Re: The PPC factor.

[Johan Klockars <rand@cd.chalmers.se>]

> I really can't see any problems in creating a PPC-accelerator with
> fastmem, a fast'n wide SCSI-bus, PCI-slots etc. except that it would be
> three times as expensive as a G3-Mac... IMHO it makes much more sense to

Judging by the prices of our AB040s and the Amiga PPC cards, I'd say it
would be far cheaper than that. Likely less than $1000.

Unfortunately, the only way I think we're ever going to get something like
that would be if someone built an adaptor card to use those Amiga
accelerators. The potential market would probably be too small otherwise.

> port MiNT to PPC/G3-Macs and write a native VDI and AES for that one. This

Those things really shouldn't be that much of a problem.
MiNT is mostly C as are XaAES and oAESis (those two would of course need
some more work), and the generic parts of fVDI are neither performance
critical nor very large (they are about 75% assembly right now).
MiNT of course relies on TOS, but that should be a minor thing compared
to the rest of it.

> also means that the Mac must *boot* MiNT, and not just run it as an
> application.

I don't see why that would be necessary (and it would definitely not be
easy to do, judging by the Linux ports).

In any case, if we're going to do a complete port to another computer,
why would that be a Mac? They are more expensive than PCs and it's generally
harder to get at hardware information.
I can understand that people may like Macs better than PCs (I do so myself),
but that's beside the point if it is to be used for Atari software.

Perhaps the best thing would be to port to Unix/X. That way everyone can
use their favourite computer. This would mean that native programs would
have to be available in several versions, but then again the step from
one version for normal Ataris and one for "MacOS" to one for Ataris and
perhaps two for Linux (Mac and PC) is not really that far.
There are free 68000 emulators available for UNIX, so that base is covered
as well.

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