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2015-05-16 14:42

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 ?

... 10 posts hidden. Click here to view all posts....

2015-05-18 20:19

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.

2015-05-20 09:15

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.

2015-05-20 10:21

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.

2015-05-20 10:24

Oswald

Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5025

count me in in case of scpu&1541&reu&cart emulation :) I'd also like to see amidog's doom running on it :)

2015-05-20 13:47

chatGPZ

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 11136

jim drew already did this!

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