Terrible Fire Accelerators

[plasmab]

After posting a fair bit on other peoples threads I thought i should actually start my own one and keep the noise off their threads...

Ethos of my project is to produce designs that are GPL for the Amiga and ST. I have no intention of selling these directly (although i may sell my excess) and I am happy for anyone to make and sell these boards (and time permitting I will support anyone who does) but if you modify the design you must publish the modifications (and I will enforce that).

The boards I have created are...

TF520 - 68020 research board (No RAM, No IDE, No FPU)
TF530 - 68030 board (32bit 2Mb 12ns Static RAM - Zorro II, Experimental IDE, 32 bit FPU).
TF328 - CD32 RAM + IDE Board (8Mb 32 bit DRAM + Gayle Emulated IDE).
TF534S - 68030 (32bit 4Mb 55ns Static RAM - Zorro III, SATA, 32bit FPU)
TF534I - 68030 (32bit 4Mb 55ns Static RAM - Zorro III, 44Pin IDE, 32bit FPU)


Planned

TF540S - 68040FEV (fixed frequency 25Mhz) (32bit 32Mb SDRAM, SATA, NO FPU)

[Pat the Cat]

Ohhh,,, I get it. You are working up to a full CD32 accelerator, by practising making boards as small as you can, at each stage.

Very canny. ("Smart", "Wise").

[wmsteele]

Amazing work PlasmaB... can't wait to see something for the CD32.

[plasmab]

Don't suppose anyone knows if this is what an FPU is supposed to look like when memory mapped?


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[plasmab]

Just posted a new video..

[ Show youtube player ]

[plasmab]

Some A500 frame limited game suggestions needed. How can i show off the speed on camera.

[Locutus]

The classic example is Frontier Elite II.

[emufan]

nice project, respect. cool board design
there was a game demo by gunnar (apollo/vampire), 194x - which had a framecounter,
but i cannot find a link for it. IIRC it should run on any amiga,
so it could be a benchmark for your board aswell. maybe someone else can provide a link.

[plasmab]

Found it

http://www.greyhound-data.com/gunnar...page=downloads

Unfortunately its 16mb of ram + GFX card only. Oh well.

[Locutus]

Elite doesn't have any weirdo requirements if needed you can even run it of floppy.

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by Locutus

Elite doesn't have any weirdo requirements if needed you can even run it of floppy.

I've been using Elite II. I find Elite is a bit crap on anything except an Archimedes.

[emufan]

Originally Posted by plasmab

Found it

yep, thats the one - I could not remember the requirements

Originally Posted by Locutus

Elite doesn't have any weirdo requirements if needed you can even run it of floppy.

yes, indeed, but something with a framecounter/fps display would be of good help, i thought.

[robinsonb5]

When tinkering with the Minimig FPGA core I tended to use Zeewolf 2 - it benefits both from the faster CPU and also from Fast RAM.

[plasmab]

That and Epic might be good.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

Zeewolf 2.

Ha. Very good choice for testing purposes. Frontier on an A3000 25MHz was pretty much stutter free, but I've no idea what the frame rate was...20Hz or better, I guess. NTSC mode helps too, IIRC.

MicroProse sims like GS2000 or M1 Tank Platoon are pretty good, because LIKE Frontier, they also have some attempt at real physical world modelling. BUT all Microprose sims were password protected, I think. Not sure about that, but they would be good test alternatives, in my opinion. I can't remember many others off the top of my head. Driving, flying, and racing games are probably a good genre. You might want to consider loading at non-floppy speeds, and a lot of sims are multi-floppy. M1 Tank Platoon isn't.

TerribleFire, I'm not too sure what I can do to help, apart from maybe try building a couple in a couple months, and I'm awfully busy for a week or so, but...

... after that, I'll get Eagle fired up and see if I can look your projects over and help suggest stuff.

I'm not a great developer and pretty slow, and it's a slow boat you're taking in the long run. But I like your goals very much.

I think the longest Amiga MC program I've ever written was about half a K. And that spent 99% of it's time executing NOPs. But, it was a real time app, and works very nicely. Never released any of that stuff, haven't coded for 20 years.

[Amiga1992]

Thank you plasmab for your efforts and especially for caring about the CD32 I'll be looking with great interest, hoping someone goes and builds some of your boards "en masse" for us to be able to get them.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by plasmab

I find Elite is a bit crap on anything except an Archimedes.

Brit detected!

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by Locutus

Brit detected!

Indeed. I did an implemenation of the Archie for the MiST board...

https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-b...r/cores/archie

There is a bit of tension between Apollo and MiST... I feel like i'm a bit stuck in the middle.

[jediknight]

plasmab once you designed your 030 board with everything on it working wouldnt it be easy to keep that board and just swap the cpu to the 040 but keep all the other features of the 030 board?

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by jediknight

plasmab once you designed your 030 board with everything on it working wouldnt it be easy to keep that board and just swap the cpu to the 040 but keep all the other features of the 030 board?

Hell no. It will need rerouted completely which will take about 1-2 weeks. It will also need a larger CPLD (the data bus needs to go completely through a CPLD)...

I understand why you might think that but I invite you to try it once i push the sources.. should do that later this week.

EDIT: The schematic is the easy bit. Its routing that takes time.