OK, first off all I'm back after a long leave of absence from the forums, YAY! :lol:. Now, back to business, remember awhile back how I posted information of how I was going to work on a NeXTcube in an FPGA? Well, the project's back on, but with a different sort of goal. Is anyone here a user of Atari STs, TTs, or Falcons? I would be, if I could afford one of the two latter (the STs are too slow for any of the cool stuff :wink: ). An even if I could get one, the Falcon, my favorite of the three, is really just a hack job thrown together at the last minute. So then I got to thinking, what's something similar to the Falcon? :idea: :idea: :idea: :idea:
Suddenly I realized NeXT Hardware has a lot of similarities to the Falcon, same CPU, FPU, and DSP, however NeXT is a lot faster and bet all in all. So my first mission is to get FreeMiNT and EmuTOS to boot on a NeXT machine. With a bit of hacking some guys have managed to boot MiNT onto a Coldfire Dev board. And the NeXT is even more similar, so this may actually not be that hard.
I'm also going to call this project Sparrow, in honor of what the NeXT (HAHAHAHA!!! pun!!!) Atari computer would've been called. My NeXT (THERE IT IS AGAIN!!!!) goal is to make an FPGA board specifically designed for getting my (theoretical) NeXTcube verilog code running on it. My basic idea for the design of the board is to have a 68060 running in an FPGA, along with the free OpenRISC project programmed to do on the fly opcode translation for the incompatibilities between the 040 and the 060. Then on another FPGA I will have all the other logic (besides the DSP). The advantages of using two FPGAs is that the one designed for the processor can be smaller but clocked faster (I believe there are some FPGAs that are designed from the ground up specifically for softcores) and the FPGA for the other logic can be clocked slower, but have more space. And then finally there will be the DSP. Sound good? My two main improvements I want to make to the Cube is a faster clock speed, and faster I/O. Do we have the schematics for the Turbo Cube anywhere around here? Obviously that would vital to the project.
Tell me what you guys think.
lol sounds overly ambitious!
What hardware info do you have on any next hardware platforms, and tell us more about this port of MiNT.....
I've played with it on a $5 PowerPC mac I bought.... It was almost usable.
Well the port of MiNT to NeXT has been completed, but it should be pretty simple. I'm not sure of any MiNT port to the PowerPC, were you using an emulator? If so, then that is an extremely inaccurate portrayal of MiNT in general. We get spoiled by the high quality of Amiga emulators
Quote from: "krfkeith"Well the port of MiNT to NeXT has been completed, but it should be pretty simple. I'm not sure of any MiNT port to the PowerPC, were you using an emulator? If so, then that is an extremely inaccurate portrayal of MiNT in general. We get spoiled by the high quality of Amiga emulators
The port of MiNT has or has not been completed?
Also the PowerPC was running with the default Apple 68040 emulator...
It's running System 7
What I mean is, I have not ported MiNT to NeXT yet. Now, how are you running MiNT on a Mac? I realize there is an emulator. I didn't know that it ran on 68k macs
Oh, I just found MacMiNT. I saw the last update was in 2000. Keep in mind that this isn't even the main version of MiNT. The real one is optimized for Atari. And it is has been developed considerably more since 2000
Yeah this one:
http://www.sra.co.jp/people/hoshi/macmint/index-e.htmlIt's 68000 code that the PowerPC mac's have a built in emulator to run... System 7 was still mostly 68000 code, as were most of the applications at the time of the launch... But then even a 66Mhz 601 PowerPC was faster then a 20Mhz 68030... running 68000 user mode instructions.
MacMiNT made use of this fun program called JET (Just Enough TOS) which would setup an interrupt vector table, like CPM-68k/TOS, and what ever basic calls were made by MiNT.
I suspect there would be enough 'glue' to pull of MacMiNT from the NetBSD bootloader...................