ANAIIS vs Poseidon

[Jameson]

Hey all,

there seems to be no comparisons between these two USB stacks for classic 68k Amiga's. Can someone who knows a bit about both please shed some light on the pros and cons of each?

From what I can tell, Poseidon has not been updated in quite a few years whilst ANAIIS is still under development..... and ANAIIS can run on a base 68000 where as Poseidon requires an '020 minimum.

On a TF1260 system running Amiga OS 3.2.2 and a Subway USB which stack would I be better off using? I don't need lots of features etc, just to be able to plug in a USB storage device or an occasional USB mouse and have it work with minimal system resources being hogged....

Any thoughts/experiences would be appreciated.

 

[Xanxi]

Hi.

Yes this is an interesting matter.
I have never used ANAIIS so far because i need the advanced features of Poseidon with my Deneb for USB networking and USB audio, but Poseidon eats a lot of ressources.
I plan to rebuild my A500Plus with a plain 68000 and use a clockport adapter for a Subway and i shall then use ANAIIS. Also thinking of using it with the Subway of my A1200 to free ressources as there is no use there for the fancy capabilities of Poseidon.

I look forward to read what others have to say.

 

[Deleted member 9116]

Hi. In short

Anaïs is rather slow. Poseidon is pretty fast.

Poseidon supports many more hardware types like wacom tablets, hubs, some toys like missile turrets, flatbed scanners, ethernet bridge thumb cards, automounts NTFS or Fat16/32, even touch screens although I couldn't get any to work.

Both USB stacks won't work with WHDLoad games, or non system compliant games. You need original mice and keyboards there.

Poseidon offers an incredibly comprehensive setup, where most USB events can be monitored, triggered, or tied to events, for most devices. On this regard, Poseidon crushes all the market, especially Win$ based systems.

Poseidon, at least for me, can have series of reliability issues. For example you shouldn't use it with executive, or executive should ignore all of it's processes. Some perfectly reliable memory cards on PC can fail out of the blue on Amiga. In my experience it's a matter of hours before anything tied to Poseidon crashes.

Anaiis is simple but does the job. You have to put your hands in the dirt, though: for example with mountlists. But hey it's pretty optimized memory usage make it absolutely interesting. It may be the future.

 

[Xanxi]

I must say i had no real problem with Poseidon so far like failing memory cards. On the contrary, a SD used into a USB card reader is my harddrive for Shapeshifter on the A4000 and is faster than the onboard IDE and stable (on Deneb Z3 DMA). However, i have an internal USB powered hub so i don't rely on the power from the Deneb itself.
The ethernet usb thing i use is also perfectly stable.
Sometimes, usb audio dongle can fall dead and need to be powercycled but this only happen with weird usb audio dongles from Amazon. Using better ones from Creative such as Creative Sound Blaster Play!3 and Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Go!, it is just perfect.
Speaking of which, i am not sure to have been able to use these ones to the max of their abilities. Poseidon detects a lot of audio modes with them that i have linked to AHI devices, but it also detects line in or mic input and show some options to add gain, but i don't know how i can use this. Any idea?

As for the performance hit, on my A1200 with Blizzard 1260 / 50, with USB Poseidon ON, i get only about 33000 dhrystones in Sysinfo while Poseidon OFF gives the usual full 37000, so about 4000 dhrystones out of the CPU to have the usb stack running.

 

[Deleted member 9116]

Well, I've used Poseidon with different cards and systems, even raw 3.2.2 on my 3000T, and I always end up having curiosities. Yes, it proves pretty stable if I don't actively use it. Since the 4000 is using a rapidroad and the 3000T is using a Spider.. Welllll ... I really am suspicious now.

 

[Xanxi]

I think the rapidroad can be pretty funny and concerning the Spider I have not seen one since the time they couldn’t not be licensed with Poseidon anymore when Platon got mad with Elbox.
Old subway and the mighty Deneb are very good hardware. I wonder why they don’t make the Deneb anymore.

 

[Deleted member 9116]

Tell me about it. I've searched seas and skies for it. But hey at least I can use my printer/scanner/external HD when necessary. I wonder if having too many drives of different types doesn't take a toll on stability (like, PFS/Fat32/NTSC etc)