PDS Card idea... maybe it could be done?

[brad162]

I have seen snippets where someone got a Pi essentially emulating a 68k cpu upgrade for an Amiga, and this gave me an idea.

This is way above my head as it's been ages since i've coded anything or messed with PCBs... but maybe getting a Pi on a PDS card to act as an accelerator and hardware decoder for things like video/audio.

Web browsing would be the hardest though as figuring out how to "accelerate" SSL functions and page rendering would likely be the hardest thing to figure out getting any sort of "modern" browsing on it as the Pi would even need to break the pages down into simpler code to fit into the smaller RAM footprint.

I'm of course just shooting off ideas, but in theory this should be possible with the correct firmware loaded to the Pi and some creative MacOS extensions, correct?

 

[eharmon]

There's some other threads about the potential for adding it as an co-processor (TLS, etc), which could work over NuBus as well and probably wouldn't be hugely different in performance with DMA. Pretty heavy lift to write drivers though... just a pretty heavy lift overall. It's doable though.

As a more general purpose accelerator (CPU Replacement), PDS makes a lot of sense, and the most sensible place to start is PiStorm: https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm

Unfortunately its ports to Macintosh are pretty nascent, there's only a few cases where folks have gotten it booting. I just posted over here about some ideas for improving PiStorm: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/interware-booster-30-se50f-info-dump.46555/post-521195

 

[cheesestraws]

Pretty heavy lift to write drivers though... just a pretty heavy lift overall. It's doable though.

The way to do this would be to pull an A/UX and replace the whole MacTCP API. The A/UX implementation which thunks through to the UNIX kernel is surprisingly small.