I would/wouldn't like a production run of 060's

[nicholas]

50Mhz isn't close to enuff.


For me it needs to be at least 500 Mhz as a bare minimum for a new run.  And have MMU + FPU.

If we sit around and do nothing we will get 500Mhz FPGA 060s in 4 years without any kickstarter.


If you want a 50Mhz 060 you can buy those right now.  No need for a kickstarter.

If you want a 100Mhz 060 you can buy those right now.

Kickstarter is to make new things that don't already exist.


Another possibility is a bounty or kickstarter to make an ARM JIT to run Motorola bytecodes.  You should be able to get 300Mhz 060 speed (without MMU) on a wide variety of cheap ARM cpus.

There is no 68060 JIT for iphones because Steve Jobs personally banned it.

But everyone is allowed to code 68060 JIT for ARM cpus for 10 other devices.

There are multiple 1.0+ Ghz ARM cpu computers (usually with 2-4 cores) in the $99.00 range typically with 1GB+ of RAM.

Or you can buy a top-of-the-line smartphone from Samsung or HTC or Motorola and get a 1.6Ghz to 1.8Ghz ARM cpu with 2 or 4 cores + 2GB RAM and uses hardly any electricity.  They are much cheaper and more energy efficient than silly intel processors.  But those smartphones have expensive 1080P or 720P screens built in so they cost around $600.00.   But $600.00 for a 300Mhz 060 sounds like a damn good deal when I see ppl selling 80Mhz 060 cards with 64MB of ram for the same price!

If you are serious about a kickstarter you really need to find someone who can and WILL code an ARM JIT and focus on that.  It is 1000x less risky and cheaper and more achievable than trying to get some lame cpu company to fab new high speed 68060s.

I have been trying to brainwash Mrs. Beanbag into coding it for us but I have not been successful yet.  There are various ppl who could do it.  Matt Hey, Rachy, whoever wrote the JIT for MorphOS, + a dozen other ppl.

I will pay $300.00 for someone to code a working FREE OPENSOURCE JIT that works on ARM.  As proof it must be built into UAE and shown to work or optionally it must be built into a cheap arm computer and shown to run Amiga software.  This is so if UAE source code is too hard to understand, then there is another way.   For example, you could make it run on Raspberry Pi.  But I am more a fan of the better ARM chips in the other competing computers such as Ouya, or any of a zillion other computers in the $99.00 to $250.00 price range.  I prefer Cortex A9 atm.  But if you don't like that then ok I won't discriminate against Rpi.

My offer expires in 1 year.  But I reserve the right to extend it.  I can't leave my bounties open ended forever and ever or I might get hit with a whole bunch of bounties all at the same time and not have enuff cash to pay them all at once.  So I hafta keep things limited to something that I can GUARANTEED pay.   I know $300.00 is nothing for all the hours of work you hafta put into the project.  I'm sorry.  I am dying and have little money.  If I was rich I would pay $3000.00 or $30000.00 to get things moving.  Grrr!  I want something to get done but I have little power :*(

Doesn't UAE4All2 have a JIT core now?

I could have sworn it got one a few months back.

Maybe i'm thinking of AGA support.

[nicholas]

UAE4all2 68020 CPU emu is coded in dreadfully slow C.

Well there's always Cyclone which while not a JIT is written in ARM assembly and heavily optimized for speed.

http://notaz.gp2x.de/cyclone.php

[nicholas]

@ElPolloDiabl

If you're interested, utsource.net have them at $100 USD (last price known). They have 10-100 of them, minimum quantity 1 piece. I use them for all sorts of weird things (A2386SX bridgeboard RAM, AmigaOneXE sound chips, that sort of thing).

http://www.utsource.net/mc68060rc50.html

I notice they sell the mysterious MC68060FE133.

Has anyone ever been able to confirm that these are genuine parts?

All I've ever seen is rumours that they were manufactured by Freescale for secret military projects long after they had offically stopped making the 060.

[nicholas]

We could dream but a realistic production run should be 80--133 mhz with fpu and mmu. These chips could be made without redesign the chip.

Freescale wouldn't even entertain the notion of a new production run unless a few million dollars worth of guaranteed orders were involved and as they own the IP no one else could make them without buying a licence and then we are back to the millions of dollars problem again.

[nicholas]

Remember the crazy fpga hardware I was talking about the other day with a 150MHz enhanced 68k in fpga soon and a possible 500MHz+ 68k CPU in fpga in about a year? It is possible but I don't want any "announcements" or vapor ware claims. There may be some interesting reading on http://www.amigacoding.de/ if you haven't been over there recently. I have seen the I/O expansion board early schematic .

In the form of accelerator cards for existing Amigas or complete systems like FPGA Arcade/MiST/Minimig?

[nicholas]

You can sell emulators on the Apple AppStore, but you are not allowed to sideload any software on to them... So it either has to come with all the software it's ever going to run... Or you need to sell extra software via an "in app purchase".

There are three problems with running emulators on an iOS device:
1. If the emulator is free open source, it must be free on the AppStore.
2. Most of the software you want to run on the emulator will still be in copyright (or you already own and don't want to buy again).
3. (This is the biggy) The old games just aren't suited to running on a touch screen devices and are often quite awkward to play/use.

-ON TOPIC-

A production run of any 68k is never going to happen, technology has moved on and you are never going to get rights to the IP.

Your options are an FPGA, the A600 Vampire board is already here or (my favourite) an ARM board with an emulator/JIT, with an interface for Plugging into Amiga CPU slots

I'd like the same but with an x86 rather than ARM just for the raw power and the latest x86 chips probably run cooler than an 040 does.

Regarding the App Store, isn't there a legal problem with GPL apps? I seem to remember VLC having issues.

[nicholas]

My money is on ARM long term... But yeah, a x86-64 based JIT accelerator would be three levels of awesome!

We need a genius wizard to port the existing 32-bit JIT to AMD64 first though.  Jason maybe?

Yeah, the AppStore licence changed a couple of years back to allow GPL, I already downloaded VLC so I wasn't affected by its removal, very useful for watching WMVs on my iOS devices. But it is returning now the Licence allows GPL.

VLC is the first thing I install on any Mac or Linux box.

I wonder if OS4 will receive a port of it now they have Qt4?

[nicholas]

if it was up to me, I'd just port the WinUAE hardware emulation to QEMU, and use QEMU's m68k dynamic-translation (JIT like) which works on any architecture.

Hi Jason!  Sounds like a nice project for you to fit into that 25th hour of each day.

[nicholas]

I can't see why anyone would want a 500mhz ECS machine, even AGA limitations would hold it back.

I'd love a 500MHz 060 in my A3000/PIV, I never use any ECS screenmodes.

[nicholas]

It's still being crippled by the Zorro bus. An FPGA that could do a 500mhz 68060 could also emulate a PIV with much higher memory bandwidth.
 
Throw in a floppy port that can use standard PC high density floppy drives, Ethernet, 96khz 32bit sound, sata, usb and I'm not sure there is much out of the A3000 that you'd still want to be using.

Something akin to the Chameleon 64 would be great. Works as an add-on to real hardware but can also be used standalone.

[nicholas]

I understand the concept, it just makes less sense to do it when you've got eight different Amiga models instead of one model of C64.
 
It will be cheaper, easier, quicker etc to just produce something standalone. By the time it happens the number of people who say they want one that fits in a real Amiga will decline & I believe that if a cheaper standalone card was offered first then that will clear out most of the rest of the potential customers.

Quite possibly but we are talking imaginary hardware here.

[nicholas]

Nobody has created a Phase5 PPC emulator because they can't be bothered, not because it's particularly hard.
I though about doing it, but I have too much other stuff going on. It doesn't help that I've never owned one so I have no software for it or even an idea of what I'd use the emulation for.

For running the B/CSPPC version of OS4 on hardware that isn't crap.

That's my reason for lusting after such a feature in UAE anyway.

But Bloodline's idea of having virtual 68k and PPC cores in an (A)SMP variant of AROS would be even better.

[nicholas]

Hang on... It's taken me a while but wouldn't this allow you to creat some "interesting" virtual hardware setups... Like an Amiga with an x86 or ARM as a CPU!? -edit- or even something really weird like a PPC!?

+Eleventy-one to that!

[nicholas]

Are there any killer apps on OS4?

Absolutely none whatsoever but I still lust after such an emulator.

[nicholas]

Would it be possible to adapt PearPC? I remember successfully running OSX on that thing but it was really slow. I don't remember what kind of hardware had back then, but it would be interesting to let my i7 have a crack at it now

It's theoretically possible, same as using the GXEmul or QEMU dynamic translation cores but nobody seems interested to do the work required to integrate it with UAE to appear as a Phase5 board to the emulated Amiga.

Looking at the code of all three, I say using GXEmul would be the least amount of work but that's only my guess as doing such a thing is way above my abilities but i'd very much like to see it happen.

Maybe a hefty "Phase5 PPC board emulation for UAE" bounty might tempt someone?

Then again I reckon more people would be interested in a 68k-JIT for UAE on PPC and last time I checked that bounty prize wasn't particularly large in relation to how much work Álmos is putting into it.

http://euaejit.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.amigabounty.net/?function=viewproject&projectid=35
http://gxemul.sourceforge.net/