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Motorola's 68000 CPU was probably way ahead of its time

TheD

The Detective
Intel got lucky when they got the IBM contract. Matter of fact IBM would be huge if they kept on making their own shit.

The only CPUs IBM had at the time the PC came out (AFAIK) were ones for the System/370 mainframes, wildly unsuited for a home computer.
 

blu

Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Yeah same arch/chip family, different versions. Kinda like how the GameCube MIPS is basically the same arch as what the WiiU uses, but obviously one is more powerful than the other.
ppc

It was supposed to be backward compatible with the Famicom. While the idea was scrapped, the processor remained (it's the same one in both, the 6508 I believe, going off memory)
65c816 - the 8/16 hybrid successor to the all-mighty 6502.

As re the 68K - it was way ahead of its time, like most other designs by moto from their golden era, ergo the longevity. Unfortunately, those days are gone. The last truly exceptional CPU moto did was the ppc 603/603e (gave a run for their money to everything intel had back in the day), and established the foundations to the ultra successful G3 and G4 series, which are alive and kicking to this day in some game consoles, and even on Mars! : )
 

Sails

Banned
As an added bonus, if you've ever written or perused code for the 68000, it's rather fantastic for the era.
 

DECK'ARD

The Amiga Brotherhood
QFMFT, brother. Guru Meditation FL!

guru-meditation.gif
 
Motorola was one of those companies that was way ahead of it's time always, I remember my dad in the 90's coming back with some sleek looking flip phone/pager that was the Motorola StarTac. He needed them because of his work. He got Palm 1000(obviously not Motorola) later on too since he was a Psychiatrist and these helped him immensely when he was on call. It wasn't just the 68000 CPU, but yeah. That definitely was ahead of it's time. Not probably.
 

Arkham

The Amiga Brotherhood

How I hated it, yet how much I miss it. I laugh at the whole XBOX SNAP thing because the Amiga did it first with the pull-down windows. Not to mention the Genlock/Mandala that beat Eye snd Kinect by 25 years. I remember having drinks with those guys at World of Amiga '89. (Maybe not the hippie guy, but some of their crew. It was a fuzzy night.)

Agnes, Denise, Paula. I still love you.
 

ymmv

Banned
The Amiga was such an increbile, powerful system back in the day. It may have been my favorite system ever. The speed, the graphics, the os, everything!
 

AlexMogil

Member
How I hated it, yet how much I miss it. I laugh at the whole XBOX SNAP thing because the Amiga did it first with the pull-down windows. Not to mention the Genlock/Mandala that beat Eye snd Kinect by 25 years. I remember having drinks with those guys at World of Amiga '89.

Agnes, Denise, Paula. I still love you.

Thanks for that real quick walk down memory lane. It's 1989 again, sheesh. I miss those days. I coded back then... CODED.
 
For those wanting easy access to true 68000 goodness, the Amiga CD32 has wonderful compilation CDs with hundreds of games and demoes on them.
 

boingball

Member
Love the 68k processors. Though I mostly used C on my Amiga not so much assembler anymore. But assembler code was pretty readable.


Yeah, the only problem of the Amiga OS and architecture was that it had no MMU and that all tasks shared the same memory space. So when one task crashed it crashed the whole system (hope you saved everything before the crash).
 
The moment I saw 68000, I thought of that Japanese PC. But why would they choose specifically that number? Just for coolness in marketing?
 

Herne

Member
It was a great design, it's no wonder it found it's way onto so many machines.

This is from the reference manual so you can see there's quite a few variations of the chip. Somewhat similar to how there are different x86, ARM, etc processors but possibly with less differences. The console manufacturers will have had their own customizations as well.

9qLYEZ7.png

Not seeing the 68060 on there.
 

Herne

Member
The moment I saw 68000, I thought of that Japanese PC. But why would they choose specifically that number? Just for coolness in marketing?

It was the successor to the 8-bit 6800. Intel had 8086 (hence 286, 386, 486), MOS Technology/Commodore had the 6502...
 

DECK'ARD

The Amiga Brotherhood
Love the 68k processors. Though I mostly used C on my Amiga not so much assembler anymore. But assembler code was pretty readable.



Yeah, the only problem of the Amiga OS and architecture was that it had no MMU and that all tasks shared the same memory space. So when one task crashed it crashed the whole system (hope you saved everything before the crash).

Lack of memory protection was a bit of a bugger, but then the Amiga OS was way ahead of its time with full multitasking in the first place.

You took so many things for granted that wouldn't appear on PC/Mac for ages.
 

Schrade

Member
I wanna be part of The Amiga Brotherhood :(

Still have my A3000 and bought an A1000 + 1080 monitor several years ago just to have the original beast of a system.

Lack of memory protection was a bit of a bugger, but then the Amiga OS was way ahead of its time with full multitasking in the first place.

You took so many things for granted that wouldn't appear on PC/Mac for ages.

God. The insanely responsive GUI of the Amiga still hasn't been achieved on today's modern OSes. And the Amiga first introduced me to RAM disks that could survive reboots/crashes. God, that was glorious.

I also still love and miss AmigaDOS and WShell to this day.

Oh and CygnusEd! What a beautiful beast of a text editor.
 

Fularu

Banned
I wanna be part of The Amiga Brotherhood :(

Still have my A3000 and bought an A1000 + 1080 monitor several years ago just to have the original beast of a system.



God. The insanely responsive GUI of the Amiga still hasn't been achieved on today's modern OSes. And the Amiga first introduced me to RAM disks that could survive reboots/crashes. God, that was glorious.

I also still love and miss AmigaDOS and WShell to this day.

Oh and CygnusEd! What a beautiful beast of a text editor.

Eh I still have my A500, my A1000, my A2500 and my A1200 :)

I really need to find an A4000 and a 68060 card :p But monies!

I first dabbled in Amos before using Devpac and ASM+ :p

Our first "project" was a port of SFII using AMOS (you can laugh!). We used my DCTV to capture all the frames from a SFC, clean them up in DPIV and work on implementing the system. We had prety much everything going except collisions (obviously). It would have been a shitty port but it taught us a lot :D
 

mclem

Member
I would say that the Zilog Z80 would've been like the ARM of the past. The Z80 was used in just about every 8bit home computer back in the day, and and just about every 8bit arcade machine used a z80 as well. The Sega Master System, Game Gear, Neo-Geo Pocket all used Z80 variants. The Game Boy used some kind of hybrid Z80 as well. The Genesis had a z80 in it, and it was used in a lot of Sega's scaling arcade hardware as sound controllers.

Yeah, I was going to mention the Z80. I'd say it's even more prevalent than the 68k family, myself. Not as popular, but the 6502 deserves a nod as well.
 

beril

Member
That looks awesome. I want to play that.



Could they do that with the Genesis, put extra chips in the cart?

It is possible for mega drive carts to have extra processors, but much less common; apparently Virtua Racing is the only game that does.

Mega Drive could probably do what the DSP-1 does without the special chip though, but without Mode-7 that wouldn't help, so you'd need something way more powerful.

It may be possible to brute force mode7 like effects in software, like in the previously posted pier solar video, but it's hard to make out exactly how well that runs in the videos, it looks really low res, and I doubt you could do 60 fps slit-screen Mario Kart.
 

Jabba

Banned
I had a 1.5meg chip ram in an A1000 in 1988. Later I had to a 68040 for my A1200. This thread will bring tears to my eyes for sure.
 
Could they do that with the Genesis, put extra chips in the cart?

323250_Virtua-Racing__00.jpg


virtua_racing.jpg


The SVP chip for this game was so large that it needed it's own heat sync in the cartridge. But there was nothing stopping Sega from putting additional chips in their Genesis games. Though the only Genesis game to actually do this was Virtua Racing. .
 

Fularu

Banned
It is possible for mega drive carts to have extra processors, but much less common; apparently Virtua Racing is the only game that does.

Mega Drive could probably do what the DSP-1 does without the special chip though, but without Mode-7 that wouldn't help, so you'd need something way more powerful.

It may be possible to brute force mode7 like effects in software, like in the previously posted pier solar video, but it's hard to make out exactly how well that runs in the videos, it looks really low res, and I doubt you could do 60 fps slit-screen Mario Kart.

http://youtu.be/Ly8FqQQ2HIQ

This is better than anything Mode7. Mode 7 was prety ugly tbh

Here's a video of Star Fox on genesis

http://youtu.be/UuYFmIEtLLk

Neither of those use any extra chip, the MC68k handles much of the work.
 

beril

Member
It does.

Wacky races uses a polygonal track

Mario Kart uses a bitmap image that it rotates

Yes a very low poly track with much less detail, horrible pop in, and crappy framerate.
Just tried it in an emulator, it's 30 fps in single player and 15 fps in split screen.
Since it's still completely flat any benefits of using polygons are gone.
 
Look, arguing over SNES vs Megadrive in this day and age is just distracting us from the real issue here: on a scale of awesome to amazing, what did you think of the Amiga?
 

Fularu

Banned
Yes a very low poly track with much less detail, horrible pop in, and crappy framerate.
Just tried it in an emulator, it's 30 fps in single player and 15 fps in split screen.
Since it's still completely flat any benefits of using polygons are gone.

This is Mario Kart (since you seem to have forgotten what it looks like)

A crappy looking bunch of hyper pixelated stuff :

http://youtu.be/AlAmXXNz5ac

Wacky races is a beta, was never released and looks cleaner and smoother. But eh, you can keep pretending like Mario Kart was amazing looking or something if you want :)
 

Brashnir

Member
This is Mario Kart (since you seem to have forgotten what it looks like)

A crappy looking bunch of hyper pixelated stuff :

http://youtu.be/AlAmXXNz5ac

Wacky races is a beta, was never released and looks cleaner and smoother. But eh, you can keep pretending like Mario Kart was amazing looking or something if you want :)

Wacky Races also has far shorter draw distance and an angle so low that you can't see a damn thing that's in coming up in front of you.

The fact that it also looks like drab poo covered in more poo also doesn't help its case.

I was a Genesis kid back in the day, but Mario Kart is the far better looking game.
 
I remember that when the Mega Drive launched in the UK, everyone was like "Pfft, my Amiga hoses on it." It was such a weird juxtaposition to the concept of "What Nintendon't."

Greatest piece of tech ever to grace my life. Everything I am today I owe to the BBC Micro and Commodore Amiga.
 

beril

Member
This is Mario Kart (since you seem to have forgotten what it looks like)

A crappy looking bunch of hyper pixelated stuff :

http://youtu.be/AlAmXXNz5ac
Yes I know what mario kart looks like, and it has a lot of flickering, some levels worse than others. Basically the same issue you run into by not having mip maps in modern graphics. There's are games that look a bit cleaner though, and being full screen also tend to help.

Mode 7 is extremely limited tech, but you really can't claim that a handful of untextured poygons is better for rendering flat terrain. You can't get nearly the same amount of detail of complexity, and if wacky races actually had more than a few meters of viewing distance you'd end up with a bunch of flickering there as well.

Wacky races is a beta, was never released and looks cleaner and smoother. But eh, you can keep pretending like Mario Kart was amazing looking or something if you want :)

Now that's just factually ridiculous
 

Fularu

Banned
Wacky Races also has far shorter draw distance and an angle so low that you can't see a damn thing that's in coming up in front of you.

The fact that it also looks like drab poo covered in more poo also doesn't help its case.

I was a Genesis kid back in the day, but Mario Kart is the far better looking game.

From an "art"/"design" point of view? Yes

Technically? No.

There's better 3D on genesis from the demoscene if you bother to look for it though.

Now that's just factually ridiculous

While the draw distance is small, the road rotation/progress is smoother. The constant pixel corrections and their huge, ugly nature in mode 7 games are just jarring to look at now. It's like trying to play an Amiga FPS in 4x Chunky2Planar mode.
 

Truespeed

Member
The 68000 and its variants were great CPU's, but its pals Denise, Agnus and Paula are what really made it stand out.
 
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