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| Author | Really crazy ideas for m68k gfx acceleration (Read 101 times) | ||||||||||||||
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lauland
512 MB  Posts: 692 Symtes 7 Mewconer! |
on: August 25, 2026, 15:24
So I have a performa 630 dos compatible that I put a full 040 in, and have been racking my brain on ways to get graphics performance faster for SDL games. I doubt we're going to get a radeon or nvidia. I don't know if pci adapters of the sort Amiga has exist. Nubus would be too slow, but PDS might not be bad. A pistorm for 030 macs doesn't exist, but is technically possible. Using a Rocket card or the 8*24gc's coprocessor could work, but I don't have either of those and aren't going to shell out for them. But...the 630 has a Valkyrie chip, and those can do scaling in hardware and ppc performa people have done some impressive things, which should work on m68k. And there's that 66mhz 486 sitting there, maybe it could be put to use? Anyway...yet another wacky side project... |
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cballero
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1024 MB Posts: 1203 System 7, today and forever
Reply #1 on: August 27, 2026, 23:07
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Oh wow, so a full ‘030 co can lift graphics more then? I didn’t know that! (I bought a Quadra 630 years back, which should have had those same specs, but my gaming on it was the older shareware titles at the time) 
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 2048 MB  Posts: 2081 
Reply #2 on: August 28, 2026, 18:57
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Intriguing idea! So we're basically talking about what the Amigans call "PiStorm" for the Mac? Actually, why has nobody come up with that yet? Sounds like an excellent idea to push 68k Macs further
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 692 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #3 on: August 28, 2026, 20:42
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Well, you both have the right direction, but not quite what I was talking about... First, the 630 has an 040, it isn't bad, and is comparable to an average quadra or lc 475. But no speed demon as far as full screen drawing goes, which is why some older mac games would run in a window, or have borders around their game display. That particular machine does use a video chip that the 6300 also uses, where some people have been able to make use a feature meant for video input or tv tuner screen scaling, to do hardware scaling so the machine can do something like a 320x240 full screen, which is 4 times less data to push. There IS a pistorm for that mac, but, so far, it only fits in the socket on 68000 machines, nothing higher. The drivers were never finished, so it may not be able to boot off of scsi, and there may be a lot of limitations...but we're talking mac pluses and se's. ---- What I was talking about was using the dos compatible card, which is basically a pc on a card, to off load tasks from the 040 and system 7 itself. Basically the mac side would "send messages" to the pc side and the pc side would do things...like draw lines, or compute 3d geometry. This would run in parallel with the 040, so, in theory, could leverage the 486 on the card as a kind of "graphics accelerator". Anyway, it's something I'll look into one day... The main reason I'm not actively jumping on it is that it may not be worth the trouble. It may not speed things up enough, because of the overhead of the communication...and having the split the "tasks" between the 040 and the 486, would have to be done by hand.
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