There are some other pretty nice and featured 68k cores that are open source (TG68, WF68K30L etc.) but none that is really close to the features and performance of the Apollo 68080.

If you do a little research you'll find out that there's plenty of "stay away" and "can't believe they haven't been sued into oblivion yet" indicators and all sorts of misleading claims and marketing.

My summary would be that it's a tightly-controlled, closed project lead by questionable people with well-documented histories of questionable practices including ignoring copyrights, distributing infringing software, deleting critical posts from their forums and putting out misleading information.

https://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/doku.php/about_us:links

That would be a fun upgrade if I had an old 68k Mac in good condition. I've thought occasionally about what if Motorola had had the resources to continue developing 68k like x86.

I have a "Firebee", an Atari ST-like machine built around a 264mhz coldfire, and it's quite nice.

My understanding is that Coldfire got used in a lot of networking hardware, due in part to its network order endianness, and partially because Freescale put network hardware support into some of the cores.

But there is no continuing demand for Coldfire, really, so it has stalled, NXP never continued on with it and is going the ARM route now, like everyone else.

Chips that cost $1000 from a distributor cost 1/10th to 1/100th the price when you have a relationship with the manufacturer, mostly because distributors can't sell them very quickly and have to keep a ton of stock to have the SKUs you want.

On a modern FPGA, processor clocks of 200-300 MHz are possible to get with designs that aren't huge.

Honestly instead of chasing after new 68k silicon it'd be better to just emulate on a modern processor. Not the same romance, I know....but

It really is "spiritually" a 68k series processor, just with some cleaning up. I like it.

I believe freescale currently owns the architecture, and still manufactures some 68k microcontroller cores.

Owns it how? 68060-- the last of 68k's designs-- was released in 1994. Any patents should now be expired.

> Owns it how? 68060-- the last of 68k's designs-- was released in 1994. Any patents should now be expired.

Sure, patents wouldn't be a barrier to clone the design and create an equivalent using the same patented ideas, but copyright still prevents you from copying the design, and will prevent copying significant parts of the design as well.

Shouldn't that already be problematic for the 68k projects in hardware through FPGAs? Apollo already does it and sells hardware, and the MiSTER project also does it by releasing FPGA designs for e.g. the Sega Genesis which has a 68k processor. Is it a different story if you embed 68k in an ASIC?