Comment by Annatar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Annatar | Hacker News Reader

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I’ve got one in my Amiga 500 and it’s crazy: bumps the speed up to around 234 MHz, runs in 1390 x 1024 x 32 through RTG SAGA (“Super AGA”) driver and a HDMI output, MicroSDHC reader onboard (plus 44-pin IDE), 64-bit superscalar MC68080 (not a typo), 128 MB memory + realtime clock + 1 MB CHIP. The newest core adds FPU support and they’re considering adding MMU support too. I’m running AmigaOS 3.9... on an Amiga 500.

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.

Can you still run everything (in original color/resolution modes) on the amiga monitor or does it only then work on the HDMI output?

For now any screens using the Amiga's on board chips will use the original video outputs. Only RTG screens are displayed via HDMI.

This will change in an upcoming release.

If you have a scan doubler from Individual Computers and your monitor supports multiple inputs, the hardware banging resolutions go to that over VGA and Vampire goes over HDMI. If you don’t see it on HDMI you have to switch to VGA.

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.

I'd love to get one of these... The Amiga was my favorite computer growing up in the late 80's, early 90's.

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.

I know this, which is why I explicitly mentioned SunOS 4.x. However remnants of MC68000 are sprinkled throughout the code. It should prove an interesting challenge to port an ultramodern OS to Amiga hardware. Vampire could make this possible.

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.

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