Baremetal Amiga Emulator

[bloodline]

Originally Posted by MartinW

Could someone summarise at what point this is now after 15 pages of thread please?

That's certainly some insane speed!!

Ok, so let me describe what Omega currently is: It’s basically a 68000 Emulator (using the free open source Musashi code, as used in other projects like mame), with just enough of the Amiga OCS hardware emulated to get AmigaOS 1.3 and AmigaOS 2.x booting (OS3 boots, but does something odd with the display) and running os legal software.

The lack of hardware emulation overhead means that it can run fast with fairly modest host resources, but means that not many games/hardware banging software work properly. (That said games like Lemmings do work, but with display glitches).

All I/O (graphics, mouse and keyboard) is via a small set of functions, to allow easy porting to new hosts (particularly hosts which don’t have an operating system). Currently, while in the development phase, it uses SDL2.0 as its host layer which allow it to compile on any platform with SDL2.0 library available.

The only way to currently load software is via ADF floppy disk images, and four floppy disk images are supported (Amiga hardware limitation).

I also have some interesting features in development, which will make it more a useful on Baremetal systems.

Any questions, please ask.

[kamelito]

Will it be possible with a switch to just run under RTG for maximum speed those eliminating HW emulation overhead ala Draco?

[bloodline]

Originally Posted by kamelito

Will it be possible with a switch to just run under RTG for maximum speed those eliminating HW emulation overhead ala Draco?

Yes, that’s the plan, the 68000 Emulator has unrestricted access to all RAM above the lowest 32meg, so drivers can be written in AmigaOS which just access the host hardware directly.

Obviously if any of the emulated Amiga DMA channels is off, then that hardware feature doesn’t get any host CPU time... Though currently, I don’t have any method to stop the CIAs as AmigaOS relies heavily upon them.

My target is the RaspberryPi

[R4M]

Did someone download the file

Specifications%20Gayle%20-%20Manual-ENG.pdf

and is willing to post it in the zone? It was mentioned some posts ago, but it is not available there anymore.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by R4M

Did someone download the file

Specifications%20Gayle%20-%20Manual-ENG.pdf

and is willing to post it in the zone? It was mentioned some posts ago, but it is not available there anymore.

It's in the EAB FTP site under "~Uploads/DH/PDF Schematics, Service & User Manuals/Gayle/Gayle.pdf" so all you have to do is look up the FTP site.

[bloodline]

Unfortunately, real life events have overtaken me. Work commitments, the impending arrival of my second child, and other things not going as planned so I’ve had to put this project on hold for a little while.

But the source code is available, feel free to have a play/fork/branch etc., I will monitor it and should be able to answer questions (do a few bits here and there).

[malko]

Congratulations to you and to the mother

Probably that between diapers and bottles of milk you'll have five minutes for the/a rest

[Radertified]

I'm a big fan of BMC64 on the Pi. Almost instant on, zero lag and being based on Vice means support for everything (disks, tapes, carts, expansions, etc).

If this emulator was anything like BMC64, it would've been something special. It's a shame that development stopped but it's understandable. Fingers crossed that someday development picks up again

[Samurai_Crow]

Dr. Michal Schulz is doing a standalone JIT for running 680x0 machine language on 64-bit ARM. See https://github.com/michalsc/Emu68.

[Radertified]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Dr. Michal Schulz is doing a standalone JIT for running 680x0 machine language on 64-bit ARM. See https://github.com/michalsc/Emu68.

That's awesome. Now for the custom chips

[Rugruth]

Awesome!

I wish you the best luck with this project, imagine this inside the upcoming retrogames Amiga case/keyboard. Im already drooling.

[skan]

Originally Posted by Radertified

That's awesome. Now for the custom chips

Originally Posted by Rugruth

Awesome!

I wish you the best luck with this project, imagine this inside the upcoming retrogames Amiga case/keyboard. Im already drooling.

Yeah, interesting times indeed...

I wonder how far we are from a proper full-blown baremetal A500/1200 solution... is it feasible? Amiberry / UAE4ARM / Omega / etc... the pieces are out there mostly, we just need to clean it up a bit!

[bloodline]

Originally Posted by skan

Yeah, interesting times indeed...

I wonder how far we are from a proper full-blown baremetal A500/1200 solution... is it feasible? Amiberry / UAE4ARM / Omega / etc... the pieces are out there mostly, we just need to clean it up a bit!

The biggest issue with bare metal is that the emulation needs to handle the (host hardware) I/O as part of the emulating process (where the host operating system usually does this). My project was only really to get amiga hardware emulation “good Enough” to get AmigaOS booting, from there I am planning to write exec style devices to allow AmigaOS to interact directly with the actual RaspberryPi hardware... this reduced the emulation burden (hopefully eventually down to just the CPU).

This is slow going as I really have no time (my full time job as a Public Health Analyst and COVID is taking all my time!). But Thomas Richter has given me some really helpful explanations as to how to write exec style devices, so I’m doing little bits here and there!

[skan]

Originally Posted by bloodline

My project was only really to get amiga hardware emulation “good Enough” to get AmigaOS booting, from there I am planning to write exec style devices to allow AmigaOS to interact directly with the actual RaspberryPi hardware... this reduced the emulation burden (hopefully eventually down to just the CPU).

So let's say full chipset compatibility is not a main goal, but you aim more for an Amiga-compatible (DraCo style) system? Cool anyway!

This is slow going as I really have no time (my full time job as a Public Health Analyst and COVID is taking all my time!). But Thomas Richter has given me some really helpful explanations as to how to write exec style devices, so I’m doing little bits here and there!

And I'd say you job is waaaay more important right now! Kudos!

[bloodline]

Originally Posted by skan

So let's say full chipset compatibility is not a main goal, but you aim more for an Amiga-compatible (DraCo style) system? Cool anyway!

Yes, that’s good description... Essentially an ARM Draco, but with more chipset compatibility (since I’ve implemented way more of the chipset emulation than I initially planned (I was just having too much fun)). So many games and demos do actually work if they aren’t too fussy about timing (this will never be, and was never intended to be, as good at hardware compatibility as WinUAE).

And I'd say you job is waaaay more important right now! Kudos!

But far far more boring!

[skan]

Originally Posted by bloodline

Yes, that’s good description... Essentially an ARM Draco, but with more chipset compatibility (since I’ve implemented way more of the chipset emulation than I initially planned (I was just having too much fun)). So many games and demos do actually work if they aren’t too fussy about timing (this will never be, and was never intended to be, as good at hardware compatibility as WinUAE).

...but you never know!

[bloodline]

I recently found this project... it seems the perfect candidate to provide the Host Layer for Omega... if I can just find time!!

https://github.com/jhhoward/Faux86

-edit- and here is the base layer:

https://github.com/rsta2/circle

[Radertified]

Originally Posted by bloodline

https://github.com/rsta2/circle

Worth noting that BMC64 uses circle-stdlib so Circle is tried and tested for some baremetal emulators.

[pixie]

There's some hardware being setup for classic with the same philosophy of this project:
https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm

[skan]

Originally Posted by pixie

There's some hardware being setup for classic with the same philosophy of this project:
https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm

Not really the same as pistorm is linux hosted and far from being bare metal AFAIK?