The team at Buffee is quite busy it seems. Now they are showing some real progress towards getting the first boards ready for the beta testers soon. They can also confirm that the AM335x is booting. Everything is on the track as they have run some BogoMIPS tests. Now the work is to make it 68k compatible at its highest level.
Buffee is a new PJIT 68k CPU and Mem-only accelerator for all computers and consoles with a 68000 socket type of connector. Just remove the 68000 CPU and replace it with Buffee. Then you will have a 68030 at 3.2GHz to play with. This is just awesome!
Amiga compatibility with Buffee revealed
The Buffee supports everything your Amiga can do right now:
- Autoconfig and Zorro-II
- In-socket expansions
- All 2MB of chip RAM
- Any fast RAM you might have
- Any “ranger” RAM you might have
- The original OCS all the way to ECS
- Floppy drives
- Mice
- Joysticks
- Custom ROMs
- CDTV expansion ROMs …
With Buffee you will either have a very fast standard Amiga 500 or if you do have Amiga 2000. You can use it with ZZ9000 graphics card and get the max out of its power. Buffee will for sure take the Classic Amiga line to new heights once it’s out. And with the price tag, it will for sure compete.
Buffee supports various settings to be set
From a default state, Buffee will operate in “ultra compatible mode” and will require that the user or retailer preconfigure Buffee before hand. This includes such things as
- Enable CPU local RAM in 32-bit memory (disabled by default)
- Set the location and amount of this RAM
- Enable data and/or instruction caches for any memory block (by default only the instruction cache is enabled in 24-bit memory, all caches are enabled for 32-bit memory)
- Enable PJIT instruction cache for any memory block (by default, PJIT ICache is enabled only on 32-bit memory)
- Set the CPU base clock PLLs (presets for 275 to 1000 MHz)
- Set the CPU clock divider (from 1 to 1/256th of the base clock)
- Select between 68000 or 68030 instruction set (68000 default)
- Select between No FPU, 68882, 68040 or fast 68040 FPU modes (No FPU is default)
- Enable 68K MMU emulation
- Preload and remap up to a 2MB ROM image (with or without 68K MMU enabled)
There will be CLI tools launched for AmigaOS that can be used to change the default settings. Also, the retailers will get tools so the Buffee can be configured as the customer wants it to be. This means that Buffee can run in various states on various platforms which makes it very flexible.
It will be fun to see how Buffee will perform. With production started and lots of beta testers have asked for helping the team. It will be interesting to see in the end how this amazing CPU + mem accelerator will lift the oldest Amiga computers.
Also, I personally think that the price tag doesn’t scare. A cheaper way of getting extra power.
