Atari Coldfire Project

The Atari Coldfire Project (ACP) is a volunteer project that aims to create a modern Atari computer clone.

Reason for the project

The Atari 16 and 32 computer systems (ST, TT and Falcon) were popular home computers in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. Atari withdrew largely from the computer market in 1993, and completely in 1995-1996 when Atari merged with JTS and all support for the platform by Atari was dropped. The systems Atari had built became increasingly left behind as newer and faster systems came out. The few dedicated users who were left wanted more processing power to develop more-advanced TOS applications, paving the way for a number of "clone" machines, such as the 68040-based Milan and the 68060-based Hades, both of which were considerably more powerful than the 68030-based TT and Falcon and the 68000-based ST/STe. These machines support ISA and PCI buses, which make the use of network and graphics cards designed for the PC possible (something no original Atari machines could do). The machines also support tower cases, making it possible ot use internal CD drives.

A new clone named Phoenix never made it to market in final form. However, the powerful rev. 6 68060 CPU it would use did make it into a new accelerator board for the Falcon, the CT60/CT63 series, which meant that, for the first time, the Atari platform had a CPU rated at over 100 MHz. The use of a high-speed bus and PC133 RAM also accounted for a big performance improvement and significantly increased the Falcon's on-board memory limit from 14 MiB to 512 MiB with a CT60.

These systems were not mass-produced and are now hard to find. While the CT60/CT63 needs a Falcon “donor” system, and is still not as powerful as the ACP potential system could be, the ACP will use a completely new design, moving away from 68K CPUs to the newer ColdFire class, more powerful than even the fastest 68K chips while still having a largely similar (but not completely compatible) instruction set. It will also allow for the integration of many IO ports that are currently only available though extensive hardware modification on the Atari platform.

Specifications

The specifications for the ACP have changed considerably over time, in response to advancing technology and price considerations. However, it seems the following will be in the final design:Fact|date=March 2008

*USB 2.0
*3 PCI expansion slots
*1 AGP expansion slot
*2 serial (modem) ports (9-pin)
*1 25-pin parallel printer port
*2 PS/2 ports
*MIDI In/Out
*2 banks of SD-RAM
*10/100 Ethernet
*2 IDE channels with LS120 support
*Motorola MCF5417 "ColdFire" class CPU
*1 MiB Flash ROM

External links

* [http://acp.atari.org ACP Homepage]
* [http://www.atari.org Atari community portal Atari.Org