Smaller, energy efficient turbo card for A1200

[Protek]

I consider myself a total beginner at electronics. I've, however managed to get myself acquainted with the subject, so that I have a glimpse what electronics is all about. Having followed the development of great homebrew Amiga projects on this forum and others (i.e. Dennis' MiniMig), I've got an itch to get my hands dirty in a project. Although it's starting to  seem that I'm way over my head with this project. But hey, you can't blaim a guy for trying.  :-D

Obviously, I would get easier and probably cheaper off if just bought an accelerator second hand. Of course, when I came up with this idea, the first thing was to try to find out whether similar homebrew projects exist already. The lack of such projects made me to bring this subject up on this forum. Having followed this thread, I've let myself understand that there isn't a modern chip available that would be downwards compatible with the MC680x0 family of chips. PPC is one thing but I suppose that is more viable if you want to use OS4.

[utri007]

Today would be quite easy and cheap make accelerator card for a1200 with 040, even as a hobbyist project.

manufacturin costs would be aroud 40 -60 €

Just wonderind why allways this kind of treads start to go to distant galaxy

Allways starting to imagine 10 000 € accelrator wich would be impossile to do with just hobbyists or semi pros and planning would take 5 years.

Another point is, that seems ? that coldfire accelerator is pointless, would be too slow with old apps and any "not so system friendly" programs wouldn't work

[Oli_hd]

Sorry about not posting when I got home, I got errors on the a.org site when I went to post (Just one line of text something like "reply can not be posted"), mehh.
The 68060 SD-Ram chip was made by Vcubed and was/is called the V380SDC, supports 2gig of SD-Ram, an i2c interface needed for DIMM modules (Well not needed but a standard part of) and designed for the 68040+, PPC's and others.
The company sold over 10,000 of this chip in a year (Probably rather low but getting it wasnt easy from what I saw)

The down side is Vcubed went bankrupt, the IP was bought by Quicklogic and the new company no longer seem to make the SDRam chip (Only PCI bridges from Vcubed) but they are still available on the net, just may not be wise to do a new design using them.

Linky to news item
Datasheet for chip

[alexh]

Interesting.

I found the Datasheet on the net, there is no real details about the interface timing. I suspect that it is not as good as Rodolphe's CT060 SDC. He went out of his way to maximise SDRAM performance for a 100MHz 060, taking advantage of any and all burst modes of the 060 processor.

The datasheet is also available here

If the part is still available through the reseller network it could reduce the cost of a 68060 turbo card considerably. A large gate FPGA could be replaced with a low gate count CPLD.

[Donar]

utri007 wrote:
Today would be quite easy and cheap make accelerator card for a1200 with 040, even as a hobbyist project.

manufacturin costs would be aroud 40 -60 €

Just wonderind why allways this kind of treads start to go to distant galaxy

Because people want 060 Power. :-D

Another point is, that seems ? that coldfire accelerator is pointless, would be too slow with old apps and any "not so system friendly" programs wouldn't work

As we haven't seen one out in the wild having the opportunity to test/benchmark one it is hard to judge...

Unlike those poor Atari savages, we've had companies like Phase 5, GVP, DCE, Elbox developing our hardware.

Unlike those poor Atari savages who run TOS on a Freescale Coldfire developer board. we are discssing if AMIGA OS could be run on Coldfire. I have to admit that the Atari OS seems to be somehow open sourced so that a re compile is possible...

[shoggoth]

Unlike those poor Atari savages, we've had companies like Phase 5, GVP, DCE, Elbox developing our hardware.

Unlike those poor Atari savages who run TOS on a Freescale Coldfire developer board. we are discssing if AMIGA OS could be run on Coldfire. I have to admit that the Atari OS seems to be somehow open sourced so that a re compile is possible...[/quote]

Actually, TOS isn't opensource. The MultiTOS kernel (known as MiNT or FreeMiNT) is, however. Didier M has managed to patch and reverse engineer the binary TOS ROM image by hand, which is.. well.. insane. But that's what he did.
AFAIK someone else has had the FreeMiNT kernel up and running on some coldfire evaluation board.. Opensource is great.


-- Peter

[Donar]

shoggoth wrote:
...
AFAIK someone else has had the FreeMiNT kernel up and running on some coldfire evaluation board.. Opensource is great.

I just found the site i meant. It seems he uses the Freescale CF68k library, build for emulating a 030...
In the lower half you see some pictures about the eval board running ATARI OS -and some speed comparisons between HADES 060/CT 060 @100?/Coldfire EVB, or am i wrong?

http://perso.orange.fr/didierm/ct60/ctpci-e.htm

[shoggoth]

I just found the site i meant. It seems he uses the Freescale CF68k library, build for emulating a 030...
In the lower half you see some pictures about the eval board running ATARI OS -and some speed comparisons between HADES 060/CT 060 @100?/Coldfire EVB, or am i wrong?

Nope, that's the guy. He's developing graphics drivers for CTPCI, the PCI adapter for the CT60. Since no actual hardware was available, he started patching TOS instead, and used a freescale EVB.

-- Peter