1 Nov
2012
1 Nov
'12
10:53 a.m.
Am 01.11.2012 um 16:52 schrieb David Riley:
Yap, that was also a thought of a friend. Most of the chips used in a
SE/30 are out of production for years now. So it's easier to emulate
these stuff in some kind of FPGA.
SDRAM would be nice, but modern chips are very huge in capacity, so it
would be hard to get less memory than 256MB. ;-)
Bedides that, since there's much available space on the board, the
FPGA could emulate a 8390 for getting Ethernet, better video cirquity
for having 256 gays on the internal screen and possibly a second
graphics logic for external monitors. Since the SE/30 features the
NuBus-Adressing scheme with only one slot available, this all could be
done in a compatible manner. I'd pay up to 300 Euros for such a board.
It's so sweet to dream...
:wq! PoC
If I had time
and knowledge of this digital stuff, I'd start a
project for a replacement board for the SE/30 with modern
components, being fully compatible to the old one.
That would be fun! But 68030s are still quite expensive.
A Coldfire reimagining would be a lot of fun, but unfortunately,
most modern Coldfires use the A-line instructions for the
enhanced MAC unit (multiply-accumulate, not Macintosh), so
there's no A-line trap for the toolbox instructions.
Alternatively, a small FPGA that could reliably emulate a
68030 probably actually costs less than the real thing, so
it wouldn't be impossible. You could use super-cheap SDRAM
then, as well.