Hello

[Tricky]

Hi!  I'd prefer not to have any dirty PCs in my house either to be honest, but unfortunately they're quite a necessary evil these days.

Considering building myself an Amiga laptop now though.  An A1200 laptop... quite a task... just discovered you can still buy 68060s new, although they're like $300 each and you have to order more than a thousand.  I reckon it should be do-able these days though, with FPGAs for the custom chips and maybe a GumStix with a ROM emulator or something.  Building an Amiga from scratch... how does that sound?

I'll have to think about it.

[Tricky]

Oh I think I know what processor to use anyway... Motorola (FreeScale) ColdFire MCF5407.  316 MIPS and you can get a free 680x0 emulator for it!

ColdFire is based on 68k anyway (it's sort of a RISC version of it), so a lot of the most common instructions it can just run as normal, so should be pretty quick.

As for the custom chips, that's going to take a bit more thought...

[Tricky]

Well I don't have an A1000 motherboard... and it's not AGA anyway... and the idea is to build a laptop...

Other than that, it's really about the fact that Amigas are no longer in production, and so the original stock of custom chips isn't going to last forever and becomes increasingly difficult to find and more expensive.

[Tricky]

Why not x86?  Well... because they're the enemy!

But seriously... the reason I'm thinking ColdFire is just because it will be easier.  It's basically just a cut down 68000 instruction set and there's a free emulator for the bits it's missing.  And they're not dear either.  Unless you consider $30 too expensive.  Or, err... free samples...  and they're just generally simpler to work with.

Speed isn't that much of an issue.  I just want it to work.  But it will be about 3x the speed of an 060 anyway and I'm happy with that.

Also any emulator for an incompatible processor is going to have to load from somewhere, and so the smaller the better.

Besides, look where all the money's going to go from now on...
http://www.activewin.com/awin/comments.asp?HeadlineIndex=29527&Group=1
Ohohoho if Microsoft have finally decided that PPC is a good idea afterall, I guess it must be.