Motorola 68060 FPGA replacement module (idea)

[AJCopland]

Optimistic? Yes! Waste of time? Maybe. At least I can say I tried even if I'm dreaming a little. Reality is only one visionary person with a wad of cash away 8-).

This is the best argument I've heard for anything. If you want to see a particular thing happen then you have to try and make it happen rather than sitting around hoping for it.

I don't know about a 68060 FPGA replacement module. More useful for a lot of A1200 owners, one of the larger active groups of owners it seems, would just be an FPGA based trap door board with whatever core they wanted available from micro-SD card for easy upgrading/swapping.

KickStart(er) get that designed, and get it on KickStarter to see how much you can raise.

I do think however that all of this is a little moot given that MikeJ has his FPGAArcade well under way now

[AJCopland]

Going from a general purpose cpu would end up as an inefficient microcode based 68k.
 
It makes sense to dump the original 68000 & 68010 microcode to emulate those processors. Not all of it's done yet though, there is some work hopefully happening soon.
 
I don't know how much of the 68020 and later were microcoded.

That isn't the idea thought is it? He mentioned looking at the MIPS as a basis so if I was doing that it would be to take the ALU and other sub-sections and then work out how to feed the 68k through it.

Rather like parts of the Natami/N68k idea was inspired by Paul Metzgen's ALU paper "A High Performance 32-bit ALU for Programmable Logic", it's not meant for 68k but it's a proven and powerful basis to build upon.

Although yes I agree that a microcoded 68k would probably be a bit rubbish. That wasn't at all the impression I got from Bloodlines post.