MiniMig with AGA

[bloodline]

Damn fine work by all involved, then

Alright, I'll rephrase my statement... TWO guys in their bedrooms built a better CPU than Motorola's entire CPU dev team in the whole 80's...

[Karlos]

Out of curiosity I downloaded the VHDL source for the TG68K. My first reaction was, "Is that it? It's so small!"

When you consider the size of your typical software emulation implementation, it looks dinky

[Fats]

Alright, I'll rephrase my statement... TWO guys in their bedrooms built a better CPU than Motorola's entire CPU dev team in the whole 80's...

Probably most people are able now to make a car in their garage that performs better than the early Ford (or Citroen deux-chevaux for the Europeans) in their garage. This does not mean that the original work was not a magnificent peace of engineering.

greets,
Staf.

[bloodline]

Out of curiosity I downloaded the VHDL source for the TG68K. My first reaction was, "Is that it? It's so small!"

When you consider the size of your typical software emulation implementation, it looks dinky

I think the fact that the languages have defined microblocks ( I think I'm using the term properly) for basic operations (arithmetic, logic, data moving), these things have been preoptimised for performance. All one really needs to do in the TG68 core is decode the instruction, set the flags and pin signals correctly etc... Not to say that this isn't a huge achievement, just that the boring shuffling of bits is handled at a lower level, which saves a lot of space.


The whole tone of this post sounds negative and wrong... Try and reread it with a smile, as it's supposed to sound positive and excited...

[bloodline]

Probably most people are able now to make a car in their garage that performs better than the early Ford (or Citroen deux-chevaux for the Europeans) in their garage. This does not mean that the original work was not a magnificent peace of engineering.

greets,
Staf.

Hey Staf, I was not being serious in my post. The FPGA tools do a lot of the hard implementation work that simply had to be done by hand in the 80s... Also it's easier to build something that you know is going to work as it's based on a preexisitng idea, than to build something from scratch

[billt]

The A500 core on a Minimig is simply a complete A500 recreated in software and loaded onto the FPGA chip.

FPGAs don't run software. They are not processors themselves.

[Karlos]

I think the fact that the languages have defined microblocks ( I think I'm using the term properly) for basic operations (arithmetic, logic, data moving), these things have been preoptimised for performance. All one really needs to do in the TG68 core is decode the instruction, set the flags and pin signals correctly etc... Not to say that this isn't a huge achievement, just that the boring shuffling of bits is handled at a lower level, which saves a lot of space.

Viewed in those terms, so does any software implementation. You know, things like data move, logic and arithmetic tend to have operators in C

The whole tone of this post sounds negative and wrong... Try and reread it with a smile, as it's supposed to sound positive and excited...

:lol:

[bloodline]

Viewed in those terms, so does any software implementation. You know, things like data move, logic and arithmetic tend to have operators in C

Exactly! C v's ASM

:lol:

I know, sometimes I basically suck...

[nicholas]

I was thinking I should learn VHDL or Verilog or something too. When you think of all those "I wish I had XYZ for my old machine" moments...

20MIPS Z80 clone for your speccy?

[nicholas]

Exactly! C v's ASM



I know, sometimes I basically suck...

Fnarr fnarr!

[nicholas]

My word this looks sexy!

http://opencores.org/websvn,filedetails?repname=tg68&path=/tg68/trunk/VHDL/TG68.vhd

All those years of PL-SQL and Turbo Pascal are flooding back to me.

Ada is nice!

[bloodline]

My word this looks sexy!

http://opencores.org/websvn,filedetails?repname=tg68&path=/tg68/trunk/VHDL/TG68.vhd

All those years of PL-SQL and Turbo Pascal are flooding back to me.

Ada is nice!

ADA... and there was Karlos mocking my contentment with Obj-C!!

[nicholas]

ADA... and there was Karlos mocking my contentment with Obj-C!!

heheh

We all have our deviancies I guess Matt!

You're lucky that you'll only get it on tha interwebs, I'll have to put up with his mockery in person quite often! :/

[bloodline]

heheh

We all have our deviancies I guess Matt!

You're lucky that you'll only get it on tha interwebs, I'll have to put up with his mockery in person quite often! :/

Don't be so sure, the interwebs are a positive haven from the torment of the real world... but I bring it upon myself as someone not necessarily wishing to conform.

[nicholas]

Don't be so sure, the interwebs are a positive haven from the torment of the real world... but I bring it upon myself as someone not necessarily wishing to conform.

Not wishing to conform probably explains why I'm a minority within a minority within a minority.

[Karlos]

Like most languages, ADA is what it is. Each language syntax is a jigsaw, pieces of which may be ugly and confusing, but overall build a recognisable whole where every piece has it's place and it all fits together snugly.

Objective-C, on the other hand, is like taking pieces from two wholly different, unrelated jigsaws and ham-fisting them together until they fit the same shape as the cover on the box, but is clear to anybody looking at them that they've been crudely mashed together without any real thought as the inherent incompatibilities between the two; you've got strange gaps, and overlapping bits that are bent completely out of shape. Overall it still works but it isn't pretty.