Minimig AGA for Turbo Chameleon 64…

…and rattling the tin! – 2020-05-25

At long last, the AGA enhanced Minimig core finally comes to the Turbo Chameleon 64!

I teased the new core on YouTube a couple of days ago:

At the same time I announced that, in response to several people prompting me in the past, I now have a virtual tip jar – so anyone who wishes to contribute towards the development of this and other cores can now do so.

One off donations are welcome at https://www.paypal.me/robinsonb5 and will be much appreciated – but I found that pretty much everyone I spoke to about this was telling me I should set up a Patreon, too – so I’ve done that. Anyone who wishes to contribute regularly can now do so at https://www.patreon.com/coresforchameleon

I’m not planning to paywall cores or releases – that’s not my style – but as an incentive for supporters, I’ve added a “Core Supporters” page to the On-screen Menu, which I’ll use to thank by name anyone who donates £20 or more via PayPal or supports me on Patreon at the second tier.

In other news – I’ve just released the first beta – see the Turbo Chameleon 64 section elsewhere on this site.

The Totally Unscientific Code Density Competition!

The EightThirtyTwo ISA – Part 22 – 2020-05-04

What better way to celebrate Star Wars Day than with a multi-CPU code density shoot-out?! (Well, OK, most people can probably name a dozen better ways without even trying – but this is how I’m choosing to spend it!)

I was curious to know just how well the code density of EightThirtyTwo code generated by the VBCC backend stacks up against other architectures, so I compiled a fixed codebase, namely the OSD control module from one of the many Minimig variants, targetting 832, m68k, MIPS, OpenRISC, RISC-V ARM, and even i386 and x86-64. The results make for interesting reading…

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