Resident evil for Atari

[shoggoth]

countzero wrote:
well I got some bad news for you then. we had a fabled coldfire board in the works too, but in the end it turned out coldfire is not fully 68k compatible and the software layer which translates 68k to coldfire code dropped the performance to sinilar level to our 50 MHz 060 boards. Elbox canceled the project completely. I'm sure your 100MHz CT63 boards would kick the hell out of any coldfire board.

I've done some research on this topic on "that other 68k" platform. Basically, one has to deal with three cases.

A: applications which are inherently incompatible with the CF and need to be patched

B: applications which are compatible enough (emulation by means of trapped emulation of missing instructions)

C: applications which works out of the box.

Case C is rare, case B is not completely uncommon, and A has to be handled through user land emulation. All these cases has to be catered for by the OS, which means you either have to patch your OS completely or get access to the source code.

Supervisor mode can be dealt with (at least on the platform I'm referring to). I've worked on case A (user land emulation). Performance suffer greatly for those apps, but since you don't emulate hardware nor OS functions, it isn't that obvious to the user for everyday apps. An interesting approach would be JIT emulation - HP did an experiment once, where they used some form av JIT emulation where the host architecture was identical to the guest architecture. The interesting part is that in some cases, the JIT emulated environment ran faster than the "real" conterpart, due to the fact that the JIT compiler could eliminate unneeded checks in the code (branches etc) since it had enough runtime information to completely rule out certain execution paths. If this was possible on the CF (I don't know if it is), case A could be pretty fast too.

All this means that CF incompatibilites can't be solved by nifty hardware solutions; it can only be solved on the OS level.

I don't know how well all this applies to the Amiga though. Why ColdFire? Personally I like 68k coding, but I want new hardware.

[alexh]

There are other reasons the Amiga coldfire boards were cancelled.

The chip package type they chose was obsoleted before the board was launched.

The compatibility was low.

The speed when running compatibility emulation was very low. (Lower than existing boards)

[Computolio]

    So what's stopping the development of an Amiga version of the CT60? That thing would blow the doors off of even the fastest Blizzard/Cyberstorm.

    Oh right, those stupid PDS slot connectors.

[Flashlab]

Computolio wrote:

    So what's stopping the development of an Amiga version of the CT60? That thing would blow the doors off of even the fastest Blizzard/Cyberstorm.

    Oh right, those stupid PDS slot connectors.

And besides that money, will and the right people that can actually achieve such a project.

[darksun9210]

Shoggoth did pen the following...

If you're referring to the SuperVIDEL project, it's definitely alive. I saw the hardware myself a few weeks ago. The CTPCI project is alive as well; I tried it myself on a ColdFire evaluation board.

Sweet!  :-D

[shoggoth]

darksun9210 wrote:
Shoggoth did pen the following...

If you're referring to the SuperVIDEL project, it's definitely alive. I saw the hardware myself a few weeks ago. The CTPCI project is alive as well; I tried it myself on a ColdFire evaluation board.

Sweet!  :-D

The SuperVIDEL concept is really neat. The CT60 is designed to allow expansion boards to replace legacy hardware registers. In the case of the SuperVIDEL, this means it's compatible "out of the box", even without drivers. It's also capable of snooping accesses to ST-ram (i.e. chipram) to provide support for apps that aren't SuperVIDEL-aware.

A really nice solution imo, can't wait to try it out. Just like the Amiga, these machines suffer from poor video ram bandwidth (and planar graphics in <=8bpp), which means a lot of CPU cycles are wasted just for C2P conversion and copying to video ram. I predict approx 2x speed increase for some of my projects, perhaps even more since I won't have to buffer & convert stuff.

[darksun9210]

now that sounds like the daddy. able to redirect low level hardware calls to modern chippery. dayum. cutting out CP2, would boost not just speed, but what i can only liken as user interface smoothness. like when i first got a graphics card going in an A4000, window movement, and scrolling of web pages was oh so nice. even at 24/32bit depth. i imagine the same sort of thing.

i'm glad Atari "classic" aren't pushing up daisies either.
 :-)

[alexh]

Computolio wrote:
So what's stopping the development of an Amiga version of the CT60?

1) It is closed source

2) The A1200 Trapdoor and A3000/A4000 CPU Slot connectors are not made anymore (and you cannot use old ones due to them not meeting RoHS).

3) The MC68060RC50 E41J chip is no longer manufactured and not available in large quantities at a reasonable price.

4) Demand. There are clearly lots of Amiga 060 accelerators already out there which makes a small market even smaller.