Freescale Coldfire V4s

[matthey]

Joska mentions about 90% compatibility with the ColdFire on the Atari with it's patching and traps:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=60771&page=3

A 68k fpga processor can handle the self modifying code better than the 68040, 68060 or ColdFire. They should be more compatible also but we will have to see what the performance is like. I expect the Natami Apollo fpga CPU will be competitive with a fast 68060. A ColdFire V4 should be faster with ColdFire code. Maybe the ColdFire could be used for I/O and (DSP like) sound processing. The fpga could then run the Apollo core if your fpga is big enough or the fpgaArcade core otherwise.

[matthey]

Interesting idea.I wonder how well a 68K softcore and another processor could co-exist.

That would be the tricky part. I expect you would run a kind of simple service and overseer OS on the CF. This isn't so much unlike the ARM CPU on the fpgaArcade. The Natami may be able to have the 68060 and fpga Apollo active at the same time. Synchronizing and sharing data is the difficult part. It's done with the Amiga CPU and custom chip's "processors" like copper and blitter.

[matthey]

Recompiling source code will be fine - you 'just' require the source. However, some instructions behave differently, so without code analysis you will never know if the code at hand works OK.

If you recompile the code for ColdFire, you could put a ColdFire identifier for the code in the executable. This is how PPC code in an Amiga executable works. There is probably already a ColdFire ELF code identifier if using AROS. Vbbc/vasm may already be able to compile and assemble it. I have assembled ColdFire code on my Amiga into an executable with vasm. I disassembled which verified that it did use the ColdFire instructions.