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Author Topic: Amiga Coldfire project dead?  (Read 13620 times)

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Offline bloodline

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« on: November 17, 2010, 01:21:50 PM »
Quote from: Amiga_Nut;592428
Thanks for the link. I totally understand though, working full-time to cover your life expenses leaves very little time/energy for doing stuff like this.

If I won the lottery I would put up a £200,000 bounty to finish this.

(£200k is including combining hardware design with a Kickstart work around compatible with the v4 Coldfire CPU)
Get a scratch card if you win a tenner, I'm still gonna hold you to the above statement ;)

Also, the 68k AROS project will go a long way to solving the kickstart issue... The Amiga software issue aside...
« Last Edit: November 17, 2010, 01:24:32 PM by bloodline »
 

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #1 on: November 17, 2010, 02:30:12 PM »
Quote from: nicholas;592450
Sorry, I was on my mobile at the time and it's too fiddly to type on it.

The Atari Coldfire team have managed to create a Coldfire based motherboard that runs 68k Atari binaries with no apparent loss of performance or compatibility.
Well...EmuTOS...

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #2 on: November 17, 2010, 03:23:09 PM »
Quote from: nicholas;592479
Only if you declare it. lol

I think my own account in the Iranian Tax Free Zone of Kish is safe the from the greedy mitts of the Inland Revenue. ;)
Given how disgusting I think it is that Guidian Osbourne and Vodaphone are for avoiding their due taxes, I'm not impressed by tax avoidance... But I'm not going to be drawn into a poetical debate in the middle of a fun topic about computer hardware.

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #3 on: November 17, 2010, 03:32:35 PM »
Quote from: Franko;592487
Sorry to butt in but...

are poets and politicians the same thing, or are yo a wee bit dislexic erm.. dysslax... oh cobblers, never mind...

Butting out now... :)
Hahahhaha, that is the beauty of then iPhone autocorrect... :roll:

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #4 on: November 17, 2010, 04:53:51 PM »
Quote from: warpdesign;592512
True. What I mean is that in free cases it's a complete rewrite... And in all cases you don't have to support all motherboards. Just like you decide to support two/three ppc boards, you may support two/three x86 or arm boards.

So yes, it's a huge work, but surely no less than PPC...
Hardly a rewrite! A compiler switch and a bit work on the CPU specific parts of AROS... Easy ;)

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #5 on: November 17, 2010, 05:54:47 PM »
Quote from: Iggy;592518
Yes, both are cheap and plentiful. However, both require a total rewrite of the OS.


Hardly a rewrite! A compiler switch and a bit work on the CPU specific parts of AROS... Easy :)

Is there an echo in here?

Quote

PPC s are already supported by two OS' and there is a small, but growing, library of software.


Err, it's supported by the three AmigaOS clones... But that is neither here nor there... PPC's are a dead end for us as users.

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #6 on: November 17, 2010, 06:33:41 PM »
Quote from: Tension;592534
Why does nobody just do this?

To hell with the copyright!
AROS currently runs on:

x86 - Stable, binaries and complete distributions available.
x86-64 - Stable and binaries available.
PPC - Stable and binaries available for specific PPC hardware.
68K - Unstable alpha and binaries available (1meg ROM version only at the moment)
ARM - Beta, binaries unavailable (ask Pavel Fedin or Michal Shultz if you really want).

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #7 on: November 17, 2010, 11:32:34 PM »
Quote from: Tension;592621
Sorry, you misunderstood me.

I was talking about converting AmigaOS to x86
Waste of time, just use AROS :)

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #8 on: November 18, 2010, 10:31:27 AM »
Guys... The falcon used MultiTOS and later MiNT...

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #9 on: November 18, 2010, 12:07:28 PM »
Quote from: Karlos;592744
I just couldn't use an OS called "TOS"... :lol:
To be fair on Atari, MiNT (MiNT Is Not TOS) was actually a pretty good OS... And the Falcon was far better than the A1200 (and the A4000 IMHO)... Had they not cancelled it in favour of the Jaguar it might have run! :-o

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #10 on: November 18, 2010, 12:42:03 PM »
Quote from: Karlos;592752
Actually, I have to disagree. The principal things the Falcon had going for it were the DSP and chunky/RGB graphics support, both of which were very nice. Unfortunately, the 16MHz 68030 it came with (considered a selling point over the A1200's 14MHz 020) was rather crippled considering it was wired into the rest of the entire system, RAM included, by a 16-bit data bus.

Having said that, a Falcon with one of those CT60 boards is a proposition :)
You forgot the proper 16bit audio of the falcon too... Yeah, the killer was the 16bit bus... But come on, while that is a limitation, it is a VERY easy fix for a future hardware revision... The rest of the falcon hardware was an order of magnitude superior to AGA...

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #11 on: November 18, 2010, 12:47:39 PM »
Quote from: Tension;592755
I hope you're wearing your flame-proof jacket!

I have always made it clear that I feel the AGA chip set should have been released in 1988 or 1989 at the very latest... IIRC the C= engineers had this in mind but engineering management said "no new chips"... That day, the Amiga was doomed.

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #12 on: November 18, 2010, 12:57:57 PM »
Quote from: Karlos;592758
I didn't forget, I just regarded it as a subset of the DSP feature. Of course the DAC was a separate component, but it was the DSP that gave it the capability to do multichannel audio playback at CD quality.

You know better than most that the DSP was useful for more than just Audio, and given the fact that the A1200 had nothing like a DSP an was stuck with 8bit audio... It is worth mentioning :)
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Not sure it was that easy to fix, it can't have been a decision their hardware designers were thrilled about releasing it in that configuration in the first place.

If wikipedia is to be believed then the 16bit was was simply to ensure better compatibilty with the ST... Suggesting this hardware revision was a transitional machine. Seinberg's Falcon clone didn't use a 16Bit bus IIRC...
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By the same token, the shortcomings of the A1200 were easily remedied by 3rd party expansions. It's all a question of how much you're prepared to pay for it. I'd but an 060+PCI (RTG, soundcard) A1200 up against an equivalently clocked 060 Falcon with it's out-of-the-box hardware any day.


Yeah, but A1200 RTG boards came about quite a bit later than 1992, which is the time period I'm talking about here... And also we are taking about base spec machines... Damn... We need to compare a standard Flacon running AROS with a standard A1200 running AROS to really see how the two machines compare :)

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #13 on: November 18, 2010, 01:27:16 PM »
Quote from: Karlos;592765
Hey, don't get your knickers in a twist :) I'm not knocking the Falcon. Of course the DSP is certainly useful for more than just audio, but since we're talking about the time it was first released, there wasn't a lot (IIRC) that used the DSP for non-audio purposes. Just as much later, the A1200 found new capabilities through third party expansions, so people also found new uses for the Falcon's DSP.


Hmmm... Not sure of your train of thought here... Third party expansion is quite different to finding new uses for already existing hardware... I would agree with you if someone had managed to figure out how to do double precision floating point math with the copper (to the non technical: you can't, don't try ;)).

Quote

Not sure how much I believe that. Since we're comparing same era hardware here, AGA managed to retain a respectable degree of backwards compatibility without resorting to using a 16-bit data bus between the CPU/custom chips and certainly not for it's interface to normal (fast) RAM.


I'm not sure either here, but I don't know anything about the ST or the Falcon's schematics so I can't. Say anything for sure... But (basically) doubling the number of traces on a circuit board is more of a cost issue than a technical one.

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Sure, I acknowledge the time gap, but since we are now in the present, we can compare what the machines have become since. I stand by the observation that you can now build a significantly more powerful A1200 than you can a Falcon, with the exception of which has the fastest 68K processor; there's just nothing comparable to the CT60 board in the Amiga scene. I'd love to see something similar :D


Careful not to confuse the issue though! My assertion was that the Atari Falcon's hardware was an order of magnitude better than the A1200... I think that point still stands.

Put more simply, had commodore realeased both the A1200 and the falcon (running AmigaOS of course, possibly with a cost option for ECS compatibility)... I would have opted for the Falcon... How about you?

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Re: Amiga Coldfire project dead?
« Reply #14 on: November 18, 2010, 01:59:29 PM »
It wasn't until very recently that (I think) Piru explained how Akiko worked to me... I was horrified... It is a total waste of time, clearly they had a bit of space left on the CD controller silicon and squeezed it in :(

I had thought it was (at least) more like a blotter that performed the bit translation on the fly...

Yeah, had the A1200 had fast ram as standard the CPU performance would have pissed on the Falcon base model... But we are dreaming again :(