New Buffee (ARM 68K Emulator) Accelerator In Development

[fgh]

What a cool project! Awesome work, I want at least two

Nonarkitten : A suggestion regarding CDTV compatibility:
Cdtv.device and cdfs.device from the CDTV extended ROM fail to work with any RAM in the Zorro 3 memory space present, as they attempt to DMA into it.. (https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/forum/vi...=1951&start=10)

So a firmware feature to set system RAM (limited to 8MB-10MB) to Zorro 2 space would be required in order to use the CDTV as a CDTV.

Many CDTV's have a switch (mod) connected to J15, which disables the extended ROM, turning it into an A500. So a jumper to toggle Z2/Z3 would be ideal, it could be coupled to the same switch as CDTV J15.
(90% of the time I use the CDTV, I'd rather have Z3 RAM than the CDROM/remote)


Finally, a less likely suggestion:
As there will never be a disk interface, but 'huge' amounts of RAM, is there any chance you could make a feature to pre-fill the RAM with user content (updateable, ideally). I'd be very happy with just 64MB RAM and a 960MB RAD: drive.
(Would require user configuration, and FastRAD to use fast RAM)

[seb132]

Originally Posted by McTrinsic

Any IDE device for the 68k slot would do.

There are some homebrew options.

Could you point me to a link ot 2 of existing solutions ?
Wicher ?

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by seb132

Could you point me to a link ot 2 of existing solutions ?
Wicher ?

https://www.pcbway.com/project/share..._Emulator.html

maybe?

[seb132]

Thanks.
Cool but not auto boot, which means booting from a floppy with a reduced startup-sequence, then continue on the CF card adapter mounted on this board...?

[Promilus]

Wasn't Mika Leinonen IDE autobooting with kick 2.05+ ? I think I saw design on pcbway as well...

[voyager_1701e]

Originally Posted by seb132

Thanks.
Cool but not auto boot, which means booting from a floppy with a reduced startup-sequence, then continue on the CF card adapter mounted on this board...?

I've built a few of these and they work well except for the no auto-booting, but its cheap as to build!

[seb132]

I’ll remember that, thanks!

[fgh]

Mika (MKL) has several designs.
The one called IDE68K autoboots. (The simpler one linked above is called A500IDE and does not)

http://www.mklboards.fi/ide/index.html

[seb132]

Ahhhh yes. IDE68k. That’s the one I was thinking of, I believe...

[Yulquen74]

Very cool, I want at least 2 as well! Nice to see an accelerator with such amount of speed and memory that does not render the original custom chips useless, but rather makes the most out of what they are. I also like that the board facilitates signals for external bus-masters, which in theory could support external controllers like the common old (but still very capable) A590 and similar. To get it working with the Buffee, the accelerator would have to allow the A590 to autoconfig during reset, do proper bus arbitration with BR/BG/BGACK, and it should also have a lump of fastram in the 24 bit area (the A590 can DMA into the entire 24bit area if allowed) instead of installing a maximum of only 2MB in the A590 itself.

[eXeler0]

I'm really no hardware expert but a solution like this is inevitably going to have some bottlenecks. If its a problem or not will depend on the application. The chipset in Amiga was elegantly designed around the humble 7MHz 68k. When the CPU and custom-chipset get separated too much (perforamce wise), the system becomes "unbalanced" (chips that made sense in the original design lose something when they sit next to an uber cpu). But in this case its cool ;-) the devs have this "scaling down" to fit your needs -design mentality which is great.
(But running the CPU at max might be similar to something like having a Geforce 3090 card rendering Quake 1 at 1000fps, but you're playing it on a display that's locked at 50Hz ;-)

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

I'm really no hardware expert but a solution like this is inevitably going to have some bottlenecks. ...

Aren't those the exact same "problems" every single accelerator for classic Amiga faces?
It is meant to provide a fast (pseudo)CPU and lots of RAM for old Amigas - nothing more.

[Promilus]

@eXeler0 - I'm afraid it's not a valid metaphor. Even on 50Hz display you'll get decent experience and you really won't get anything serious past 120 so all those fps above doesn't actually mean a thing. With amiga and super fast cpu it's quite different. It's like having Core i7 with Riva 128ZX. Sure - amiga with fast cpu works but cpu speed alone will be severely limited due to the same slow chip mem, the same small chip mem, the same slow chipset and limited display modes and the same pio0 ide if you get some solutions (interna or external) for A500.
So in many games - there won't be a benefit. In disk operations - there won't be a benefit. In archives - there should be decent benefits. In decoding (mp3 and so on) - there should be great benefit. In rendering - there should be benefit. Other than that - I doubt you'll see much of the difference. Many modern turbo cards include RTG but that's mostly because it allows you to connect amiga to modern tv or monitor since even SCART is rarely present nowadays. RTG has one drawback - it doesn't work with most chipset-oriented games (I'd use PAL games for short from now). You need scandoubler for that and it costs extra. Fortunately now it is possible to use fairly decent "kind of" scandoubler in form of RPI zero and some additional logic between it and denise. But - modern RTG gives also new modes (like Full HD, Trucolor) which rpi zero scandoubler + ECS cannot (but at least hires interlaced doesn't hurt eyes now). So it's one feature missing in the project which some ppl find attractive. Fast mass storage is another. And the last one - networking (ethernet, wifi). At the moment there isn't much beside CPU + mem (despite SoC being able to deliver all of the mentioned). But with that kind of pricing - well you can't rich feature set with something several times cheaper than other solutions. And eventually - with time - requested features might appear with either forked project or updated project. We'll see.

@Gorf - no, not really. With Vampire you get chipset with less rigid chip mem design and since it uses global ram to both cpu, rtg, chipset implementation data transfer is pretty high. So no bottleneck there. With RTG on e.g. Warp it's exactly the same thing. You connect CPU to mem controller (artix7) and inside it there's also rtg - so it's high bandwidth, low latency bus between CPU and RTG. Not much to limit there. With ZZ9000 - well it's a limit of Zorro II/III bus itself. But - theoretically - if you run ARM binary on card memory itself there shouldn't be much of a bottleneck. With storage options - many solutions gives off mass storage usb or sd card. Ain't that fast though (maybe because of lack of proper DMA and lack of decent driver on AOS). There's plenty room for improvement with that aspect. So in short - any solution which can connect to "new and improved" local cpu and mem might benefit from it and be much faster than what we had in past turbo cards (with edo ram and uwscsi at the most, eventually super duper slow local bus like blizz ppc - a fraction of full pci). It ain't that good to limit yourself early just to use original chipset as much as possible. With networking and storage options you surely can go wild.

[Gorf]

Vampire is not an accelerator but a replacement.

[kamelito]

@Gorf, http://apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=products

[nikosidis]

We can see from all NG Amiga versions. OS4, MorphOS and AROS that none succeed.
Legacy Amiga 68k is by far the most used and developed for.
Vampire is another project that is kind of a success but what exactly
is there for that system? I mean, is there a single, original program or game of any quality?
What is the point with RTG? If I would use Amiga 68k with RTG I rather run a NG Amiga version.
If I wanted a Vampire it would be for my A1200 to play some of the nice AGA demos.
I think the price of the Vampire, A1200 cards are quite step and from what I heard it is not
that compatible with the 060, AGA stuff either. It is some bugs here and there.

Buffee is reasonable priced and seams like a fun piece of hardware as long as there are not to many problems
regarding compatibility. AGA demos can not be run but it should be possible to use some 8-bit emulators at full speed together with other legacy programs. With the RGB to HDMI it can be a very nice low res. system.
A dream would be if this kind of hardware could become some kind of reference 16-bit, ECS system.
I like that it is only a CPU with RAM.

[Promilus]

@Gorf - V4 is a replacement, V2 is an accelerator. And while SAGA (not entirely essential part of core) basically takes over role of on-board chipset it still is just an accelerator. With physical amigas I don't really like things which use mainboard for power only but doesn't mean turbo has to be minimalistic.

@nikosidis

What is the point with RTG

Well you can run e.g. napalm rtg on ecs machine thanks to that, or maybe settlers II using shapeshifter, right? Which you wouldn't be able to run on ecs amiga no matter how fast cpu. Right? Right. New hi-res hi pallette screen modes are just cherry on the top. If you want amiga to solely play pal games you really don't need turbo anyway, at least not even that fast.

Buffee is reasonable priced

Yes, yes, but the main point of this particular discussion is - what for exactly do you need 030 several hundreds of megahertz fast with 512MB of memory if all you do is use ECS and ~1MB/s hard drive?

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@Gorf - V4 is a replacement, V2 is an accelerator. And while SAGA (not entirely essential part of core) basically takes over role of on-board chipset it still is just an accelerator. With physical amigas I don't really like things which use mainboard for power only but doesn't mean turbo has to be minimalistic.

@nikosidis

Well you can run e.g. napalm rtg on ecs machine thanks to that, or maybe settlers II using shapeshifter, right? Which you wouldn't be able to run on ecs amiga no matter how fast cpu. Right? Right. New hi-res hi pallette screen modes are just cherry on the top. If you want amiga to solely play pal games you really don't need turbo anyway, at least not even that fast.

Yes, yes, but the main point of this particular discussion is - what for exactly do you need 030 several hundreds of megahertz fast with 512MB of memory if all you do is use ECS and ~1MB/s hard drive?

It is kinda why I bought Furia for my A600. I just wanted to have a responsive workbench to run whd-load.
I do not care that much about disk speed. There are some games and demos that benefit from a faster CPU.
With this kind of power it would even be possible to run more powerful tasks like emulators, mp3 etc.
I guess there could even come some other cool stuff with this. Not that I would rely on it

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by kamelito

@Gorf, http://apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=products

What are you trying to tell me?

In what reality is a stand alone board the same as an accelerator card?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@Gorf - V4 is a replacement, V2 is an accelerator. And while SAGA (not entirely essential part of core) basically takes over role of on-board chipset it still is just an accelerator.

As soon as it takes over the custom chips it os no longer just an accelerator in my book.
Not judging if this is a good or a bad thing - just trying to point out the difference.

The statement was that this level of CPU performance might cause trouble - my reply to that was, this is the same problem for all typical accelerators.
That is nothing new and by no means special for Buffee.