From mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi Wed Apr 29 10:21:09 2009 Message-ID: <8461730.283901241014565357.JavaMail.defaultUser@defaultHost> Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:16:05 +0200 (CEST) From: "penbox@tiscali.it" Reply-To: "penbox@tiscali.it" To: mint@fishpool.com Subject: [MiNT] Alternatives to ColdFire: what about the ARM platform and imx515 Genesi Developer Program MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;charset="UTF-8" xOriginalSenderIP: 78.12.91.191 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi Errors-to: mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi X-original-sender: penbox@tiscali.it Precedence: bulk List-help: List-unsubscribe: List-Id: X-List-ID: List-subscribe: List-owner: List-post: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by mail.sparemint.org id n3TEL1eD022460 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! ;-) Arriva Tiscali Mobile! Acquista la tua SIM Tiscali a soli €5 e scopri la semplicità e la convenienza del nuovo servizio per il tuo cellulare. Passa a Tiscali Mobile http://abbonati.tiscali.it/promo/tiscalimobile/