Hello everyone,
With the advent of FPGA’s development of retro computers has kicked back into life. The immortal Amiga has a new soft-core CPU in the form of the Apollo 080 which has full range of all the instructions of the 68000 - 68060 plus new enhancements such as AMMX as an Apollo implementation of Intel’s MMX.
Apollo Core 68080
The performance on the earlier Cyclone iii version is rougly 4.5 times the speed of a 66Mhz 68060 (see the performance section of the Apollo page)
The Vampire board which has that Apollo 080 soft-processor on it implements an evolving updates to the final version of custom chips onto the full range of Amiga computers right to the original 1985 Amiga 1000. This is about to be extended to the Atari ST range of computers also. It can also be extended to the 68k Mac range as well or anything else with a socketed 68K chip in it.
Atari and Mac were basically CPU-does-all systems like the PC, but the Amiga is different with its musical conductor approach to the CPU which delegates as much as possible from the CPU to make everything smooth. But part of the magic was the Operating System.
BeOS was basically an improved Amiga Workbench.
Atari ST desperately needs a better OS.
Either Haiku or a hybrid form of it could be used on these systems (especially the Atari) to bring them to be up to date modern computers.
Are there currently any moves towards API comparability layers for so as to run software from other OS such as Windows with WINE?
Otherwise code could be taken from AROS (Amiga Research Operating System) into the Haiku Kernel to make a hybrid system. Likewise for Atari ST. Not sure what it would take for Mac 68k. AROS runs on x86 PC’s natively with 68k JIT for compatibility to run Amiga software on PC hardware. A similar process could be used here, or a compatibility layer that could then be extended to many different systems to be able to run software from anywhere.
With an Apollo 080 compiled version of Haiku, or use of it as a co-processor, compatibility with these systems would be possible and melding all the software libraries into one larger pool.
How would that work for your chicken and egg software library dilemma?
Amiga games, Atari Falcon music software plus the 68kMac version of Photo-shop and MS Office for Mac amongst the rest of the software libraries would give Haiku a more solid foundation for going forward. 4 small ponds of cult systems all brought together into one super advanced system. Then we can all move towards low power massively parallel RISC V CPU’s together