Hi,

After 18 months of experience on Coldfire M5484LITE board where the TOS, MyAES and MINT works under a Radeon PCI board, the idea is to use the lastest Freescale M54455EVB board for accelerate the Coldfire migration:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=M54455EVB&fsrch=1

It's a complete board with a mini-ATX box who use u-boot for start Linux under the latest Feescale Coldfire:

* Freescale MCF54455 ColdFire microprocessor
* DDR2 SDRAM (256 MByte)
* Two NOR flash memory devices (16 MByte, 512 KByte)
* Serial flash
* U-Boot bootloader
* MRAM (512 KByte, accessible through FPGA Flexbus interface)
* Four PCI slots
* Two-port Ethernet interface 40-pin
* ATA connector
* Audio interface (I2S mode of SSI module connected to audio codec)
* Multiple USB interface options
o FS/LS Host via on-chip transceiver with host support (Type A receptacle)
o HS/FS/LS dual-role via external ULPI PHY (Mini-AB receptacle)
* Two RS232 serial ports (RS232 transceivers on UART0 & UART1)
* One USB serial port (UART0 serial converted to USB converted on UART0)
* Built-in P&E Micro USB Multilink debug interface
* Standard 26-pin BDM header
* Serial interface header for access to timers, interrupts, DSPI, I2C, and more
* Clock generation logic adjustable via I2C
* LEDs and 7-segment display programmable via CPLD and FPGA

It's possible without lot of work (one or two months) to rebuild a Coldfire TOS 4.04 (like here http://ctpci.atari.org) for get an Atari clone (a base of work) booting under a Radeon PCI board.

The coldfire MCF54455 V4m at 266 MHz is faster than the MCF5484, like the v4e has an MMU but _NO_ FPU (look at Kronos capture here http://ctpci.atari.org).

But there are some advantages like USB host, ATA 6 Ultra DMA Interface, I2S sound port.

There are also 2 Ethernet ports, 2 serials port and a 3rd serial port in 5V who can use the original Eiffel interface with just a cable or a why not TT keyboard.
In a 1st time use host USB is another story, but Eiffel exists for mouse and keyboard.

Actually the TOS 4.04 for the Coldfire not need external driver for get drives on CompactFlash, so it's easy to get ATA working with the same method.

The SCSIDRV protocol is also implemented under TOS but not tested because a CompactFlash cannot replace a DVD drive with Extendos.

There are also an lwIP Ethernet stack under TOS who works fine (TOS GlueSTick, TFTP / HTTP / FTP servers, and also a VNC server unfinished), where I need just to update the Fast Ethernet Controler file for this new Coldfire.


If some peoples are interrested by this project or has some questions, please contact me :

a * n * i * p * l * a * y * AT * w * a * n * a * d * o * o * POINT * f * r

Sorry I hate spams !


It's a great complete development board !


PS. thanks also to Olivier Landemarre for his Coldfire MyAes port.