PowerPC accelerator - how does that work then?

[nyteschayde]

Ok, please don't kill me. I know this has been beaten to death in one way or another. I also know OS4 is very anti-x86 right now (for now) as is MOS with their reuse PowerPC hardware drive (which I appreciate as I own both old PowerMacs as wells a A1200T/PPC).

My question is wouldn't something like a x86 SOC with a 68K emulation layer be a good fit? A trapdoor expansion for the A500/A1200 style machines could offer up SATA, Ethernet, possibly even a RTG driver for the SOC graphics driver and much faster performance than any 68K.

Intel CPUs haven't been very good at emulating PPC hardware to my knowledge (aka PearPC and what not) but that could simply have just been the software and not the chips fault.

It seems as long as the Amiga thinks it's getting a 68K CPU, it really doesn't matter what the architecture of the accelerator is. And if it comes with lots of the features provided by a SOC style solution and perhaps a DDR3 (not for speed reasons but rather availability reasons) RAM slot then woohoo!

I'm guessing this isn't viable only because nobody would spend the time to invest this type of development on the Amiga community.

Thoughts, please, not angry flame war comments.

[nyteschayde]

I believe Natami is right chioce for you :-)

Well it's certainly on my shopping list. Whenever the damn add to cart button appears I'll be pressing it

The design and implementation of any new hardware expansion for classic Amigas is a massive undertaking with no real profit gains to be had. So, yeah, I totally understand there are more reasons to not do it than to do it.

@commodorejohn - I run UAE too and it's not quite the same thing. I was pointing at the relatively "free" nature of all the features of most SOC style chips. All the things I spoke of would be additions to the Amiga chipset.

Assuming someone were to undertake a new classic expansion, it seems like a big bang could be had for fewer dollars going with a SOC style chip only because of what you get for free with the chip alone.

There may be some life in the idea only because it could offer for non-towered systems what a mediator style setup would for big box and expanded A1200s (namely ethernet, sata, graphics, etc...)

I know it's a pipe dream but it was a fun thought.

[nyteschayde]

I had BPPC+BVision with PPC native JPEG datatypes and mpega.library installed but that is all. Few games (often buggy) and few demos didn't really justify investment.

Later I got chance to run MorphOS 0.x on it but in the end it was just waste of money.

I think culmination point was when I tried PPC native Unzip program that was slower than 68k native Unzip on my lousy 68040 @ 25 MHz.

Well if you don't want any of that old hardware, go ahead and throw it my bin. I'd like another OS4.x compatible classic.