About Coldfire. We all know that the main problem to use it at Amiga is not complete set of opcodes. But I remember that same problem was when Amiga users started using 040/060 and some clever guys wrote special libraries and patches for missing opcodes emulation.

What fundamental problem to write same emulation library for Coldfire? Yes, it may be slower at some operations that native 68k opcodes, but I think that it is not a big problem, because it is possible to build a lot of new low-cost and fast accelerators that will replace our old Blizzards, DCEs and so on.

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A1200 + (looking for bppc060) + bvppc + Indivision AGA MKII + OS 3.9
A3000 + OS 3.9

AFAIK there are some libraries for Coldfire, that can emulate missing functions, but also, to my knowledge, that also slows everything down.

@Thread, I really do hope that UltimatePPC will materialze, but sometimes, no news is bad news.

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Coldfire: forget it. Elbox's one demo of the "Dragon" showed that at 200 (or was it 300?) mhz, emulating an 040 the coldfire clocks in around...33mhz 040 speed. Whee. Don't bring up that thing that some folks did with the Atari ST, either. They extensively rewrote the OS to get it to work on the coldfire, and they emulate when necessary.

Power Vixxen: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.

I'd rather hope the "Ultimate PPC" guys have sorted out the problem(s) with using a non-OS4-capable PPC CPU, or made the switch fairly easily. Otherwise it'll wind up as more vaporware.

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The problem with AmigaOS on PPC isn't that PPC is big-endian. The problem with AmigaOS on PPC is that PPC is dead-endian.

@coriolis

DRAGON ColdFire. DRAGON is a ColdFire-based accelerator card combined with the PCI/AGP Expansion busboard.

http://www.elbox.com/news_04_12_17.html

it was demoed in November 2006

http://tdolphin.org/amikrak/amizaduszki2006.php

There were some videos but they are dead links now, one of pictures shows an A1200 whit dragon inside.

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Facebook::LiveForIt Software for AmigaOS

Quote:

I'd rather hope the "Ultimate PPC" guys have sorted out the problem(s) with using a non-OS4-capable PPC CPU, or made the switch fairly easily

Why these guys use non-OS4-capable CPU from the beginning of project? I can't imagine more strange thing for a time-killing than doing initially not working prototype (and they are even demonstrated the photos of prototype!!!)

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A1200 + (looking for bppc060) + bvppc + Indivision AGA MKII + OS 3.9
A3000 + OS 3.9

@coriolis

Woot…? Where did they demonstrate it? Are you confused, I showed el-box demonstration of Dragon not UltimatePPC.

All we have from UltimatePPC is some screenshots of almost complete prototype, with out the bus connector.

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about coldfire.. the main problem is so far i understand the kickstart would not work due to differences in instruction set and memory map. at the time coldfire attempts were launched there there was no working aros68k. today kickstart could be substituted and some sort of emu or trapping could be run immediately via setpatch to ensure compatibility. im not saying thats worth the deal, but things have changed, and may be reconsidered.

@coriolis

Quote:

Why these guys use non-OS4-capable CPU from the beginning of project?

actually id prefer they d forget an os4 or wos compatibility and go for full 68k emu on top of a really fast cpu no, matter what architecture. i would surely buy into that.

Last edited by wawa on 22-Dec-2012 at 07:39 PM.

@wawa

Quote:

actually id prefer they d forget an os4 or wos compatibility and go for full 68k emu on top of a really fast cpu no, matter what architecture. i would surely buy into that.

me too! but I can't understand why they don't want to make A1200 version

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A1200 + (looking for bppc060) + bvppc + Indivision AGA MKII + OS 3.9
A3000 + OS 3.9

@Thread

I read somewhere that the problem with Coldfire is not only the missing op-codes,
but some op-codes do different things. It's difficult to trap for valid op-codes.

I think I read this on one of the Natami threads.

Wol..

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It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.~Albert Einstein

@Wol

Quote:

I read somewhere that the problem with Coldfire is not only the missing op-codes, but some op-codes do different things. It's difficult to trap for valid op-codes.

so it is need to patch a kernel, etc. to prevent use these opcodes

@Bobo

you mean amiga kernel, the exec? thats why i mentioned aros..

At least the amijoe card was made for A1200 but it never worked 400Mhz is most welcome, but I got a strange feeling a 400Mhz+ Blizzard card will surface one day, its seems dram bandwidth maybe just holding it back as there is little point in putting in a very fast processor and having a bottleneck with the old memory.

Either way it does not matter, expect world record for dram bandwidth on classic amiga, expect world record highest sgram performance ever across any platform that use permedia 2.

Expect another world record possibly in another area on classic amiga, its awaiting OS4.2

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The Machine: Bride Of The Pin•Bot by Williams Electronics

Quote:

There were some videos but they are dead links now, one of pictures shows an A1200 whit dragon inside.

I think I got them on HD somewhere, will have a look if someone is interested

@Fred_AROS

Dragon and Shark are dead!
Ultimate PPC will be only options if theyfinish it!
Christmas 2012 is expected date for pre-orders...but something goes wrong I think...procesor etc..
No info from July...

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F1 Srbija

@Comi

Yeah; I wonder if they put the brakes on and start working on an OS-4 compatible board. 'course even if they did there's still no guarantee OS-4 would be ported to it by the Friedens, so...yeah. Regardless I hope they have the best of luck even if it only winds up being a PPC sitting there running a 68k JIT emulation so A3000 and A4000 users have a nice, fast accelerator.

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The problem with AmigaOS on PPC isn't that PPC is big-endian. The problem with AmigaOS on PPC is that PPC is dead-endian.

@coriolis

Didn't they demo a prototype SharkPPC running OS3.9 a couple of years back?

Possibly thinking of different project but was sure I've seen it somewhere!

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A1200, 68060/64MB/1.2GB/WiFi/AGAtoCRT/OS3.9 Pegasos I, G3 600Mhz/512/9200SE/80GB WinUAE, Ryzen 5 2400G/Vega11, 8GB DDR4, 256GB SSD,Win 10 Pro x64 Amiga Forever !

@TheDungeonDelver

Quote:

Yeah; I wonder if they put the brakes on and start working on an OS-4 compatible board. 'course even if they did there's still no guarantee OS-4 would be ported to it by the Friedens, so...yeah. Regardless I hope they have the best of luck even if it only winds up being a PPC sitting there running a 68k JIT emulation so A3000 and A4000 users have a nice, fast accelerator.

^
the whole content of your post being actually that they need to drop os4 since nothing can be granted there, and actually they even would be best advised to drop ppc since most likely the best solution would be to run 68k emu on it and in that case there is better choice... ... . ..

@DBAlex

Quote:

Didn't they demo a prototype SharkPPC running OS3.9 a couple of years back? Possibly thinking of different project but was sure I've seen it somewhere!

You're thinking of their Dragon board. I guess they didn't get the performance they were looking for with coldfire. Not sure why they didn't make a 68k CPU board for the Dragon since it would have been a much better setup than the Mediator.

@wawa

Quote:

the whole content of your post being actually that they need to drop os4 since nothing can be granted there, and actually they even would be best advised to drop ppc since most likely the best solution would be to run 68k emu on it and in that case there is better choice... ... . ..

Their project bears name "UltimatePPC" - that means OS4, or bust.