News of Free 060 Like Apollo Core License

[gregthecanuck]

Hey Chucky -

Having fun in this thread?  

I think your A3660 board is a great idea for upgrading A3640s. I may look into that some time next year (I have an 060 and an A3640 kicking around).

As for the Vampire/Apollo core... This isn't your thing now. Sure, I get that. Let's see how the FPU issues resolve in V2.7 and also the debugging tools that will take advantage of the internal MPU.

I think that in the next few months there should be better answers to the issues you are highlighting. In addition there will be more end-user experience out there.

Cheers!

[gregthecanuck]

Hey Chucky -

Well in fact the demo platforms have 3 configurations:

1. OCS machine  (7MHz), etc...
2. AGA machine (14MHz), etc...
3. AGA 060 machine (50MHz), etc...

And now the Vampire opens up the possibility of a fourth level:

4. SAGA 080 machine (100MHz) etc...

I would like to think that some (definitely not all) demo coders would be interested in taking their demos to the next level. Compared to multi-GHz PCs this is still a very restricted platform and does pose its own challenges and also opens up new possibilities.

But let's just see how things evolve over the next few months after V2.7 is out.

Cheers!

[gregthecanuck]

Chucky - I suggest you wait until the 2.7 core is out and some user feedback happens.

[gregthecanuck]

It's mind boggling to me that transitioning away from 68k became an exercise in tightly-coupling the OS with yet another CPU suffering from accelerated decrepitude.

Fifteen years ago we knew that going platform agnostic was the way to go - even if that meant favouring the PPC.

I believe a TON of work has been done on OS4 to do exactly that - limiting the areas of tight coupling to the CPU/architecture. It is something reasonably obvious to do. For example, a lot of old assembler code was replaced by C. That decouples from CPU. I expect if you compared a lot of OS4 code to OS3 code one would see significant cleanup all over.

However, I suspect the endianness is still expected to be the same.