Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12408 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
>>>> Oli HD did his talk about his Coldfire project and Jens absolutely tore into Oli over it.
>>> I have two Coldfire systems. They are actually pretty cool. And the cpus are
>>> dirt cheap with support for PCI and LAN built in. So I'm not sure I give a
>>> rat's ass for what Jen's thinks.
>> The fact you don't intend to run AmigaOS on them might play a role in your conclusion,
>> I reckon ;-)
> AmigaOS could be ported to run on Coldfire.
Porting AmigaOS to ColdFire wasn't Oli HD's intention with his ColdFusion project (ColdFire accelerator boards for Classic Amigas), obviously, as he couldn't use the AmigaOS source code. His intentions with regards to running AmigaOS were as follows:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/22https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/23https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/27https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/40https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/54https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/113https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/114https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/613https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/832https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/838> 68K software would still require a software layer to trap commands that differ
> between the two ISAs, but it can be done.
Jens always said that he had doubts whether this would work (fast enough) with AmigaOS as it used too many and/or too often instructions missing with ColdFire (DBRA, DBCC etc.). But maybe more importantly, Jens was very down on the hardware design concept of the ColdFusion boards, which he didn't have flattering remarks for:
http://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/comments/66601.htmlhttp://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/comments/66676.htmlhttps://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/1803https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/1809https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/1923The developer's final verdict on the hardware side of his project was very disillusioning:
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=309729https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Amigacoldfire/conversations/messages/2009> Amigans [...] dismissed the Coldfire out of hand.
Not true. Over the years, there were at least 3 ColdFire projects for Amiga (
ColdFusion,
Turbo-CF,
Elbox Dragon), and none came to pass. That's for a reason, I'd say.
> It seems to have served the Atari community well.
As far as I know, that's because Atari software makes less use of the critical m68k instructions.
