CANCELLED DUE TO LACK OF INTEREST! Here just for history.

For those programmers who are not so good with hardware, I am posting to offer the possibility of creation of coldfire development machines. They will consist of an M5485EVB which is one of the fastest coldfires available. This EVB comes with the following features:

16MB Boot flash
64MB SDRAM (NOT UPGRADEABLE)
2 PCI slots (1 usable easily)
Real time clock
IRDA
2 10/100Mbit Ethernet ports
USB High speed Host + 4 USB ports
1 USB client port
2 ISA ports (for possible future use)
Onboard CHIPS video controller

Well much time has passed since the original rumblings of a Coldfire based Atari clone has been discussed. I'm pleased to announce that after such a long absence of progress things are moving at breakneck pace! Hardly like the Atari community I know ;) but who can complain right? :-P I have officially joined the Atari Coldfire project at http://acp.atari.org. This project has been revived using some original members and many new members to create a coldfire clone.

WARNING: The following guide involves serious plumbing and electrical work. The electrical box on most pool involves 240volt ac electricity. This is DANGEROUS and can kill you INSTANTLY. You should not attempt work inside your electrical box unless you absolutely know what you are doing, otherwise consult a licensed electrician. Don't gamble with your life to save a buck.

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Please refer to this page for all your Atari on coldfire needs!

Current Projects:
Atari Coldfire Project: Progress: Not stalled but slow with 2 people working.
Didier Mequignon's Efforts: Progress:

Some of you may or may not have seen my usenet post, but now available in the development packages section of this site is an RPM for ccache. ccache is a gcc preprocessor cache. It's usage can speed up build times immensely. For people who are building their development software or making incremental changes to rpm builds, any software that was previously compiled will compile lightyears faster. On my falcon freemint takes 1 hour+ to build in total, after running a build with ccache enabled, if you make distclean and make a marginal change and rebuild the whole thing, the result is it finishing in only a few minutes.

WARNING: This guide is severely deprecated. Look elsewhere for more updated instructions. This is only being left here for historical purposes.

Hello all, some more Coldfire news. The coldfire boards are in and the donations have been set in stone. The lucky recipients are Didier Mequignon of Aniplayer fame. He will be patching TOS to run on the Coldfire and will be working on Video and keyboard/mouse. This is of course of utmost importance! Alan Hourihane will be receiving one and will be working on linux video stuff which can hopefully be reworked for TOS. Olivier Landemarre will be working on MyAES, TOS and whatever else comes along. Finally we have Nicholas Steele whose generous credentials and time should yield some good Atari stuff.

Back again, and this time with an agreement from Freescale to donate a few M5484LITE development boards to our community. I'll be using one, and I'm going to try to get some other guys to take some but there'll be one or two left. The key things we'll need from someone who takes the boards are getting the USB and a PCI video card working on the device. Which means the freemint kernel will need the integrated PCI bios, and USB 2.0 high speed support in order to boot the rest of the system. All this must fit in the 4MB of flash.

It's been a little while since I really updated anyone on anything. I have so many projects, so many things going on so what have I been working on? Well besides a super huge project at work ;), what I've been doing. Well GIM is fairly stable and has had no complaints (and perhaps no users ;) ). The new sparemint site seems to have a lot more interest and that's been consuming my time. Lately the most time has been spent on adding an automatic build system and completely revamping the package upload process. Now there's build farm functionality provided by simplistic shell scripts so other users can contribute. Make sure to read more ;)

A Christmas release of GEM Instant Messenger has arrived. GEM Instant Messenger is an AOL instant messenger compatible IM client for Atari systems running MiNT. This version has fixes of iconification, font selection issues fixed, it's built with Windom 2.0, buddylist size/position is saved in the configuration file, debug text has been isolated and removed, bug causing buddylist to redraw over everything fixed, and restructuring and beautification of all dialogs.