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This news from AmiWest is very nice and encouraging but what can we expect for our classic ?

The announcement says it will be machine specific so :
- will we get a SCSI driver for the BlizzardPPC ?
- will we get a 3D driver for Permedia2 ?
- ...

And one question more (refering the tex in the FE announcement):

"Extended memory functionality (beneficial for all supported platforms even those platforms which cannot be equipped
with more than 2GB)"

What does that exactly mean in the case of FE classic? What type of memory can be defined as "extended'' and how does it work? Is it an alternative to the 'swap' memory which can be either Hard disk or Zorro III memory?

The paged memory function are for systems with greater than 2 GB memory, not the classic. I assume that functions to the OS only will be seen in the classic version and as far as the BlizzardPPC, I wound not hazard a guess when €29.95 will tell.

danbeaver wrote:The paged memory function are for systems with greater than 2 GB memory, not the classic. I assume that functions to the OS only will be seen in the classic version and as far as the BlizzardPPC, I wound not hazard a guess when €29.95 will tell.

But how do you then explain that statement ("beneficial for _all supported platforms_ even those platforms which cannot be equipped with more than 2GB")? Hyperion does not have the habit of putting meaningless words in their announcements...

Gregor wrote:

danbeaver wrote:The paged memory function are for systems with greater than 2 GB memory, not the classic. I assume that functions to the OS only will be seen in the classic version and as far as the BlizzardPPC, I wound not hazard a guess when €29.95 will tell.

But how do you then explain that statement ("beneficial for _all supported platforms_ even those platforms which cannot be equipped with more than 2GB")? Hyperion does not have the habit of putting meaningless words in their announcements...

I believe that, to get to the point to be able to use the Extended Memory, there has been a great deal of development went into the memory module.
The devs probably fixed some bugs as they went by, optimized things and squeezed a little bit more performance out of the whole section...

"Beneficial for all supported platforms" only means, imho, that they get something positive out of it...so, even if there was only one little bug fixed, that statement applies

As it has been discussed in depth before, Z3 and PCI video memory are too slow; a LIMM system used on Z3 memory would be the same as the virtual page memory management now used on th ZorRam and BigRamPlus boards. But those in their infinite wisdom may have a solution that puts additional ram in play that is fast as system ram. Using the CSPPC's local PCI bus has already been discussed, though. So go for it!

Gregor wrote:What does that exactly mean in the case of FE classic? What type of memory can be defined as "extended'' and how does it work? Is it an alternative to the 'swap' memory which can be either Hard disk or Zorro III memory?

For machines with less than 2 GB of physical memory, this is mostly aimed at expanding the virtual address space. As you know, this is limited to 2 GB on Amiga systems, and the new method basically adds more address space. It's not really very useful on the classic since they are limited by the hardware to about, what, 256 MB of memory ?

Thomas Frieden wrote:

Gregor wrote:What does that exactly mean in the case of FE classic? What type of memory can be defined as "extended'' and how does it work? Is it an alternative to the 'swap' memory which can be either Hard disk or Zorro III memory?

For machines with less than 2 GB of physical memory, this is mostly aimed at expanding the virtual address space. As you know, this is limited to 2 GB on Amiga systems, and the new method basically adds more address space. It's not really very useful on the classic since they are limited by the hardware to about, what, 256 MB of memory ?

Correct, the Blizzard PPC tops out at 256MB of directly accessible memory on the accelerator board. The Cyberstorm PPC 128MB. Users can add Zorro memory (up to 1GB or so) under AmigaOS 3.x, and under AmigaOS 4.x they can add the memory as swap (as long as the total allocation of memory (swap+main memory) is not greater than 512MB) I believe - you tell me, you wrote the kernel

Darren

Lio wrote:This news from AmiWest is very nice and encouraging but what can we expect for our classic ?

The announcement says it will be machine specific so :
- will we get a SCSI driver for the BlizzardPPC ?
- will we get a 3D driver for Permedia2 ?
- ...

I'm not allowed to talk about any potential new features yet specific to classic, but there was already 3D support for Permedia 2 in OS 4.1 Classic as an update, albeit in beta form but it was pretty solid.

is this beta available only to betatesters or are any classic users entitled to it ? I dont think I have it since benchmarking with 3D simply fails or dont launch at all (and I did all the updates until upd6 and then everything appearing in AmiUpdate).

how would I know whether this 3D driver is installed on my system ? no 3D game (quake, quake2) seems to benefit from it on my A1200PPC