I would/wouldn't like a production run of 060's

[ElPolloDiabl]

@ above
The thrill of having the classic hardware/software perform at an amazing speed. When an emulator does it, its not a big deal.

I'm not pushing for this, but it will be awesome (when it happens) and 100% compatible as oppose to when we got PowerPC accelerators at 200-300mhz.

[psxphill]

@ above
The thrill of having the classic hardware/software perform at an amazing speed. When an emulator does it, its not a big deal.

It's an expensive thrill. A reconfigurable FPGA computer would be much better, you'd get a thrill every time someone created a new personality for it.

[ElPolloDiabl]

It's an expensive thrill. A reconfigurable FPGA computer would be much better, you'd get a thrill every time someone created a new personality for it.

Oh, I thought that you could have both. You could fit heaps of functions on an accelerator card as well.

I agree. It might be a big bottleneck when accessing the classic hardware. Sought of like the switch between 16-bit and 32-bit RAM.

[psxphill]

Oh, I thought that you could have both. You could fit heaps of functions on an accelerator card as well.
 
I agree. It might be a big bottleneck when accessing the classic hardware. Sought of like the switch between 16-bit and 32-bit RAM.

Once you've added sound and graphics output to your accelerator card, you're unlikely going to want to switch your cables between both. So you'll add ECS/AGA to the FPGA and throw in 8mb of chip ram. Making the A600 a rather inconvenient keyboard.
 
It sounds like a lot of work to go to for people who want to upgrade an A600, so you'll want to build a standalone card as well. This is the one that everyone will buy anyway, making you wonder why you bothered with trying to cram it into an A600 case in the first place.
 
Sure there is room for a cheap one today, but anything more complex is kinda pointless.

[nicholas]

I can't see why anyone would want a 500mhz ECS machine, even AGA limitations would hold it back.

I'd love a 500MHz 060 in my A3000/PIV, I never use any ECS screenmodes.

[bbond007]

In the end, the overall speed for most everything end up being slower than a 33MHz 040.

The various Mac benchmarking programs showed only minor improvements in certain benchmarks with the 060.

Maybe on Fusion which I never ran... I had the BlizzPPC 240/060-50

these benchmarks are from my current Blizz1260

[ChaosLord]

060 is quite a lot better than 040.  After I got my 060 I gave my 040 machine away.

[psxphill]

I'd love a 500MHz 060 in my A3000/PIV, I never use any ECS screenmodes.

It's still being crippled by the Zorro bus. An FPGA that could do a 500mhz 68060 could also emulate a PIV with much higher memory bandwidth. I don't have an A3000 but according to the internet, buster 11 hits 10mb/s with a PIV. DDR2 is orders of magnitude faster than that.
 
Throw in a floppy port that can use standard PC high density floppy drives, Ethernet, 96khz 32bit sound, sata, usb and I'm not sure there is much out of the A3000 that you'd still want to be using.

[nicholas]

It's still being crippled by the Zorro bus. An FPGA that could do a 500mhz 68060 could also emulate a PIV with much higher memory bandwidth.
 
Throw in a floppy port that can use standard PC high density floppy drives, Ethernet, 96khz 32bit sound, sata, usb and I'm not sure there is much out of the A3000 that you'd still want to be using.

Something akin to the Chameleon 64 would be great. Works as an add-on to real hardware but can also be used standalone.

[psxphill]

Something akin to the Chameleon 64 would be great. Works as an add-on to real hardware but can also be used standalone.

I understand the concept, it just makes less sense to do it when you've got eight different Amiga models instead of one model of C64.
 
It will be cheaper, easier, quicker etc to just produce something standalone. By the time it happens the number of people who say they want one that fits in a real Amiga will decline & I believe that if a cheaper standalone card was offered first then that will clear out most of the rest of the potential customers.

[nicholas]

I understand the concept, it just makes less sense to do it when you've got eight different Amiga models instead of one model of C64.
 
It will be cheaper, easier, quicker etc to just produce something standalone. By the time it happens the number of people who say they want one that fits in a real Amiga will decline & I believe that if a cheaper standalone card was offered first then that will clear out most of the rest of the potential customers.

Quite possibly but we are talking imaginary hardware here.

[stefcep2]

It's still being crippled by the Zorro bus. An FPGA that could do a 500mhz 68060 could also emulate a PIV with much higher memory bandwidth. I don't have an A3000 but according to the internet, buster 11 hits 10mb/s with a PIV. DDR2 is orders of magnitude faster than that.
 
Throw in a floppy port that can use standard PC high density floppy drives, Ethernet, 96khz 32bit sound, sata, usb and I'm not sure there is much out of the A3000 that you'd still want to be using.

Yeah and then you'd need to re-write major chunks of the OS to support the  new hardware, plus you'd want some of the things that modern OS's have, so that there'll be very little of OS 3 you'd still be using....wait a minute..wait a minute...I think we've gone down this path already....

[ElPolloDiabl]

Don't throw the thread off on a tangent.
There are only two subjects: A CPU faster than an 060. It's in the works already.
Also the standalone FPGA based Amiga.

It will really be based on demand. Nobody is going to make a card unless there is demand for one.

[matthey]

Quite possibly but we are talking imaginary hardware here.

New standalone hardware is going to happen because it's too easy. Many will fail but there are several fpga projects in the works. Standalone makes the most sense. If there is a PS2 port for using a real Amiga keyboard and 9 pin joystick ports, what is there to miss? SATA, usb, PCIe, memory cards, most of this new stuff is fast and cheap.

The TG68k is reaching 68020-68030 speeds and is not fully pipelined but it may reach low 68040 speeds. A fully pipelined CPU in similar speed but larger fpga with smart caching should be 68040-68060 speed. A bigger fpga is a real plus for a faster CPU and leaves room for an FPU and MMU/MPU. That's why the Apollo aims for a Cyclone 5 minimum (that and ALMs are an advantage over LEs). The fpgaArcade is going to be hard pressed to fit an FPU in it's fpga. This is fine for what the fpgaArcade is targeting though. They would do better to focus on retro console emulation like Genesis and X68000 after the Amiga and Atari ST, IMO.

[psxphill]

Yeah and then you'd need to re-write major chunks of the OS to support the new hardware, plus you'd want some of the things that modern OS's have, so that there'll be very little of OS 3 you'd still be using....wait a minute..wait a minute...I think we've gone down this path already....

You'd just need drivers, not rewrite chunks of the OS. Ideally it would also be able to run in legacy mode where SATA appears like gayle ide or you could mount a hard drive image from a file on a USB stick and have it appear as a IDE/SCSI hard drive/cdrom etc.
 
The purpose of using SATA is more about getting cheap hardware than utilising all it's functionality, although if there was the option for that by replacing the scsi.device driver in kickstart then that would be great too. Even if it was just making it emulate IDE fix express.
 
I'm also more interested in a USB gamepad appearing like a 9 pin D joystick than being able to run a USB stack on the Amiga. Although if you could make the USB controller compatible with one of the existing Amiga solutions then that would be a bonus.
 
I'm not sure I'd bother with PS2, a USB to Amiga keyboard convertor would be better. http://ezhid.sourceforge.net/amikbd.html http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=64931
 
The simplicity of PS2 draws you in, but it's actually just hassle if you're also going to support a USB keyboard. People will expect to be able to use a PS2 or Amiga keyboard, which are different and you'd need to configure it (without using a keyboard). Only supporting USB is much easier as you just detect a keyboard and use it.

[bloodline]

if it was up to me, I'd just port the WinUAE hardware emulation to QEMU, and use QEMU's m68k dynamic-translation (JIT like) which works on any architecture.

Hang on... It's taken me a while but wouldn't this allow you to creat some "interesting" virtual hardware setups... Like an Amiga with an x86 or ARM as a CPU!? -edit- or even something really weird like a PPC!?