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[MiNT] Alternatives to ColdFire: what about the ARM platform and imx515 Genesi Developer Program
Hi to all.
First off, I wish good luck to the ACP team and I'll help
them as I can.
But, in the meantime, I think here we could discuss if
there are alternatives for new hardware to this raod.... alternatives
that should be cheap and standard. All in all I share the following
questions/doubts:
> When programmers are going to spend their time to
adapt the existing
> source code to run on a new processor, to adapt
operating system, to add
> m68k emulation to it, then why don't they do
it the way Apple did and
> move to a more mainstream platform (Apple
did it even twice, both time
> successfully - first PPC, then Intel)?
As I've often been saying in the last months, at the moment, in my
humble opinion, the best hardware option for our platform would be one
of the ARM solutions at the heart of the upcoming netbook (like nVidia
Tegra or Freescale i.MX515). They would be cheap, the cpu could be set
to act as big-endian and there wouldn't be a Windows option to fight
with...
Furthetrmore, real hardware already exsists, as there are
reference boards produced directly by Freescale and nVidia.
More
importantly, Genesi (the Guys behind PegasosPPC and Efika boards) are
accepting proposals of projects for their upcoming board based on
Freescale i.MX515.
There are proposal of ports for Haiku, Anubis and
Aros OSs, why not MiNT? (http://projects.powerdeveloper.
org/program/imx515)
So I ask to the coders of this mailing list: do you
think it possible?
How much work would it be necessary to free MiNT
from TOS dependencies, to let it run natively on an hardware different
from original Atari's?
Otherwise, could EmuTos be ported to new
hardware to run MiNT on top of it?
Is it a though work to add a 68k
emultor for the old binaries to tun on the new platform?
Best regards,
Ben
PS: Just as an example, wouldn't it be nice having MiNT (with
included m68k emulation) running natively on a Skytone Alpha 680?
(http://www.skytone.net.cn/en/products.php?
bigclass=4&smallclass=13&show_type=1)
After porting the OS to this new
architecture we could even think of proposing it to some Chinise
hardware producers... after all, we wouldn't have Windows to fight! ;-)
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