Well... I'll probably get flamed for this .. but ...
Looking at the above posts I've come to the conclusion that we need a machine which IS hardware compatible to the ST/STE.
My reasoning is that I believe a large part of the success of the atari was the ability to be able to 'hit the hardware' directly. This in itself has limited the widespread use, even within the atari community of multitasking systems. In addition without hitting the hardware... would any demo-scene survive?
So with this idea in mind I suggest that the best project for the atari groups are a VHDL custom logic project. The 68000 is already available from Mot.. and another vender as a VHDL core.
I think this is way possible because to my mind the atari is more of a legacy to Gary Kildal and Digital Research as much as to atari. If Atari were forced to write their own OS from scratch I don't think we would be here talking about this now. Even MiNT wasn't an atari creation.
It seems to me that the atari ST doesn't have many custom chips.. and those that it does have are quite simple implementations.
My reasoning for this is that the Tramiels were slash and burn merchants and because of this;
1. Tramiels sacked almost everyone not of immediate value before ST work began.
2. Atari ST was rushed to market
3. Custom chipset was rushed.. blitter not even ready
4. Use of off the shelf sound and floppy logic=rushed to market.
5. Everything else was rushed
6. Even the TOS roms were rushed/not ready
7. GEM was the only thing not rushed as it was already written.
8. Did I mention anything being rushed?
It seems to me synthesizing a chipset to clock at a bus of 33MHz and a 68000 at 150MHz on FPGA's/CPLD's might keep us happy for a while. It would also give us a free/open hardware platform ! Who else has that?!!
To update that.. maybe the easiest to do would be to widen the shifer (high/true color and clock for VGA resolutions) and add an ethernet chip to the board.
