3 ms·
Yes - I think "heyday" is the wrong word choice here. What I meant to say is that my impression is that the most powerful hardware with 68k CPUs came out in the
by DCKing 6y ago
Yes - I think "heyday" is the wrong word choice here. What I meant to say is that my impression is that the most powerful hardware with 68k CPUs came out in the early 90s, and outside of microcontrollers there hasn't been much development in 68k since. At least, that is my impression from googling around - the 68060 in Atari clones and late Amiga revisions around 1995 seem to be the end of the line for 68k.
- cbmuser 6y agoAs mentioned in another comment, you can get very fast m68k hardware with the Vampire accelerators these days which actually implement additional instructions and are therefore called 68080 by its developers.
- DCKing 6y agoAh very cool. It seems that Apollo 68080 is a 'virtual' 68k CPU running on an FPGA. I was curious about FPGAs since they currently have plenty of headroom to emulate early nineties consoles (inluding 68k based ones like the Genesis) - it's awesome to see that FPGAs can now be used for continued life of old CPU architectures.
- tyingq 6y agoIt is a little tricky for the older CPUs that want 5v I/O. There's not a universal bi-directional level shifter that works well in all common situations.
- jsymolon 6y agothe ColdFire SOCs (system on a chip) are still available and of newer "stock" vs chasing down original 68xxxx chips. I'm not too fond of emulators and like to work on actual hardware although the FPGA 68k cores are interesting.