Apollo Accelerators – Amiga Classic accelerator boards
apollo-accelerators.com
apollo-accelerators.com
I also understood that there was work happening on a from-scratch system that could run as an Amiga and potentially Atari ST compatible as well and would not require legacy hardware at all. I'd pay money for that.
That said, I doubt they could get away with licensing it for $$ in quantities, I suspect that they'd run into legal problems at that point. But who knows?
This is demonstrated in these videos:
That said the second video does show a stock TOS running a game, so that's encouraging.
They probably threw in some replicated atari hardware into the core.
Flashing of the FPGA circuitry with a new CPU core is done while the system is running, and they keep increasing the execution speed of the CPU with every update. The thing is nuts.
In theory, once MMU support is added, it should be possible to port illumos back to MC68000, since SunOS 4 used to run on that CPU years back. Solaris zones, DTrace and ZFS on Amiga hardware... now that’s what I’d call a hacking project.
This will change in an upcoming release.
The scan doubler is shitty though: the quality varies with the monitor and it overheats. Jens knows about this because the manual mentions adding a small fan and since he was obviously aware of it, it should have been designed in.
BTW, Solaris 2.x and above (aka SunOS 5.x) never ran on the 68K.
SunOS 4.x (retroactively renamed Solaris 1.x) did, but it was a completely different code base than Solaris 2.x and above. I used to have a Sun 3/60 back in the day! My Amiga 3000 was a better machine.
Amiga did run a genuine System V Release 4.0 UNIX from AT&T ported over by Commodore. The link to the tape archive is on generationamiga.com in one of the articles.
Sun Microsystems almost bought the Amiga but Commodore screwed up the deal as usual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_Direct_Slot
You can typically pull some lines down and the CPU will stop clocking, or the accelerator card can follow the CPU clock and bang data directly into it. It provides very low-level and direct control of the CPU.
Early PCs would stack/piggy-back memory chips to increase capacity. This was possible because of how memory was addressed.
Another use is to find dead chips. If you put a working chip on top of a dead chip it will read the signals and work.
Finally, in the case of the Vampire and other accelerators for PLCC socketed chips, the accelerator hi-jacks the bus telling the original CPU to do nothing while it takes over the bus.
Electrically there is no trickery, think of each pin as plugging two cords into a power strip. Both get power even though there is one source.
This probably would not work with modern chip packaging and modern frequencies, but it was a common technique back in the day.
Back in the 80's you could bend a couple of the legs out of a second 6581, solder it to the first one, add a couple of wires (and maybe a diode? Can't quite remember), and now you had two sound chips for stereo sound.
These days for some reason people who choose to mod 64's make it unnecessarily complicated with tiny daughterboards and all kinds of needless circuitry. (They also learn how to do it from YouTube videos. We did it from ASCII text files!)
[0] http://forum.apollo-accelerators.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=190...
If you want the most modern AmigaOS to run on classic hardware that's obviously 3.9 which was released in 2000.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Aros/Platforms/68k_support
(AROS is an AmigaOS open source clone. Source compatible for all other platforms, such as Intel, binary compatible for 68000.)
Vampire v4 should have a standalone version.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_Fodder_(video_game) and a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyDGPlIkySA
Also I didn't even realize that scene was computer generated. That's amazing.
For those of us who prefer the real-deal this is a way of using original kit, but also making it faster + more ram + storage etc.
The Amiga hardware scene is very much alive and kicking and there's new products coming out all the time.
Original hardware with modern FPGA-based expansions is a lot better in terms of retaining the feel of the Amiga and not compromising on performance.
That said I am looking forward to the V4 standalone and A1200 V4 cards, both being instabuys for me.
"Updated emulation core from WinUAE 3300b2."
Since then, WinUAE has had _6_ major releases, the changelog is visible on the front page and you can simply go there and read it, the list of features I consider killer is too big:
Old school computer are pretty slow, but they react faster than our modern computers.
There was this comparison of "time to first character" or something like that - when you press a button, how long is it until you see a character on screen? IIRC old school computers like Apple II and Amigas won over Intel Core i* monsters.
edit: https://www.pcgamer.com/the-latency-problem-why-modern-gamin...
I still miss the Amiga magic and wish we had something similar now, not just boring x86/64..
The Amiga was technically better, in a way that can't easily be emulated. The Amiga video hardware could generate an interrupt at the end of the video frame output. As a result, an application could do all its work for the current frame, then call a "wait for vsync" function. That made it yield to the OS scheduler. When the interrupt fired, the scheduler would handle it and reschedule the app VERY QUICKLY. It was almost like a real-time OS. It knew that video generating was time critical.
I don't think you can't do that on Windows or Linux. The video hardware _might_ support interrupt generation but it isn't wired into the OS in the same way. You might get close to being able to use the "wait for vsync" in full screen DirectX apps, but even then it's a nightmare of video driver lies and OS scheduler complexity instead of a nice clean, simple, reliable feature all applications can use.
I'd be interested to know if Wayland solves this problem.
Heck, back in the day, even though I loved my Amiga, I preferred the editor of Turbo C to more sluggish, font rendering editors on the Amiga. DOS in text mode was unconditionally fast.
Maybe VR will drive the technology back to low latency. Latency in VR equals users throwing up.
I might now try to recreate the classic Amiga Bezier lines screen saver.
The next day my machine had rebooted itself (presumably to apply an update) and now the stutter is gone.
That's the kind of thing that didn't happen on an Amiga :-)
I've got one in an Amiga 1000 and it's a lot of fun :)
Your A1000 will be able to do up to 1390 x 1024 x 32 via RTG. Any software which already targets RTG should be able to make use of that immediately.
You’ll also have 128 MB of FAST RAM.
I’m given to understand that eventually it might be possible to do 1920 x 1280 x 32. We’ll have to wait and see, but every core update makes it better and better.
I'm keenly looking forward to the Gold 3 update which will give it 4MB chip ram and AGA output via HDMI.
It supports SIMD “AMMX” instructions as well. They invented additional instructions not found in the MC68060.