Apollo 68080 – Motorola 680x0 High Performance Processor in FPGA
apollo-core.com
apollo-core.com
Pretty cool. It's too bad there's not more energy put into manufacturing legacy hardware with modern processes… something like a Pi Zero sized 68k machine capable of running System 7.5 or Mac OS 8 (which handle monochrome displays well) hooked up to an e-ink display in an ultrabook case would make for a very compelling writing/focus machine… it'd boot nearly instantly from modern storage and would have resource usage in the ballpark of that of a headless Linux install while sporting a full UI.
Probably doable, BTW. Office (and home) networks were much less hostile back then.
Only a miniscule market, but still...
Refresh rate depends on how much of the screen is updating at once. Scrolling a whole page is pretty bad, updating a small region is reasonably quick. Some devices have an 'A2 mode' that makes it somewhat faster by just doing black/white instead of grayscale.
Also the e-ink display running classic is very reminiscent of one of the early LCD displays in this old thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable
You can try http://www.mosis.com/ or https://europractice-ic.com/ depending on which side of the Atlantic you are. They are intended to make small batch/prototype fabrication processes available to industry and academia.
OTOH, I am not optimistic the demand for such a CPU would be sufficient for any size of run that could end up in a low-cost part.
I had a similar idea for a portable writing/focus sub-notebook, except using Linux rather than MacOS. At the time, e-ink displays weren't good enough, but now they are nearly there in terms of refresh rate.
I was thinking of an appliance that would mostly be used for editing text, a A5-format or 10" sub-notebook with a very good keyboard and e-ink screen, and potentially one-week long battery life (due to a low-power CPU and the fact that e-ink doesn't consume electricity unless there is a change).
The iPad isn't a competitor to this in the sense that it has no or no good keyboard and a poor screen for writing/reading/editing text professionally (glossy, no e-paper quality).
Drop in replacement for the 68000 that boots in milliseconds (about the same as a real 68000) and leverages the whole rest of the system as is, but with 1000 MIPS of 68K goodness and 512MB of RAM.
There have been accusations of this being simply a Coldfire ripoff based on leaked information [1] but also a lot of people have complained that they delete critical posts from their web forum and discord.
The core is buggy and not really fully compatible with Motorola processors. They've also implemented their own extensions (AMMX). The Amiga scene has had countless peddlers of proprietary hardware, trying to vendor lock-in a substantial userbase. My opinion is that people are better served with Mister FPGA which is completely open and/or other open solutions (The Buffee project, PiStorm).
I mean, MiST/MiSTer comes out of the Atari ST community, for example. That's what it was originally designed for, an ST core, and all the vhdl is open source.
There is also the open source stuff: for example Apollo have abandoned CoffinOS due to licensing issues and are now developing ApolloOS, which is a fork of AROS, which is an open source reimplementation of AmigaOS. Free Software ideas aren't as prevalent as I'd like in the Amiga community but they are there (plenty of GNU software was ported to Amiga via ixemul.library so they've always been there).
The Amiga community will be better off with fully open source community projects.
We're a smaller community, but I don't see this kind of fighting on Atari ST forums. And we have a good quality fully open sourced GPL reimplementation of the operating system, too, with a pretty awesome development team.
There's a font organiser which used to be sold by its author for £10, but was bought up by another company and is now being sold at £45. A personal accounts package that was £30 is now £95. A long outdated word processor, £60. Oh, and the tool to format SD cards - that's £15.
Who really pays that kind of money for a retro 'toy'?
http://www.apollo-core.com/faq.html (top-level nav item)
http://www.apollo-core.com/index.html (top-level nav item)
http://www.apollo-core.com/apollOS.html (linked to from the bottom of http://www.apollo-core.com/features.html )
Clicking Learn More takes me to https://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/
Then I somehow found my way to http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm which has a completely different top-level navigation. What?
And then I click Order and it takes me to http://www.apollo-computer.com/ , in a new tab. Can you just have stuff on one domain (with an SSL certificate) and consolidate information / headers / footers? It's also concerning there's an entire forum (with tens of thousands of messages) with no https...
Then you get an email from a domain that has "apollo" in it but is not mentioned or linked to anywhere on the main site. The person sending the email says your order is ready and asks you to send ~500 EUR to some personal bank account in Ireland.
Uhh... no? I've said thanks, but let's use paypal and I'll cover the extra fees. The idea was that if it turns out to be a scam I can get the money back.
In the end everything was fine. Got the V1200, it worked. Also I got some candy, yay! But yeah, the whole process seemed a bit sketchy.
Don't expect it to beat Apple M1 anytime soon.
Or an Amiga CPU
It's not intended to be a replacement for a modern desktop. But it is impressive if you're into the retrocomputing / emulation scene.
Who cares. The software for this one is better (:
"IBM considered the 68000 for the IBM PC but chose the Intel 8088 because the 68000 was not ready; Walden C. Rhines wrote that thus "Motorola, with its superior technology, lost the single most important design contest of the last 50 years" -- Wikipedia
Too bad we missed out on M68K IBM PCs, but in the end Macs ended up running x86 (ARM next I suppose).
On the other hand, with the volume of units that IBM Compatibles had, it may have allowed more resources to push that boundary.
For a long time, x86 was a joke when compared to PPC. As it was compared to 68K’s right up to the 68040.
And, as such things go, it was until it wasn’t. Now, the tables have turned and ARM is proving easier to tweak into higher performance designs.
I still have a preliminary instruction set manual for the 68000 printed in 1979. At that time I was learning 8080A machine code. When I saw that book the hardware became something I HAD to get my hands on eventually. I finally got to code one in assembly in college and it was every bit as enjoyable as I had imagined.
BTW my dad wrote a disassembler for the 8080 in basic, and to simplify everything he rewrote all the mnemonics in a far simpler form than the official syntax from Intel. I still have the 16x16 instruction map. Because of that, the 68000s primary advantage was the increased number of registers and their 32bit size along with some better instructions. The pain of proper 8080 syntax was never a thing for me.
If you or he still has his notes, would you be able to ZIP them up and upload them to archive.org?
Not sure why, we were the only 2 people on earth to ever use that. To summarize, he used single letters for verbs and then single letters for register names: a, b,c, d,e, h,l for the 8-bit registers and x,y,z for the 16 bit pairs (b,c) (d,e) (h,l). It turns out you could always figure out some implied stuff. MAY was move a to y, but since A is 8 bits and Y is 16 this meant Y was an address, whereas MAD would be move A to D as an 8 bit register-to-register copy. This lead to all mnemonics being 3 characters or less. There could also be 8 or 16 bit immediate values. The disassembler used a 4 byte decode table - 3 characters and a size (0,1,2) of the immediate data. It was super clean. I'll post is somewhere some day. I still have my Interact computer in its original box waiting to find a nice museum somewhere. And lots of tapes including a bunch of little kid created basic programs. Hard copies of all the "Interaction" newsletters from the local users group too.
So as games got more complex, and clock rates higher, a 68k would definitely outperform.
The 6502 is very cycle efficient and its ridiculously small register makes it fast to respond to interrupts, which I guess in a game machine is a good thing. But machines like the Amiga, Sharp X68000, and lots of arcade games packed in a bunch of custom video hardware too.
Looking back, the similar but not nearly as successful NS320xx architecture was better. Atari apparently even prototyped it for use in what became the (68k based) Atari ST, but the first chips produced in that series were too buggy.
Both the 68k series and the NS32k series were heavily 'inspired' by the VAX.
One thing that makes the 68k cool is that it's about as "retro" of an architecture as you can get that still supports a modern C/C++ toolchain. GCC still (mostly) supports it.
The NS parts were really a due-diligence affair, and we looked at them just to make sure we weren't missing out on something really great (we weren't).
Definitely a prettier architecture than the 68K, with better toolchains and development support at the time. Didn't make up for the bad, though.
That and the story about Atari talking with Microsoft about an early version of Windows for their hardware.
Another factor in the 68K's favor was that it was pretty easy to buy off-the-shelf 68K-based workstations (e.g., Motorola VME-10, the Apple Lisa), which let us do 4-5 months of software development while waiting for the actual ST hardware.
I miss 1980s boot times.
I doubt many people would be picking it for new designs nowadays.
I don't know what "Legacy" means to NXP, exactly. They're probably not making new, compatible cores. But if you're buying more than a few hundred per year you're likely to be able to do it for a while yet. Microchip, I know, use the phrase "customer-driven obsolescence", which means that as long as people are buying the chips they will keep making them. They still have a few 5V programmable logic devices that are maybe 25 years old but still available in onesies, and some from that series that I've heard they make as a sort of "print on demand" system if you buy the 500 or however many are in one batch. In general obsolescence in embedded hardware is very different to PC software, especially the kind that's normally discussed here.
Basically, in embedded products you end up touching everything from the app, OS (if there is one), device drivers all the way down to the on-chip peripherals.
I just doubt they can compete against ARM on price at this point. Or I suspect on power consumption.
Not a fan of yet another target for Amiga software - we already have 68000, '020+, PowerPC AmigaOS, PowerPC MorphOS, PowerPC WarpUp, PowerPC PowerUp... And now they want to add "68080"? No, thank you.
I don’t see any prices on their website…
(Bet you thought you'd be able to just buy one on Amazon, huh? Me too...)
And it can JIT the 68K code into native instructions as it goes, so it’ll end much faster than anything implementable on a cheap FPGA. A much faster 68K doesn’t make much sense for a gaming machine, but makes a lot of sense emulating a Unix workstation or a 68K Mac.