#ByteCellar

#IRC #terminal #irssi #MC68000 #Freescale #NoMansSky #photo #random #mydesk #Mac #macOS #tech #nostalgia #dusty

There are quite a few oldschool Amiga OCS/ECS demos that will run as intended, perfectly, smoothly only on base Amiga 1000, 500, 2000 systems with 68000 CPU -- unaccelerated. One example is TBL's Eon (2019) -- an incredible demo.

I've encountered a few games that fall into this category also.

Will these run properly with 68000-emulator accelerators such as the PiStorm? It emulates the 68000, but can it do so with 100% never-failing, cycle-exact precision when operating as a base, unaccelerated 68000 at 7.16/7.09 MHz?

The demos I speak of fail to run or run visibly broken with most accelerators, including my A2620 (14.32MHz 68020).

#Amiga #CommodoreAmiga #PiStorm #RPi #emulation #demoscene #scenedemo #demos #demo #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #retrogaming #TheBlackLotus #BlackLotus #MC68000

If you love Assembly, I am sure you'll love my #UltimASM #DSL it allows you to design the Assembly of your dreams or to code in #6502asm , #MC6809 , #mc68000 and even #VAX #ASM on #RISC_OS (and all other supported platform by my #UltimaVM).

Want to know more? Come at the RISC OS London Show Saturday 25th October!

#riscos #bytecode #virtualMachine

Novomatic Coolfire. Самый навороченный игровой автомат двухтысячных

Приветствую всех! Пару лет назад я уже рассказывал про игровые автоматы. И вот сейчас ко мне в руки попало довольно интересное железо — Novomatic Coolair, игровая платформа от одного из самых продвинутых производителей такого оборудования. Сегодня мы узнаем, как были устроены «топовые» игровые автоматы и как заставить работать начинку от них. Заодно соберём своего «механического гангстера», выиграем первый миллион и тут же его проиграем. Как водится, будет много интересного. Congratulations! Jackpot won!

https://habr.com/ru/companies/timeweb/articles/917726/

#игровой_автомат #novomatic #mc68000 #кнопки #переключатели #разъёмы #реле #timeweb_статьи

In 1978, Prof. Verbaeten ported 7th Ed. Unix to the Motorola 68000 at KU Leuven in Belgium. This port is not archived at TUHS, only mentioned here:
https://eng.kuleuven.be/en/stories/50-years-of-computer-science-engineering
https://museum.cs.kuleuven.be/misc/Tim_Ameye_Sander_Van_Loock_40-jaar.pdf (p. 12)

There's also a paper describing the port which is not available:
Verbaeten, P., Berbers, Y. (1983). Porting Unix. In: Proceedings of UNICOM Conference, San Diego.

If you happen to have pointers to any of this, I would be happy to hear from you!

#retrocomputing #unix #MC68000 #kuleuven

I just found my Sinclair QL lurking at the back of the garage. It's going to take a bit of work to get it going again.

I built it into a metal toolbox to sit beside my desk and used a separate keyboard, which was borrowed from a VT100 and rewired to work with the QL.

My QL had not the usual 128 K of RAM, nor was it expanded to only 640 K, but I had 656 K, with an extra 16 K battery backed on a board which I could also use as an EPROM emulator when doing things with other micros. That board also contains a Dallas clock chip, so I didn't have to set the time everytime that I booted the machine up.

The extra 16 K of RAM was actually in the slot usually reserved for a ROM cartridge so it usually contained the dongle from Metacomco's port of the Lattice C compiler alongside a bit of extra code of my own.
#RetroComputing #SinclairQL #SinclairResearch #mc68008 #MC68000

Happy Birthday, Atari ST!
Already 40 years, where has the time gone?

https://dfarq.homeip.net/atari-st-introduced-april-8-1985/

#AtariST #retrocomputing #motorola #MC68000

I am considering the configuration of my Amiga 2000 w/ 68020 accelerator... I would appreciate opinions from drivers of slotted Amigas, here.

I have an Amiga 2000 with SCSI + SCSI2SD, 4MB 16-bit FAST RAM, 1MB CHIP RAM, etc. It also has an A2620 68020 accelerator (14MHz) with 2MB 32-bit FAST RAM which is meager, but makes things noticeably faster on the Workbench. Most of what I do on this is watch demos and play games, though. All I do on desktop, really, is use AmiTCP and ncftp to bring files over and run IMP sometimes.

I recently downloaded the Amiga demo 'Downslope' and noticed it's less fluid / smooth with the accelerator enabled. I've seen this before here and there, but assumed that the accelerator was doing my a solid in demos - giving a bit of a boost.

I commented about this in the Pouet 'Downslope' thread and the developer came in and commented,

---
"Accelerators often introduce an asynchronicity between CPU and chip memory, which adds to chip access latency.
This can be worsened by the occurrance of many interrupts, which can cause additional strain on memory on a higher CPU.
If we are unlucky, not even the much faster execution time of the higher CPU can make up for the additional latencies and strain on chip memory.
It's a matter of focus on the target. There are side effects on higher CPUs which are difficult to anticipate, and usually you have only a limited number of machines for testing."
---

This makes sense, I suppose. Is this common? Are people with '030, '040, '060 accelerators having a lesser experience with demos due to CHIP RAM latency than with base '000? Certainly in some scenarios the more powerful CPU helps hugely for demos and games alike - I've seen this on my '020. But, yes -- demos are the most tightly coded of all Amiga apps, certainly. To the metal, etc.

So I am wondering now, should I remove the accelerator to get the most out of OCS/ECS demos on the system? Yes, I can disable the accelerator with a right mouse click at reboot, but that gets in the way of keeping Degrader's PAL state in effect, causing a hassle. (it's an NTSC A2000, unfortunately).

Anyone been down this road? Thoughts?

#Amiga #Commodore #CommodoreAmiga #A2000 #A2500 #MC68000 #MC68020 #MC68030 #demo #demos #demoscene #scenedemo #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #vintagecomputers #retrocomputers #retrogaming #hardware #vintaghardware #A2620 #A2630 #DaveHaynie #ZorroII #terriblefire #oldcomputers