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0 pointsvidarh11y ago0 comments

If that was the goal, basing it on something like the Motorola 680x0 family would've been a better choice:

* The architecture is already 32 bit.

* There are FPGA reimplementations, including a range of boards from different people, and open source designs (the Minimig) that people have produced working machines from.

* There's been a variety of work on producing more advanced versions of the cores, employing more modern design features.

* The M68k family has MMU support.

* There are Linux ports for M68k, as well as a number of other OS's.

Looking at his Google Plus ports, which includes various ancient hardware as well as a variety of old emulators, I think the retro appeal is more relevant.

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boyaka11y ago

Not claiming to have much understanding about any of this stuff, but here's his comment from the link:

"+retrotails prower I'm sure +Dirk Hohndel would like an Atari ST port but once you get past 286 there are better OS to run. For m68k you have to deal with the lack of segmentation or banking in most cases (so vfork not fork), but if you can do that then given you've usually got real DMA I would have thought 2.11BSD/RetroBSD a far far better place to start, or even ucLinux. Many of the 68K platforms are also blessed with other open but non-Unix OS's especially the Atari where basically all the underlying OS code you need is nowdays available in a free form (eg FreeMiNT/XaAes - which is even uses rpm)

Some of the key assumptions in UZI and thus in Fuzix really stop making sense if you have a 32bit system or you have good offloaded I/O. I'm not entirely sure those assumptions don't break down by 286 to be honest. However 286 protected mode is so wonderfully demented and feature filled it has to be done."

vidarhOP11y ago

Everything he writes there makes sense. Nobody would bother with a UZI derivative on an M68k system, because you can run far more advanced OS's on them. But that's exactly why M68k would make far more sense if his OS was an "exercise in open computing".

But as a fun retro project, on the other hand, UZI / Fuzix seems like an awesome thing to play with (though I'd prefer to see a C64/C128 version...)

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