Vampire 600: FPGA A600 Accelerator Preorder

[trekiej]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdJqQ6Zr5J8
[youtube]WdJqQ6Zr5J8[/youtube]

[NovaCoder]

count me in when you've got an a1200/a3000 version with an 100mhz 060 fpga.

x2

[Acill]

Nice work on this project! I am tired of the prices for Amiga hardware and would love to see something like this take off!! Dont forget when Minimeg was first talked about people said no way would it ever work and now its as real as anything out there!

[Madshib]

   

                                                                 (Originally Posted by nicholas                              
                 count me in when you've got an a1200/a3000 version with an 100mhz 060 fpga. )
                                 
 x2

x3

[majsta]

@Mrs Beanbag
that is what is all about to many people participate in this and that we build new cores constantly and put them into board. So anyone with VHDL or Verilog knowledge can try and best thing is that you can't damage A600 or accelerator itself because there are lot of protection modules there.

About those accelerators for A1200, we will see...

[Mrs Beanbag]

I don't have any VHDL or Verilog knowledge, yet...

[polyp2000]

@Mrs Beanbag
that is what is all about to many people participate in this and that we build new cores constantly and put them into board. So anyone with VHDL or Verilog knowledge can try and best thing is that you can't damage A600 or accelerator itself because there are lot of protection modules there.

About those accelerators for A1200, we will see...

@majsta : I dont have an a600 - I might consider one of the a500 ones but If you do an a1200 version i will be lining up for a pre-order myself. Just out of curiousity how much is the speed limited by the FPGA? and would you need more expensive FPGA to achieve greater speeds?

N

[bloodline]

@Mrs Beanbag
that is what is all about to many people participate in this and that we build new cores constantly and put them into board. So anyone with VHDL or Verilog knowledge can try and best thing is that you can't damage A600 or accelerator itself because there are lot of protection modules there.

About those accelerators for A1200, we will see...

Interesting project! What else is on the board other than an FPGA? I assume a boot processor etc?

My thinking is that this could make a fun hacking platform for the A600!

[ChaosLord]

. Just out of curiousity how much is the speed limited by the FPGA? and would you need more expensive FPGA to achieve greater speeds?

The speed is currently limited by the absence of L1 cache right now.

Using a more expensive FPGA would do nothing until after an L1 cache is implemented.

[majsta]

Yes that's correct but I don't think that in the future adding such cache will be some huge problem. Also current cache can be improved so right now no one can calculate limits of this design.

[fishy_fiz]

Very cool stuff.
I only have an a1200, but will start looking for an a600 soon 'cos of the Vampire cards.

Just curious, but apart from speed increases, what enhancements can potentially be added? Would some sort of basic RTG system be possible?  Or even something like Grafitti emulation ?

[Mrs Beanbag]

I gather there are still plenty of spare LUTs on the FPGA, room for a lot of enhancements.

[polyp2000]

I gather there are still plenty of spare LUTs on the FPGA, room for a lot of enhancements.

Akiko in FPGA could be interesting... Or perhaps some other wacko invention like a hardware implemented raycaster. I wonder if we could actually add features to the Amiga that never existed before that would provide hardware assistance to other CPU intensive tasks. A very exciting time indeed!

[nicholas]

How modest of you.

Well I suppose I could always wait for the 1GHz 060 FPGA version he's surely working on.

[bloodline]

Akiko in FPGA could be interesting... Or perhaps some other wacko invention like a hardware implemented raycaster. I wonder if we could actually add features to the Amiga that never existed before that would provide hardware assistance to other CPU intensive tasks. A very exciting time indeed!

Akiko done right might be a nice addition, where instead of writing the chunky pixel to the chip, then reading back the planar pixel and copying that data to the bitmap... Perhaps one could simply set a pointer to the chunky buffer in fast ram, then set it off to automatically copy and covert the buffer to chipram as planar data

[nicholas]

Akiko done right might be a nice addition, where instead of writing the chunky pixel to the chip, then reading back the planar pixel and copying that data to the bitmap... Perhaps one could simply set a pointer to the chunky buffer in fast ram, then set it off to automatically copy and covert the buffer to chipram as planar data

Kalms released code that does chunky-planar faster than Akiko could do it. lol

http://code.google.com/p/unitedstatesofamiga/downloads/list