28 May 2024, 09:26 | #1 |
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Motorola's 68000 Series: Its Rise in Ten Computers
Someone wrote an article about the 68000 and the computers it powered. Interesting to know about its origins.
https://thechipletter.substack.com/p...es-its-rise-in |
28 May 2024, 18:11 | #2 |
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I always find it somewhat sobering that the 68020 was launched one year before the Amiga...
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28 May 2024, 18:19 | #3 |
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28 May 2024, 19:20 | #4 |
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How much would using the 68020 (or 010) have added to the A1000's cost in 1985, or the A500's in 1987? Using an 020 would also have presumably limited how much code could have been ST-ported (I assume an ST with an 020 or 030 has compatibility issues comparable to the A1200?).
If the 020 had been used in the A500 but not the A1000, you'd need some sort of boot options to at least disable the cache, otherwise a huge percentage of early Amiga games wouldnt've worked on it. That would have been a far higher proportion than when the A1200 launched, because by 1992 the 020 and higher were widely in use, and the A3000 was already out (games released after the A3000 seemed to have a higher chance of working on the A1200). |
28 May 2024, 19:39 | #5 |
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To be fair there's about a handful of titles before the Amiga 500 launch worth playing and I don't think it would have made a huge dent in the success of the machine if those titles wouldn't have worked (properly).
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28 May 2024, 20:05 | #6 | |||
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Quote:
Quote:
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28 May 2024, 20:23 | #7 | |
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Quote:
Before that people were attaching 68020 CPUs to the A1000. 68020 accelerator boards started appearing in 1986. |
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28 May 2024, 20:25 | #8 |
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We had a couple of 68020 based hp workstations around 1990 at the university, 8MB memory, continuously swapping if running X. For a home computer, the 68020 was way, way, way out of reach at this time.
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28 May 2024, 20:48 | #9 | |
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The article mention the main contributor to the 68000 : Nick Tredennick
Quote:
Unfortunately he passed away 2 years ago and it was at Los Gatos! |
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28 May 2024, 20:49 | #10 |
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The early Amiga games weren't great compared to Amiga games from its heyday, but they were great compared to existing C64 / Spectrum / in some cases ST games, so it would have been awkward to launch the A500 with an 020. Faery Tale Adventure comes to mind as one that fails on an 020, which was adored at the time. I'm assuming the cost would have been prohibitive for the A500 anyway, considering that in the UK at £500 on launch in late 1987 it was already £200 more than you could get an ST for?
How much would it have cost to launch the A2000 with an 020 instead of a 000 in 1987? You could ignore a few games incompatibilities . |
28 May 2024, 20:53 | #11 | |||
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Quote:
DTACK GROUNDED #35 - September 1984 Quote:
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