Indeed we did.XorA wrote:TerribleFire is basically the equivalent of an SGC.
Tetroid already said he was looking at a new version of SGC.
Dave Park also looked at something similar to the TerribleFire not based on the SGC design.
This stuff is easier on the Amiga because its OS is already aware of expansion buses with detectable hardware and the OS was always 32bit so it doesn't trip over with address assumptions.
If you're going to the expense of doing that, well, there's so many better things you could do. Having a 32-bit CPU that, whenever it has an access to video or the IO area has to do it as four separate 1-byte accesses, meanwhile the video capability is almost zero. As in, imagine every QL clone ever, and it only has the QL native display modes. That take up half the memory timing.
680X0 CPUs are very cheap and some are quite overclockable. The rest of the machine? That's where the dev bucks need to go.
It's such an intractible problem, Peter solved it by replacing the entire system with a FPGA. Even then, (screen depth*resolution) can have a heavy impact on performance, because of the way the QL is organized. If there was a way to put 128K or 256K of dual port VRAM on it, the change would be transformative. An instant doubling in speed, all the time, in modes 4 and 8, and up to 15x in higher modes.
And all this has to be done while maintaining compatibility.