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hth313 / Calypsi-tool-chains

Overview of the Calypsi tool chain and open source support packages
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Request : FPU for 68K #34

Open Landemarre opened 7 months ago

Landemarre commented 7 months ago

Hello

Do you plane support FPU for 68K processor?

Thanks for your work, impressive

Olivier

hth313 commented 7 months ago

I have no immediate plans to implement floating point instruction support for 68000. However, it is something that falls inside the scope of things I may consider doing in the mid term time frame. Can you elaborate it bit on actual situation where you see this as needed and important?

djipi commented 7 months ago

The native FPU support started with the 68040.

Landemarre commented 7 months ago

Hello

This is good news to see possible good progress in that software. I work on an other 68K system name V4SA an Amiga with extend CPU feature and hardware, I have work on Atari Emutos ROM port on it, and result is quite impressive for my point of view (my work is on sourceforges not github). This system come with a very good FPU. I have write several program that need FPU such a raytracing modeler long time ago, so quite a need for me, so probably could have far better results with better compiler even if already working. Today there is some old C compiler that provide not too bad FPU output but ,not able compil more modern code and we have modern compiler such GCC and clang llvm, 68K output are generally not very good. Don't really know about clang 68k status, but for GCC I can speak a bit, FPU output is quite good but CPU output is a mess, quality is so bad in some case, a simple code can easily twice slower than a version compiled with GCC 3, but GCC 3 has not good FPU support it is quite slow. I have checked some example of output with Calipsy, it is not as good of GCC 3 but not far, and far far better than GCC 4 to 13! So Calypsi is for my point of view the only modern C compiler with not too bad 68K CPU output, this is very interesting project. The 68080 of V4SA has a lot of potential even without speaking of new instruction it could do far more than what it do today with some adjustment (more easy to said than to do!) link to multi instruction it is able to do in same time, so a challenge more for this computer. Thanks for this interesting work.

hth313 commented 7 months ago

Thank you for the perspective. I have considered the V4SA but ended up postponing it for now, focusing on variants before it. I may get back to the V4SA at some point. I do have an Amiga 3000 so I already have a machine with the 68882 FPU.

My current focus is on using the tools in some of my own projects and improving the Calypsi tools, as a result of that and user input.