OK... why no new 68K boards?

[bloodline]

ral-clan wrote:
Something I've been thinking about for a while....

1. Real Amiga hardware is breaking down.
2. Many don't want to use Amiga emulation because emulation does not "feel right" due to the fact that custom chip funtctions aren't documented, only reverse engineered.

No, the Hardware was well documented, though obviously many of the bugs in the Amiga chipset were not well documented... The "feeling" problem is 99% psychological, based on a perceived difference between doing something "in Software" and doing it "in Hardware", the fact that Emulations use modern display and audio devices and thus lack the inherent flaws in the older devices... and the lack of "ritual" required to get the Emulation running.

3. Then perhaps someone can produce an unpopulated PCI card where the user could insert a real PAUL, AGNES, DENISE, KICKSTART, etc. (from a dead Amiga).

Why bother... the amount of work required to get it to sync up, you may as well just use UAE... plus, do you really want to plug a TV, Amiga Mouse, Amiga Keyboard into your PC?... You would prefer to just use the I/O of the PC... bang... let's just use UAE...

4. The emulator (UAE) could recognise and use these real Amiga custom chips on the PCI card.  It would only have to emulate the CPU and other address things (or heck - one could even put a real 68000 CPU on the card as an option).

To Sync with real hardware is a pain..

This has been done to an extent with the C64 SID chip PCI cards.

The SID chip is basically a simple but quirky Synth on a chip, that is quite desirable... the Amiga is a more integrated system, with the individual parts not doing much on their own...

[alexh]

bloodline wrote:
The "feeling" problem is 99% psychological, based on a perceived difference between doing something "in Software" and doing it "in Hardware"

Nah, it's more the fact most people do not run UAE with a 50Hz screen (or 100Hz?) and vsync on.

[bloodline]

alexh wrote:

bloodline wrote:
The "feeling" problem is 99% psychological, based on a perceived difference between doing something "in Software" and doing it "in Hardware"

Nah, it's more the fact most people do not run UAE with a 50Hz screen (or 100Hz?) and vsync on.

True, Shadow of the Beast 2 is beautiful on my MBP in WinUAE with the proper Vsyncing switched on :-)

But I still remember when I first moved to LCD from CRT... I found it very uncomfortable... but now I'm used to LCD and I find CRTs uncomfortable... people just have to learn to get used to the new technology.

[AeroMan]

little wrote:

I´ve heard some good news from some friends about Freescale

If you have not signed a NDA then spill the beans already, it is not like we haven't been waiting for years to learn what exactly the new v5 coldfire will offer.

Sorry, I´m not allowed to do that, unfortunately...  :-(

[little]

Sorry, I´m not allowed to do that, unfortunately

 Give us at least an approximate date, like 3rd quarter of  the year.
 Anyhow, my bet is full 32 bit emulation (68020/30/40 and maybe even 60). Why not include the 68000? because it (like the intel procesor prior to VT-x AMD-v) cannot be virtualized and a fast enough coldfire should be able to trap instructions and easily emulate a 68000 at say 28 mhz (fast enough for any games) and any games/applications requiring more speed were compatible with the 68020 and upwards.

[bloodline]

little wrote:

Sorry, I´m not allowed to do that, unfortunately

 Give us at least an approximate date, like 3rd quarter of  the year.
 Anyhow, my bet is full 32 bit emulation (68020/30/40 and maybe even 60). Why not include the 68000? because it (like the intel procesor prior to VT-x AMD-v) cannot be virtualized and a fast enough coldfire should be able to trap instructions and easily emulate a 68000 at say 28 mhz (fast enough for any games) and any games/applications requiring more speed were compatible with the 68020 and upwards.

The Coldfire is already a sort of 68060, missing a bunch of instruction and addressing modes that are difficult to pipeline and consume valuable silicon space...

Unless Freescale sort out the incompatible instructions (instructions that don't work the same way as the original 68k equivalents) and rip out the entire Coldfire supervisor mode, which it totally incompatible with the 68k... The coldfire is totally unusable in an Amiga... you can't trap these flaws/features...

[Damion]

I've been using LCD for many years, and would never want to go back to CRT for daily use... but nothing beats an Eizo Diamondtron, or a good Trinitron for classic gaming using real hardware. One reason being that LCD smearing is usually much worse at non-native resolutions - it's definitely not as much of an issue with WinUAE on a fast LCD. ;-)

Someone mentioned that the old hardware is dying off - battery damage, and leaking caps on the SMT boards. Another reason why a new CPU card for the classics likely won't happen. (I've had to significantly improve my hw repair skillz to keep the oldies running :-)) But there are still plenty of cool projects around for those interested in something different than (or in addition to) UAE... minimig, clone-a, the GB1000, etc.

[little]

sort out the incompatible instructions (instructions that don't work the same way as the original 68k equivalents) and rip out the entire Coldfire supervisor mode,

If they run a virtual 32-bit 680x0 in it's own thread there is no need to remove anything from the original coldfire, so the main OS would run in coldfire mode and any apps requiring 68020+ mode would run in a separate thread, with it's own supervisor mode. Worst case scenario, if the 68020 thread goes bonkers (guru meditation anyone?) then the main os simple ends it without any danger to the main system stability.

[bloodline]

little wrote:

sort out the incompatible instructions (instructions that don't work the same way as the original 68k equivalents) and rip out the entire Coldfire supervisor mode,

If they run a virtual 32-bit 680x0 in it's own thread there is no need to remove anything from the original coldfire, so the main OS would run in coldfire mode and any apps requiring 68020+ mode would run in a separate thread, with it's own supervisor mode. Worst case scenario, if the 68020 thread goes bonkers (guru meditation anyone?) then the main os simple ends it without any danger to the main system stability.

Then why bother with a ColdFire?!?! If you are going to that trouble... then a PPC will be cheaper and faster, and have more support... The Coldfire is really mean as a user mode source compatible 68k CPU... it was not designed as drop in replacement for the 68k on the desktop. As far as Motorola were concerned the 68k was a dead end, and all future work should be done with the PPC.

[alexh]

It was me who suggested the news might be about Coldfire. It could be something else altogether!

If it is just about Freescale confirming that they have no patents still enforceable on the 020+ instruction set (making it legally reproducible in FPGA designs) I'll be a bit disappointed. :-)

[bloodline]

more likely it's the fact that Freescale are trying to raise $1 billion... Perhaps to develop their potential cash cow of MRAM.

[Belial6]

bloodline wrote:

No, the Hardware was well documented, though obviously many of the bugs in the Amiga chipset were not well documented... The "feeling" problem is 99% psychological, based on a perceived difference between doing something "in Software" and doing it "in Hardware", the fact that Emulations use modern display and audio devices and thus lack the inherent flaws in the older devices... and the lack of "ritual" required to get the Emulation running.

That is certainly one of my big problems with it.  The last time I checked, E-UAE was not really on par with WinUAE, so you also have to have a Windows license to run WinUAE.

To get me to do a real switch to Emulation and have it feel like a real Amiga what would be needed is:

*Hide the PC POST.  This can be done on many motherboards.  My MSI board official supports this functionality.

*Have real 9 pin joysticks.  Catweasal already supports this, but I believe it is only under Windows.  It does also give the ability to read real Amiga floppies while it is at it.

*Get Windows out of the equation.  I don't want to have both Amiga Inc. AND MS getting in my way when I want to play with my toys.  Things like, I don't want to have to "Activate" my Amiga with MS.

*Boot directly into UAE.  Easy, no problem.

*A clean way to select configurations.  This is certainly doable, but it is just not there right now.  Personally if all the other pieces came together, I would consider making myself an external button/LCD screen that would let me toggle between configurations/boot options so that I never had to see the PC side.  I wouldn't think that it would be unrealistic to write an app that runs in Workbench that will manage the configuration files.

There is nothing technical that prevents an x86/emulation system from being indistinguishable from a 'real Amiga' (one might even say from BEING a 'real Amiga').  It's just that no one has done it, and I don't see anyone indicating that they are moving in that direction.

[little]

Then why bother with a ColdFire?!?! If you are going to that trouble...

1. it is cheap
2. it would be the best hardware emulation solution (if my supposition is right).
3. would be a true roadmap to leverage legacy and at the same time access modern hardware.

AFAIL powerpc was never Motorola's idea, more like Apple and IBM making a deal with motorola to create a new cpu architecture where EVERYONE would have ip rights, not just motorola.

E-UAE was not really on par with WinUAE

I always wonder why there is no bounty to update e-uae up to date where winuae is right now.

[bloodline]

little wrote:

Then why bother with a ColdFire?!?! If you are going to that trouble...

1. it is cheap

No it's not... compare it with ARM, PPC and x86...

2. it would be the best hardware emulation solution (if my supposition is right).

The best hardware emulation would be x86... Cheap and powerful...

3. would be a true roadmap to leverage legacy and at the same time access modern hardware.

It is a technological dead end... How is that in any way a true road map?

AFAIL powerpc was never Motorola's idea, more like Apple and IBM making a deal with motorola to create a new cpu architecture where EVERYONE would have ip rights, not just motorola.

Ok, you need to read your history... Even Wikipedia has a good article on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC

PPC was a win win for everyone involved at the time!

E-UAE was not really on par with WinUAE

I always wonder why there is no bounty to update e-uae up to date where winuae is right now.

I think the demand for Amiga Emulators can be measured in the low 1000s... of that the majority of users will be Windows users... The Amiga is only going to get less popular as time goes on. Almost all Amiga Games are available on other (more popular) platforms (notably the easy to emulate on modern systems DOS platform)... Unless someone buys Toni Wilen a MacBook Pro, WinUAE will get to 99.9% perfect emulation of every Amiga model, and then the machine will die out.

We are all getting older too... one by one we will die and the Amiga will just be a foot note in history books.

[Spektro]

Daedalus wrote:
A lot of accelerators (most?) have their CPUs soldered down, and PGA chips like that are very difficult to desolder without causing damage unless you have really specialised equipment...

Fortunately I have a A3640 :-)

[Spektro]

alexh wrote:
I think the market for Classic Amiga users who already own an MC68060 chip is ridiculously small don't you?

No-one who has a working 68060 board is going to seriously consider buying a new one are they? Most (all?) boards support BlizKick for storing KS ROM and most owners of 68060 boards have already maxed them out with RAM.

The only reason to upgrade that I can think of would be something like a true 2x performance upgrade. And even then I think people would think twice considering the sums of money involved.

I have a broken 040 board (A3640) and I'm not really interested in 060 boards. I would be happy to get a new 040 board without a CPU. If I need more CPU power, I use my A1.

Those lucky ones who have a working 060 board may think like you said and the markets are small, I agree. I don't know anything about hardware design, but if there was a board with 3 (or 2?) CPU sockets (for 030, 040 and 060), with some nice but cheap extra features, and the installed CPU could be easily overclocked, it might sell quite well.