Re: Future //

[Roy and/or Janet Miller <millers@inetnebr.com>]

Liam Busey wrote:

> The 68k line is relatively low powered and at an evolutionary dead end
> (is coldfire 68k?). The only benefit to using them is that Roy's friend
> appears to experienced with them. I am not confident that '40 Macs will
> be around much longer do to the rabid obsolecense of Macs over the past
> 3 years.

Which is why he will only use the 040  for the first phase of "roughing in" the card, getting some code up and seeing if the basic idea works. He has 040s, and knows how to program them. He does not intend to release an 040 based card though, it would, as you said, but too under powered.

>
>
> >     If he thinks there is any commercial viability though, I'd > encourage him to move on to the PPC now. I understand that it would be > much more complex, at a time that he feels he needs practice with > something simpler, but it's the only sensible approach. I can't quote > exact prices, but in any posible volume, the ppc will cost half as > much as the 060, easy. And while he can salvage the 040 to his heart's > content, finding more than 1 or 2 at a time will be a thankless task.
> >     Motorola might send him a sample PPC, as far as that goes, as long > as he pretends to be in business. Doubtful that they would for the 060 > though.
>
> Roy, has your friend ever considered using a CPU from ARM family of RISC
> chips (www.arm.com)?

No, but I will forward this post to him. He chose the PPC, because the PPC is fairly well known and supported, and with two IIGS emulators on PPC based operating systems, it might be easier to get help, if needed, to do the 65816 emulation.

> Supposedly the family came into existence because
> Acorn computer wanted a next generation 65xxx CPU for their BBC Micro
> but were dissatisfied with what was on the market. If this is accurate,
> the ARM could be seen as a descendant of the 6502 just like the 65816.
> Your buddy could implement 6502 and 65816 emulators in software and just
> use native mode for 32 bit operations.
>
>
> > PS He's gonna have trouble getting the 65816 too. WDC is playing hard > to get.

Well, that was my idea - rather than a socket for the 65816 on the IIGS mother board. Since the largest II card is fairly small, anything that will give room for the other features would help. That's one of the three reasons for a 72 pin simm socket (as opposed to two 30 pin sockets - the other two reasons are 72 pin simms are more common, and 32 bit memory access certainly wouldn't hurt when speed is important.

>
>
> Didn't they just want a couple month of lead time for large orders?
> Seeing as they don't fab their own chips wouldn't this be no surprise?

I'll let him know about the problems with Motorola and WDC - thanks guys.

Roy

>
>
> Liam Busey