Hello all,

is it possible for a FPGA to emulate a PowerPC compatible with MorphOS ?

It exist a hardware low price could launch MorphOS ?

A Vampire with a module PPC in the FPGA ? as a 1200 with a PowerPC...

[ Edité par Papiosaur 23.10.2018 - 11:16 ]

There are FPGAs that include real PowerPC cores (Virtex series), but they are pretty slow for our standards. I am sure you could get an FPGA with enough juice to emulate a slow PPC but then what would be the point?

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Isn't the Vampire created because there are no successors to the 68060 ?


You can buy PowerPC cpu's which are faster and cheaper then FPGA solutions.


A solution as the Minimig - with a real cpu and a chipset in the FPGA would be a better and cheaper, but offcourse, replace the cpu with PowerPC and put SAGA in the FGPA chip.


[ Edited by bennymee 23.10.2018 - 13:08 ]

What about the Coldfire Processor? 68XXX compatible and but my understanding or the fastest and expensive. Not PPC compatible though. So I guess more of a Classic Amiga clone than a Morphos machine.

[ Edited by fmh 27.10.2018 - 07:55 ]

ColdFire is as much compatible with 68k as the Tabor is with proper PPC.

Without active development both in the OS and the applications such an Amiga would end up slower than an actual 060 (or only run a few selected apps).

100% OT offcourse...

An FPGA that could beat an G4 in running PPC code is properly still a decade out.

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The Elbox Dragon had a Coldfire CPU and ran Amiga OS but they can't have been satisfied with the overall performance of the product since they decided to cut their losses on the R&D and not proceed with production.

There are limit to FPGA speed, defined by quantum effects like leakage and transistor die size in the chip itself. Not only will it take a very long time to get one that's as near as fast as a 2004-era G4, it might not actually ever happen.

Not with that technology anyway. More chance of custom "3D printed" ASICs being accessible to hobbyists IMO. And not for many years.

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Basically, recompilation with manual work required for commands that work differently, aren't implemented, or have alternatives that aren't directly interchangable via a cross compiling.
Messy,but some companies that supported the 68K (including a major laser printer manufacturer) went this way.

However, Freescale/NXP has never offered their best Coldfire CPUs (the super scalar Coldfire V5s) for sale to the general public.
There are 200-233 MHz V4's still available (you can even get them directly at a good price if you buy in lots of 300).

Still, pretty slow (and the best V5's make a P1022 look like a speed demon).

Power 9 folks, if we want to continue legacy compatibility, or X64 if we want commodity hardware.

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Sure if you got 100% control over the limited stack of SW your HW will ever run those issues become minor.

> recompilation with manual work required for commands that
> work differently, aren't implemented, or have alternatives
> that aren't directly interchangable via a cross compiling.

Such manual work wouldn't be required with recompilation. After all, that's the point of using a compiler: translating the source code into the correct opcodes of the target CPU. Problem would be with running existing, already compiled binaries where there's no source code available anymore to recompile.

> some companies that supported the 68K (including a major
> laser printer manufacturer) went this way.

Yes, HP didn't need to run binaries compiled for their old m68k-based printers on their newer ColdFire-based printers. They could simply recompile the sources.

> Freescale/NXP has never offered their best Coldfire CPUs
> (the super scalar Coldfire V5s) for sale to the general public.

While this is true, availability of the ColdFire V5/V5e chips is not the real problem, but documentation is:

http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=333280#p333280
http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=333429#p333429

> There are 200-233 MHz V4's still available

Even up to 266 MHz for the V4e.

Interesting story shared by BigGun:

"I had once a very long discussion with one of the Hyperion CEOs. Hyperion asked me if we could add a PowerPC CPU to the Vampires. [...] Hyperion told me that they see PowerPC as the only future for Amiga. And if we add a PowerPC this would be a win for the users and would motivate Amiga users to switch to PowerPC finally. [...] The Hyperion CEO said, he thinks that 68K is dead. He told me that they not plan to invest into a future for 68K. He said, that he thinks 68K Amiga is for Hyperion a good market to make money from it now, but that they will only investment into development and future for PowerPC and not in 68k. He thought 68K is dead and as sooner the people leave 68k as better. He said that the best would be, if all 68K Amigas die, so that the Amiga users have a reason to buy some PowerPC and move on."
http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=9¬e=30011&x=1

I guess this discussion took place before Hyperion purchased ReAction.

"This discussion was in German [...]. I was clearly and unmistakable told by one of the CEOs that 1) the Hyperion has no interest to develop for 68k. It was made clear that 2) Hyperion wants that all 68K users will upgrade to PowerPC as soon as possible. Hyperion made it clear that their development focus will only be PowerPC, and even if they make income with Amiga 68k fans, Hyperion does see no future for 68K Amigas. [...] the CEO from Hyperion made it to my clear that Hyperion and Thomas Richters "plans" for OS 3.1.4 are not aligned and not the same. He clearly said that in contrary to what the OS3.1.4-team wants, for Hyperion the 68K Amiga has no future."
http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=9¬e=30011&x=3

German? This may limit the options.

If it would not be about Vampire I would have thought that this talk took place 20 years ago.

I had a dream!

In my dream, I'm in front of a beautiful desktop computer. On the left side, it has a blue butterfly licking the honey supplied by a X64 CPU.

Near the computer, there's a red and black box.
I open it and discover a PCI-E card populated with a big cyclone.
In the back of the card there's printed : legacy stuff for the new Morphos world"
I plug the card, power on the station and Morphos fly into the screen in few seconds. After this very fast boot, I run a application. I don't know what it's but suddenly I can see a beautiful demo showing protracker playing a nice song, then it's time to see Deluxpaint and then my favorite oldschool game R-Type II. This isn't a video, they are the original stuff playing inside my new card and controlled by Morphos like if they were were native Morphos stuff.
The demo ends. I take an eye to the box and there's an USB floppy drive !
I put a floppy into the drive press A A CTRL, then Morphos reboots and aske to me if I want boot from the floppy or the hard drive. I choose ths floppy and the spaceballs logo with the dragon appears into the screen. Then it's a pure moment of state of the art 😁.
I don't saw the end, my dream kicked me out of it and I wake up.


[ Edited by sergius 29.05.2020 - 18:40 ]

a) stop eating them shruums

b) all that could be achieved (easier) just with SW

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Isn't Trance in a way "compiling" opcodes for a target CPU, but using a 68k binary stream as source code instead of text files?

> Isn't Trance in a way "compiling" opcodes for a target CPU, but
> using a 68k binary stream as source code instead of text files?

Yes, JIT compilers in general are are a way to make different-ISA executables run on a platform in absence of the executable's source code, and they produce significantly better results than interpreters, but compared to native compilation of the source code, even JIT compilers achieve only a fraction of the execution speed.
This severe performance degradation isn't an issue when JIT-compiling executables compiled for relatively slow CPUs on relatively fast CPUs (as Trance on PPC does with m68k executables), but it becomes unbearable when the performance difference between the CPUs is too small to compensate for it (like with m68k on ColdFire).

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thanks for the compliment.
Usually, mushrooms open your mind 😉

You know what they say, don't keep your mind so open that your brain fall out.

I really appreciate your humor 😅
Because, it's humor, isn't it? 🤔

I said it in jest, but there's a kernel of truth in there ;)