it is quite good. Kinda has that Amiga feel, even tho it is for other OS's. One thing - anything come of Amiga Opera? That would be sweet.
Oh, and on the subject of user-defined CSS - IE3 supported it, but they removed the feature in IE4. Don't know if Netscape ever supported it or if Mozilla does/will.
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Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder -
Re:Great if it's true
I still use my A500 on a regular basis with DPaint IV. If this company comes through with Amiga compatible hardware at the $800 price tag for the wannabe G3(1010) with a DVD drive, then I will be first in line to buy one. A good place to get the OS is at Softhut, they have OS 3.1 for $92 and the upgrade to 3.5 costs $40(Pre order). I say good luck to this company, since it seems Amiga,Inc. is going to screw up the Amiga just like commodore did.