/aig/ Alternative ISA General

Alternative ISA General is a discussion thread about non x86 hardware. While there have been such threads in the past, they were usually sporadic and not very well connected with one another, which meant that whatever transpired in one thread wasn't carried over to the next one.

Due to the rise of desktop-class ARM chips, interest in alternative hardware has risen, with many Anons even coming up with projects of their own. Therefore, a centralised place was needed, where we could keep track of the development and goals of the community.

While discussion of Intel or AMD hardware is not absolutely prohibited (and even if it were, who is gonna enforce this? LOL), due to the ubiquity of x86 hardware, it is assumed that whatever concerns such architecture can be discussed in any of the other gorillion threads on the board.

Ongoing projects

Anons are currently interested in porting several open source projects to the PowerPC architecture. Currently the following proposals have been made:

Grand Theft Auto III

Re3 is a homebrew engine intended to replace proprietay RenderWare with an open source implementation. Anons have been discussing making a port for the 32-bit PowerPC version of Mac OS X.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

OpenMW is a free and open source modern re-implementation of the Gamebryo engine.

Tomb Raider

OpenLara is a Classic Tomb Raider open-source engine.

Resources

Anon has been kind enough to put together a small reference library.

Links

Amiga (Motorola 68k)

amigaXfer, an easy-to-use GUI tool for lightning fast disk/file transfers on the serial port with the Amiga

Amiga 3000 running PPC software on KillerNIC NPU.

Amiga Hardware Database

Amiga Wiki

Compiled list of free/open sources related to classic Commodore Amiga computers

Atari (Motorola 68k)

Atari Museum

Other Motorola 68k Links

Motorola 68000 computer

News around Motorola 680x0 CPU computer systems

Motorola 680x0 Resources

MIPS

Emulate Windows NT 4.0 MIPS version (translated)

A guide to running IRIX 6.5.22 in MAME

IRIX Introduction

MIPS is back (translated)

Windows NT 3.50/MIPS installation on QEMU/MIPS

NMOS 6502

C64 Resources

Commodore 64 Preservation Project

Commodore 64 Resources

Commodore Computer Club - USA

Developing for the 6502 microprocessor and its relatives

The 6502 microprocessor resorce

POWER/PowerPC

About Power9

Compiling for Powerpc, how to?

Evolution of PowerPC

Fixing Radeon Linux graphics on PowerPC

GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC notebook

More about Spectre and the PowerPC (or why you may want to dust that G3 off)

http://bgafc.t-hosting.hu/oses4ppc.php Operating Systems for PowerPC

Power Macintosh

RISC-V

Haiku RISC-V port progress

SiFive: The Direction and Magnitude of SiFive Intelligence

SPARC

The Resurgence of SPARC/Solaris (Okamoto Rikiya)

SPARC Internacional, Inc.

SuperH

Hitachi SuperH RISC Engine (Kawasaki Ikuya et al)

SuperH RISC engine Family Features

VAX

The Computer History Simulation Project

VAX MP: SIMH VAX simulator able to execute OpenVMS (VAX/VMS)

Z80

Sharp PC-1500 (TRS-80 PC-2) resource page

ZX Spectrum Next

Hardware Reimplementation

An interesting fpga handheld is being crowdfunded, with a focus on security

FPGA-related repositories on GitHub

Homebrew Cray-1A

MiSTer wiki

Raspberry Pi (arm)

Raspberry Pi hardware

Apple Silicon (arm)

Apple M1 SoC Tech Specs

Check if an app is native Apple Silicon or not yet

Apple MacBook Air (2020, M1)

Other

Developing for all sorts of CPU

ForwardCom Instruction Set

FrogFind search engine

High-energy Electron Beam Lithography for Nanoscale Fabrication

Transputer Instruction Set