Re: All this talk of a new GS...

[Jonas Bevren <jbevren@yahoo.com>]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2000, Frank Carney wrote:

> Subject: Re: All this talk of a new GS...
> 
> Jonas Bevren wrote:
> > 
> > If you look closely, you'll see that a K6II-400 is cheaper than you'll find
> > most embedded 386s and 486s these days.  PII-400's sell for $100 at a
> > certain irritating auction site <grin> quite often.  Cyrix cpu's, with their
> > quite superior integer math machine, are almost a dime a dozen =)
> 
> I was talking about building a non-IBM compatible system that connects
> directly to the IIgs CPU socket.  I was not talking about the embedded
> systems that can run Win95 and can support PC-104 cards.  I was thinking
> of building a system that runs a core with none of the crap that is in
> the PC now.  And yes, if this project were to mature to bigger faster
> processors such as the 400Mhz machines that would be great.  I guess
> when people think of "embedded" they think of an embedded PC.  I want
> this thing to fit in the original IIgs case, but not be a full PC.
> 

Ah, but you misunderstand me.  I talk of the chip itself.  You can get even
modest (but relatively fast) 233mhz pentium-class CPUs for pennies these
days.  If run at lower frequencies, say 100mhz, they can likely be operated
without fan, and possibly even without heatsink (the mediagx-233 cpu can run
at 166mhz without any ventilation or heatsink in fact from what I hear).

Right. I agree that using a full peecee wouldnt suit the bill.  I'd never
wish taht on an apple2 lover (as I"m a commodore lover and dislike any
similar fate for my beloved =).  No winCE core, no win95, linux, or
anything.  Just a raw 100% machine language opcode interpreter running
rampant on the CPU socket to make GS/OS look like win3.11 on a PIII <grin>.

Hmz.. perhaps even operating like the commodore's superCPU, which houses,
powers, and accesses only local ram, and mirrors only what's needed
(selected by the user) to ram to be sure the video display gets updated at
regular interfals.  The only other timing constraints are the I/O devices,
which cause a 20-cycle delay (thus increasing access time for the needed 1mhz
clock).  Put in a small core for running the emulator, which should be small
enough to fit as much as possible in the little on-chip CPU cache, and run
all GS/OS apps from the accelerator's internal RAM.  This leaves the CPU
free of delays and worries, and only needs to slow down for slow devices (ie
the DOC chip, writing to the video display's I/O registers, etc).  In fact,
toss on an OS friendly localbus harddisk and your necktie would be flying
behind you.

Hm.  Maybe I should be in marketing. (duck, cringe)

-Jonas