exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Does anyone know how compatible the Suska is? Does anyone here own one, or know anyone who owns one?

dhedberg wrote: 06 Apr 2018 23:02 Does anyone know how compatible the Suska is? Does anyone here own one, or know anyone who owns one?

I never heard of anyone owning one.. The chips are supposed to be 100% compatible.. but only way to know, is to build them one by one and throw everything under the sun at it...

exxos wrote: 06 Apr 2018 23:04

dhedberg wrote: 06 Apr 2018 23:02 Does anyone know how compatible the Suska is? Does anyone here own one, or know anyone who owns one?

I never heard of anyone owning one.. The chips are supposed to be 100% compatible.. but only way to know, is to build them one by one and throw everything under the sun at it...

I'd love to play around with one. I saw they're selling for 499 EUR (tax included) now. Still a bit too much without knowing how compatible it is.

I'd thought of getting a Suska at one point years ago too, but it is quite a bit of money without knowing if it really does live up it's claim.

Some more thoughts on this. An ST is perhaps not an ST when it is based on an FPGA CPU capable of emulating 50 other cores. That's something else I was thinking of earlier, I think with your project it would be best to focus 100% on ST only even if you went the FPGA route. Make it the most compatible and smooth running recreation of an ST there is, but only focus on that, rather than some projects we are seeing where you can then jump ship and make it into a speccy, megadrive or an Amiga. You practically should implement an electric shock to stop people if they even try it. That for me is also a very telling, almost dead giveaway that something is not an ST and only pretending to be one.

dhedberg wrote: 06 Apr 2018 23:35 I'd love to play around with one. I saw they're selling for 499 EUR (tax included) now. Still a bit too much without knowing how compatible it is.

Yeah .. I'm half tempted to get one to mess about with it... Its supposed to be a 100% clone.. As I'm plotting to go FPGA with some chips then it would make sense to get the full thing to play with..

DrF wrote: 05 Apr 2018 23:31 Adding the blitter to the STFM is not how it came out the factory, so is it now a STE or a upgraded STFM?

Well, considering that it was only the 260ST and 520ST{F}{M} didn't have the blitter, the 1040ST{F}{M} did have one, it's still an STFM, just with the option installed.

As for replacing the chips with FPGAs, I would suggest that if the main circuit board is the same then it's still the original machine, but with modifications, as the bulk of the system is original.

stephen_usher wrote: 07 Apr 2018 13:19it was only the 260ST and 520ST{F}{M} didn't have the blitter, the 1040ST{F}{M} did have one, it's still an STFM, just with the option installed.

Umm no. Some STF(M) motherboard revisions do have solder pads for a blitter, but no socket, and the same motherboards were used for both 520 and 1040 just with different amounts of RAM populated.

The Mega STs are the ones where early versions had a blitter socket, but not populated, but all later models came with the blitter preinstalled.

exxos wrote: 06 Apr 2018 21:01 So if we put a F1 engine into a mini, is it still a mini ?

My view totally different engine/heart then no it not really a mini is it.
Tuned up old mini engine still a mini?

Same argument could go for a old style 020 cpu card from way back then, in which case a new style 020/030/040 what ever card would be the same.

This is very confusing, im confused easily as it is, I use OutLook Express I don't need this pressure in my life :lol:

For me the most important thing is that there is a hardware configuration that achieves 100% compatibility with official Atari computer models, otherwise one could just as well use an emulator or the MIST. So if you plan to recreate the STe, it should run everything that the real thing does, or at least I wouldn't be interested. But I totally understand that others may think differently.

If it's possible to enable enhancements/add-ons (that could have an impact on compatibility) it's a bonus as long as there's a 100% compatibility mode. Whether this recreation is using FPGAs, software emulation, a combination, or something else I'm not bothered with.

I like watching old demos on real hardware and the challenge of programming demos on stock machines! :-)

exxos wrote: 06 Apr 2018 23:04

dhedberg wrote: 06 Apr 2018 23:02 Does anyone know how compatible the Suska is? Does anyone here own one, or know anyone who owns one?

I never heard of anyone owning one.. The chips are supposed to be 100% compatible.. but only way to know, is to build them one by one and throw everything under the sun at it...

I provided quite a bit of feedback to the suska project as (I think) I implemented the separate cores into one FPGA before they did, probably worlds first. I didn't implement the CPU as I don't think it was complete and the memory was SRAM rather than DRAM. TOS was in an bit ROM double clocked to get 16bits out. The video output actually used a Video DAC from a falcon! This was all about 10 years ago.