New Project: Prodigy 040/060 Card

[Oliver_A]

Hello Mac community,

I joined MLA68K 2 days ago, because I recently acquired a Macintosh LC475, which I have started to like a lot due to its compact size, and actually very good performance.

Most people know me in the Amiga community, where I have started several hardware designs ranging from sound card, graphics card and cpu accelerators.

So by using Shapeshifter since almost 30 years, one could call me a "passive Mac user", since I have gotten to really like the Mac OS itself, but also the vast choice of native 68k software I could suddenly use on my Amiga at great speed.

I have recently stumbled across the great efforts made by @zigzagjoe to get a 68060 CPU running in a real MAC, something that Amiga users have been doing since a long time, and sadly never passed back to the MAC community due to the emergence of PPC-based machines.

The most prominent headline of this effort, which actually sparked my interest here, was "The Fastest (68k) Macintosh Might Not Be An Amiga Anymore". So I asked myself: well, why not give something back, and make this a reality. Because, at least that's my perspective, what unites both our communities is the love and passion for the Motorola 68k CPU architecture, which, still to this day, is amongst the best, if not the best, CISC ISA ever been created.


(Some people might even claim it should never have been superseded by PPC..... )

As a lucky coincidence, I have recently started to make my own Amiga 68060-based accelerator design a while back, which I am waiting now for the very first Revision 0 prototype PCB. Lucky, because I can actually re-use most of my design for a classic m68k MAC accelerator. Therefore, as my introduction to this community, I would proudly like to annouce the:

Prodigy 040/060 Card

So what is this card? In short, it is a CPU card for classic 68k-based MACs, which plugs directly into the 68040 CPU Socket.

Here is a rendering of the first prototype:



The card will have the following features:

• Support for 68040 and 68060 CPUs, selectable by jumper setting.
• CPU clock rate: up to 50MHz (68040) and, yes, 100MHz! (68060)
• SDRAM memory controller, which runs at either 1x or 2x bus speed (to minimize first access penalty) - meaning up to 100MHz memory clock
• 128MB on-board SDRAM
• Flexible bus interface: always full speed to SDRAM, selectable 1/2 or 1/4 bus speed to MAC mainboard (no need to overclock SCSI bus in order to run 100MHz!)
• 2 MB Flash Rom, for startup code, 68060 compatibility software layer and patching of MAC OS
• RECOVERY jumper: if set, system starts using the mainboard ram and rom, enabling you to flash the rom via software
• A prominent Amiga feature: MAPROM - copy the MacOS Rom to superfast SDRAM on start-up, and use memory protection/remapping to execute it as if it were a real ROM - withou the need of using the MMU
• Configuration settings can be flashed in FPGA
• FPGA can be software upgraded on the MAC
• Designed to (hopefully) fit in all 68k-based MACs, first prototype will be developed on an LC475

This card will bring significant acceleration even if you keep using your on-board 68040 CPU due to its superior memory interface.

So, what do you think? ;-)

What I would like to ask you is, whether you think this product might be useful to you, and if yes, since I am basically "an Amiga guy", I would appreciate if you could guide me a bit on how these features could be implemented the best way in software to integrate well with MacOS.

So for example, I can design a memory controller very easily, but I have currently no idea how I can make this memory available to MAC OS in the most system friendly way. On Amiga, this is actually quite easy, since the Amiga implements a card resource management system called "Autoconfig", making it very easy to make the OS recognize additional memory and I/O resources (much like PCI).

From what I have gathered so far, the way to go here would be to patch the MacOS Rom to utilize the new resources without getting into conflict with the on-board hardware.

In any case, I shall be looking forward to your feedback and help!

Best regards,

Oliver Achten

 

[Durosity]

This is pretty damn crazy exciting!

 

[eharmon]

Hello Mac community,

I joined MLA68K 2 days ago, because I recently acquired a Macintosh LC475, which I have started to like a lot due to its compact size, and actually very good performance.

Most people know me in the Amiga community, where I have started several hardware designs ranging from sound card, graphics card and cpu accelerators.

So by using Shapeshifter since almost 30 years, one could call me a "passive Mac user", since I have gotten to really like the Mac OS itself, but also the vast choice of native 68k software I could suddenly use on my Amiga at great speed.

I have recently stumbled across the great efforts made by @zigzagjoe to get a 68060 CPU running in a real MAC, something that Amiga users have been doing since a long time, and sadly never passed back to the MAC community due to the emergence of PPC-based machines.

The most prominent headline of this effort, which actually sparked my interest here, was "The Fastest (68k) Macintosh Might Not Be An Amiga Anymore". So I asked myself: well, why not give something back, and make this a reality. Because, at least that's my perspective, what unites both our communities is the love and passion for the Motorola 68k CPU architecture, which, still to this day, is amongst the best, if not the best, CISC ISA ever been created.


(Some people might even claim it should never have been superseded by PPC..... )

As a lucky coincidence, I have recently started to make my own Amiga 68060-based accelerator design a while back, which I am waiting now for the very first Revision 0 prototype PCB. Lucky, because I can actually re-use most of my design for a classic m68k MAC accelerator. Therefore, as my introduction to this community, I would proudly like to annouce the:

Prodigy 040/060 Card

So what is this card? In short, it is a CPU card for classic 68k-based MACs, which plugs directly into the 68040 CPU Socket.

Here is a rendering of the first prototype:

View attachment 93907

The card will have the following features:

• Support for 68040 and 68060 CPUs, selectable by jumper setting.
• CPU clock rate: up to 50MHz (68040) and, yes, 100MHz! (68060)
• SDRAM memory controller, which runs at either 1x or 2x bus speed (to minimize first access penalty) - meaning up to 100MHz memory clock
• 128MB on-board SDRAM
• Flexible bus interface: always full speed to SDRAM, selectable 1/2 or 1/4 bus speed to MAC mainboard (no need to overclock SCSI bus in order to run 100MHz!)
• 2 MB Flash Rom, for startup code, 68060 compatibility software layer and patching of MAC OS
• RECOVERY jumper: if set, system starts using the mainboard ram and rom, enabling you to flash the rom via software
• A prominent Amiga feature: MAPROM - copy the MacOS Rom to superfast SDRAM on start-up, and use memory protection/remapping to execute it as if it were a real ROM - withou the need of using the MMU
• Configuration settings can be flashed in FPGA
• FPGA can be software upgraded on the MAC
• Designed to (hopefully) fit in all 68k-based MACs, first prototype will be developed on an LC475

This card will bring significant acceleration even if you keep using your on-board 68040 CPU due to its superior memory interface.

So, what do you think? ;-)

What I would like to ask you is, whether you think this product might be useful to you, and if yes, since I am basically "an Amiga guy", I would appreciate if you could guide me a bit on how these features could be implemented the best way in software to integrate well with MacOS.

So for example, I can design a memory controller very easily, but I have currently no idea how I can make this memory available to MAC OS in the most system friendly way. On Amiga, this is actually quite easy, since the Amiga implements a card resource management system called "Autoconfig", making it very easy to make the OS recognize additional memory and I/O resources (much like PCI).

From what I have gathered so far, the way to go here would be to patch the MacOS Rom to utilize the new resources without getting into conflict with the on-board hardware.

In any case, I shall be looking forward to your feedback and help!

Best regards,

Oliver Achten

Great to have more hardware developers in the community!

Overall I think you'll find the Mac ROM is much, much less auto-configurable (more like Kickstart 1.x than 2.x+). Using your memory example:

• ROMs are "universal", but only in theory. Despite many machines shipping with ROM SIMM slots, upgrades were never provided and compatibility was never really ensured. So while the ROM itself supports earlier machines, it was never debugged for regressions. As a result, some ROMs can be used across machines (IIsi -> SE/30, LC 475 -> Wombat-based Quadra), but not always, and there's often quirks (LC 475 ROMs have the wrong memory timing for instance).
• Most machines have different ROMs (though there's some overlap), meaning offsets are different per machine.
• The ROMs do autodetect the logic board type using resistor matrices, etc, and configure themselves accordingly.
• Combining this, let's look at memory sizing, which I happened to be debugging yesterday:
  • The ROM detects what machine it's running on.
  • It branches to the correct memory sizing routine for the memory controller corresponding to that machine.
  • It builds a table of memory chunks in memory.
  • It returns a pointer to that table for configuration of the rest of the system.

So this might not be too bad in theory, you can patch in your own memory controller routine and jump to it to add those address ranges. But there's a few challenges to think about:

• You need to choose a single ROM and set of machines to support, or build a table of patches per ROM.
• It's possible the OS overpatches these routines itself (unlikely for memory sizing, but common for other routines) which you need to avoid or re-patch.
• It's possible other parts of the ROM or OS size memory on their own; since it wasn't meant to be extended, these quirks may not have been discovered yet by the community.

Despite this, it's definitely doable. The Turbo040 does a large amount of patches for a large amount of ROMs to enable 040 compatibility on 030 machines, for instance. Overall I'd look at targeting the LC 475 ROM, as it has the widest '040 machine support (with a few fix-ups).

For mapping ROM to RAM, here's a relevant discussion on a software utility (w/ benchmarks and more): https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/rom-in-ram-for-quadra-performance-boost.46536/

Were you planning for software configurable clock speeds?

As a real challenge, A/UX support would be very interesting, since it never ran beyond 68k. I'm not sure how it handles 040 compatibility (It mostly doesn't use the ROM, so I'm not sure where its support packages come from -- it might depend on the normal OS boot gluing everything together).

 

[ObeyDaleks]

This sounds great! I have a few Amigas with (your???) accelerators, including the ACA500, ACA1234 (with an FPU upgrade), as well as the AGA MK3.

As the previous poster, I'm also curious how this will work across different models. AFAIK, there's a lot of proprietary trickery that was implemented on the old-school accelerators. Also, there are many different board layouts and while some accelerators worked on multiple "sibling" models, they had to use a variety of adapters to make it work.

Oh, one other thought. I'm wondering how "useful" (LOL) a 100MHz 68060 would be on a Mac. There just wasn't a lot of 68k Mac software written that would need that much speed. Later software was written for the PPC, so there's sort of a cut-off to where speed gains just outpace any software ever written for the platform. It's quite different than the Amiga scene where people are creating demos to this day.

Regardless, it's quite an exciting prospect and I'm sure there would be many people interested in the product.

Following this with great interest.

 

[eharmon]

Oh, one other thought. I'm wondering how "useful" (LOL) a 100MHz 68060 would be on a Mac. There just wasn't a lot of 68k Mac software written that would need that much speed. Later software was written for the PPC, so there's sort of a cut-off to where speed gains just outpace any software ever written for the platform. It's quite different than the Amiga scene where people are creating demos to this day.

You'd be surprised. So much was still emulated on PowerPC, and it was "fast enough" that applications took awhile to transition.

In the same vein, obviously running System 7 on a New World G4 will smoke any '060 anyway, but that's no fun (well it is fun, but differently fun).

That said, I think slow graphics and anemic disk performance will indeed drag down the overall "experience" to make it less impressive than on an Amiga. With graphics running at standard clocks on the 040 bus (or NuBus) and 5MB/s SCSI, I suspect things like Finder won't feel a lot faster.

But any period productivity app should fly, I would think.