exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Checking eBay as I do for vintage CPUs I noted the TMS34020 and its floating point coprocessor TMS34082 are available for reasonable prices which led me to think about as a proof of concept / retro computing experiment a 68020/68851/68881 Atari board running both those processors as a dual boot TOS / UNIX machine. It’s been a long time since I worked in electronics but I appreciate exactly how complex a task that would be.

Having said that, would such an exercise be worth it both in producing a workable machine and as an exercise in alternative retro-computing to see what an Atari version of a Sun 386i workstation would have been like?

kgilmore wrote: 07 Sep 2026 12:41 Having said that, would such an exercise be worth it both in producing a workable machine and as an exercise in alternative retro-computing to see what an Atari version of a Sun 386i workstation would have been like?

I have wondered from time to time if anyone would attempt a recreation of the old Elmtech Parsec board for the ST. I think it was a TMS34010 with some VRAM - limited to 16 colours / 4bpp but decent high resolution. I don't remember all the details now.

The 34020/082 pairing though would be much nicer. :)