ahmadexp wrote on 2023-07-02, 04:43:
Just a thought provoking idea to Eivind, Rastri and everyone. What would you consider to add/change if you decide to build the Tinyllama III?
For instance, can we consider the VortexEX2, getting the SM750 with HDMI? Just wondering.
PS: I love the Tinyllama II a lot that I hand soldered two of them.
Let me try to sum up my thoughts about the TinyLlama!
I've considered your question many many times - and what I always keep coming back to is another question: "What do I want from this system?"
Another way to look at this is "from which time period do I want this system to be?"
I think most people would answer either early 90s or mid/late 90s.
For early 90s DOS usage and, obviously, games (and, really, 80s games as well), I believe the TinyLlama as it stands hits the mark pretty well. I'm sure there could be various smaller fixes and tweaks people would be interested in, and if we figure out something that's important enough, I might do another revision.
BUT: what most of us really want is a mid/late-90s gaming system, right? I know I do! 😀
Unfortunately, there's one main challenge with this - and it isn't the Vortex86EX, it's the graphics card. Given a sufficiently powerful CPU, one could always do software rendering in games, and rasteri's weeCee with its DX CPU tackles this way better than what can be done with the EX.
I've had extensive talks with people from DMP, and the EX2 won't really fit the bill for reasons I don't want to get into because I assume they were given to me in confidentiality. They have an EX3 coming up in the future though, that might be something to look into.
However - for 3D games, we're still stuck in a place where the 2D-only Vortex86VGA and SM750 will always be the bottleneck. I'm quite sure Mini-PCIe or Mini-PCI graphics cards with 3D acceleration don't exist. And even if they did, they wouldn't have driver support for Windows 98.
Therefore, going down the route of using a 3D accelerator, it's either using a real PCI(e) card or creating one. That last option is orders of magnitude more challenging than anything I've ever done and I don't really consider it viable. The only thing I can think of as prior work is zx-c64 / Anthony's modern Voodoo 4 and 5 recreations (google it!). His cards use the VSA-100 chip which is, surprisingly, still easy to get hold of new-old-stock. The card design and layout is something else, though. We're talking 12-layer boards and R&D and production costs at another level.
If we abandon the wet dream of making a small VSA-100 card, we're back to real cards from the 90s or early 2000s.
...and that's basically where I am with my ongoing ITX-Llama project.
Trying to keep the form factor small-ish, adding all peripherals I want, using the EX chip which gives me complete BIOS freedom, etc.
I'm still tweaking, testing and updating BIOS code for that one, please feel free to drop me suggestions and feedback if you have in that thread!
As for the Raspberry Pi-sized TinyLlama, like I said, I'm still open to feedback on what could go into a potential version 3, but I don't see how we could meaningfully improve it in major ways in terms of speed or features.
If you think I'm wrong, let me know! 😉
