OK... why no new 68K boards?

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I'll let you all into a little secret...

Run UAE on one of these:



Check out what you get... it will squeeze happily into an old Miggy case and give you EVERYTHING you could possibly want...


Nano-ITX

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Darrin wrote:

bloodline wrote:
I'll let you all into a little secret...

Run UAE on one of these:

Check out what you get... it will squeeze happily into an old Miggy case and give you EVERYTHING you could possibly want...

... except real joystick ports and the "feel" of a genuine Miggy running old games.

The Board comes with a Mini-PCI slot... Who doesn't one of the FPGA hackers here, build a breakout board with the Joystick ports... perhaps an RGB port... maybe even an Amiga floppy connector! the point is why not use a nice piece of high powered commodity hardware to do the boring stuff, and then use simpler hardware to do the exotic stuff...

Just looking around... the Pico-ITX boards are an even better fit!!!

As for feel... If you hid the host OS (Linux or Windows), you would never know you were running an Emulation! Until of course you brought up the config menu to run software than needs a specific hardware config... something real hardware simply can't do!

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ral-clan wrote:
Something I've been thinking about for a while....

1. Real Amiga hardware is breaking down.
2. Many don't want to use Amiga emulation because emulation does not "feel right" due to the fact that custom chip funtctions aren't documented, only reverse engineered.

No, the Hardware was well documented, though obviously many of the bugs in the Amiga chipset were not well documented... The "feeling" problem is 99% psychological, based on a perceived difference between doing something "in Software" and doing it "in Hardware", the fact that Emulations use modern display and audio devices and thus lack the inherent flaws in the older devices... and the lack of "ritual" required to get the Emulation running.

3. Then perhaps someone can produce an unpopulated PCI card where the user could insert a real PAUL, AGNES, DENISE, KICKSTART, etc. (from a dead Amiga).

Why bother... the amount of work required to get it to sync up, you may as well just use UAE... plus, do you really want to plug a TV, Amiga Mouse, Amiga Keyboard into your PC?... You would prefer to just use the I/O of the PC... bang... let's just use UAE...

4. The emulator (UAE) could recognise and use these real Amiga custom chips on the PCI card.  It would only have to emulate the CPU and other address things (or heck - one could even put a real 68000 CPU on the card as an option).

To Sync with real hardware is a pain..

This has been done to an extent with the C64 SID chip PCI cards.

The SID chip is basically a simple but quirky Synth on a chip, that is quite desirable... the Amiga is a more integrated system, with the individual parts not doing much on their own...

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alexh wrote:

bloodline wrote:
The "feeling" problem is 99% psychological, based on a perceived difference between doing something "in Software" and doing it "in Hardware"

Nah, it's more the fact most people do not run UAE with a 50Hz screen (or 100Hz?) and vsync on.

True, Shadow of the Beast 2 is beautiful on my MBP in WinUAE with the proper Vsyncing switched on :-)

But I still remember when I first moved to LCD from CRT... I found it very uncomfortable... but now I'm used to LCD and I find CRTs uncomfortable... people just have to learn to get used to the new technology.

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little wrote:

Sorry, I´m not allowed to do that, unfortunately

 Give us at least an approximate date, like 3rd quarter of  the year.
 Anyhow, my bet is full 32 bit emulation (68020/30/40 and maybe even 60). Why not include the 68000? because it (like the intel procesor prior to VT-x AMD-v) cannot be virtualized and a fast enough coldfire should be able to trap instructions and easily emulate a 68000 at say 28 mhz (fast enough for any games) and any games/applications requiring more speed were compatible with the 68020 and upwards.

The Coldfire is already a sort of 68060, missing a bunch of instruction and addressing modes that are difficult to pipeline and consume valuable silicon space...

Unless Freescale sort out the incompatible instructions (instructions that don't work the same way as the original 68k equivalents) and rip out the entire Coldfire supervisor mode, which it totally incompatible with the 68k... The coldfire is totally unusable in an Amiga... you can't trap these flaws/features...

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little wrote:

sort out the incompatible instructions (instructions that don't work the same way as the original 68k equivalents) and rip out the entire Coldfire supervisor mode,

If they run a virtual 32-bit 680x0 in it's own thread there is no need to remove anything from the original coldfire, so the main OS would run in coldfire mode and any apps requiring 68020+ mode would run in a separate thread, with it's own supervisor mode. Worst case scenario, if the 68020 thread goes bonkers (guru meditation anyone?) then the main os simple ends it without any danger to the main system stability.

Then why bother with a ColdFire?!?! If you are going to that trouble... then a PPC will be cheaper and faster, and have more support... The Coldfire is really mean as a user mode source compatible 68k CPU... it was not designed as drop in replacement for the 68k on the desktop. As far as Motorola were concerned the 68k was a dead end, and all future work should be done with the PPC.

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more likely it's the fact that Freescale are trying to raise $1 billion... Perhaps to develop their potential cash cow of MRAM.

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little wrote:

Then why bother with a ColdFire?!?! If you are going to that trouble...

1. it is cheap

No it's not... compare it with ARM, PPC and x86...

2. it would be the best hardware emulation solution (if my supposition is right).

The best hardware emulation would be x86... Cheap and powerful...

3. would be a true roadmap to leverage legacy and at the same time access modern hardware.

It is a technological dead end... How is that in any way a true road map?

AFAIL powerpc was never Motorola's idea, more like Apple and IBM making a deal with motorola to create a new cpu architecture where EVERYONE would have ip rights, not just motorola.

Ok, you need to read your history... Even Wikipedia has a good article on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC

PPC was a win win for everyone involved at the time!

E-UAE was not really on par with WinUAE

I always wonder why there is no bounty to update e-uae up to date where winuae is right now.

I think the demand for Amiga Emulators can be measured in the low 1000s... of that the majority of users will be Windows users... The Amiga is only going to get less popular as time goes on. Almost all Amiga Games are available on other (more popular) platforms (notably the easy to emulate on modern systems DOS platform)... Unless someone buys Toni Wilen a MacBook Pro, WinUAE will get to 99.9% perfect emulation of every Amiga model, and then the machine will die out.

We are all getting older too... one by one we will die and the Amiga will just be a foot note in history books.

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@Dandy

And your father? What did you get him for his birthday?