ColdFusion CF4000 prototype Arrives!

[Nautilus]

It's nice, but it's trully oldware.

[TheMagicM]

linux and e-uae? then you might aswell get a pc :/

you're not using your thinking cap.

OS3.x is kinda old and boring.. imagine plugging in a CF card and running a up-to-date os on a A4k or A1200 thats just sitting there doing nothing.  Well worth the money for a board that can do this.

Everyone is waiting on new PPC hardware, a new browser, new features and its just taking quite some time and nobody knows if it will ever happen.  If this board works under Linux you'll have all that you need software wise.. next tough part would be porting a linux distro..

[mongo]

Actually thats why there isnt a flash chip on this prototype, I do want to give Linux a try.. and AROS if Im up to porting it. (Which at the moment Im not but its something I am working on)

And how do you plan on booting Linux without some sort of boot ROM, exactly? I'm pretty sure the Amiga's ROM won't work with a Coldfire CPU without some serious patching.

However, how are you going to handle supervisor mode? My understanding is that supervisor mode is completely different in Coldfire, and to emulate m68k supervisor fully you'd need to pretty much have some full blown emulation for it (build compatible stackframes, emulate supervisor instructions etc).

Doing supervisor mode emulation isn't really all that difficult. If you look at the source for Basilisk II, you'll see code for a partial supervisor mode emulation. Just enough to allow Mac OS to run in user mode though.

At one time I was thinking about doing a Mac emulator that would run as a virtual machine on the Amiga and use the MMU for memory re-mapping and to trap all hardware accesses so that it would be able to run Mac OS completely unpatched in an isolated environment. I started doing some work on the virtual machine, which included supervisor mode emulation, and it really wasn't all that difficult.

Unfortunately, I didn't get all that far on it before I lost interest.

The biggest problem with Coldfire is instructions that aren't trapped, yet behave differently than on the 68k.

On a 68k, you could monitor the incomming instruction stream in hardware and check for those instructions and generate an exception when they are encountered, but I'm not sure if the Coldfire has anything like the 68k's FC outputs that would allow you to determine if the CPU is fetching code or data. And you wouldn't be able to do this if you were using the Coldfire's built in memory controller anyway.

[fx]

@TheMagicM
Well, I put on my thinking cap, but still can't really see what the difference in running Linux on an Amiga or a PC would be ?

If I were to run Linux, I would definitely get a fast PC which I could probably get for less than the price of one of those accelerators.

But don't get me wrong here, I applaud every effort on doing something with our classic Amigas, and even if it this would only support Linux I still think it's great that people are doing classic hardware stuff, even though I wouldn't be interested in it myself.

And the "porting AROS"-idea sounds interesting, I guess it could be somewhat binary-compatible with the missing 68k instructions-emulation done in software then?

[Orjan]

Where is the "Free sex and beer" jumper?  :lol:

Seriously, though: Awesome!

[TheMagicM]

@fx:

let me put it this way.. A ODW Pegasos, while its a awesome machine, is $799.  A A1 if one would want to purchase it probably cost the same or whatever (I dont know).   If this board costs $300 or $400, plugs into your A1200 or A4k, capable of running Linux.. why even switch to a new system?  You could use your existing Amiga, if you want retro games, load up E-UAE.

[Piru]

@TheMagicM

A ODW Pegasos, while its a awesome machine, is $799. A A1 if one would want to purchase it probably cost the same or whatever (I dont know). If this board costs $300 or $400, plugs into your A1200 or A4k

ODW is full system. Plain Pegasos II motherboard + G4 is cheaper. If you assume that someone has A1200 or A4000, I assume the same someone has PC tower, keyboard, mouse, memory, HDD etc. ;-)

why even switch to a new system?

Because:
a) The new system is a lot faster (no legacy hw bogging it down).
b) With ColdFusion E-UAE is too slow to reach even A500 speeds.

[dammy]

(Or an AROS coldfire native kickstart needs making)

Guess that's my que: ROM Phase I and ROM PhaseII both could use more $ and a developer.  :devildance:

Dammy
TeamAROS

[Jose]

Can't the instructions be converted on the fly when loaded from disk instead all the time when the program is running ? Kinda like an LoadSeg () patch or something, there is already software that does this for the 060 IIRC (Cyberpatcher ? can't remember, never had an 060..).
It would be MUCH faster:)

[Piru]

Can't the instructions be converted on the fly when loaded from disk instead all the time when the program is running ? Kinda like an LoadSeg () patch or something

No, since you can't tell which part is code and which data. You'd end up corrupting some data in the process... bad.

there is already software that does this for the 060 IIRC (Cyberpatcher ? can't remember, never had an 060..).

Cyberpatcher doesn't do this. Nothing that wants to avoid random data corruption does this.

It would be MUCH faster:)

If it worked, but it can't.

[redrumloa]

Me likes!  :-D

[Animagic]

I think it is a great idea if you want to use some "basic" (for today) stuff. Mpeg1 (or even Mpeg2 with the appropriate player ), Inet etc...
If you want to run "the super- duper- wow game of your life" or the "A500 reeeeeeeally old game" then its not for you  :-D
That simple  :-P

[Sparky]

Hi there, cool that the project is still chugging along :-)

Got a question though about testing it ...

Would it be easier to drop in an eprom on the A4000 motherboard (replacing the existing Kickstart ROMs) with enough software on it to kick the Coldfire CPU to life, then have it boot whatever else is required for the OS from disk ?
Could even do something fancy like use the FLASH on board the CPU board and plumb it into the Kickstart sockets using a ribbon cable .. would allow flash updating then.
Either way it might give you more control over the startup of the board.

Just a thought, ignore me if it's already been thought of and discarded as crap :-)