Porting / AMIGA / PiStorm32 / developer needed - Back to the roots

[Ignacio Soriano Hernandez]

> Am 12.04.2023 um 17:39 schrieb Brian Paul <brianp at vmware.com>:
> 
> On 4/12/23 02:30, Ignacio Soriano Hernandez wrote:
>> !! External Email
>> Dear Mesa dev community,
>> Please let me apologize if you consider this off topic but I think that this is probably the audience that could help in reviving and getting back to the roots where Mesa3D originated from.
>> To use Brian Paul’s words:
>> The core library was originally (started in 1993) written on an Amiga using the DCC compiler. Later, development was moved to an SGI workstation.  Current development is done on PC/Linux systems.
> 
> Hard to believe it's been 30 years!
> 
> 
>> So thirty years later the AMIGA community is still huge, growing and the development on hardware and software accelerators is giving us new capabilities. One of the most interesting projects has been the PiStorm32 and Emu68 which enable the AMIGA to use a Pi as CPU accelerator with a baremetal ARM <-> 68k CPU emulator. Incredible CPU power but no access to the GPU and acceleration that could also boost graphics capabilities and applications via an RTG (Retargetable Graphics) access. The AMIGA OS is actively being developed (yes, still 40 years later) and AMIGA cross-compiler toolchains do exist for all kind of nowadays operating systems.
>> So what are we looking for? An experienced Mesa3D developer with and affinity/background for/on AMIGA that would be interested in porting an actual Mesa3D build to the PiStorm32/Emu68/AMIGA OS combo. Yes, 30 years later where it originated from. We have been collecting some funds as we know that this is not a weekend job but maybe someone is looking to for a challenge where „this is impossible“ gains your interest.
> 
> I'm not familiar with PiStorm32/Emu68 but the first big issue may be that Mesa makes pervasive use of 64-bit datatypes (int64_t, uint64_t). Just from its name, PiStorm32/Emu68 sounds like a 32-bit environment. So unless your compiler has good support for emulating 64-bit types with 32-bit operations, you may be out of luck.
> 
> -Brian
> 
> 

Brian, thanks for taking the time .. while doing research I could see that you used AMIGA’s for nearly 10 years, we love it.

With regards to the compiler it would be as good as gcc is as this is one of the core cross-compiler environments being used nowadays for AMIGA development, vbcc is another option. What we were mostly thinking of bigger challenges are around the whole infrastructure Mesa3D requires, shader compiler, X and Linux dependencies etc. to summarize it up we would need to understand the bigger picture so that we can can look into this tremendous task more realistically. There are some really good AMIGA programmers that would like to get onto "this mission to Mars“  but we lack the understanding of Mesa3D to a level where we know how we could try to do that with AMIGA OS.

Thanks

Iggi