I use Amiga in my home for a surprising number of common computing tasks. I have no illusions of having an Amiga that competes with others for things like high end office programs, or other things this complex. For this stuff another platform is more logical. My idea of Amiga is that of a home computer. Play a few games on it, browse the web, get email, work with digital pictures, work with home videos, keep an address book, be able to view modern PDF files and variety of other type image files, listen to mp3's, etc... Amiga already doing a lot of these things quite well. Web browser still coming up to speed hence the reason I brought this up.

That's not the same and you know it, stop being facetious.

There. Now be quiet. You argue like whiny children. I know it is not my place to say, but arguing over things is not the way to get things done.

Argue like children? Pot kettle black me thinks.

Back to the original topic, a modern 68k browser is useful, but the annoying thing is you're asking the wrong people for help. I don't go into the Minimig forums and ask why the developers aren't porting Blender, you might think that's a ridiculous comparison but the point is the team here doesn't have the resources to devote to working on a web browser, and even if they did they would be duplicating the work of others if they persued this goal.

The Natami forums aren't the only place new 68k Amiga developments are being discussed, send a message to the developer of 68k Netsurf if you wish, or talk to the guy porting AROS to 68k, those would be far more productive uses of your time.

But it is a solution that is readily avalible. I know it is not ideal, but it is an okay stopgap. I don't think natami needs internet more than for aminet and other amiga sites, that usually work fine in aweb or iBrowse. It would be much more comfortable, in terms of rendering speed, to use a modern system (or atleast 1999 era). I don't like it either. My pcmia slot is lonely.
 
 

Thomas Clarke wrote:

Argue like children? Pot kettle black me thinks.

I haven't done any arguing yet. And I don't want to. Can we just all be friends and work towards a common goal?
 

Thomas Clarke wrote:

Back to the original topic, a modern 68k browser is useful, but the annoying thing is you're asking the wrong people for help. I don't go into the Minimig forums and ask why the developers aren't porting Blender, you might think that's a ridiculous comparison but the point is the team here doesn't have the resources to devote to working on a web browser, and even if they did they would be duplicating the work of others if they persued this goal.     The Natami forums aren't the only place new 68k Amiga developments are being discussed, send a message to the developer of 68k Netsurf if you wish, or talk to the guy porting AROS to 68k, those would be far more productive uses of your time.

I agree with this.

(OK... this is my final final comment ;)

I didn't say the only component that counts is a browser. I said most of what I do these days is with a browser. The most important thing to me is the OS & computer the browser is running on. Is it snappy and fast? Can I trust it? Does it do what I say, when I say it - or does it treat me as a low priority second-class citizen that must be controlled and limited while it does whatever the hell it wants in the background without my permission? (most "modern" "secure" operating systems)

BeOS boots fast (faster than the damn slow PC BIOS), is fairly trustworthy and responsive - but it's crap compared to Amiga. I won't bore you with the details, but the point is that I'd rather not be using any PC. (don't suggest mobile phone - I hate those too)

What makes Natami special? I want to run all my Amiga programs natively (Nat-ami) and do everything I need to do with a computer on an OS that I love and trust. It's really quite simple. :)

(.... please, no comments on how Linux is "rock solid" and "super secure" - I can crash Linux in a second. I can access every file without a password. Hell, I can even cause a system failure and prevent booting by simply back-dating the system time! Rock solid, my ass!)

Look, the utter question is - right again - what is the Natami system is supposed to be. If I get your point right, you want it a general purpose desktop machine. But - and this is now my point - this "war" is already lost, was lost fifteen years ago. Forget it, if you want a "does all I need to do" system, get over it and buy a PC. Problem solved, everything else is a matter of taste. (The most extreme position of that is the google "operating system" - *only* the browser matters)

Thus, were is the "niche" within which Natami would possibly have a chance? In my opinion, that nice would be Amiga retro systems, backward compatibility to the software platform, and a nice study system for development and gaming.

Don't tell me about Linux; there are a couple of points where Linux is utter crap. Time handling is none of them, though (if you have root access, you can crash the system anyhow, what's the deal?), but "media" support definitely is. (udev,hal,desktop - a very entangled system for something very simple, copying bad design ideas from windows. Why do I need to "remove" media if I just could unplug them?).

Amiga Os (or Tripos) had a decently nice design for removable hardware media, and datatypes were a pretty good design for "media format" support. Rexx was a pretty neat design for interaction of programs - *simplicity*. There are other points where AmigaOs is utter crap (lack of protection of all kind, for example), though. There is nothing ideal in this world, but Linux lacks at least the simplicity I prefer. Good things ought to be simple, not complicated.

Nevertheless, Amiga is a nice enough toy system to preserve, and that deserves better than what currently happens. And about the crap part, well, I hope something could be done about *that* mess.

So long,
Thomas

Apologies if I came across as harsh Richard, I just found the tone you used in your previous message a little abrupt considering all you had suggested was a stopgap solution. You are right, it is better to work towards a common goal through cooperation.

I look forward to doing whatever I can, be it word of mouth "hey check out natami! isn't it cool?" to creating games (currently trying to get that off the ground right now) to going "well, I dunno. I don't know enough to say". It takes my mind off the constant terrible weather we have here in england (can't speak for the rest of the kingdom - scotland has always had better weather all the times I've visited).

Getting RTG running on Natami seems like something Natami folk do need to worry about. So, is this logical and should we start talking about this instead of web browser development?

RTG (with other updated and enhanced OS components) and a good optimizing compiler are important pieces to a more modern and fast browser. Gunnar started to talk about a CyberGFX driver for SAGA. Is there someone currently working on this? I would think it's too early to know the SAGA hardware register layout?

I see more than 3 people here :).

I think that its a good idea for the team to focus on HW development and on writing libs and example code on how to use the new features so that other people can learn from this.

I agree. Good HW with good documentation will attract software developers. The Natami will be very useful and fast from day 1 without any drivers if the HW is good. It would still be nice if some needed software was worked on before release.

The current Webbrowsers (MOS/AROS/OS4) could relative easily be compiled for NATAMI. NATAMI is more powerful than any classic AMIGA. So programs like OWB should run 2-3 faster on NATAMI, this might make them actually run relative OK on NATAMI.   And tuning these browsers for more speed will be more rewarding if people can then try/use these program on their real NATAMI machine.

I have tried 68k OWB on my CSMK3 with 68060@75MHz and Voodoo4 and it was too slow to be useful. I don't ever use it. NetSurf is considerably faster but still lacks a user interface. I use AWeb which is pretty fast and usable considering it's poorly optimized (GCC) state. I would expect Natami with 68060 to only be 50-100% faster than my setup in most cases. There is a lot of room for improving the speed of all these web browsers.

Matt your compiler work is very important. I agree with you that GCC does only a suboptimal job on 68K code generation.    Thinking of it, I should probably change my compile environment from GCC... Matt, would you like to help us in this regard?

I have to admit that I really have not done much with VBCC myself. I want to get ADis compiling with it at some point but it has not been a priority as it's fast enough and working. I have mostly worked with vasm and improving it. Vasm is a very good assembler. It's mature and probably the best assembler for 68k ever. Vasm is responsible for a lot of the optimizations done by VBCC. It's too bad GCC and SAS/C did not have such a fine optimizing assembler although it may be possible to retrofit it. VBCC the compiler, I believe, is mostly written by Volker instead of Wille. It tries to do some pretty sophisticated optimizations but it doesn't always get them right and there are some bugs. VBCC does generate pretty good code with O1 as it uses registers often, functions are assembler inlines by default, and vasm optimizes too. There are few bugs with O1. O2 mostly works with a few rare bugs. O3 is buggy, slow and a memory hog in my experience. VBCC is certainly a different beast than GCC and takes some getting used to. GCC is a pretty nice compiler minus the crap 68k code generation. It's faster at compiling than VBCC. VBCC is easy to install though and worth a look, but I wouldn't plan on converting large projects until you have some experience with it.

I am actually not a very experienced C coder. ADis is my 1st C project bigger than a hello world. I have always been more of a 68k assembler programmer with it's simple logic. I still often look at the assembler output to see what I need to change in C ;). Luckily, I have a pretty good disassembler now. The newest version of ADis has the same name at the same link by the way. I am kind of an oddity. I know that I didn't do enough the 1st time around with the Amiga so now I am trying to figure out what I am good at and how I can help the Amiga survive in one form or another.

- The CPU on the NATAMI is a little faster than your system.
- The Memory is MUCH MUCH faster.
- And the Bus interface to the GFX card is magnitutes faster.

So where is the bottleneck of these applications.
Is it simple arithmetics?
Is it lot of memory access?
Is it rendering?

Depending what you answer is the speedgain could be anything from 30% to 1000%

I agree with you the speeding those up could be done.
I think we should tackle this simultaniously from different angles.

* Jens and myself could put work on the CPU development.
A 68K CPU with 150Mhz, 64KB cache and a memory performance of 500MB/sec would make a huge performance difference.

* You could work on compiler tuning.
Your point that GCC 68K code is not perfect, is fully right.
If you could improve this by the 25% that you assumed then this would make a huge difference also.

As third party the developer/porter of the browser could look into tuning his code also.