Skip to main content
Home▸ Forums▸ 68kMLA▸ 68060 accelerator cards for Mac: Would you be willing? — #22
Post #22 by SiliconValleyPirate
Source Forum68kMLA
Category68k
Post DateSat, 8 Sep 2007 - 00:15
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/68060-accelerator-cards-for-mac-would-you-be-willing.8459/
Post
Not gonna happen. The Amiga 060 cards only work with apps that go through the 68060.library that contains the patches required. It was relatively east on the Amiga. I challenge anyone to build a similar library for the Mac that loads at ROM level (which would probably be required). Daystar did it basck in the day with the Turbo040 and Turbo601 cards but I doubt anyone has the documentation, facilities or motivation to do it now.

IMHO the old Mac OS isn't worth building 060 cards for ( many others will disagree, and disagree I will, happily!), 8.1 runs well enough on a 040 for me. That said I *own* an Amiga 060 machine (an A4000 with a Cyberstorm060 Mk1 and 128MB RAM) so I can get an 060 fix anytime I need one.

Amiga and Atari people spend big bucks on slow PPC and fast 68060 processors because their platform died and they have no other choice (outside of emulation) and even they only buy NEW designs by the handfull.
At least in the Amiga arena (where I have lots of experience), it created some really great machines at the time, but they are all slow compared to modern machines. PowerPC has never been properly implemented on the Classic Amiga anyway - at best PPC cards use PPCs as co-processors, and most PPC apps are frankly worse than the 68k versions.

As I stated above, and in the Amiga vs. Mac thread however one compelling force was the flexibility and expandability of the Amiga platform. Commodore developed the ability to work CPU patches into the system in OS 3.x to allow the 68040 to work with 68030 software reliably on the Amiga Workbench. That meant the 060 was very easy for experience Amiga techs to work into the OS.

If motorola got bored they could take the old 68040 design, add 2MB of cache to the die and shrink it with new production methods and probably get a 68040/800Mhz that runs without a heatsink. Thing is developers have moved on and few would buy the new chip.
Freescale (who are the present owners of all Motorola's CPU technology that they spun off in 2004) produce a chip called Coldfire, which is a 68k compatible chip that runs at 360MHz or more. Several projects have worked on bringing that to Amiga, but so far non have produced salable item based on Coldfire, partly because of the hurdles interfacing the main system CPU running at 360MHz with a 7MHz chipset, and partly because of significant differences in the code base.

If you guys were really serious you would want a Coldfire 68k Mac. It'd give a 601 or mid-range 603e a serious run for its money. Amiga 060s will easily play a 128kbps MP3 with cycles to spare, so I'd imagine a Coldfire machine would be a sight faster still!

Realistically, if you want a faster Classic Mac, Unknown_K is right - use a PPC. A small number of apps don't run well on PPC but they are a really small number, which you could probably run on an old 030 Mac without any fuss anyway. One reason I have done little with the 68k MAcs in latter years is they are a backwater - stuff pretty much dried up for them in the mid-1990s and they have never seen anything exciting since.