More Python is a good thing. If you want to inspire creativity, there's nothing quite like a good multimedia engine like http://www.sfml-dev.org/ or a 3D game engine like http://www.panda3d.org/ for higher levels of creativity. The only downside to these is that they'll require decent implementations of Mesa to implement OpenGL graphics capabilities. Also some teachers are annoyed when computers make noise so they cannot hear what's going on in the classroom so you may want to hold off on the music part of the multimedia.
You have misread my comment. This version of FireFox is not intended to run on a Classic Amiga with a 680x0 processor. This one is intended to run on a yet-to-be-released AmigaOne X1000 which is rumored to have a dual-core PowerPC clocked at 1.8 GHz. It will walk all over your iPad and keep pace with my Mac Mini. For more information about the X1000 see A-Eon's website.
People use new PowerPC Amigas because they can. Classic Amigas are at least collectible because they were 10 years ahead of their time when they came out. They have held their value well.
PCs depreciate very quickly by comparison. The fact that every new version of the OS needs more hardware each time drives the value of used PCs through the floor.
I can understand why people think the next-generation Amigas with the PowerPC chips are not so great though. They use commodity hardware internally instead of doing original stuff like Commodore did.
Amiga Inc. had contracts to support Windows and Windows Mobile. Hyperion Entertainment didn't do so, in fact they used to port games from Windows to Linux, Mac, and Amiga and made their bread and butter by it for a few years that way.
The OS patents have expired and the last AGA chipset patent will expire in 2010. Next year the hardware starts to look a bit more familiar than what the Sam440Flex looks like. Let the fun begin!
http://www.natami.net/index.htm is the website of the Natami Project if you've never heard of it before. Don't expect MMU support though, that would slow down the design process (not to mention the processor itself).
Don't forget Hypertriton, Inc. Their Agar project has a scene graph and portable SDL-based GUI as well as a tile map engine. You can't say that that isn't game related because, even though it is useful for other things, the tile map engine is definitely game related.
Also forgotten is http://llvm.org/ , the fastest target of the platforms supported by PyPy. It also supports native code on x86, x86_64, PPC, and PPC64. Static compiling is available on all of those and several others besides.
There is an ongoing lawsuit between Amiga, Inc. and Hyperion-Entertainment, VOF. The Amiga, Inc. that was chartered in Washington went belly up but never signed the insolvency papers. Hyperion has, as part of their contract, a transfer agreement similar to the one between Novell and SCO. Hyperion claims AmigaOS 4 is theirs because of the former insolvency of Amiga, Inc. Washington.
On the other side of the coin, Amiga, Inc.'s name and IP rights have been bought out by another company called KMOS that changed their name to Amiga, Inc. and is chartered in Delaware. Amiga, Inc. Delaware is claiming to own the rights to the name AmigaOS 4 as a result of that situation.
As soon as Amiga, Inc. Washington went belly-up Hyperion started letting their third-party contractors get by with binary-only licenses of their contributions to the AmigaOS 4 code-base and so, even if Amiga, Inc. Delaware buys Hyperion they won't have the source code rights to AmigaOS 4.
It's easier to port from Linux to Windows than from Windows to Linux due to available source code. OpenOffice.org is developed on Solaris and Linux then ported from there to anything else, for example.
There are reasonably good Linux distros for home use as well, but I think the main reason for the increase in Linux development is that Cygwin and MSYS will recompile a lot of Linux sources for Windows easily so it's just plain easier to get software to run on Linux first and then port it to other platforms.
It doesn't help Microsoft that scripting languages like Python are more cross-platform compliant than C# since.NET has a HUGE runtime library that takes too much time to port.
The Amiga used to use drivers on the ROMs of a Zorro II/III cards all of the time. It was proprietary card slot design so since it would only work on AmigaOS 2+ it wasn't a problem. Treating Windows the same way with a PCI slot should be a problem since PCI slots aren't Windows or even an x86-specific specification. (Does anybody remember the PowerPC Common Hardware Reference Platform specification? PCI was in there.)
Rescue on Fractalis distributed by Epyx (actually created by Lucasfilm Games) used procedural terrain generation (hence the name Fractalis for fractals) and it ran just fine on a Commodore 64 or Atari 800 back in the 80s. If the same source code were recompiled for a modern PC it would look just like a terrain generator in OpenGL.
The catch is: Where is Epyx now? This game would have outlasted its company if it had been written for other operating systems now. Furthermore it wouldn't hold people's attention nowadays since all the modern games look like that with the 3d polygon renderned graphics and such.
Which machine code? That's the big question. Certainly Intel would be happy to have you believe that their processors are the only ones available but what about the PowerPC? Python is used in game scripting as well as server work so why not for the game platforms?
The Cell can share memory between SPEs. That's part of how the DMA controller works. The problem with this is that only one of the SPEs can function when the local store is not in "isolate mode".
As for conventional caches being able to keep up with local store, have you ever tried to cache a linked-list? You can do this with a DMA controller.
The old 8086-based PCs were hard to program too but their memory expansion used DMA transfers very similiar to the way the SPEs handle their memory stashing and fetching. The instruction set of the SPEs are not very unique except for the "branch hints" for software controlled branch prediction. Apart from that it's pretty straightforward.
http://www.imitationpickles.org/pgu/ is Phil's PyGame Utilities for Python and Pygame. It's still in the works but it includes example source for a standard tile game engine and has an editor for hex maps.
You seem to also be forgetting that linked structures can be prefetched by the DMA in ways that even a lock-in cache cannot. If you have a mesh stored as an array (as most are) then you run into trouble. If you are dealing with something stored in a linked tree structure or a linked list, the SPE will outperform a general purpose CPU.
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More Python is a good thing. If you want to inspire creativity, there's nothing quite like a good multimedia engine like http://www.sfml-dev.org/ or a 3D game engine like http://www.panda3d.org/ for higher levels of creativity. The only downside to these is that they'll require decent implementations of Mesa to implement OpenGL graphics capabilities. Also some teachers are annoyed when computers make noise so they cannot hear what's going on in the classroom so you may want to hold off on the music part of the multimedia.
You have misread my comment. This version of FireFox is not intended to run on a Classic Amiga with a 680x0 processor. This one is intended to run on a yet-to-be-released AmigaOne X1000 which is rumored to have a dual-core PowerPC clocked at 1.8 GHz. It will walk all over your iPad and keep pace with my Mac Mini. For more information about the X1000 see A-Eon's website.
People use new PowerPC Amigas because they can. Classic Amigas are at least collectible because they were 10 years ahead of their time when they came out. They have held their value well.
PCs depreciate very quickly by comparison. The fact that every new version of the OS needs more hardware each time drives the value of used PCs through the floor.
I can understand why people think the next-generation Amigas with the PowerPC chips are not so great though. They use commodity hardware internally instead of doing original stuff like Commodore did.
Mod parent up!
Amiga Inc. had contracts to support Windows and Windows Mobile. Hyperion Entertainment didn't do so, in fact they used to port games from Windows to Linux, Mac, and Amiga and made their bread and butter by it for a few years that way.
The OS patents have expired and the last AGA chipset patent will expire in 2010. Next year the hardware starts to look a bit more familiar than what the Sam440Flex looks like. Let the fun begin!
Well, .NET and Windows development in general is excluded, no?
Not if you use boot camp or Parallels. You can even use Mono if you want to use .NET on a Mac.
http://www.natami.net/index.htm is the website of the Natami Project if you've never heard of it before. Don't expect MMU support though, that would slow down the design process (not to mention the processor itself).
Doh! I thought you meant Frontal Assault!
Why did they only have 6 when they listed REBOL at the very end as a seventh? Did they just forget a header and then miscount?
Don't forget Hypertriton, Inc. Their Agar project has a scene graph and portable SDL-based GUI as well as a tile map engine. You can't say that that isn't game related because, even though it is useful for other things, the tile map engine is definitely game related.
Also forgotten is http://llvm.org/ , the fastest target of the platforms supported by PyPy. It also supports native code on x86, x86_64, PPC, and PPC64. Static compiling is available on all of those and several others besides.
http://llvm.org/ProjectsWithLLVM/#adobe-hydra
Hydra is a new programming language based on LLVM: a BSD-like licensed open-source compiler framework for many platforms.
There is an ongoing lawsuit between Amiga, Inc. and Hyperion-Entertainment, VOF. The Amiga, Inc. that was chartered in Washington went belly up but never signed the insolvency papers. Hyperion has, as part of their contract, a transfer agreement similar to the one between Novell and SCO. Hyperion claims AmigaOS 4 is theirs because of the former insolvency of Amiga, Inc. Washington. On the other side of the coin, Amiga, Inc.'s name and IP rights have been bought out by another company called KMOS that changed their name to Amiga, Inc. and is chartered in Delaware. Amiga, Inc. Delaware is claiming to own the rights to the name AmigaOS 4 as a result of that situation. As soon as Amiga, Inc. Washington went belly-up Hyperion started letting their third-party contractors get by with binary-only licenses of their contributions to the AmigaOS 4 code-base and so, even if Amiga, Inc. Delaware buys Hyperion they won't have the source code rights to AmigaOS 4.
It's easier to port from Linux to Windows than from Windows to Linux due to available source code. OpenOffice.org is developed on Solaris and Linux then ported from there to anything else, for example. There are reasonably good Linux distros for home use as well, but I think the main reason for the increase in Linux development is that Cygwin and MSYS will recompile a lot of Linux sources for Windows easily so it's just plain easier to get software to run on Linux first and then port it to other platforms. It doesn't help Microsoft that scripting languages like Python are more cross-platform compliant than C# since .NET has a HUGE runtime library that takes too much time to port.
The Amiga used to use drivers on the ROMs of a Zorro II/III cards all of the time. It was proprietary card slot design so since it would only work on AmigaOS 2+ it wasn't a problem. Treating Windows the same way with a PCI slot should be a problem since PCI slots aren't Windows or even an x86-specific specification. (Does anybody remember the PowerPC Common Hardware Reference Platform specification? PCI was in there.)
Rescue on Fractalis distributed by Epyx (actually created by Lucasfilm Games) used procedural terrain generation (hence the name Fractalis for fractals) and it ran just fine on a Commodore 64 or Atari 800 back in the 80s. If the same source code were recompiled for a modern PC it would look just like a terrain generator in OpenGL. The catch is: Where is Epyx now? This game would have outlasted its company if it had been written for other operating systems now. Furthermore it wouldn't hold people's attention nowadays since all the modern games look like that with the 3d polygon renderned graphics and such.
If you think the Mac Mini is old news, my Amiga 1200 used 2.5" IDE drives back in '93!
Which machine code? That's the big question. Certainly Intel would be happy to have you believe that their processors are the only ones available but what about the PowerPC? Python is used in game scripting as well as server work so why not for the game platforms?
The Cell can share memory between SPEs. That's part of how the DMA controller works. The problem with this is that only one of the SPEs can function when the local store is not in "isolate mode". As for conventional caches being able to keep up with local store, have you ever tried to cache a linked-list? You can do this with a DMA controller.
The old 8086-based PCs were hard to program too but their memory expansion used DMA transfers very similiar to the way the SPEs handle their memory stashing and fetching. The instruction set of the SPEs are not very unique except for the "branch hints" for software controlled branch prediction. Apart from that it's pretty straightforward.
http://www.imitationpickles.org/pgu/ is Phil's PyGame Utilities for Python and Pygame. It's still in the works but it includes example source for a standard tile game engine and has an editor for hex maps.
You seem to also be forgetting that linked structures can be prefetched by the DMA in ways that even a lock-in cache cannot. If you have a mesh stored as an array (as most are) then you run into trouble. If you are dealing with something stored in a linked tree structure or a linked list, the SPE will outperform a general purpose CPU.
Read the subject line. Python is faster to develop for than Java yet Python is able to produce Java compatible class files using the Jython utility.
IIRC They support internet through a wireless network. They will still depend on a server to connect them though.