Steve wrote: 27 Aug 2021 19:44
I just thought of the perfect analogy: @Badwolf 's Falcon accelerator. We all know everyone is interested in it, and would all invest in a finished product, but could he sell his last revision? No :) (or barely) but like, he shouldn't be disheartened by that and neither should you. That is my point :)
I do see your point
@Steve . But if you read the entire thread and see very strange issues with TOS206 and the -38 DMA, which would take many hours to debug, but likely is a problem within TOS206 itself. This was supposed to be corrected with MAPROM been able to emulate TOS206 space etc then there is issues with the blitter.. Both of this software was developed by
@agranlund Who may or may not be back any time soon. I don't have the time or the motivation to sit down start learning assembly and the ins and outs of TOS and the 030 MMU operations etc. It is a phenomenal amount of work.
Realistically,EMUTOS will probably work fine running from fast-ram anyway. But I have not done much testing in that respect. I doubt anyone else will step up to troubleshoot the software side of things either.So the only thing not developed is IDE basically. But this may be actually be somewhat pointless as Trudie is being developed for the IDE interface and working on it on the TF536 is basically a step backwards. As far as things go, is pretty much *is* the final board as I cannot really do anything else with it hardware wise.
Boosters generally don't sell well, I know that much. It's why I am not in any hurry to finish the SEC booster which has been in the pipeline for many years now. Like I say, nothing in particular sells well in Atari land, but boosters are indeed one of the worst things for interest / sales and soak up the most amount of time. Things are escalated as well because they are " self-assembly" which is not easy and practically nobody can do it either... Might as well throw in parts shortages where people cannot get the parts anyway.
In the case of
@Badwolf It is a personal project for him. I really like the idea myself. I would prefer to have a boosted 030 than a CT60 bodged in my falcon. I'm sure he's busy like the rest of us, but I doubt he's trying to run a web store and designing and trying to coordinate 100's of projects all at once like I am doing constantly. I mean sure, if I had no other projects on the go, I probably would spend a lot of time on the thing. Time is just better spent on power supplies, general stock items, decoder boards, memory expansions etc etc at the end of the day it helps out a lot more people than just spending hundreds of hours on something the which will likely never sell. I really just messed with the TF536 as a personal project and did not really expect there to be much interest in it from the start. But there are a lot more interesting projects to be getting on with.
Also don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is "the end". I may pick it up again further down the line even just for my own personal interests, but meanwhile, I just have countless other things which need to get done. Like I need to get on board with
@Icky With the FPGA MMU cores etc, time is much better spent on that, because at the end of the day, if those chipsets are reworked and can run faster, it pretty much makes boosters obsolete anyway. So why really spend lots of time on something which has no interest when there is already something a lot better in the pipeline.
It is also the reason why I dropped the 16MHz project which many people protested against. But like I said, it also had issues which could not easily be solved, and spending hundreds of hours trying to bodge it up, what is the point because it is a dead-end road when you cannot scale up to 32Mhz anyway.
Even if this project does eventually vanish, people can still obtain the original TF536 rev2 and flash with the Atari firmware. It is of course not exactly the same, but if people really want to experiment with a 030 and fast ram, it's still a very good solution and the Amiga guys are still building TF536's up AFAIK.