Re: MACH chip question

From: Johan Klockars <rand_at_cd.chalmers.se>
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 11:06:19 +0200 (MET DST)

> Some time back I talked to an engineer at Wizztronics about the AB040
> and their failure the Barracuda. According to him the Falcon needs
> a patched TOS to even boot. There a some instruction at boot up which
> will make the 040 hang, so it's necessary for the hardware on the

I guess we should test this once and for all.

> a comment about this? He claims this was the problem with the Barracuda
> and they could not release it as it needed a patched TOS to even

Publically they have claimed that it would only run on some Falcons...

> boot. We all know that TOS 4.01 and possible 4.02 doesn't boot, so

...perhaps that was those with TOS 4.04.

Anyway, there are lots of machines with patched TOSes around.

> hard to belive that the AB040 would decode instructions at bootup
> and alter them though.

Yes.

> As the AB040 hasn't got the fastest RAM access in the world, maybe it
> would be possible to change these 3 PLDs and make it faster. If someone

IIRC, I found the FastRAM access to be 4-3-3-3 when I tested this a long
time ago. 4-2-2-2 might be possible without interleaved RAM, but would
only be about 25% faster. Since the caches should be reasonably effective
in most cases, this should not be very noticeable and hardly worth the trouble.

-- 
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   Gothenburg, Sweden   |     well?     |            (MGIFv5, QLem, BAD MOOD)
Received on ma. juni 15 1998 - 00:15:00 CEST

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