We did our primitive Imagine 3D render famrs by having the same project data with the same Imagine 3D set-up on separate machines, then assigned each Amiga to render a range of frames. Afterward, all the 24bit-IFF frames would be processed on one Amiga with ImageMasterRT. Some animations were HAM, others were DCTV. ImageMaster RT produced better results than having Imagine 3D do HAM or DCTV directly.
Sounds familiar. Back in the young days me and a friend were moonlighting as 3D guys, and on every "major job" I'd render parts like that on my A4000/060+Cel300A@450 and he'd render what he could on his A1200/060, then he'd bring his part over on CD along with his high end SVHS VCR, we'd hook it to my VLab-Motion and go for a 2-3h long coffee while Movieshop transferred the frames over to the Micropolis aka portable heater so we could record it to tape. Funny enough, some was stuff to go on TV and they'd refuse to take SVHS tapes, so we had to hop over to a specialist shop to transfer SVHS>Beta so we could deliver it. Nobody ever said anything about the quality or questioned the origins... We also never told them how jank our setup was :D Fun days.
I didn't use an Amiga for 3D in the 90s, I used a fleet of PCs installed in a media office with (among other things) 3D Studio installed. Network rendering on 3D Studio first you have to have the all PCs networked with ethernet cables. Then one PC is given "master" status. From that PC you menu-select all the 3D animations you want to render and start it going. The network manager rendered all the animations in the list and also orders the animation frames (which can be rendered out of order) and through a controller and a PAL compatible broadcast-quality 24bit graphics card renders the full colour broadcast-resolution 24bit images to a frame-by-frame professional video recorder. Then when we went into the office the next day the first thing we'd do was play the Betacam Professional video of all the animations as full colour 24bit PAL broadcast resolution at the full frame rate of 25frames (50fields) per second. Because it was 3D Studio running on PCs each PC could render each frame in a matter of seconds, or maybe a few minutes each. You could get about ten seconds of 24bit 50fps computer animated video onto a broadcast quality master tape over night. 10 seconds doesn't sound like a lot but it's 500 24bit images. To my knowledge there was no way to do that on an Amiga which as time and cost effective at that time. If we'd used LightWave 3D we'd have been lucky to get one frame of animation rendered overnight per Amiga.
@@vapourmile Amiga’s topped out around the 68040 for most. The 68060 did come out. It was comparable to an INTEL P100 …almost. But those 68060s came way too late. By 1993 a lot of 3D people were already looking at Windows options. Even I fell from Amiga around late 1994, early 1995. Sold it and built a P133 Windows 95 box with 64mb of ram. The ram I already owned and was going to use with a 68060 card I planned to buy. When I saw the speeds of those INTELs, when I saw how the Windows version of Lightwave was getting better features over the Amiga version. I knew it was time. Had to cut Amiga loose.
Used to do renders late at night so we could utilise every machine in the office, even the PC on the front reception desk. Did the same years later with backburner when I moved on to 3DS max. Was a great feeling of power, like having a supercomputer at your fingertips. I bet you could render as fast on an iPad nowadays.
I loved the late night office takeovers. Yeah, definitely give n some thoughts to all those old ipads stacked up as e-waste. Small packaged, lower power, Amiga render nodes!! :)
Yes I started this channel for this very thing. So many show demos and games and that’s great. But there’s so much great software for Amiga. I wanted to share those experiences as best I could.
I think they only made 4 Dec Alpha Screamers (I worked at Play with the former Newtek bunch that started the Toaster and LW, one of them told me that), and I was lucky enough to use one for a week or two when I worked Alpha Video before I worked at Play. Alpha always got early releases on things sonce they sold more NewTek product than anyone. It was a blast a a young 3D guy back in 94 or so when I worked there. Man the Screamer was fast. I dont recall the stats of how much faster... it had been 30 year (holy moly)... but it was wicked fast for its day. It had a cool look to it with a twisted chimney as an air intake or exhaust. I remember giving it my queue of animations while I had it and thinking it was weeks or months of rendering on my own. I think Brad Carvey and the studio Jon Gross worked at each had one. Allen Hastings probably had one. The one i had was their tradeshow one. Those would great LW museum pieces.
I have a Toaster Screamer (Bezel) in my collection and I ran screamer net render farm in hollywood in the 90s. (I used to also work for NewTek) Really the key to screamer net is understanding the content directory setting and making all your scene and objects and images relative to that.
Been using ScreamerNet with Amiberry-running Pi4s when doing intensive anims nowadays, but I guess you must already have guessed that! 😉 Amiga and LW5 rule!!! Thanks for the vid, mate!
Thanks Q, love your Lightwave videos, many more if possible, always happy to watch animation software from the staging all the way to the final renders, ❤
Back in the late 90s I was working as an artist for a games developer. At that time everyone had shifted to working on PCs (DPaint and 3D Studio in DOS...blerrgh ), but I still had my own Amiga 4000/060 on my desk for running Lightwave and Brilliance. One job I was assigned was creating a 3D rendered cut scenes for a flight simulator we were working on - originally it was just going to be a 2D comic strip, panning from frame to frame, but I convinced the boss that it would look better as a 3D animation. So I set up a whole scene where you moved through a dusty loft and found the comic book in a chest. The camera zoomed in on the comic and started moving between frames, then comic pages flipping over to show the next frames. I did it all in Ligtwave on my Amiga, but knew that rendering everything would take too long, so at night when everyone left work, I would run around the building and run Screamernet on everyone's PCs, then head back to my Amiga and set the rendering going... then head off down the pub, returning hours later to find everything rendered and looking glorious!
I might be odd but I love ScreamerNET and LW5.....it's just satisfying knowing how powerful this was when it was introduced. Mixed nodes, Amiga and SGI are fun too.
Pretty much how we rendered a lot of our "low" profile (aka local TV stuff) commercials in 1993; via two racks full of A3000 all running LW / ScreamerNet during the night.
And just a few years later Mental Ray would distribute tiles across those UTP cables - try to get them rendered out of lockstep so they don't step on each others toes to much when getting resources.
I never had the patience or artistic skill to get into 3D modelling, but I was fascinated by the 'distributed computing' concept back then. I recall there being a horrendously expensive, multi-processor rendering machine called the "Raptor", which used Lightwave and Screamernet to munch through frames at an incredible rate, far faster than a room full of maxed out Amigas, but the Amiga would be in control. Ah, the good old days. 😁
Sigh... Guess I'll just have to delay what I'm doing in Blitz 2 as "proof of concept" and go ready some hdf's so i can test this running 6 instances of WinUAE side by side... Fun fact, going back to my old coding days on the Amiga sure is making me appreciate the blessing and modern day convenience that is not crashing the whole machine just because i mishandled a pointer :D
The pilot episode of B5 and a chunk of the first season was Amigas and ScreamerNet and later a custom render controller software called F.I.R.E. Written by an employee of Foundation Imaging. Then moving forward in Windows, LWSN, the render node part of screamernet, was continued to be used and is to this very day. With other render controller apps managing it. Like, Deadline or Butterfly. It’s the “free” render node that comes with LW. You can have unlimited free render nodes with LW.
@@HoldandModifyAs I recall, at least some of SeaQuest DSV was rendered by Amigas too? I know Lightwave had a long and happy life after the Amiga, but it all started with the Miggy and the Toaster. 😁
@@HoldandModify I seem to remember Butterfly was one we used for a while at Wet Cement. I seem to remember buying a major commercial LW server controller we had on our 1 THz render farm... Jeeze that system was nutzo fast. Instead of rendering a postage stamp with all Ray tracing off when getting a coffee, we could render full res everything on and spank out anti aliased shots in 3-8 minutes. Electrical bill was high tho lol... All the cooling requirements. Man. Those were the days. That was 07.
I used to open up Screamernet and dream that I actually had more Amigas to use it. Didn't need it though... 060 96mb RAM - it's all a LWer ever needed ever! harharhar
I never got on with screamernet back in the day. always seemed to crash or you'd start a render going and find the client had quit after some frames so you were just single cpu rendering anyway.... So i stuck a 68060 in it instead. that made up it! Even with modern network nodes on PC lightwave its still pretty shonky! but at least we have other options now.
Seems like a couple super powerful machines like WinUAE instances or the standalone Vampire would make this real nice. Would be nice to know what’s in the ack and other files. It also seems like some tool could make all that boiler plate much easier.
There are other render controller softwares out there that offer much more that work with LWSN. The job and ack files contain status reports from the LWSN node. As well as commands from the controller.
I managed to get screamernet working from your video, well kind of. Managed to get 3 cpus to render the same scene, but when they save the image files to drawer on the network the image files are 0 kilobytes in size. I'll have another look, great video by the way.
@@libbysworld1509 The scene you are rendering. You have set its output path? Also, make sure all the LW installs on the machines have their plugins added. Image Savers writing zero byte files sound likes a LW config issue. Confirm needed plugins are added for all computers with LW running.
I would guess that running Winuae and 68K Lightwave on multiple PCs networked together would really scream. Pun intended. This video makes me curious to know if anyone is still using Amiga Lightwave to render videos for modern shows. Again guessing since it's been years since I've used Lightwave, but I would imagine that the current PC version of Lightwave supports some version of networked rendering.
Technically, WinUAE is a single core, so with say, a bargain bin 1600AF or something, you have a 6 render node in a box. If really on a budget, you probably can pick up a whole 2nd/3rd gen i5 for peanuts, and it will still be really fast, just not ridiculously so. And last time i used in (on PC), it still supported this exact setup, and while it may have "evolved" a bit, i don't expect it to have gone too far from the concept, because its really simple and really functional. Only downside is having to have duplicate installs, which is easier on the Amiga as you just copy the whole thing over and done...
that was the weird thing that was one of the things I was going to show in the video, but I could not get it to work. I ran winUAE set up a screamer node, and even though that Amiga‘s shares on that Windows PC could be seen by the other Amiga, It would not detect the screamer node. .so something is going on there. Yes LW in its modern form is still used for some shows. There’s only a tiny handful of actual studios left using it. However there are plenty of contractors doing work in Hollywood for many shows and films that still use LW. Individuals mostly. You’re still seeing a lot of “transparent VFX” as they call it in a lot of TV shows, done with LW.
@@HoldandModify Swear to god, i replied to you twice already, and twice YT decided it didn't like me... 6 nodes worked OK on WinUAE. Bit slower than i expected, but hey, can pick up some old i5 for peanuts and get a nice boost for near free. Your share issue is probably having the share on the Windows side. I'd try putting it on the Amiga side and then mounting it in the WinUAE nodes. It worked ok for me because all nodes were in WinUAE which must be doing some "magic" when it mounts the share. In the meantime, been having fun with my "thingy". Much fun can be had when your machine is CPU bound but not so much that it can't do "moderately fast" I/O. A bog standard 68k isn't blazing fast at decoding JPEG's, but it's fast enough to send it over the network to the Win side and get back a PNG/TGA in a couple of seconds. Bit of a thought experiment really, just wanted to have a "software proof of concept" that if there was a cheap and moderately fast AmigaSPI interface, you could use cheap MCU's like the ESP32 as fairly beefy co-processors, just a matter of sending the data and getting the result back. It seriously irks me that so many new expansions for "vintage machines" don't add it as standard even though most are based around some MCU like the PiStorm that support it natively.
We did our primitive Imagine 3D render famrs by having the same project data with the same Imagine 3D set-up on separate machines, then assigned each Amiga to render a range of frames. Afterward, all the 24bit-IFF frames would be processed on one Amiga with ImageMasterRT. Some animations were HAM, others were DCTV. ImageMaster RT produced better results than having Imagine 3D do HAM or DCTV directly.
Awesome! Yeah that sounds like the familiar “SneakerNET” way of life. Running files to each machine by hand.
Sounds familiar. Back in the young days me and a friend were moonlighting as 3D guys, and on every "major job" I'd render parts like that on my A4000/060+Cel300A@450 and he'd render what he could on his A1200/060, then he'd bring his part over on CD along with his high end SVHS VCR, we'd hook it to my VLab-Motion and go for a 2-3h long coffee while Movieshop transferred the frames over to the Micropolis aka portable heater so we could record it to tape. Funny enough, some was stuff to go on TV and they'd refuse to take SVHS tapes, so we had to hop over to a specialist shop to transfer SVHS>Beta so we could deliver it. Nobody ever said anything about the quality or questioned the origins... We also never told them how jank our setup was :D Fun days.
I didn't use an Amiga for 3D in the 90s, I used a fleet of PCs installed in a media office with (among other things) 3D Studio installed.
Network rendering on 3D Studio first you have to have the all PCs networked with ethernet cables. Then one PC is given "master" status. From that PC you menu-select all the 3D animations you want to render and start it going. The network manager rendered all the animations in the list and also orders the animation frames (which can be rendered out of order) and through a controller and a PAL compatible broadcast-quality 24bit graphics card renders the full colour broadcast-resolution 24bit images to a frame-by-frame professional video recorder.
Then when we went into the office the next day the first thing we'd do was play the Betacam Professional video of all the animations as full colour 24bit PAL broadcast resolution at the full frame rate of 25frames (50fields) per second.
Because it was 3D Studio running on PCs each PC could render each frame in a matter of seconds, or maybe a few minutes each. You could get about ten seconds of 24bit 50fps computer animated video onto a broadcast quality master tape over night. 10 seconds doesn't sound like a lot but it's 500 24bit images.
To my knowledge there was no way to do that on an Amiga which as time and cost effective at that time. If we'd used LightWave 3D we'd have been lucky to get one frame of animation rendered overnight per Amiga.
@@vapourmile Amiga’s topped out around the 68040 for most. The 68060 did come out. It was comparable to an INTEL P100 …almost. But those 68060s came way too late. By 1993 a lot of 3D people were already looking at Windows options. Even I fell from Amiga around late 1994, early 1995. Sold it and built a P133 Windows 95 box with 64mb of ram. The ram I already owned and was going to use with a 68060 card I planned to buy. When I saw the speeds of those INTELs, when I saw how the Windows version of Lightwave was getting better features over the Amiga version. I knew it was time. Had to cut Amiga loose.
Used to do renders late at night so we could utilise every machine in the office, even the PC on the front reception desk.
Did the same years later with backburner when I moved on to 3DS max.
Was a great feeling of power, like having a supercomputer at your fingertips.
I bet you could render as fast on an iPad nowadays.
I loved the late night office takeovers. Yeah, definitely give n some thoughts to all those old ipads stacked up as e-waste. Small packaged, lower power, Amiga render nodes!! :)
my wife “why do you happily watch a guy waving his hand at a screen “ 😉
Because doing this at the Pub would be ridiculous. :)
I'd probably watch your videos in a pub but network rendering in a pub could be difficult
@@Lbf5677 I have miles of cable, I'm a data tech I could string up 100 machines in probably 1 or 2 beers.
@@MatthewHolevinski 90's network rendering in a pub 😅
@@Lbf5677 probably wouldn't be the first time, tell me those guys using bmrt for toy story were sober, please.
This light wave stuff requires 90’s familiarity: glad you’re recording for posterity. Amazed this works !
Yes I started this channel for this very thing. So many show demos and games and that’s great. But there’s so much great software for Amiga. I wanted to share those experiences as best I could.
I think they only made 4 Dec Alpha Screamers (I worked at Play with the former Newtek bunch that started the Toaster and LW, one of them told me that), and I was lucky enough to use one for a week or two when I worked Alpha Video before I worked at Play. Alpha always got early releases on things sonce they sold more NewTek product than anyone. It was a blast a a young 3D guy back in 94 or so when I worked there.
Man the Screamer was fast. I dont recall the stats of how much faster... it had been 30 year (holy moly)... but it was wicked fast for its day. It had a cool look to it with a twisted chimney as an air intake or exhaust. I remember giving it my queue of animations while I had it and thinking it was weeks or months of rendering on my own.
I think Brad Carvey and the studio Jon Gross worked at each had one. Allen Hastings probably had one. The one i had was their tradeshow one.
Those would great LW museum pieces.
Awesome story! What a great experience. I keep hoping one shows up someday.
How cool would it be if there is a cloud based Lightwave renderer the you can access with Lightwave on the Amiga
I have a Toaster Screamer (Bezel) in my collection and I ran screamer net render farm in hollywood in the 90s. (I used to also work for NewTek) Really the key to screamer net is understanding the content directory setting and making all your scene and objects and images relative to that.
Yup. I tried to make that clear. Hopefully folks don’t have too many issues.
Been using ScreamerNet with Amiberry-running Pi4s when doing intensive anims nowadays, but I guess you must already have guessed that! 😉 Amiga and LW5 rule!!! Thanks for the vid, mate!
I am VERY tempted at the PiFarm concept for Amiga LW.
Thanks Q, love your Lightwave videos, many more if possible, always happy to watch animation software from the staging all the way to the final renders, ❤
Yes I wonder if those types might require a sub-channel. Branching off. Hmmm.
@@HoldandModify yes please would be great then you can make long detailed videos for the people that are truly interested
Back in the late 90s I was working as an artist for a games developer. At that time everyone had shifted to working on PCs (DPaint and 3D Studio in DOS...blerrgh ), but I still had my own Amiga 4000/060 on my desk for running Lightwave and Brilliance. One job I was assigned was creating a 3D rendered cut scenes for a flight simulator we were working on - originally it was just going to be a 2D comic strip, panning from frame to frame, but I convinced the boss that it would look better as a 3D animation.
So I set up a whole scene where you moved through a dusty loft and found the comic book in a chest. The camera zoomed in on the comic and started moving between frames, then comic pages flipping over to show the next frames.
I did it all in Ligtwave on my Amiga, but knew that rendering everything would take too long, so at night when everyone left work, I would run around the building and run Screamernet on everyone's PCs, then head back to my Amiga and set the rendering going... then head off down the pub, returning hours later to find everything rendered and looking glorious!
This is a fantastic story!! That’s great. What was the game?
I might be odd but I love ScreamerNET and LW5.....it's just satisfying knowing how powerful this was when it was introduced. Mixed nodes, Amiga and SGI are fun too.
I did get a kick out of doing this.
Pretty much how we rendered a lot of our "low" profile (aka local TV stuff) commercials in 1993; via two racks full of A3000 all running LW / ScreamerNet during the night.
Love your videos! Awesome!
Glad to hear! They can be a bit….different.
What an interesting video you did there! I should try this with my Amigas! Awsome and Thanks
Please do! I think it’s a beat idea. I might actually expand on this and do more. :)
And just a few years later Mental Ray would distribute tiles across those UTP cables - try to get them rendered out of lockstep so they don't step on each others toes to much when getting resources.
Tiles and buckets!
I never had the patience or artistic skill to get into 3D modelling, but I was fascinated by the 'distributed computing' concept back then. I recall there being a horrendously expensive, multi-processor rendering machine called the "Raptor", which used Lightwave and Screamernet to munch through frames at an incredible rate, far faster than a room full of maxed out Amigas, but the Amiga would be in control. Ah, the good old days. 😁
Yeah I mentioned the Raptor in another comment. It was 4 CPUs in one box. ADVANCED for the time.
Super cool. Thanks Q!
Glad you enjoyed it.
Sigh... Guess I'll just have to delay what I'm doing in Blitz 2 as "proof of concept" and go ready some hdf's so i can test this running 6 instances of WinUAE side by side...
Fun fact, going back to my old coding days on the Amiga sure is making me appreciate the blessing and modern day convenience that is not crashing the whole machine just because i mishandled a pointer :D
lol! Yes, I can only imagine. I did try and get real Amiga to “see” a node running in WinUae on Windows and it wouldn’t see it. HMMM.
Hey Q, ahh Screamer net!!! Fond memories
The good old render farm ') , it's been years that i thought of that.
It is fun setting up!
Your thumbnail image suggests this was how B5 was done, but with a whole fleet of networked Amigas?
The pilot episode of B5 and a chunk of the first season was Amigas and ScreamerNet and later a custom render controller software called F.I.R.E. Written by an employee of Foundation Imaging. Then moving forward in Windows, LWSN, the render node part of screamernet, was continued to be used and is to this very day. With other render controller apps managing it. Like, Deadline or Butterfly. It’s the “free” render node that comes with LW. You can have unlimited free render nodes with LW.
@@HoldandModifyAs I recall, at least some of SeaQuest DSV was rendered by Amigas too? I know Lightwave had a long and happy life after the Amiga, but it all started with the Miggy and the Toaster. 😁
@@HoldandModify I seem to remember Butterfly was one we used for a while at Wet Cement. I seem to remember buying a major commercial LW server controller we had on our 1 THz render farm... Jeeze that system was nutzo fast. Instead of rendering a postage stamp with all Ray tracing off when getting a coffee, we could render full res everything on and spank out anti aliased shots in 3-8 minutes. Electrical bill was high tho lol... All the cooling requirements. Man. Those were the days. That was 07.
It would be cool if you could add nodes from other ISA's like PPC, x86, Arm. Distributed rendering 30 years ago.
SGI and x86 nodes i believe are supported by the controller.
I used to open up Screamernet and dream that I actually had more Amigas to use it. Didn't need it though... 060 96mb RAM - it's all a LWer ever needed ever! harharhar
Yeah that was the idea for many. The dream! I came close getting an 060 back then. Very close. But then…went down a dark path…to…..Windows.
I never used Screamernet, looks pretty good. I'll have to give it a go, thanks Q.
Yeah the way i use it, it’s fairly easy to set up.
I never got on with screamernet back in the day. always seemed to crash or you'd start a render going and find the client had quit after some frames so you were just single cpu rendering anyway.... So i stuck a 68060 in it instead. that made up it! Even with modern network nodes on PC lightwave its still pretty shonky! but at least we have other options now.
I’ve had much the opposite experience. In my years I’ve appreciated how robust LWSN has been.
It hurts my soul to see you don't have kingcon installed. Poor sod 😥
There are many Amiga tools I am clueless about. I had MagicWB and Tool Manager. That was it. :)
Seems like a couple super powerful machines like WinUAE instances or the standalone Vampire would make this real nice.
Would be nice to know what’s in the ack and other files. It also seems like some tool could make all that boiler plate much easier.
There are other render controller softwares out there that offer much more that work with LWSN. The job and ack files contain status reports from the LWSN node. As well as commands from the controller.
Back in the day I made a boot floppy with the ScreamerNet client so I could turn my office into a render farm after everyone went home.
oh yeah that’d be fast way. Need networking setup too. getting that all on one floppy would be a fun challenge. :)
So screamer net tells them to render different frames?
Yeah, it’s the controller software.
So if you have two amigas connect to the same network, screamernet will auto connect to each other one both programs are up and running?
Yes. As long as your content is seen by all computers.
I managed to get screamernet working from your video, well kind of. Managed to get 3 cpus to render the same scene, but when they save the image files to drawer on the network the image files are 0 kilobytes in size.
I'll have another look, great video by the way.
@@libbysworld1509 The scene you are rendering. You have set its output path? Also, make sure all the LW installs on the machines have their plugins added. Image Savers writing zero byte files sound likes a LW config issue. Confirm needed plugins are added for all computers with LW running.
thats a lot of words and singing
He always did have such a lovely singing voice…
syn ack yo sup
Hahaaa
I would guess that running Winuae and 68K Lightwave on multiple PCs networked together would really scream. Pun intended. This video makes me curious to know if anyone is still using Amiga Lightwave to render videos for modern shows. Again guessing since it's been years since I've used Lightwave, but I would imagine that the current PC version of Lightwave supports some version of networked rendering.
Technically, WinUAE is a single core, so with say, a bargain bin 1600AF or something, you have a 6 render node in a box. If really on a budget, you probably can pick up a whole 2nd/3rd gen i5 for peanuts, and it will still be really fast, just not ridiculously so. And last time i used in (on PC), it still supported this exact setup, and while it may have "evolved" a bit, i don't expect it to have gone too far from the concept, because its really simple and really functional. Only downside is having to have duplicate installs, which is easier on the Amiga as you just copy the whole thing over and done...
that was the weird thing that was one of the things I was going to show in the video, but I could not get it to work. I ran winUAE set up a screamer node, and even though that Amiga‘s shares on that Windows PC could be seen by the other Amiga, It would not detect the screamer node. .so something is going on there.
Yes LW in its modern form is still used for some shows. There’s only a tiny handful of actual studios left using it. However there are plenty of contractors doing work in Hollywood for many shows and films that still use LW. Individuals mostly. You’re still seeing a lot of “transparent VFX” as they call it in a lot of TV shows, done with LW.
@@HoldandModify Swear to god, i replied to you twice already, and twice YT decided it didn't like me... 6 nodes worked OK on WinUAE. Bit slower than i expected, but hey, can pick up some old i5 for peanuts and get a nice boost for near free. Your share issue is probably having the share on the Windows side. I'd try putting it on the Amiga side and then mounting it in the WinUAE nodes. It worked ok for me because all nodes were in WinUAE which must be doing some "magic" when it mounts the share.
In the meantime, been having fun with my "thingy". Much fun can be had when your machine is CPU bound but not so much that it can't do "moderately fast" I/O. A bog standard 68k isn't blazing fast at decoding JPEG's, but it's fast enough to send it over the network to the Win side and get back a PNG/TGA in a couple of seconds. Bit of a thought experiment really, just wanted to have a "software proof of concept" that if there was a cheap and moderately fast AmigaSPI interface, you could use cheap MCU's like the ESP32 as fairly beefy co-processors, just a matter of sending the data and getting the result back. It seriously irks me that so many new expansions for "vintage machines" don't add it as standard even though most are based around some MCU like the PiStorm that support it natively.