[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [MiNT] Re[2]: GEM boost
Evan Langlois wrote:
On Sun, 2005-07-17 at 01:08 +0200, Johan Klockars wrote:
Getting MiNT to run on an '040 NeXT would be a neat thing. That NeXT
even had the same 56001 DSP as the Falcon (perhaps all of them did?).
I've always wanted to get hold of a black NeXT cube...
All NeXT machines had a 56K, although if I remember they had less RAM
and a slower clock speed than the Falcon's DSP. I have a fractal
generator and an oscilliscope that uses the DSP, and the result is
pretty impressive for the age of the machine. I should turn it on some
day.
Yes. Slower, and only 24KB of RAM. I used to do a lot of my early Atari
compiles on a '030 cube, back in the day. That was before I got a TT.
(Yes, the TT is faster.)
The hardware differences would be the issue. No documentation really
available for the NeXT special chips either, like their weird DMA
controller that everything is connected to.
Their weird, POS DMA controller. Despite their claiming 8 (was it 8?)
independent DMA channels, any large disk access would bring the system
to a halt, suspending the CPU until the access completed. It may have
just been a bad kernel driver issue, but I don't recall it improving in
later revisions of NextOS. (I used it from 0.8 thru 1.0 as I recall.)
Is there an Atari emulator
designed to run on a 68K mac? Like maybe MagiC for Mac? I could run
that under executor possibly - the Mac emulator for NeXT (not sure about
the speed or compatibility of running emulators inside each other). It
wouldn't export the 56K thats in there, like running it native, but it
would be the quickest path to making it run. I wonder if Aranym can be
ported to the NeXT to use the host CPU?
I had a DOS shell for NeXT that would run TOS command-line executables
natively. Being a Unix CLI kinda guy I never wrote any graphics code
back then...
And mine isn't a cube, its a color slab (can't add cards to it, no
optical drive or CD ROM - I had to net-boot it off the PC/Linux box to
install the OS). The best bet for a fast NeXT would be getting one of
the black 040 cubes (the Turbo one with a 32Mhz/040) and that video card
add-on that was available (good luck finding it - VERY expensive if you
can find one). They did full 24 bit color, plus video in, genlocking,
and they had their own Intel 64bit RISC graphics processor on the card
complete with its own version of Mach. The RAM on the card (SIMM
expandable) held all the window backing store and OS and such, and the
card could even do virtual memory by handing off disk/io to the host
CPU. There was supposed to be some other special hardware for some
operations like JPEG or MPEG decoding, but some of that hardware wasn't
ready and not included. If I remember, all of display postscript ran on
the card so it handled the display all by itself.
Yeah, the '040 revision sounded pretty cool, but I had gotten
disillusioned by the '030 and abandoned NeXT by then.
Of course, that's because of the graphics card having really fast memory
itself, and hardware accelerated drawing.
Yeah, my ATI should be faster on my PC, but it can be a dog. I'm
surprised how fast Atari machines are even without all the bells and
whistles and specialized harwdare that PCs have access to.
Back when the Atari machines were new, the PCs didn't have any of that
specialized hardware. A lot of it came from Atari - Atari patents on
graphics techniques that eventually expired.
I really think a 266Mhz Coldfire (FPU, MMU, eMAC, DDR RAM - everything
you want on your Atari is on the chip) combined with a decent graphics
chip connected, running MiNT/XaAES would really turn a few heads.
Especially when you consider that the Aranym project has already done a
VDI natfeat where the VDI is handled by OpenGL .. ATI has open-source
OpenGL drivers. I bet side-by-side with machines that are 10 times the
clock speed, the 266Mhz machine would keep up just fine. If any company
produced such a thing - it would be my next machine - especially if it
had decent audio (24 bit/96Khz or better and clean DACs).
Hm.... I really wonder. Certainly that class of machine ought to be able
to run a dynamite 2D user interface. But I don't think it'd be faster
than a contemporary PC for compiling code, calculating FFTs (essential
to all audio and video compression), or other things we commonly do.
OK - dream mode off. We're WAY off topic. The computer industry just
doesn't go the direction I want. Gotta live with it. *sigh*
The art of computer programming suffered a major blow when the M68K
family disappeared from desktop computing. AMD64 seems to be
philosophically picking up where we left off, after more than a decade
of suffering under the x86 architecture. *double sigh*
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc
OpenLDAP Core Team http://www.openldap.org/project/