Re: [MiNT] EmuTOS for ColdFire

[Petr Stehlik <pstehlik@sophics.cz>]

Vincent Rivière píše v Po 04. 05. 2009 v 09:07 +0200:
> > I also think this can be viewed as a stepping stone.  The work done on
> > porting the system would help later to move it to a different processor.  It
> > forces the sources to be cleaned up, especially the assembler parts.
> 
> I totally agree. Of course, I would prefer to port Atari stuff to another 
> recent, faster CPU. But the ColdFire is the easiest one to start. And the 
> only one with the same assembler that 680x0. The cleanup we will do for 
> ColdFire will be reused if we switch later to another totally different CPU.

I don't agree. It doesn't make any sense for me to rewrite each given
source twice - first to port from m68k to CF and then from CF to
anything else. The CF step is unnecessary, IMHO. There is no m68k
cleaning that could be reused for a completely different CPU, I believe
(unless this is done the way Martin worked on EmuTOS - he was rewriting
every assembler source he could to plain C to achieve true portability -
but we cannot afford that on 8 MHz machines - the assembler is used
there for a good reason).

Another thing I don't agree with is that CF is a stepping stone to ARM,
PPC or anything else. If I still were an active Atari developer I would
soon become bored by generating several different binaries (for m68k,
for CF, and for anything else that might appear) especially when I
wouldn't have a chance to test them out properly (I don't plan on buying
CF). 

Also, the more different CPUs the worse situation is with the user base.
In plain words - every time you upgrade the hardware to an incompatible
one you loose part of users. And you don't gain any because there are no
newcomers on the horizon... Of course this doesn't matter if you don't
care about your potential users - if you do everything for yourself
only...

Please note that I am not in any way against ACP or any other hobby/fun
project someone might come up with. I just can't agree with the logic
that is presented here in some mails. I think things work differently in
real world (and I am talking from my own experience when I release the
multi-platform software I happen to develop).

Petr