Peter wrote:pjw wrote:Sounds good so far! Obviously, Im a punter in these matters, not a pundit, but would this at least be worth looking into? The Apollo is available now, AFAICS..
It has been looked into. "Available" means one has to pay for commercial support of porting/debugging this closed source core to a different hardware. And it is nowhere clear if the core would execute QL code correctly. Just like the TG68 ran Amiga/Atari stuff fine, but failed with QL code. Until Richard and me painfully debugged it over years. Way too risky for me, both in terms of finances and time.
I thought Böhn had opened up his design? Well, you know your own business, of course. I can only dream.
Peter wrote:Compared to that, a classic 68060 approach is way more realistic. The question really is, at which speed are folks like you satisfied. On one hand you say 3-5 times Q68 speed is okay, on the other hand you say a 68060 @ 80 MHz (certainly 3-5 times faster) is too sluggish...
I dont know how I can make it any clearer. Lets just say: The Pi4 with SMSQmulator is just within the border of feeling comfortable; the Q68 and Q80, for whatever reason, never achieved that for me. As you saw from my simple timing test, the Pi4 setup is >5x faster than Q68, so perhaps I was just trying to be too kind with the numbers ..
Peter wrote:Maybe a closer look at what exactly felt too sluggish on the Q60/80 is worthwhile. A new 68060 design could make memory significantly faster, but not the CPU speed behind cache. So it would mainly improve tasks where a lot of memory is involved.
Scroll without jerking in hicolor; move window without lag for saving background, dragging, and then again on dropping it; screen geometry that matches modern displays.
But if Im the only one here who wants anything like it - I dont hear anyone else piping up - you can safely ignore me. I can soldier on with the existing options. Thanks for engaging, though!