This is an edited transcript of a special *live* chat conference, held on the *Portal System in the Amiga Zone chat area, on the evening of November 7, 1993. This transcript is Copyright 1993, The Amiga Zone, and may be freely distributed provided no further editing of any kind is performed on it. User Groups may reprint this transcript in their newsletters and it may be posted on Bulletin Boards, Usenet, and FTP sites. Our special guest speaker was Mr. Dave "Hazy" Haynie, of Commodore West Chester. The conference took the form of a question & answer session with Dave. This conference took almost exactly four hours in real time. Much superfluous yakking and hellos and g'byes have been edited out to make for a cleaner read. Thanks to Brian J. Cerveny for his yeoman's job of editing this capture of the conference. Thanks to Bill Seymour for maintaining the question queue during the evening. And thanks to all who participated. And special thanks to Dave Haynie for his vast storehouse of Amiga knowledge and willingness to give an entire evening to this endeavor. ABOUT PORTAL: The Portal Online System offers unparalled Amiga support in its Amiga Zone SIG. Not only do we have huge file libraries with thousands of Amiga programs and files of all description, but we also maintain the entire Fred Fish disk library online (currently at 930 disks) for downloading. There are also a gazillion Amiga-specific message bases, nightly live chats, over twenty Amiga-specific Commercial Vendor areas (with their own file libraries), and more. Over 2.5 Gigabytes of Portal disk space is devoted exclusively to the Amiga Zone. In addition, Portal offers all the familiar "Internet Services" including FTP, IRC, Telnet, and etc., wrapped into an easy-to-use menu system. There are NO limits on these services and no additional hourly costs to use them. Every Portal user also gets an unlimited Internet-connected Email box, as well as a full UNIX Shell account if desired. Portal has a "T1" connection to the Internet and runs on a large network of Sun workstations. For more information about Portal, locate, download, and read the Portal ad in any recent issue of the "Amiga Report" online magazine. Or send email to "cs@portal.com". Or phone 1-408-973-9111. Portal can be reached by direct dial (to Cupertino, CA), by SprintNet and Tymnet, or from anywhere in the world as "portal.com" via telnet. Portal does NOT surcharge hi-speed modem users. *Portal is a registered trademark of Portal Communications ============================================================================== The edited transcript begins here. The host was Harv Laser, head Moderator/Sysop of The Amiga Zone. Harv: AND NOW, IT'S MY EXTREME PLEASURE TO INTRODUCE A TEN YEAR VETERAN OF COMMODORE ENGINEERING A MAN WHOSE NAME IS ETCHED UPON THE MOTHERBOARDS OF YOUR COMPUTER. MISTER... ____ _ _ _ | _ \ __ ___ _____ | | | | __ _ _ _ _ __ (_) ___ | | | |/ _` \ \ / / _ \ | |_| |/ _` | | | | '_ \| |/ _ \ | |_| | (_| |\ V / __/ | _ | (_| | |_| | | | | | __/ |____/ \__,_| \_/ \___| |_| |_|\__,_|\__, |_| |_|_|\___| |___/ DAVE - ANY INTRO MATERIAL YOU'D CARE TO START WITH, BEFORE QUESTIONS START... BY ALL MEANS, FIRE AWAY hazy: Cough! At home, drawing pictures, of mountaintops... Whoops, I thought I was Eddie Vedder for a sec, I'm OK now. Kerry - Stratford: I have an accelerated 2000 and a Picasso II board on order. I understand that with the new 3.1 ROMS I will be able to use many AGA programs in 256 colors with Picasso's Retargetable Graphics. How do I get this ROMS and can you confirm the above. Also will they allow me to finally upgrade my CDTV so I can run 2.0 programs and Operating System? hazy: I don't know the exact status of 3.1. Last I heard, it was, like 2.04 before it, planned as an upgrade for all systems. This would be for A3000, A500/A2000, and probably the new ones, since it is a different ROM. I don't know if you necessarily want to upgrade a CDTV, since there are a number of programs that seem to be 1.3-specific. The CD32 has what's essentially a per-title patch library to handle CDTV titles,, I don't know if they plan this sort of upgrade for CDTV or not. Kerry - Stratford: Sorry I use the CDTV for my kids as a computer and you can't with the CD-32. hazy: Like I said, I don't know of the CDTV plans. ScottJ: Dave, has CBM decided which RISC chip to use in future Amigas? If they havent which one would you prefer to see used, PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, or HP/PA? hazy: We have looked at all of the RISC chips. No decision has been publicly announced, however. Keep in mind that chances are, the chip we pick will need to be servicable at all levels of computing, from our high enough down through the games level. However, I don't imagine we would be going with a chip _not_ on the list you have given, if that's enough of a clue for you (it's all you're gonna get). ScottJ: I hope its not SPARC, that chip's a dog. Thanks, Dave. hazy: The next generation high-end systems will use a CPU independent local bus, so the RISC decision isn't particularly critical at this point. Timeus: Will there be a display enhancer for the A4000 similar to the A2000's? When? hazy: The planned display enhancer for the A4000 has been tabled at present. That means that no one is currently working on it, not that they never will. I believe the design was offered to 3rd parties, though I don't know if any of them picked it up or not. I'm not certain it's much advantage over some of the existing 3rd party display cards. soft-logik: Dave, do you have any guess as to who bought a lot of Commodore stock last Thursday? hazy: Rumors abound. The rumor mill has been quite active lately, with talk of some financial improvements and some possible takeovers. However, I don't know what's going on. soft-logik: Well, good luck to ya. hazy: In fact, one of best sources for rumors couldn't make our Friday lunch this past week, so I'm at least a week behind on the best gossip. Bjarian: Hazy, thanks for your inputs. My question is about UNIX. The amiga was first in V.4 and beat even SUN. It is the only viable pc platform. What is being done now for Amiga unix? hazy: Currently, nothing is being done on UNIX. Sorry, I liked it too. It doesn't seem that Commodore management was willing to support it, though. Bjarian: RUPUGHE! hazy: That has nothing to do with the troubles of the past year, it was a much earlier decision, something nobody in Engineering was happy about. But that does happen some times. mykes: Is there any truth to the rumor that Dave's currently busy designing the dream amiga? hazy: Basically, yes. I'm currently working on several things, all of which involve the AAA chips to some extent. But of course, I don't design the Amiga chips, I design the system they go into. After the A3000 went out, I started thinking about What Next, as you might imagine. A bit over two years ago, I formally started writing up a new system architecture. We are NOW starting to implement that architecture. If all goes well, that will be the first AAA machine. DonM: I know you aren't/weren't marketing. Maybe you have a feel, though for how things are going. Ex: I just got a ToysRUs catalog. as they look to me? They GOTTA start marketing these things whatever fiduciary finagling goes on. ga Harv: [note - commodore has SAID (at WOCA) they will be introducing CD32 to the USA as of Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas in january] hazy: The US market has grown so small relative to the rest of the world, I think they pretty much take any sales as good, as long as they don't cost anything. I have, as Harv said, heard they plan to introduce CD32 in January here, but that they didn't have the quantities available to hit every market for Christmas '93. However, this is apparently not a repeat of last year, when we simply couldn't make enough systems due to supply problems. As far as I know, the factory in the Phillipines has been running CD32s at full force on 3 of the 4 production lines. That's full production for a Christmas rush. Harv: Dave - quick Q from me... tell us about the Philippines plant, if you can. what's it making and how many? hazy: I don't really know numbers. It's set up for surface mount, which is what everything is these days. They have four production lines. The fourth has been running A4000s and I suppose, anything else they needed, over the Christmas rush time (it's hard to get away from the low end at all this time of the year). Aurelius: Hi Dave, Which of your current projects is the most exciting to work on? the one you can talk about anyways? hazy: The next generation system project. Everyone's heard about AAA, of course, and I did build a AAA prototype machine, which we have running in the labs of course. However, while that's fun, it's not as cool as when I get to build My Own Thing. That will be the system that "houses" the AAA subsystem. Aurelius: does AAA include PAULA upgrade/replacement? hazy: The AAA system has a thing called "Mary", which is kinda-sorta Paula on steriods. And then some. David-L: Was the A4091 turned over to a third party? If so, who?... hazy: Yes, the A4091 has been turned over to a third party. Management has for some time been trying to get out of the peripherals biz, even while acknowledging that sometimes, we have to make them. I don't know if the third party involved has been officially announced, but having used some of their stuff and all over the years, I think they're a good company. David-L: Do you know where I go for support? hazy: I don't know how the support end is managed, though I don't suppose they're taking over the software anytime soon, so ultimately C= Engineering will still be dealing with problems at the technical level. I really don't know what happens at the user level. David-L: What's Doin w/ DiskSalv - I sent my money - should I expect somethin? hazy: As for DiskSalv, I spent all last week stuffing envelopes. Anyone who registered at any level should get something in the mail very soon. If you registered for updates and/or the commercial version, you'll get the V11.28 update disk too. colins: Dave, it seems that the PCI bus has been embraced by much of the computer industry.What chance is there that CBM might incorporate the PCI bus in a future Amiga? Also,will AmigaOS survive the transition to a RISC based Amiga? hazy: There is a very good chance Commodore will endorse the PCI bus sometime in the future. No official announcement has been made yet, of course. However, PCI is very much a solution to a problem I started working on over two years ago. It's very close, in fact, to my solution to this problem. And standard, as well. Draw your own conclusions :-) fredness: Are there plans for an AGA Amiga with SCSI-II on the motherboard? hazy: The A4000T (T=floorstanding) is an AGA machine with SCSI-2 on the motherboard. That's the same NC53C710 SCSI-2 you get on the A4091, only integrated into the motherboard. This machine isn't out yet, I don't know the status of it, but the samples seem fairly complete. This is a Greg Berlin project at present. No other AGA/SCSI-2 system has been discussed. CarmenR: Hazy: Do the RISC chips [or DSP if you're gonna use them for that matter] handle multi-tasking as elegantly as the motorolla chips do? hazy: RISC chips are generally as good at multitasking as the Motorola chips. Some have a slightly gerater task-switch overhead, but that's really no big deal if you're going that much faster to begin with. They vary in their abilities at other things. Some handle interrupts as well, others used a more primitive interrupt model. Same goes with exceptions, MMU table walks, etc. CarmenR: Is IDE here to stay? :) -=> GA hazy: Industry-wise, IDE isn't going away anytime soon. Even though it presently doesn't go much beyond 4MB/s, there are mental patients out there building IDE controllers for VL-Bus and PCI. And the PC industry is planning an enhanced IDE that supports four channels, more addressing, and greater speeds. As for Commodore... I believe it'll always make sense for the low-end systems. I don't like it for high end systems, and I think we have taken some steps in the next generation architecture to bring the cost of SCSI down relative to IDE. But we'll see -- if it's free, and there's a low cost SCSI option, you shouldn't complain too loudly. Harv: Dave - Any comment on Colins' "will amiga os survive transition to a RISC based CPU"? hazy: Oh yeah. I believe it has to. The reasoning -- low end systems. You can argue in favor of WindowNT or UNIX for high-end systems. And in fact, I think both of those are good options, especially something like NT, which should essentially be shrink-wrapped for any CPU supported. However, no one's going to see any sense in outfitting a $500 RISC low- end or CD machine with the $1200 worth of RAM, Hard Disk, etc. necessary just to boot one of those. Also, there are rather dubious Multimedia characteristics in those OSs. Most of what people call "Multimedia" are a set of realtime problems. The industry still hasn't figured out that GUI is a realtime problem. I don't know how long it's going to take them to get the Multimedia thing figured out properly. colins: That was my worry dave, something like Scala won't look too hot on WinNT. Thanks. Pjotr: Let me describe a scenario: The new line of computers CBM will concentrate on. One main RISC architecture, Windows NT (f ex?), Multimedia libraries (incl video) as primary advantage over NT PCs etc, Interfaces for Video CD cable, PCI(?), Video conferencing standards etc. Q: How will the next Amiga stand out without being propriery? hazy: On the hardware side, you'll still have Amiga chips. There are things in AAA which will make a very impressive difference in many of the things we're doing with computers these days. But hardware is expensive, and time consuming to design. If we have to build every piece of the system from scratch, it's going to take longer and cost more than comparable "standard architecture" systems. Everyone has pretty much figured this out, except maybe Sun. DEC and Apple certainly have. I think you have to concentrate on the things that will make your system stand out. On the software side, like I said, I think we'll still have AmigaOS around. CHeheck out the last BYTE for their preceived effect of NT or OS/2 on your hardware, relative to Windows. From C='s point of view, supporting NT isn't a big deal if the shrinkwrap ped version is available for your processor, so why not? Yet I think the processors (RISC-based) need to run Amiga binaries to make the system an Amiga straight-off. Of course, keep in mind I'm not the management or the software group, but that's the way I see it. Furr: I would like clarification on the Z3 BUSTER DMA mess; I've gotten conflicting stories from different people. I have an A3000, and I want to know if there is a new BUSTER available for this machine that fixes the Zorro 3 DMA problems. I am considering a Z3 board that this is apparently a consideration for (the GVP Spectrum/24). hazy: The Buster chip in the A3000 (Rev G or -07) does not support Zorro III DMA. That feature was simply left out, to get the machine out on time. You can get the latest, Rev K or -11, which supports Zorro III DMA and also fixes a bug in the Zorro II DMA to Chip RAM on the A3000. I suppose in the USA, you would have to order this part through your dealer or one of the C= parts specialty places. I don't know who's in charge of replacement parts anymore, it might be SMG. Furr: Also, when might the first machines based around the AAA chipset actually reach market, and will those first AAA machines still use 680x0 processors, or the as-yet undecided RISC chip? hazy: The first AAA machines will ship with 680x0 processors, hopefully the 68040 and 68060 will both be options, assuming Motorola's silicon development keeps paces with ours. For RISC, you would simply plug in a RISC CPU module. KyleW: Is it true that AAA will not work on AGA machines(my UG refuses to upgrade it's antique a500 because ofthat rumor) and 2)- will AAA be available for older machines (I have waytoo much money in my 2500 to upgrade any time soon). hazy: The AAA chip set is a radical departure from anything you have seen before. Everything in it was designed new, from the ground up. There is no way possible to retrofit it into any older system other than building a Zorro III card for A3000/A4000 class systems. That certainly could be done, it's up to management to order this or not. It's not practical to implement AAA on a 16-bit card (I won't say impossible, but it would be a great deal of trouble). LadyHawke: Hi Dave, nice to see you again, we owe you at least a cement-mixer full of macadamia nuts by now ... hazy: That's a rather curious image. LadyHawke: My question is more of a dilemma than a question. I have an A3000. The A4000T at the show looked good, more slots, two hard drive controllers, AGA. Harv: [and two video slots!] LadyHawke: I am at a loss as to whether to conintue to upgrade my A3000, since every dollar spent on that is a dollar less to save for a new system, and now we have even further developments. I'm worried that there is less support for the 3000 than I expected, and then RISC machines on the way. What would you do if you were a high end consumer? (and computer artist) hazy: Well, part of the question is, just what do you want for the A3000? Barring a DMA upgrade, Zorro is Zorro. AGA is a big improvement for some, maybe especially if you're into art. I still have an A3000 here. It's got an '040 card, a 3rd party display card, ab18MB and about a gig of hard disk space. I'll admit the A4000T is a bit tempting, but I don't know (I didn't work on it, so I don't necessarily get a freebie or anything). Harv: [a friend of mine has an 040 3000 with 84 meg of ram.. i hate him :-) ] hazy: It's always going to come down to new stuff coming along. The very nature of this business is Faster, Bigger, More, ASAP. I have a long-term goal to make systems far more modular than they have been, and we just might get that in the next generation. It hasn't been technically feasible before. LadyHawke: Dave, how long before another system comes along? hazy: Lew says AAA will hit sometime in '94. Don't expect it for another year, though, to be reasonable about it. I'll guarantee you someone buys an A4000 the day we announce the new machines. These things always happen. Jim-Guy: My question is about using my Video Toaster on the A4000 with a 1960 monitor.. C= was supposed to build an adapter? Has this been built.. will I ever be able to use my 1960 on my A4000 so I get full AGA support? hazy: I have seen these around the labs. Apparently the first batch came in from soemme cave in China marginally functional. They do exist. I think they're probably just in short supply at present. Jim-Guy: What is the relationship or how is the relationship between CBM and NewTek? hazy: We seem to get along fine with NewTek these days, at least from what I can tell. Personally, I have a blast every time I get together with those guys. Teletran: Dave, What's the general feeling at C= in regards to how well the CD^32 has doneso far (acceptance, sales, etc.)?... ALso, any thoughts (personal and/or professional) regarding 3-DO? hazy: For whatever reasons, we're often the last to know about sales. But the word on the street, or by the coffee machine, is that CD32 is doing well. I will admit to being a real skeptic during its development. But I think it was done very well on both the software are hardware levels. And they kept the proice pretty reasonable. Also, MPEG is as cool as Jeff Porter originally claimed it would be. I think you have to give the coolness edge to 3DO, of course. CD32 is a big upgrade to existing games machines, but 3DO could be out of this world. Then again, what do expect me to say -- I have all the respect in the world for Dave and R.J., and every day more of my friends work for 3DO :( They're aren't a guaranteed success yet, though. Remember back when CDTV came out and everyone hard that zillions of companies would be making Phillips CD-I players. Seems I can still count CD-I players on one finger. 3DO will certainly do better than this, since it's going into lots of places other than "game machine" The price point is a problem now, no other CD machine has been successful up there, at least in the volumes they were after. They'll need 3DO-specific games. They will have some, but they'll also have ports of PC games. They may have to count on stuff filtering down from embedded arcade machines before they really differentiate themselves. The SGI technology is very cool, at least on a $10,000+ workstation. What you'll get in the home for $250 is another story. Nintendo may be able to play the old game of CPU power vs. cool display hardware to some extent. But if they wind up with an embedded R3000-derivative rather than a semi-decent R4x00, they won't be much beyond the 3DO's CPU. lbperez: Greetings...just wondering when are we going to see the expansion box for the CD 32. hazy: I haven't heard any release dates on it. It's real, though, a number of the low-end guys asked me about various bits and pieces for it. And I suppose you may have noticed, if you have been pricing CD-ROM drives, that the CD-32 is about the same price. I'm certain interface solutions will be quick in coming. wms: Last time I heard you in conference here on Portal, was after some bloodletting at C= and ewhac asked "Is the light still shining, so to speak?" You replied that you were withholding judgement for the moment. How do you feel now? And how is morale in general? hazy: Well, it's a tough call. There are good things happening, no doubts. AAA is progressing, management has made committments for new chip revisions on an actual schedule, etc. CD32 seems to be doing what A1200 was supposed to have done last Christmas -- make some money. And I am getting to work on the architecture I have been designing for the last two years. On the other hand, there has been lots of attrition in Engineering. I expected this, having been through exactly this same kind of thing back in '85-'86, but it's never something to build morale. While it's impossible to say, I believe a great deal of this could have been prevented with some good management. As well as morale in general. Things may even be turning on these points, too, though perhaps it's too early to tell. We are getting some new hired in HW to replace a few who have left. I imagine SW is too, though they lost more key people than we did. elc: Motorola driven AGA is slow...will Motorola driven AAA be faster? Say the Indy were to drop in price why should my next computer purchase be an Amiga? What is it really ofering that I can't get anywhere else... Harv: [go price an Indy. if you want 24 bit and a hard drive i hope you have $10,000 handy] hazy: AGA is, in general, slow. Slow, certainly, as compared to what you expect in modern 32-bit systems. There's a good reason for this -- it's based largely on the ECS architecture. elc: The Amiga always seems to be just shy of what the Amiga community is looking for, will the next generation Amiga wait for "perfection"? hazy: AAA is completely new. While I don't expect it to be the fastest system known to man for all things, it will be a substantial improvement. For instance, a demo in the lab is blitting around 24-bit images substantially faster than AA can move an 8-bit image. It has lots of good features, compressed-video modes to speed up animations, copper-programmed-blitter to help offload the CPU, etc. The current system architecture plans call for additional system support to speed things like RAM to Chip RAM transfers. You can have either 8MB or 16MB of Chip RAM, depending on system configuration. A VRAM system consumes no chip bus bandwidth for video fetch. Lots of good stuff in there. I don't know how you compare it to an Indy, they're different systems. An R4000 is faster than any 68040, and we don't know what the '060 will do just yet. MarcR: Will there be a Laptop Amiga? Will there be more "specialized" Amigas like CD32 but for professional and other uses? Will AAA bout out too late? hazy: They have no plans for a laptop Amiga at present. I want one too, I think it may take a 3rd party to actually get one (keep in mind most 3rd party video displays run on a VGA of some kind). There will definitely be more "specialty" Amigas. I don't work on them, but we do have a group focusing on that kind of thing. I suppose if they went high-end, I might even get involved. One big advantage of the next generation high-end architecture is that it's designed to implement amodular systems. Most previous architectures did one thing well, and got in your way when you tried to do something else with them. I don't think AAA is coming out too late, though it's later than I (and all of you, of course) would have liked. There's still not a big move to 4MB floppies yet, everyone's still trying to work out just how to do multimedia, and I think AAA supports much of this in hardware, the right way. MarcR: Would C= licence the Amiga chips for someone to make a laptop, etc.? hazy: I know C= is much more interested in licensing, and does have plans for chipset deals, at least into the markets they're after. Jeff Porter might know more about this. JWolf: What are all the details about the AAA chipset? Any other new custom chips? Details? Also, when is AmigaDOS 3.1 due out? What new features are in AmigaDOS 3.1 (both under the hood and over the hood)? hazy: Well, I would need hours to discuss all of AAA, and I'd probably have to read the manuals. hazy: I can tell you it consists of four custom chips: Andrea, Mary, Monica, and Linda. They are all full 32-bit chips, and actually, Linda and Monica have a 64- bit mode. The chips support 8 MB of Chip RAM in 32-bit mode, 16MB of Chip RAM in 64-bit mode. RAM can be DRAM or VRAM, and can actually be mixed in a system on 1MB/2MB boundaries. Andrea is the Agnus/Alice replacement. It supports the old 16-bit registers, new 32-bit registers, enhanced Blitter and Copper, Burst mode to Chip RAM, and display rates up to 110MHz. Mary is the Paula replacement. It has 8 16-bit audio channels, an enhanced flooppy interface that can handle 4MB floppies, 150KB/s CD-ROM, and probably even ST-506 hard disks if anyone cared to dust one off and interface it. Linda is a smart Line Buffer chip. It takes data from Chip RAM, as directed by Andrea, and assembles it into a scan line. This allows bursts from Chip RAM to go long, and allows the chip bus rate to be decoupled from the pixel speed. CD-ROM support was kind of a freebie. The Mary chip has a few data formats, as low-level data formats, one of which is the CD-ROM format. While we expect 4x CD-ROMs soon, and CD-ROM on SCSI as the standard way in a high-end machine, the CD-ROM format throught the floppy interface does illustrate how fast the floppy interface is now. Monica is the Denise/Lisa replacement. This handles a variety of planar and chiunky display modes, HAM and some new compressed mode included. It can handle all kinds of resolutions, and with the variable pixel clock, they can be just about anything you want, assuming the system can provide that clock. The chip designers name the chips. NES-Bill: Serial ports Dave? hazy: Two buffered serial ports. DeckApe: 1) Has the A4000T hit the stores yet? If not, when is it expected to? What is its list price.... hazy: Far as I know, the A4000T has not shipped. I don't know any details on price. DeckApe: 2) Will the A4000T be outdated technology within 24 months of it's release? hazy: Will it be outdated? Well, on some level, anything that ships is outdated, since work on its replacement is already underway. It certainly won't be useless. A machine remains what it was when you bought it. However, better stuff will always come along. Harv: [lots of people still use Amiga 1000s. I bet some people here are using them right now] DeckApe: [Won't bet - *I* am one of the 1000 users!] hazy: My dad bought a C= PC-10 III system maybe 4-5 years ago. That's a 12MHz 8088 or some-such. At a computer faire today, I was a stack of 8088 machine going for $25 each. He paid around $500, C= discount at the time. You have to decide when it's right to upgrade and when it isn't, and I can't tell you what your needs are. Aaron: With whatever Risc Chip that C= Chooses/chosen (PowerPC I hope) will they be doing the same as Apple with Emulation Q. This Would allow the software to run in 68k Mode but if it is Compliled for the PowerPc it can run in PowerPC Native mode Giving it a the full power of the very powerful Power PC chip. hazy: Again, I'm not the software group, but I anticipate a 680x0 emulator would go into any RISC OS we ship. It's really not that difficult, in that only user-mode stuff has to be emulated. They can play tricks with the OS, using the emulator or native code as they see fit. And of course, the underlying hardware is the same, so you don't have to emulate it. That's perhaps the worst thing a PC Emulator has to do. Aaron: second Question: How expensive is it to make the AGA chipset Compared to the Future AA+ and AAA. If the AA+ or the AAA is the same or just a bit more will C= put them in the CD32. Would this not bring the CD32 power up past the 3DO's?? hazy: As far as chip prices, AGA is chip. Real chip. Like, cheaper than ECS, as I understand it, since it yields much better. AAA will cost more, though much less than we originally guessed, thanks to the downsizing of chips (AAA takes about a million transistors). A AAA game machine is certainly possible, though I'm not sure if it's the right direction. AAA has a lot of features than make more sense in a computer than a game machine. I mean, 3DO certainly didn't waste any silicon making sure you could get 1280x1024 noninterlaced. AmiGadget: Dave, it's obvious CBM is convinced, that there are plenty TOMORROWS for Risc Amigas, AAA chipsies 4000-T's, etc. This stuff is two years late, now. By the time you get it engineered, there'll be ZERO Amiga software developers with any capital to support it. With all due respect for you personally and NO respect for C=, I see no sense of urgency, yours or CBM's, to DO something NOW. DO you ... think there's plenty of time? Or should we all just set our clocks for 2099, when that year's LAST year's technology will then match what we can buy on several other platforms now.? Harv: [for you IRC people... AmiGadget publishes a magazine by the same name] hazy: Well, I can't make things happen any faster than I'm making them happen. I wish they were moving faster, but we're doing what we can. I think you'll find this new system isn't lacking as a '94 machine. I can't get into too much detail, only to say that [a] I have been working on this architecture for two years, something that never happened at C= before (two weeks was more like it in the... old days), and [b] I'm doing things with system throughput no one else is doing, or at least talking about, now. No big surprise, really, though. There's little incentive to get too fancy in "standard" architecture. Apple doesn't build clever hardware, and they seem to be wanting out of the hardware business anyway. AmiGadget: ALSO... you keep saying "high end"- what kinda money? $12k, $4k? hazy: C= "high-end" is $4k and below, generally. I think it should start at about $1.5K-$2K, less if possible. High end is the stuff that's not game oriented. "That which does not suck" one might say. I don't think we're going for $10K systems ever, there's no market there. mykes: Has C= considered distributed computing? ... hazy: We have done some distributed computing. Nothing real fancy, but useful nonetheless. It started out with a renderer and a custom CPU server that allowed one machine to request CPU time of anyone participating over the network. This wasn't formalized, but it's a good model, and could be formalized over Envoy without too much trouble. There has also been some work with a distributed database model, though I don't know much about that one. mykes: Which 3rd party gfx board do you own, if any? ... hazy: I have a thing called oMniBus, designed by a guy named Oliver Bausch in Germany and marketed through ArMax. This is a passive bridge card that puts Workbench up on the VGA card of your choice. It's cool, it works, it's faster at many things than AGA, does 256 colors (true color with a special loader program), and works under 2.x and 3.x. This never made the US market, unfortunatel y, and probably scared off Bridge Card users. But it does me just fine, at up to 1280x1024. mykes: ISA is faster than ECS... hazy: Actually, the ISA/Zorro II CPU to RAM interface is 1/2 that of the CPU to AGA interface speed. But the VGA card never blocks CPU access. mykes: Do you feel that C= will be able to crawl out of the niche market and into mainstream? ... hazy: Well, at least we can pursue the niches. I would like to see us grow and hit the mainstream, at least some mainstream. But increasingly, the mainstream is defined by the the software you run, it has NOTHING to do with your hardware platform. Or, at least, it shouldn't, and won't if MicroSoft has their way. What can you do against that, I don't know. [a] SGI only sells in niche markets [b] SGI machines run Windows NT, a mainstream OS. mykes: When's the new R.E.M. album coming out? And do you have it on your workbench along with your other prerelease stuff? :-) hazy: Last summer, REM said the new album would be out this fall and they'd do a tour. Now they say the album will be out maybe in the winter and they might not tour before 2000. mykes: most important question of all :-) Furr: As far as the IDE/SCSI business goes, there are now some MS-DOS systems that use IDE for the primary hard drive, and have a chip socket and connector on the motherboard for SCSI, if the user wants it. I think this would be an excellent route to go, in that it gives you an inexpensive HD interface, and no-slot SCSI access for those who need it; what do you think? hazy: Well, the high performance SCSI chip we use now is a 160 pin PQFP package, it doesn't exactly drop into a socket (well, anything like a production-worthy socket). I do agree with the spirit of this -- If you do go IDE, SCSI should be a simple addition, it should not require a full expansion card with all the inherent costs of such a card. My personal opinion, of course. Furr: Now that we're getting one-chip Ethernet interfaces, how long do you think it will be before a 10baseT port is standard on the Amiga motherboard? Artisoft [maker of the LanTastic networking software for the MS-DOS world, for those who don't know] is already calling their ALICE chip "The Serial Port of the 90's." hazy: Actually, most of the UNIX and all the networking magazines seem to be pushing 10-Base-T as a kind of serial port-ish solution. Which is appropriate, since you can't really use it directly to network anything. However, given that 10-Base-T chips are getting motherboard-cheap, and trancrivers over to 10-Base-2 are also cheap (as low as $50), I would definitely support 10-Base-T as the most practical networking solution for motherboards. Furr: Are there any new BridgeCards or other similar emulation items coming from Commodore, or will that market be left to 3rd parties? hazy: There has been nothing beyond the '386SX BridgeCard, at least discussed in public. Furr: What is your personal opinion of the Commodore Stockholder's Movement? hazy: As a stockholder, of course I'm concerned about the relatively minor investment I have in C= stock. As a C= employee, I'm far more concerned about the long term viability of C=. Since it seems to me that the Commodore Stockholder's Movement has only the Amiga and, as a result, Commodore's best interests in mind, I couldn't rightly do anything but applaud the efforts. RMills: I work at Warner bros. animation and see plenty of SGI and Macs come in for testing and wondered who or if Commodore would do this?...who should I get in contact with there? Getting my A4000 in my office was like pulling teeth. hazy: Technically, that kind of request should go through Marketing. But I don't know who would be in charge of that. RMills: Can you give me a name? hazy: I would recommend talking to Jeff Porter at Commodore, in Engineering. RMills: ok I really think stations set up at Warners could be a great plug for Commodore and they seem to miss this as a viable thing for them. hazy: Jeff does a fair share of Evangelizing in addition to running what's basically the "multimedia" branch of engineering. Harv: [Jeff P did a good job with his speeches at WOCA in pasadena] hazy: Well, the US does have new Marketing Prez. If his hands aren't tied too much, maybe he's interested in doing something. Timeus: Dave, How hard would it be for a developer to put external instruction cache on an a4000 accelerator card? hazy: You could build a cache into the design of a CPU card -- the first C= '040 prototype had a 128K cache. However, it's probably not worthwhile. You can just about always get more performance by going faster than caching, at least until you run out of clock speed (eg, you can't get '040s beyond 40MHz). We got between 5% and 15% speedup in most code with the 128K cache. As for Apple, I assume they didn't sue Commodore because they had insufficient legal grounds for a suit. Timeus: So you actually looked into it. Impressive. And why did't Apple sue Commodore over look and feel as it did to Microsoft and HP. The amiga has the better interface and the Mac is a poor copy of Amiga. hazy: Keep in mind that MicroSoft licensed some stuff from Apple for Windows 1.0, and since HP's NewWave is built on top of Windows, anything that can be said for WInindows can probably be said for NewWave, at least legally. There were plenty of elements in the Amiga's GUI that didn't enter the Mac's until later. So it was also possible that C= would have had just as much on Apple as they could have dug up on C=. Of course, C= probably could have done like NeXT and paid Xerox PARC for a GUI license, which should sufficiently stimie Apple's attempts at any suit. KyleW: the window/icon interface was developed by U of AZ and is PD! RedWine: Do you forsee any conflict between the interests of RTG and the apparent functionality of the AAA chipset? Or is it safe to assume that anything AAA will support will also be available to any other cards that come along from other parties? hazy: No. In fact, some features of AAA, such as chunky pixel support, require at least a degree of RTG to built into the system. There's a good chance that most vanilla chunky display cards won't even need a full RTG driver as a result, since that mechanism will be built-in for AAA. RedWine: With respect to the slow memory system of the 4000, why was the decision made to not include a more appropriately fast memory capability on the 68040 card itself? hazy: The card that's in the A4000 was designed to be the lowest cost '040 card possible without going to custom logic. That necessitated some compromises, but it did help on cost. Welcome to the world of the desktop system. :-) RedWine: What's the standing the CD-ROM drives for AGA machies, and is it technically feasible to include the advantage of chunky->planar hardware from the CD32's Akiko chip? Aaron: Is the Chunk->planar Feature included in AAA and AA+? hazy: Well, I thought about buying a CD-ROM drive for my A3000 today. The CD FileSystem is built in to 3.1 and beyond. You don't need any special magic to get one. The chunky-to-planar conversion (what we call corner-turn memory) is in Akiko, it's not possible to add that as-is to any other system. I expect my version of corner turn memory (which predates Hedley's, though