New Buffee (ARM 68K Emulator) Accelerator In Development

[Daedalus]

It appears that TerribleFire has started work on an adaptor that lets you add 68K DIP accelerators to the A1200, with the ultimate aim of running a Buffee in an A1200. Not sure if it would also support the PiStorm, but very interesting development!

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

It appears that TerribleFire has started work on an adaptor that lets you add 68K DIP accelerators to the A1200, with the ultimate aim of running a Buffee in an A1200. Not sure if it would also support the PiStorm, but very interesting development!

Now that is some great news...

[sampedenawa]

I doubt the PiStorm will (dimensionally) fit into A1200's slot ......

[nikosidis]

Yesssss, Buffee for my A1200 Like it.

[hooverphonique]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

It appears that TerribleFire has started work on an adaptor that lets you add 68K DIP accelerators to the A1200, with the ultimate aim of running a Buffee in an A1200. Not sure if it would also support the PiStorm, but very interesting development!

It would have poor memory bandwidth, but if the accel has tons of cache, maybe it doesn't matter much. I could see some potential issues with C2P stuff, though..

[Daedalus]

The (chip) memory bandwidth would only really suffer if the Buffee was to stick to the 68000 bus timings. But there's collaboration between TF and the Buffee team, so it's possible we could see a burst mode of sorts that does the two 16-bit transfers within the 32-bit transfer window for the A1200 bus, thus providing similar bandwidth to other A1200 accelerators for example. The board itself looks to have 8MB of SDRAM onboard, as well as the fast RAM of the Buffee itself. But it's early days yet and I'm just speculating...

[Chucky]

yeah was thinking that first aswell. 16bit 8MHz mehh until I connected by brain "heeey. no real motorola is used. make up your own rules. 16bit, 28MHz. VOILA. same speed as 14MHz 32bit as the 1200 is... problem solved

so yeah weird. sick. crazy and nice solution

[hooverphonique]

Yes, if the Buffee does something different when piggybacked on this TF device than it would when acting as a plain 7MHz 68k, then of course you can do all sorts of tricks

My train of thought was that putting an arbitrary 68k DIP socket accel (which the post I quoted hinted at) on top of the TF device will have lower chip mem bandwidth than a true 32 bit A1200 accel.

[d4rk3lf]

I was hoping that they will tease us already with some videos and crazy performance shown.

Since the Amiga got much more power through various accelerators, we saw many games (Quake 2, for example) conversions, from PC period 1995-2000.
Since Buffee is so powerful, is it to be expected that some games from 2000-2005 also is going to be converted (Warcraft 3, Civilization 3 and 4, Morrowind, Gothic 1/2.. etc)?
What do you guys think?

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

I was hoping that they will tease us already with some videos and crazy performance shown.

Since the Amiga got much more power through various accelerators, we saw many games (Quake 2, for example) conversions, from PC period 1995-2000.
Since Buffee is so powerful, is it to be expected that some games from 2000-2005 also is going to be converted (Warcraft 3, Civilization 3 and 4, Morrowind, Gothic 1/2.. etc)?
What do you guys think?

This discussion will go on until it can run Crysis

[wiz12]

What is Buffee, 3.2GHz? Can it really go that fast?

[Promilus]

@wiz12 - no it can't. SoC itself runs at 1GHz tops. There are newer version with different core (Cortex A15 and Cortex A53) which runs 1.5GHz and 1.1GHz respectively. Doesn't change all that much...
I guess the name suggests how fast would need 030 to run to achieve ARM PJIT performance level of Cortex A8@1GHz. And we're talking about 030 - CISC processor with just some cache and pretty simple pipeline. It still takes a lot of cycles to get the job done. It's way different on ARM with good cache, superscalar architecture with multiple execution units and longer pipelines. That's why low level pseudo jit (translation of binaries on the fly) can increase performance pretty nice (especially for apps loaded from local memory, not from amiga chip ram). I'm not sure if 3.2GHz 030 level is valid though. Doesn't matter all that much. It will still be bloody fast...

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

This discussion will go on until it can run Crysis

Flight Simulator 2020.

[Promilus]

is it to be expected that some games from 2000-2005 also is going to be converted

Neither of those games have any sort of usable "open source engine" like GemRB for Infinity Engine games, like OpenRA for Command and Conquer and Red alert, VCMI for Heroes 3 or RttR for Settlers II. And as far as I know most of those are plagued with some bugs and with not enough hands to fix those anytime soon. With games which doesn't have any open source engine available it's basically enormous PITA to get anything at all working under different architecture. It either requires a lot of computing power to emulate things (that's how console emulator works - some embedded into newer version of the old ones) or requires extremely time consuming reverse engineering from binary (first decompile then fix the mess it creates and workaround things it decompiles wrong). The first approach - buffee isn't THAT powerful. The second approach - basically nobody has time, patience and knowledge to do this right.
So... no, I wouldn't expect sudden increase of good old games (late 90s and further). There might be a decent power for some open source re-implementations as mentioned above so... C&C probably up to Tiberian Sun, all Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale except BG3 ... and so on. Maybe even Jedi Knight (as it already runs on PPC). With with every of those you'd need decent RTG and with 3D titles - Warp3D capable RTG. Which buffee does not offer (but actually there's iirc PowerVR chip inside).

[nikosidis]

Just use some PC, DOS emulator. With this speed it is no problem
DosBox 68k

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by nikosidis

Just use some PC, DOS emulator. With this speed it is no problem
DosBox 68k

Yep

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by nikosidis

Just use some PC, DOS emulator. With this speed it is no problem
DosBox 68k

You're not wrong, but for some reason, the second you do it on a PC it loses its appeal. Nostalgia is a strange thing, like love, is not logical :-)