Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: Is the Coldfire project dead?  (Read 9304 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline MskoDestny

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Join Date: Oct 2004
  • Posts: 363
    • Show all replies
    • http://www.retrodev.com
Re: Is the Coldfire project dead?
« on: November 19, 2004, 03:00:01 AM »
Quote

Samuar wrote:
Unfortunately, Coldfire isnt 100% compatible with the 68Ks. It misses some key stuff that the AmigaOSs have been using for quite a while.

The coldfire project they were referring to had a little ROM that emulated the missing instructions.  It's not that hard to add them in since I believe that the missing instructions cause an exception which the emulator can trap to execute the equivalent instructions.
 

Offline MskoDestny

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Join Date: Oct 2004
  • Posts: 363
    • Show all replies
    • http://www.retrodev.com
Re: Is the Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #1 on: November 21, 2004, 09:40:25 PM »
From skimming the Coldfire docs and reading the information about CF68KLib (the 68K emulation library for Coldfire that traps the exceptions for the missing instructions), I see no reason to believe that the 32 x 32 -> 64 multiply wouldn't generate an exception.  It's not like they replaced it with a 32 x 32 -> 32 multiply since that already existed on the 68k and I don't see any evidence (though perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place) to suggest that they remapped the 32 x 32 -> 64 multiplies onto the 32 x 32 -> 32 multiplies (especially since it would do little but screw up attempts to run 680x0 software on the chip while adding to the complexity of the instruction decoding logic).  The CF68KLib documentation doesn't suggest that the 32 x 32 -> 64 multiplies are a problem (though there are other problems, like MULU and MULS not setting the overflow bit).