What It Actually Takes to Drive an Intel Arc A770
Good documentation gets you past the product page. What's underneath is PCIe, MMIO, firmware, command submission, and a long staged plan instead of one heroic attempt at everything at once.
Entry 10
Development Journal
The running record of Project Ceylon: what was tried, what worked, what didn't, and what turned out to be wrong. Entries stay as they were written; when something changes, a later entry says so.
Entries, newest first
Could an Intel Arc A770 Be the Modern Amiga Custom Chipset?
The Arc A770 isn't a literal replacement for Agnus, Denise, and Paula. But one of the actual deciding factors in choosing it had nothing to do with raw performance: documentation is a…
Entry 09
Why a Modern Amiga Needed a Secure Multicore Microkernel
The display failure was a symptom. The actual disease was an architecture with no real boundaries between components. The fix was moving to a security-certified microkernel foundation.
Entry 08
Well, Hell: The Iris Math Doesn't Work
Pixels appearing on screen is not the same thing as an architecture that scales to real high-resolution video editing. I found that out the hard way, and I was irritated about it for the…
Entry 07
Why I Built the Computer in QEMU Before I Built the Computer
QEMU was never the destination. It was the laboratory — a reference machine where I could isolate architecture mistakes from hardware-driver mistakes before either one had a chance to hide…
Entry 06
Project Nu-Day: Okay, Y'all, Let's Actually Build Something
All that research had to turn into something eventually. Project Nu-Day was the first real attempt: a modern media workstation, built for x86-64, inspired by the Toaster and DigiPaint but…
Entry 05
Old Source Code Is Useful. Copying It Isn't the Point.
Having thirty-year-old source code available doesn't mean the job is to transcribe it. Here's how I actually use historical material as research instead of a shortcut.
Entry 04
Then I Found the Video Toaster Source Code
NewTek released the Video Toaster's source publicly years ago. That's where the real research thread started — not the Amiga's OS, but the thing that made the Amiga famous in the first…
Entry 03
What Was Actually Worth Saving From the Amiga?
Before building anything, I had to separate what I actually loved about the Amiga from what I just remembered fondly. Those turned out to be two different lists.
Entry 02
What If Amiga Development Never Stopped?
Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 and took continuous Amiga development down with it. This is the question that started everything: what would still be true if it hadn't.
Entry 01
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