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Laurent
Registered: Apr 2004
Posts: 40 |
Replacing the 6510 by a 1.2 GHz ARM CPU ?
The SuperCPU cartridge did this years ago, but it was quite bulky, maybe a little bit pricey too.
A new "better, faster, cheaper, slimmer, ..." SuperCpu cartridge could certainly be made with recent technology.
But is it overkill ? useless ? ridiculous ? Would you consider this kills the spirit of the c64 ?
Here is a FAQ about the SuperCPU:
Q: With a SuperCPU - is the C64 still the C64?
A: Yes, definitely. The original C64 feeling stays, the VIC graphics and the SID musics stays - and I doubt that anybody liked the C64 because of its slow processing speed.
With the SuperCPU, the C64 does NOT become a totally new, totally different computer - it stays as your C64!
I kinda lean toward this observation. To me the most important things are the SID and the VIC.
But I wonder how talented demomakers, 6510 gurus, would feel about interacting with the c64 hardware by constantly (but painlessly) saturating the c64 buses, and this by just writing cross-compiled C/C++ code for ARM processors ?
Sure, demos & games could be developed faster and would look better, but the fact that not everyone owning a c64 would have this cardridge, maybe it would just lose all of its interest ?
or maybe not, if it's super affordable & code is open ?
What are your thoughts ?
Any technical observations too ? |
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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5086 |
interesting note about ultimax, still the ram on the cartridge must also run at 1mhz so VICII can access it. probably a good HW engineer can solve that problem tho. I guess its possible to have a ram which is available to the VIC on read cycless, and write to it much faster on the 'other' cycles.
I think a supercpu card compatible fpga cartridge would see a bigger demand / userbase. I'd buy one too probably. |
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White Flame
Registered: Sep 2002
Posts: 136 |
One thing I want to get to one of these years is hooking up a Raspberry Pi to the C64. I think it would be easy enough to hook it up to the IEC bus, but I'm not sure there are enough GPIO lines to drive the cartridge port. If there was a GPIO expander available, I think that would be the best/easiest/cheapest option for having a CPU accelerator, expanded memory, SDcard, networking, usb, etc on the commie.
However, even in this case, it would likely be a good idea to have hardware assist in driving the bus, to free up the ARM more, so you're still taking some sort of custom logic. A Propeller could bridge the gap; pretty sure it has enough IO pins. |
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mhindsbo
Registered: Dec 2014
Posts: 51 |
I would be with Oswald on this one. The charm of coding to the C64 is the fixed boundaries of the system and to see if you can squeeze it out of it. OK it is kind of weird to like counting cycles of ML instructions, but ... ;-) |
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AlexC
Registered: Jan 2008
Posts: 298 |
I have a mixed feelings about it due to several reasons. First of all I agree that the beauty of C64 is ability to overcome hardware limitations and pushing it forward. After more than 30 years we still haven't reach to the limit of its potential.
On the other hand as a person who still loves to work on real thing whenever it is possible obviously I would like a faster machine with more memory for certain tasks. This is why I've been working on C128D with a REU and 1581 for a long time treating it as C64 with turbo option. However when Chameleon64 has been released I'm back to C64. It's turbo mode gives a lot of speedup for certain tasks.
As for SCPU since Vice got support for it anyone can try it out and decide if it is still a c64 or not. The one problem with SCPU and previous accelerator cards is a lack of software and SCPU did best in this area but unless you are using GEOS or just want to code using 16bit CPU on C64 than the software base is very limited.
I guess RPi could be easily used as form of coprocessor to speedup some calculation - just like 1541 drives can be used. |
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Tao
Registered: Aug 2002
Posts: 115 |
The SuperCPU belonged to the same family as the 6510 though, the ARM doesn't. Most/all (?) 6510 code runs on a 65816 processor, just faster.
If I want something to run fast I've got a PC and a Chameleon.
I'd love to have a backwards-compatible newly produced (or, if someone has an unused that they'd be willing to let go of) SuperCPU though. I don't think I'd be using it for demo programming though (except maybe to produce something just for the novelty). But for C*Base it's an excellent thing to have, and an ARM wouldn't help there at all... |
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lft
Registered: Jul 2007
Posts: 369 |
For what it's worth, I agree that the charm with the C64 is the limits, cycle-counting and all that.
But I also have a raspberry pi hooked up to the user port, and a terminal program that I can load really quickly from the ultimate. This gives me instant access to a high-end development environment, where I can edit source code, cross compile, and then with a simple command run the program on the real machine.
Sometimes this development environment is more convenient than vice on a pc. For instance, I could not have written ultimate opus without it. It's also nice when exploring some new glitch, when you want to be sure that you're not looking at an emulator bug.
One thing to keep in mind when designing any kind of c64-raspberrypi combo system, is that the pi takes a while to boot. |
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Laurent
Registered: Apr 2004
Posts: 40 |
Actually I was saying 1.2 GHz and a single core, but prices of those Chinese android tablets CPU are dropping at an amazing speed.
You can now get a quad-core Cortex A7 @ 1.5GHz for only $4 !
It's not even needed to use a front-end glue-logic chip at this point.
At worse one core could be "sacrificed" to handle all the c64 bus timing with plenty of time per PHI2 phase.
Such a cartridge would definitely have:
* a microSD slot (CPU would boot from it)
* a WIFI IC (like ESP8266 that seems quite easy use for this sort of application)
* USB port
Obviously, this idea isn't limited to just having an insane CPU accelerator that could smoothly spin 3D FLI logos in real-time, or to a new & cheaper SuperCPU-compatible cartridge.
You could still make it any cartridge you want, using the 6510 as always.
And depending on what other physical ports it has, it could run disc-drive emulation like 1541U, have midi, or any crazy things I can't think about.
New demos, tools, games, magazines would be directly accessed from the c64 as soon as they're out thanks to WIFI. |
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Tao
Registered: Aug 2002
Posts: 115 |
Quote: Actually I was saying 1.2 GHz and a single core, but prices of those Chinese android tablets CPU are dropping at an amazing speed.
You can now get a quad-core Cortex A7 @ 1.5GHz for only $4 !
It's not even needed to use a front-end glue-logic chip at this point.
At worse one core could be "sacrificed" to handle all the c64 bus timing with plenty of time per PHI2 phase.
Such a cartridge would definitely have:
* a microSD slot (CPU would boot from it)
* a WIFI IC (like ESP8266 that seems quite easy use for this sort of application)
* USB port
Obviously, this idea isn't limited to just having an insane CPU accelerator that could smoothly spin 3D FLI logos in real-time, or to a new & cheaper SuperCPU-compatible cartridge.
You could still make it any cartridge you want, using the 6510 as always.
And depending on what other physical ports it has, it could run disc-drive emulation like 1541U, have midi, or any crazy things I can't think about.
New demos, tools, games, magazines would be directly accessed from the c64 as soon as they're out thanks to WIFI.
Well, make it SuperCPU-compatible (with an option to run even faster, but the default being plain 1MHz/20MHz 65816 emulation) and I'll be interested. |
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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5086 |
count me in in case of scpu&1541&reu&cart emulation :) I'd also like to see amidog's doom running on it :) |
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chatGPZ
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 11350 |
jim drew already did this! |
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