Since my divorce, I have had extra time, but I have always continued to educate myself (or at least increase my knowledge base on what I am interested in),
So...the question in the subject line, did you (these last few days, over the weekend, etc).

I did, here two things I ran into.

Cortex A57 and A53 products are a lot closer to introduction than I suspected.
And this time, the Chinese will be right there with the rest of us using the latest cores.
That will make competition intense.
Oh, and for all the apparent friction between mainland China and Taiwan, there appears to be some technical cooperation going on there that surprises me.
Without being more specific, I have come across a few clues that lead me to believe that a major ARM licensee in Taiwan has been feeding info to the mainland.

Oh, and I don't know how you feel, but the core I am looking forward most to is the "little" A53.
This product in multi-core variants will be quite powerful enough on its own.

OK, now to the "weird" stuff.
I spent some time this weekend going over Sparc development and trying to talk myself into devoting some hardware to Free BSD (my sense of practicality won out on the latter as that product is not as polished as Linux based OS').
But, as many of you know, video cards get my attention.
And examining Sun's offerings over the years was frustrating, since they have an unusual blend of low power parts mixed with high end graphics components.
Its all related to the spread of their product line, server boxes without a video console for one market, and pretty capable graphics systems in another.

So, what does any of this have to do with MorphOS?
Not much, and it is not like to go anywhere.
But there are a couple of neat cards from older machines that Sun likes to refer to as "frame buffers".
I'm not sure why because they do a lot more, but...

One, the XVR-600 uses an older 3DLabs Wildcat 4 vdp.
Most internet listings about this card get the specs wrong and refer to it having only 32mbs of memory,
While ts framebuffer is only 64mbs, the total memory on the card is 128 mbs and they genlock to each other allowing multiple cards to be used.
CVery intense OpenGL hardware.

What is it to us?
Well, obviously whatever type of rom there is on the card is useless.
But the interface is via a 64bit 66MHz PCI bus.
This could probably be made to work in a few G5 Powermacs, and at a slight drop to 33 MHz, it could work in all G4s.

Not sure what would be the point ....

If I just wanted a 2nd display I'll just insert a PCI-Voodoo
If that Voodoo is to weak I'll pester Frank to write/patch a "2ndRadeon" driver and insert a PCI Radeon 9250

If thats still not enough I'll ask myself wether those SUN cards are more powerfull than a Radeon and how much work would be required to develop a driver to the point where that extra power is actually felt...

Or short:
Not sure what you are trying to tell us here.

>Not sure what you are trying to tell us here.

I'm already using a Voodoo3 PCI card Kronos.
The difference would be added memory, more color depth, and a faster interface with a broader bus.

And frankly, maybe you would want a 9250, but that is not a card that has ever impressed me.

And yes, this card might be more powerful.

But beyond that, it can be run in multiples.
Two would have as much memory as the largest 9250, and sixteen times the memory of a Voodoo3.

As to whatever Frank might want to work on.

I'm sure he has a few neat things to drop on us.

This post was merely related to the fact that there is some neat older stuff out there. And that some of it uses the extra bus width we have in some machines.

Yeah yeah, but if were allready wasting Frank's (hypothetical) time, why not just set him doing drivers that use the full potential of the cards we can allready use ?

Or maybe get him to support some more available cards, like mac-compatible NVidias ? Or even just plain PC cards completly initialized by MorphOS ?

See, when one comes up with brainfarts, make sure to aim high and true ;)

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Sure, instead of aiming low and peeing on the floor, be a hero and shit on the ceiling.

And, "Or even just plain PC cards completly initialized by MorphOS"

YES, I am wholly in favor of pursuing that.
Why not? The Mac community already does this.

And I'm not worried about wasting Frank or Mark's time.

I don't bring up the outlandish ideas to either one.

Just to you guys because I (obviously) enjoy the ridicule.

The primary problem with using a card like I have mentioned is one you have not even pointed out.

They are not well documented.

And their features embedded a lot of OpenGL functions in hardware.
I don't think our drivers have the level of complexity necessary to fully use a graphics workstation's display card.

But I find it an interesting idea, and if you were persistent, it could be made to work.

But no, as of right now, I see no other rational course but to continue with the direction we have been going and stick with ATI gpus.

BTW - No nasty comments about ARM developments?

Not to needle you guys on this subject, but I just ordered some stuff to play around with and hopefully learn something.
One is a Coldfire developers board (yes i know Coldfire is slowly dying out).
The other is an older Sun system so that i can use a Sparc based system and maybe Free BSD (although that would probably be less painful on an AMD64 system).

I also have a friend I buy parts from who has sent me a "grab bag" full of stuff that he has lots of.
Not that much useful here, but he has the ZIP chips I need for projects involving older VDPs, and the Z80182 MCUs he has sent look like a good replacement for 16550 UARTs.

So, other than Kronos' negative comments, I am really interested.
What have you all been doing?

I also found the wildcat cards very interesting almost buy one i found some months ago on ebay, they look amazing the wildcat II and III seem to by very fast maybe they can be used on linux, on a G5 as a secondary card.

Jim,
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Dibbling into some weird SW projects, and trying to get a grip on that A500-Turbo I soldered together some weeks ago ....

Jim,
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Well, got my 2nd kid in September - so my days are primarily filled with changing Pampers and such stuff. Hence, not room for much substancial other things currently. At least I wrote a little Hollywood code last week.

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That I can get behind. At least the hardware project. I do not have your discipline when it comes to focusing on software development.

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I have not even looked into linux, but Kronos had a good point about these, they are not very practical.
On the other hand, they do look neat when used in hardware that will recognize them.
Its one one the reasons I picked up a Sparc IV dual cpu workstaion.