Smaller, energy efficient turbo card for A1200

[alexh]

I have a two layer passive adapter board I made for CD32 that allows you to connect an A1200 trapdoor card.

The edge connectors are impossible to find ( or have a minimum order of 1000 ) which made it not feasible to release as a product.

[Floid]

bloodline wrote:

Well, since the alien Processor would be the bus master of the Amiga system, I would expect it wouldn't be to interface between the ZII and HT (for the Duron) bus's with an FPGA which could house a few other core's, like USB etc...

Good luck finding a Duron with HT...

/Got nothin'

[leirbag28]

@alexh

quote:
I have a two layer passive adapter board I made for CD32 that allows you to connect an A1200 trapdoor card.
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Are You SERIOUS???  where have you been??? Thats quite cool!  imagine a 68060 in a CD32 or even a blizzaed PPC card!

....more importantly..I was always searching for someone who could create a passthrough on the CD32 that would allow the SX32 and FMV card to be plugged simultaneously. Or even an extra accelerator in your case.

The CD32 would be the ultimate Multimedia machine like that!

By the way, there were many upgrade cards for Mac that used the same exact connector as the CD32....even PPC cards....I once plugged a G3 card into my CD32 and it plugged perfectly........I tested it because I was considering unsoldering the edge connectors to make my Own SX32 passthrough to plug the FMV card.....never got to it......anyway I turned the CD32 on with the G3 card in it and fried the G3 card :-D  my brother was angry and regretted giving me the card........but I didnt give 2 squats!  I was just happy I had found a connector exactly  like the Passthrough on the SX-1, SX32 and FMV card. even if it meant destroying a new G3 card wich I cared not much for. This was at the time when G3 Macs were popular around 1999?

[Rabbi]

I've got a couple more A1200s that could use some upgrading.  I would not even consider buying an accelerator with less than a 68060, but I'd really like to see the fastest & most compatible ColdFire chip, if that were possible.  Newer type RAM is a must.  (Ultra)SCSI? Well maybe, maybe not.  I've got a lot of SCSI peripherals and the Amiga was very friendly towards them until the A1200 & A4000 came out.  It would be nice, but not necessary.  Fast USB version 2.0 is a must, though.  Would be nice to hook up an external DVD burner that way and any other peripheral, for that matter.  Ethernet would be nice, especially if it could go faster than 10MBS.  Firewire?  Is that possible?  The Amiga is a video computer.  Ah yes, built-in MP3 is a must.  Anyone else?

[keropi]

(just adding to the dream thread...)
also any new accelerator should have SATA as a controller, no more huge scsi cables with terminators and all the mess they create... SATA should be more than enough for the amiga, and I bet it reaches or exceeds amiga-scsi solution in speed terms...

[cv643d]

But isnt it good to have a CPU on the HD like SCSI when you are dealing with low CPU systems like Amiga?

[Hyperspeed]

Anyone got the link for the 100Mhz Falcon '060 board?

RE. SCSI: It's a pain sometimes but it allows 7 devices to be used at very fast speeds without pestering the CPU.

Scanning and CD burning are probably best done on SCSI. That's what the industry uses.

[shoggoth]

Hyperspeed wrote:
Anyone got the link for the 100Mhz Falcon '060 board?

http://www.czuba-tech.com

I have one, running at 100Mhz. It needs a particular 060 mask, or it won't run at that speed (labelled 68EC060, but actually contains the whole shebang). Bus speed towards the SDRAM is 100Mhz too, so it's about as fast as the 68k range can ever go.

-- Peter

[keropi]

what are you talking about sata and cpu load? new controllers (like new IDE ones) use DMA for transfers like scsi. the problem is that there is NO amiga IDE controller that uses DMA AFAIK, that is why IDE is so much slower in amiga... even FastATA does not use DMA...

[alexh]

It needs a particular 060 mask, or it won't run at that speed (labelled 68EC060, but actually contains the whole shebang).

Bollocks! The chips need to be what is called a Rev6. They can easily identified because they are prefixed with MC (MC68060) AND here is the important bit.... they have a MASK number E41J written in the corner.



The EC labelling has nothing to do with their speed capability. There are older MC68EC060 chips that cannot be clocked at 100MHz. The EC representation just means that the CPU was sold as a cheaper variant which is has a broken / untested MMU & FPU.

[Hyperspeed]

Interesting that there is a parallel 68k computing universe taking place with the Atari Falcon going 100Mhz '060/SDRAM...

:-D

What kind of software are Falcon users meddling with these days? Any famous apps/games?

[shoggoth]

Dude, they actually labelled some full versions as EC. Mine happens to be one of them. I didn't say that EC:s are capable of running at 100Mhz. I'm perfectly aware that this does not apply to all CPUs of that mask.

Perhaps I could have expressed myself a bit more clearly, however I think good manners does *not* include using terms such as "bollocks" when speaking to strangers for the first time.

-- Peter

[shoggoth]

Hyperspeed wrote:
Interesting that there is a parallel 68k computing universe taking place with the Atari Falcon going 100Mhz '060/SDRAM...
What kind of software are Falcon users meddling with these days? Any famous apps/games?

The OS is open source, as is the GUI, so there is a bit of development there. Since it (sort of) complies to POSIX, it's fairly easy to port stuff from the un*x world which means that there are a few emulator/game ports.. It's probably similar to the Amiga scene, but with fewer active people.

-- Peter

[Hyperspeed]

alexh: You owe shoggoth a drink. May I reccomend this fine vintage from my cellar?



EDIT: The Falcon sounds a real interesting bit of kit, I'll scour the web for more info!

As for energy efficent accelerators I'd say a Blizzard 1260 with 16MB SIMM would be least hungry. The '060 is 3.3v as opposed to the 5v '030 and '040. Not only is the voltage lower but it doesn't require an energy sapping (and noisy!) fan to cool it.

A newer SIMM of 16MB or more may well have 4k refresh DRAM chips which are less energy guzzling than older SIMMs using 1k or 2k DRAMs (although 1k/2k DRAMs have higher refresh speeds - 16ms/32ms vs 64ms). Laptops of the time would have used 4k refresh DRAMs.

Going up to 128MB/256MB though would probably be eating into the power!

;-)

[Ral-Clan]

I second (third? fourth?) the suggestion that some enterprising soul resurrect the design of one of the out-of-production 060 cards.  Amiga users would lap this up, even if it was just a straight-forward re-issue of the original design.  If it was a slightly updated design, with newer chips that performed the same function (perhaps even faster) it would be a real seller!

(Just make sure there is an A3000/4000 version so I can get one!).

[shoggoth]

Problem is digging up rev. 6 060:s. Czuba sort of vacuum cleaned the world for them.

-- Peter