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. . . deutsch . . . english . . . español . . . français . . . italiano . . . русский . . .
| 2009-06-12 Technical Background |
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Technical Background about the planned ColdFire-Computer
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| 2009-06-07 MiNTLib ready-made for ColdFire and a new member |
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Vincent Rivière has finished to port the MiNTLib to ColdFire, his work has been included into the official sources. First tests on M5484LITE Board show that it works perfectly on TOS. Just after that, he has published a new version of his cross compiler GCC 4.4.0 with full ColdFire support, including the MiNTLib, math and GEMLib libraries. This compiler can be used right now to produce native ColdFire TOS programs that will run at the highest speed on our new computer. The cross-compiler is available on Vincent's page. Dima Sobolev from St. Petersburg/Russia joined the ACP. Dima is well known to STeem and TeraDesk users, and he also russified TOS 2.06. So we from now on got somebody responsible for "translation english/russian & TOS localization". Dimas "work" will reinforce the Atari-Scene from "Kaliningrad" to "Vladivostok" and help russian speaking Atari users to use our latest developements. We now also got a great teammember who got high experiance with lokalization of TOS in general.
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| 2009-05-23 TOS, MiNT and DVI |
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Didier Méquignon has adapted Firetos (his already for CT60 use patched version of TOS 4.04) to our new hardware. He has done quite a lot of work, so we can expect to boot our new board as soon as the prototypes are availaible. This work - also an adaptation of the work already done for ColdFire - became possible because of Didiers huge experience at the M5484LITE board since 2006. Vincent Rivière is currently patching the MiNTLib to enable its recompilation for the ColdFire processor, in order to produce fully native ColdFire executables which will run at full speed on our computer. He expects his work to be finished soon. Finally Fredi Aschwanden decided after a discussion on the Atari-Home forum to upgrade the hardware to a DVI-I connector instead of the first planned VGA. Most of the preordering persons would like to see our computer equipped with VGA and DVI possibilities and are also willing to pay more to have the digital video signals. But as a majority wants VGA - which could be seen after a quick poll - we decided to use DVI-I with both signals, and have the possibility to use an adapter from DVI to VGA. The works concerning this matter already began.
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| 2009-05-19 New development environment and a new language |
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Besides of the hardware we cared about a new development environment during last week. The developers of vbcc agreed to adapt the MiNT and TOS target of their development environment to the V4e. Thus very soon Crosscompiling will be at our disposal on many different platforms, for example AmigaOS/MorphOS, MacOS X etc. vbcc can be compiled without any changes for each platform on which an Ansi-C compiler is in existance. The vbcc team will change the last two known errors for ColdFire and we will extensively test and send bug-reports, which then again will be worked on. Likewise vbcc will be available on the ColdFire and is the fourth development environment which will run on our computer. Today it was a great pleasure to introduce our spanish news due to further support. We now can report about our progress in five languages. A big thanks goes to Victor and David.
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| 2009-05-12 New team member for editorial office and translation |
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After yesterdays request for participation in the ACP, Jens Riemann contacted us and offered help. Jens will immediately assume the editorial office and translations between German and English. Further we need people speaking French and Spanish who are willing to take on a long-term role inside ACP. This would help to release developers and to push on the project.
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| 2009-05-11 Two of the best Atari developers joined ACP |
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Didier Méquignon is with us and and will work on the ColdFire board - as soon as his "job" at CTPCI (from powerphenix) is finished . At first he likes to work at the AC'97 codec of the board. He will also bring in his great knowledge about ColdFire in general. To be sure to understand the relevance of this news; Didier patched TOS 4 to run at a ColdFire-board, got MiNT up and running at his developementboard, wrote a driver for ATI-Radeon-cards, and got one of the two only working coldfire-systems which are in existance at the moment. And that was not all! His already done great work can be contemplated at: ctpci-e.htm Lonny Pursell also agreed to join the Atari Coldfire Project as official member. As we already reported, Lonnys aim is to get GFA-Basic ready for ColdFire. Lonnys knowledge will be a big help for the whole team and beside working closely together with the compiler team (AHCC and GCC) he will also help at some minor tasks and give advice to the developers where his competency can be helpfully. Further helping hands, especially translators and developers, are welcome every time!
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| 2009-05-07 Simplified schematic of our new computer |
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| 2009-05-05 Support of all relevant developement environments assured! |
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GFA-BASIC Lonny Pursell announced his efforts for supporting the new Coldfire Computer in a first reaction after our public announcement. The maintainer of GFA-Basic prefigured possibility of reworking the GFA-Basic Compiler/Library so it builds CF native apps. Should he succeed then this would allow just a recompile of existing applications, to get even more stuff up and running at improved speeds. Lonney Pursell declared that he´s willing to do a lot of work, how he suspects it, if the machine is released. He explicitely welcomes our decision about which processor we choosed for the future developement of the Atari-ST plattform. "I'd still like to see such a beast of a machine. You would not see me jumping on the support band wagon if it was some other processor though. [...] I see the CF as an old friend who maybe went on a long trip, came back a slightly changed man. A warm familiar face I can easily speak to." he said. Read his entire message at the public MinT Mailinglist. GCC 4.4.0 GCC 4.4.0 has just been released, Vincent Rivière has updated the MiNT patches for it and built the Cygwin binaries. He enabled compiler support for the ColdFire V4e family. So right now, we can run that cross-compiler on Windows systems to write initilialization code for our ColdFire board, and to check the compatibility of other software, even if there is no hardware yet. Since the GCC patches are host-independant, the cross-compiler binaires can be rebuilt for any OS supported by GCC (MacOS X support has already been announced by Markus Fröschle). Your help is welcome ! You can find Vincent's patches and binaries here: m68k-atari-mint tools Vincent has also started to enable ColdFire support in the MiNTLib. He evaluated that is was possible with a reasonable amount of work. When this is done, it will be possible to produce native ColdFire MiNT/TOS software what will run at full speed on our new computer. GCC is the universal C/C++ compiler. Combined with current support inside the FreeMiNT kernel and the MiNTLib, it allows to port GNU/Linux software directly to Atari/MiNT. Moreover, it can be used to write standard TOS software (including GEM) at a very high level of optimization. Pure-C compatible AHCC
Henk Robbers, also part of the Atari Coldfire Project, again declared, that AHCC will be adapted to the ColdFire. So a lightweight C-compiler will most likely be available too. AHCC is verry important for recompiling existing Atari applications - and it´s GEM and single-tasking compatible. Most native Atari software is written using Pure-C and can be recompiled with AHCC. Henk Robbers´ roadmap:
1 Compile and run EmuTOS. As a proof of concept. With this three important developement environments we got the neccessary fundament to compile software native for the ColdFire computer. That would be executable with maximum speed at the ColdFire. For the future we hope thereby for many new developements for the whole range of TOS/GEM
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| 2009-05-01 News on Italian |
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Thanks to great support from the community, after our first public announcement, we today could open our news on italian language. From now on we will be reporting about further developments of the project beside english, french and german also in italian. Further languages are welcome!
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| 2009-04-30 Official ACP email address |
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We now have an official email address for the project. Please use only this one for any communication with us, including for preorders. acpinfo (at) atari (dot) org
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| 2009-04-28 Atari Coldfire Project Reloaded |
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Since the beginning of December 2008 we've been evaluating the possibilities of continuing the Atari Coldfire Project or starting over with it. Our evaluation is now complete and we'd like to let you know that we consider this project basically possible and that from now on we will be working under the name "Atari Coldfire Project". Our primary goal is to build a new Atari TOS clone which is based on a Coldfire processor and to make it available to the public for the lowest possible price. This is a free project that is free of commercial interests of any kind. One of the main goals with our new hardware is to allow further development to be possible in the future in the widest possible scope. "Hardware updates" will become possible by VHDL code for free. The long term goal is absolute compatibility with every Atari TOS machine ever built. In the beginning however, we can assure Hades compatibility. At the moment the following people are involved:
Matthias Alles Further support and advice at special tasks comes from:
Pascal Barlier We are currently in contact with other famous people, this list will soon get bigger! We welcome and request help from every person who can contribute something, no matter how small! Remember too, that since this is a free project, it absolutely depends on community involvement and cannot be accomplished without your help. Because Fredi Aschwanden with the support from Wolfgang Förster directly began to develop the hardware, there is an interim layout of the planned computer available. It got two advantages which could also be interresting for non Atari enthusiasts, we would like to point at. The verry small size of the board and the extremely low power consumption. The actual specifications are:
1. As a independent motherboard. The final price for the board isn't certain yet. For the first 25 preordered boards the fixed cost has been set to Euro557,- (+VAT and shipping). To be able to start with the production of the hardware we need 25 preorders which are fixed through a advanced payment of Euro200,-. Subsequent to that we can begin the prototype production and start with software development. Therefore the first 25 people preordering would then need only to pay the Euro357,- remaining. As much of our work as possible will be published under free licenses. Going forward, we will be continuously reporting further developments at http://acp.atari.org/news.html ACP in April 2009
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| 2008-12-15 Atari-Coldfire initiative from Switzerland and Austria |
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According to new impulses from Switzerland and Austria, since the beginning of december 2008 several developers are contacted personally. The aim is to find out which skills and how many support-possibilities in the Atari-Community are in existance. Afterwards can be decided if and how the project can continue, or if it can get started again together.
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| Atari Coldfire Project Archive | ||
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You will find here the news related to our first project which took place between 2002 and 2008.
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