68060 accelerator cards for Mac: Would you be willing? — #61

Post #61 by johnklos

Source Forum	68kMLA
Category	68k
Post Date	Wed, 21 Jul 2010 - 20:35
Original URL	https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/68060-accelerator-cards-for-mac-would-you-be-willing.8459/

Post

$600-ish dollars is a lot of money for a 300Mhz computer. Such a thing might well run 68K Mac programs at speeds comparable to a 1Ghz+ G4 or 2Ghz Pentium running an emulator, but... either of those options costs a heck of a lot less. (I can't find any benchmarks, but I'd be *seriously* surprised if the Atari Coldfire boards run EmuTOS faster than even a semi-modern PC running ARAnyM.) So clearly, the *only* reason to do this would be for love. Are there really enough people out there with undying love and nostalgia for *specifically* 68K Macs that isn't satisfied by emulators to support such a project? I have no idea. The Amiga and Atari people were faced with the complete extinction of their platforms so sketchy and uneconomical low-volume-production hardware wizardry was the only option the hardcore fans had to keep their love alive. Macs didn't die, they evolved, so... is there a point? Eh, who knows. All I know is there's an awful lot of talking and very little action. ;^b

If Ataris had meaningful preemptive multitasking, then a ShapeShifter / Basilisk type emulator / virtualizer would have already been made. There were ways to run MacOS on Ataris, but as far as I know they all required MacOS to entirely take over the whole OS, so they wouldn't work on the Coldfire board without lots of modification. But the Atari Coldfire-on-a-PCI board is an open project, so all documentation is available, so it's possible for someone with money and time.

Regarding benchmarks, emulators with JIT caching can run noticeably faster than a real m68060, but if you want or need to emulate an MMU, you can't use JIT, so the speed of a very fast x86 is not necessarily faster than a real m68060. I've heard from NetBSD Amiga developers with access to m68060 systems that some things are faster and some are slower - UAE isn't faster overall, but of course a 2+ GHz AMD or Intel system is much easier to find or buy than an Amiga with an m68060.