FPGA Replay Board

[wawrzon]

I haven't felt convinced that he ever did look elsewhere though. I really wanted him to look into some simulations of the TG68 he was looking at and compare that with simulations of the Suska's 68k block to help him understand what was so weird about the TG68 and help him figure out what to wrap around TG68 to make it work in a normal 68000 socket. I don't think I succeeded in getting him to run simulations either, or in convincing him of their utility or importance. (I'm a verification engineer of ARM SoC chips, and I think that part is tremendously important and useful for what he's trying to do so blindly) And he seemed to me that he absolutely must do it with TG68 and not anything else for some reason. I tried suggesting that he work with the already much closer to what he needed Suska 68k, see that work better much sooner to help him debug his board design, then go back to TG68 if he must, but he seemed adamant that he must complete his design using TG68 and must avoid others for some reason.

I very much like his idea, and look forward to his results, as well as whatever comes from the other guys.

http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=6¬e=32232&x=2:

Posts 25
17 Jun 2012 23:44

I have some other cores in verilog that are faster but when I start working with them I ll tell you more. Also I have some papers Turkish authors regarding to Mc68K VHDL models and those papers are very interesting. Also there are some cores that are not public but I have them but didn't work with them yet. There was some talking about ao68000 who can work stable at 80Mhz.

sounds somewhat weird, and he doesnt seem very experienced, but looks like he actually wanted to look for alternatives. i think him being not a professional he might try to figure his way around that doesnt look reasonable to you, thats frequent with autodidacts..

[wawrzon]

@mikej
do you know how to identify the correct mask? i think there was a copyback issue that the previous mask were not capable of carrying up properly.

as for softcore in fpga, do you think this can be concurrent to a 060 already? has tg68 been worked on further, since tobias has given up? this is really a sad story this development has practically been killed by natami hype..

[wawrzon]

We are just reading the product code register which contains mask revision. If you have any data this is not reliable I would love to know about it.

no, not that i knew. likely your method is good enough, why shouldnt it work?

The TG68 is still being developed, I am also running some tests.
I have my own core which is smaller and faster, but I have not had time to work on it for a while. These are both 68020 (lacking MMU and FPU) but can run faster than a 68060.

/Mike

good to hear! even though im not in a customer range as long as there is no fpu, even better some sort of mmu.

[wawrzon]

@freqmax: right, i wouldnt relay on words of some freescale guy except ist written down with signature. but nevetheless i dont think reverse engineering is prohibited. aros mimics amiga api and is legal. softcores may mimic 68k instruction set and be legal. i dont think there is any problem.

[wawrzon]

as much as i would like to see pci or pcie enabled upgrade to (68k) amigas id prefer the fpgaarcade (and the 060 daughterboard) to reach the consumer availability stage first asap, just before it turns into another vapor.

can we stop the feature creap demands for now, please?

[wawrzon]

Actually, I would prefer regular PCI . We have existing drivers, there are cheap PCI cards available for less than $10 and it's fast enough without a faster CPU.

if we take aros route we can have as much drivers as we want, there are tons of them available, and gallium brings its own share. unfortunatelly leading developers are extremally overloaded and there is not enough (competent) testers to push the development finally through. for instance arostcp stack is working on my a4k, but seems slower than miamidx under aros68k on same system. why? i cant tell. but someone with enough knowledge might find out.

i have now forwarded all the prometheus documentation i could gather to jason and toni and have jasons word he will look at the 68k pci after holidays again. but we have to stick to small goals, taken step by step.

[wawrzon]

ive never fully understood, why trapping substituted instructions have been impossible, but since everybody broke their teeth on it i guess its not worth to explain to noobs.

[wawrzon]

@mikej:
ive seen fpgaarcade testers complaining about compatibility earlier in the thread. i wonder if your fpga core is based on minimig, since there is an effort to fix the minimig core to maximal compatibility, led by boing4000 here:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?p=593283#post593283
its a german forum but you might contact him for assistance.

[wawrzon]

@mikej:

I've merged in the latest changes (mainly audio fix) and I'll ship a board of to Boing4000 for development.

great! will be following what boing will have to report on a1k!

meanwhile have you heard of this attempted italian fpga project:
http://www.tinaproject.it/
http://forum.tinaproject.it/

admittedly it doesnt look like much yet, but ive heard the guy behind it has a company that is going to carry part of the designing and manufacturing effort as a side project of a design they are working on anyway. ive been told they tried to contact you. i know there is both sides to that coin. still if its serious and some cooperative appointment profitable for both sides and the community could be found it would be worth a try. i proposed they might provide an fpgaarcade daughter board for a faster fpga core, which though isnt exactly the thing they are interested in i guess. i dont know, but maybe sharing 68k-emu and chipset-emu code could be of value. just a thought.

btw cesare di mauro accused of criticism towards os4 and ppc in this quarrel thread and responding there is apparently going to be involved with that tina project:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=37178&forum=33&start=0&viewmode=flat&order=0
i recommend this lecture only after work!! dont get side tracked.

[wawrzon]

thats "Jakub" in polish.

[wawrzon]

but the daughterboard comes with local memory, doesnt it?

[wawrzon]

Yes. But any 680x0 implementation stuck on the non-daughterboard FPGA have to fight the chipset for memory access.

where is such an implementation in first place? what are you complaining about?

[wawrzon]

I want one with at least 256 MB

this is no ppc, you know.. ive run owb on my a4k and didnt run out of 128mb fastmem, though ive run out of 4meg vmem on cv64 multiple times as it looks like. fpgaarcade solves this as it seems.

[wawrzon]

AB3D II The Killing Grounds !!!

yes, this would be certainly an interesting testcase.
and sysspeed instead of sysinfo.

[wawrzon]

Why is "AB3D II The Killing Grounds" such a good testing software?

it never ran on full speed.

[wawrzon]

why? let them get the actual thing get out of the door at last instead asking for more. you see how long it takes. besides modular design is good. everybody can complete his prefference system out of ready designed pieces keeping design and production effort low.