Two interesting newsbits from the Amiga Forever camp. First, they got Amiga Forever running on the OLPC, and secondly, they also got it running on the Eee PC. The next version of Amiga Forever will support both these platforms. The release is scheduled for somewhere in 2008.
which runs on all kinds of things…
But then what would really rock, is a re-investment in the UAE source, which seems to be somewhat fragmented and stale… Or am I wrong?
It is UAE with a bunch of presets to get you up and emulating in no time.
More importantly, it includes legal copies of various versions of the ROM and various versions of the operating system. For people with real hardware, it also has Amiga Explorer (Windows only though).
I don’t see why existing Amiga Forever users would want to upgrade, but if you don’t own it and want to emulate the Amiga on your OLPC (or anything else) this is the only bonified legal way to go.
The 2008 release will contain a “ReatroPlatform Player” that applies a media player analogy to the process of selecting from a list of games, demos and other items, and launching them. You can use Play and Pause buttons, Forward button to swap the disk or accelerate the emulation, etc.
It sounds very promising.
Since XO Laptop by default cannot run multimedia content, would a XO laptop with Amiga Forever solve the problem ?
It would be more efficient to install a Linux based media player. For example, my XO has mp3blaster. Other media players can be installed to, but I don’t know how well it will play the media files because the XO is by current standards underpowered and most media players are fairly current.
That, and you only get revisions of the Amiga workbench prior to 3.1 with Amiga Forever.
Years ago, at a club a fiend of mine owned, we played the daytime music via mp3, allowed internet access and games of Quake1 on the console, and ran a 4 terminal (wyse 60) point of sale system all on a 133MHz pentium with 32MB of RAM. I wrote my own “dialog” based front end to mpg123 or mpg321. Can’t remember which. (It had two sound cards so the music and Quake could coexist.) The music never at any time *ever* skipped a beat. And that was on a 2.0.x kernel… or maybe 2.2.x. IIRC, the mp3 player was using something like 10-15% of the processor.
Which is why I find the idea of modern audio players being resource intensive to be kinda weird.
I kind of miss old Osirus. (That was the name of the machine.) It was all pretty cool. the DJ had a terminal in the booth. And during the daytime the bartenders could quickly swap applications with “screen”, load up or configure a new play list, and kick it off, and then switch back to ring up a sale. It all seemed pretty cutting edge, because back then, few had heard of mp3’s. My friend was an old hand at Cobol and wrote the point of sale system himself. Ah, those were the days!
Edited 2008-01-19 18:11 UTC
Audio, no problem. At least for MP3. The program I use seems to peak around 2% (mono, voice), though I can see other players and other formats being less efficient.
Alas, we live in a world of video too and codecs that were designed to reduce bandwidth at the expense of CPU and memory use.
What? You wanted a picture, too?!
I swear, you’re getting as bad as Eugenia! 😉
I hat similar experiences with a FreeBSD 4.x system on a 150 MHz P1 with 64 MB RAM, GUI was IceWM.
I had a ISA Creative Labs Sound Blaster. I think one of the problems with “modern” hardware is the sound card emulation a la AC97 where the CPU has to invest cycles to do the work that’s usually done by the DSP.
I’ve used XMMS and mplayer for video and audio playback which gave a truly acceptable solution. I can’t imagine why today’s users complain about skipping playback and such stuff… with the amount of ressources available today…
I remember some WYSE terminal being able to manage multiple sessions, so you could even switch between up to four “real” login session.
In the experimental days, I even had some QIC floppy tape drive to emulate “music cassettes” (on a Linux system, Slackware I think), I did something like
$ cat /dev/rft0 | buffer | mpg123 –
to play music from a QIC or Travan tape. Can you imagine the fun? 🙂
Yes, they were… I did some programming of POS software to be used on a LAN in TurboPascal! Nonsense today, for sure, but more than 15 years ago… still impressive to those who didn’t know what you could do even with PCs low on ressources – if you knew how.