The Coldfire AMIGA

[Chathurawind]

YOUR DA MAN

Cheers for the feedback people - any e-mails I've seen will be forwarded to Oliver (and ive had tons) so watch out Oliver for a few meg worth of e-mails.

PJ

[Chathurawind]

I suppose I had better outline my intentions too. My interests in this started after looking at cdtv.org.uk and Oliver was toying with the idea of a coldfire expansion - mainly for his CDTV. I like the idea and did some research as did he. Our aim is now to produce a new machine based around the new processor but there are several leaps yet.

The first device will hook up to a regular AMIGA as an accelerator card and will allow us to do development work, and if theres enougth interest I don't see why we couldn't produce a run of cards in this form. It'll certainly prove handy to shift a number of coldfire processors.

I really do love all the feed back I've been getting and the support as well as the most welcome offer of help. Please remember guys this is the latest coldfire not the older generations.

PJ Matthews
www.walibe.com

[redrumloa]

@PJ Matthews

How about registering to Amiga.org? There is VERY good moderation here and personally I'd love to be able to discuss your plans and progress.

[System]

How do you mean register to AMIGA.org - I'm already a registered user if that what you mean???

PJ

[Chathurawind]

He may have ment me, Sorry but I have registered lots of times and after lots of reinstalls I gave up and moved on to Amiga-News.de and Ann.lu (Who are always in a bad mood), This is my first post here in ages.
Anyway better go, Lots of E-Mails to answer.
Oliver Hannaford-Day
Web Master of The Commodore CDTV Information Center @ www.cdtv.org.uk

[Bobsonsirjonny]

Does Intent/AA run on the coldfire?

If the new codefire is 68060 instruction compatible - and not pin - surely you could just rework a boxer motherboard? then bang the whole thing out really cheaply. £150 for the board, cpu, ram, floppy, case.

I'd be interested if a laptop came out.

[Bobsonsirjonny]

perhaps you could include all the custom chipsets!
OCS ECS AGA etc


One Amiga to run them all! hehe.... Lord of the rings...

[System]

A laptop AMIGA is a very popular idea, alot of AMIGA users have suggested this, it is very much a possibility - but we need to take this one step at a time.

PJ

[Chathurawind]

All of this sounds really impressive, but could we just forget about AGA & implement something a bit more cutting edge?
If not, I'd opt to see ECS over AGA for "real world" usage (who has time for games?). Either one is a set back
though. If it can't do 1024x768, it's a dissapointment. All that muscle on a chunky cartoon screen. Nearly shamefull.

[jj]

Well I say good good

Imagine being able to run all your old progs at super speeds. I know the 68k emulation in OS4 is going to be fast, but there will be limitations to use 6o3e blizzard board users.  I would not have gone down the PPC route just yet, If you could have old and new software running at case melting speeds in a 68K instruction set.

Sweet Dude

[System]

AGA was mentioned along side another another as yet undecided GPU. This would mean the AGA chipset is still there for any hardware that requires it but the GPU kicks in for other stuff. We also beable to raise the 2mb chip limit of the AGA chipset up a little, but this is a guess and I'm not even sure if it an be done. Alot of signs point to NO whilst others (The A4000 motherboard) point to YES.

PJ

[Chathurawind]

The Atari world is already constructing a clone of the Atari ST series based on the Coldfire CPU.  The project has been in the works for a while now and has some pretty good specs, including AGP graphics and USB 2.0.  Have a look at:

http://acp.atari.org/

or

http://www.xtos.de/

Good to see that another 68k community is considering the Coldfire path.  it really is a good chip.

-Jeff

[Maddestman]

This is a very interesting idea, in my opinion.

To the best of my knowledge, it is not possible to have more then 2Mb of chip RAM in any Amiga custom chipset, and the jumper on the A4K (2Mb/8Mb chip RAM) was there as a result of the A4K being a prototype that was put into production in one hell of a hurry, and which was never really designed to be put into production.  Oh, and having more then 2Mb of chip RAM would most likely break a large amount of software, perhaps even AmigaDOS/Workbench (now commonly referred to simply as AmigaOS) 3.x may have trouble with more then 2Mb of chip - I don't know and the only people who might really have an idea are those who have worked on the Amiga operating system or have at least viewed the source code to it.

The other issue that comes to mind for me, is would you be able to get Kickstart ROM chips for this, and how would they be licensed?  Or would the Kickstart ROM's be stored as files (like on the early A3K's) so you could select which Kickstart you want to use on booting the machine - which would be good for compatibility with older software that objects to anything better then Kickstart 1.3...

An interesting project indeed, and I wish all the people involved good luck and all the best.  I'd love to see this available for sale, in my opinion it has a bigger market then the CD32 ever did, even if it's not compatible with the future Amiga's (which will be out by the time this thing see's the light of day) there is still plenty of software for such a machine.  It'd be interesting to see what Amiga Inc have to say about this...

[Chathurawind]

It might lead to a slow revival of the 68k-based market if the price and performance ratio is right.

[Dr_Righteous]

Hey Wallabie, it just dawned on me it was you I was conversing with...  See my latest email reguarding the possible solution to the chipset problem  :-D

[Treke]

Hello PJ and all.
Okay, must I admit It makes sense for an amount of people. Maybe I just expect too much from a new amiga-like machine. Personally, I would expect a path forward when designing a new system, to make sense to put effort into the work.  
I'm curious about these questions:
1. What operating system you would like to use ?
Amiga OS 3.x is nice, but we must admit, world is changing... You will have to use it forever and that is not a path forward.
2. Who will write new applications for AmigaOS 3.x when there will be the 4-th, PPC version ?

Won't bother you more ;-)

And, nevertheless ,PJ,  I wish you good luck !

re

Treke