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OK, I'm sure everyone has thought about this, unless of course, you still use a 1040STfm with a single floppy, in which case, this thread isn't for you.
I don't think there is a market for a "power-house" Atari either, as the software and user-base just isn't there. If you use power-house hardware, you are going to run power-house software, such as Maya. Anyone even port Gimp to the ST yet?
So, people have come out with faster machines before, and they largely have been severely over-priced and well behind the times in terms of performance because a whole new motherboard design is needed and quite a few OS modifications. Many older technologies are now "embedded" and the old 1040 style cases can now be shrunk and considered "embedded" systems, so I think this is a closer niche for the ST. AmigaDE is/was heading this direction as well.
Now, the ST doesn't have certain capabilities and I think it needs a good OS facelift - stronger Audio/MIDI API, better font support, etc. NO ROMs either - hard disks are fast and RAM is cheap and suspend-to-disk can give you instant loading. The kludge of OS components and AUTO folder loading and all that really needs to be fixed up a bit. And finally ditch FAT please! ext2 has already been ported, ext3 with journaling is even better (reiserfs would be nice, but I don't think its a good choice in this case).
Now, unless you want to buy a really fast machine and just run an emulator (any x86 or PowerPC solution), or you want a 68060 which is an expensive and VERY outdated chip, you'll have to find a new CPU!
Its important that you realize that the Atari was popular because its hardware was included and standard and you didn't need a huge number of drivers and crazy support. PCs are bad at this. MACs come with a standard set of hardware and standard video card, etc, but can still take a number of PC add-ons for expandability, and this saves the design really. Expanding/Upgrading a computer shouldn't require a solding iron or else the design is doomed to be obsolete.
The fastest, and possibly cheapest solution for a "modern" Atari would be to use a design based on the Motorola Coldfire processor, and possibly just steal some reference design entirely. This is a mostly 680x0 compatible CPU, but the instruction set has been reduced significantly (its now a RISC design, not CISC), so only the most commonly used 40% of the instructions (based on the instruction set of the 68060) are still available - the rest must be emulated in software by trapping the illegal instruction trap. This isn't as bad as it seems, and the most common instructions are still there. Motorola has libraries to do the emulation already and its still faster than emulating a 68K on a PowerPC, and the coldfire processors are pretty cheap, like $30 or so.
Now, combine some of the hardware emulation of steem or aranym, and you don't need custom hardware, just *modern* hardware. How does this list sound:
* ColdFire MCF5475 processor (410MIPS) running at 266MHz (yes, 1/5 to 1/20 the speed of a PowerPC or x86 if you were running Windows or OS X, but can you imagine your Atari TOS/FreeMiNT at 266Mhz with fast DDR RAM?).
* Two sockets for DDR-266 SDRAM modules, support up to 1GByte of memory (1GB/s peak)
* One AGP slot (264MB/s peak access from the main processor) with an ATI Radeon 9700 or similar graphics card as standard.
* Five 66/33MHz, 32-bit PCI slots, PCI 2.2 compliant (264MB/s peak) Add SCSI cards, TVtuners, and your favorite sound card, perhaps include some standard professional card with 96Khz/24 bit recording, a DSP, MIDI ports, and an SPDIF connector as well.
* 2MBytes of 32-bit Flash memory (for firmware, bootloader,debugger, etc)
* Multi-channels DMA support (PCI <-> PCI, PCI <-> DDR, PCI <-> AGP)
* Auto-Recharge Battery-backed Real Time Clock
* One Hi-Speed USB 2.0 port with internal hub, and two FastEthernet 100Mbps controllers
* USB keyboard and mouse
* SATA hard disk controller (or 512MB DoC?)
This list was taken almost verbatim from the feature list for a currently selling Amiga accelerator, so this is very possible. There is also a project to design original Atari hardware on the coldfire processor: http://acp.atari.org/
Now, the coldfire is an embedded processor, so a desktop doesn't have to be the target, especially considering that most ST apps get along with smaller screen sizes quite acceptably (unlike many X apps where you really need 1280x1024 minimum - I use 1600x1200). You can have laptop or tablet designs, or with the current DoC and mini-hard disk technologies out there, and laptop floppies and CD/CDRW drives, you could make an all-in-one system considerably smaller than the 1040/Falcon - no thicker than a laptop really.
Perhaps the "Internet Appliance" market is dead, but if the software were to catch up so that all web sites (including flash, java, etc) and multimedia formats worked, then there could actually be a market for the new computer users that are tired of running AdAware and Virus-scans on an XP system too complicated to understand. If you could run it on battery power and it had MIDI and/or D2D recording capability, then the music industry would definately look twice!
I loved my Sharp Zaurus, and it was running Linux on a 200Mhz system. A 266Mhz portable ST would rock.
Thoughts? Comments? Flames?
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Ideas on new Atari new
