Amiga in an FPGA : Minimig

[Lozza]

Finally!

It's almost a year that I have been planning to do the same but I am not very good at hardware development so I have tried to convince other people to do this kind of stuff, including Amiga Inc., the guys who make the GP2X and others but no answers...

So my idea was very similar: a small portable Amiga compatible device able to either just run all of the games available (there are some very great games for miggy out there so keep it as a retro console) or a bit more sophisticated like a PSP (maybe running workbench).

I would keep it simple and compact (no PCI expansions) nor being itself a PCI card but a battery powered (with also a charger) miggy that you can carry with you.

Qualities:
Small
100% compatible with Amiga software (in ADF format or other)
Running just games or able to boot up Workbench and then run games/software(different flavours i.e. 1.3, 2.0, 3.0)
AGA compatible
6 or 8 switch buttons
Possibility of attaching a keyboard
USB port maybe?
LCD screen integrated

Dream machine:
TV OUT
Integrated mouse pad
Integrated mini keyboard
Recognized on another computer as another drive to move things across (software)
Integrated 56k modem

Since I am a designer, check some of my Amiga stuff at www.loriano.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
I can help you out with designing the case, let me know.

Great work :-D
Don't give up :-)

[Doppie1200]

Sounds good! This will be a true amiga since a long time!

How is this possible?!?! I thought the plans for the chips were long gone?

If UAE is possible, this is possible. He just reversed engineered it for behavioural point of view. It takes a genious to do it correctly, but it seems the community has just been enriched by such a person! Great work!

[motorollin]

Doppie1200 wrote:
Sounds good! This will be a true amiga since a long time!

How is this possible?!?! I thought the plans for the chips were long gone?

If UAE is possible, this is possible. He just reversed engineered it for behavioural point of view.

So he's guessing?  ;-)

Here's to Dennis!
:pint:  :pint:  :pint:  :pint:  :pint:

And here's one for luck, hopefully it will be released to the public! I don't care what it costs, I WILL buy one.
:pint:

--
moto

[JoannaK]

Dennis: I think you project has quite good commercial value too.. I'm sure quite many would like to have classix amy if price (+ game copatibility) is OK..

[motorollin]

Trust me, price will not be an issue. Come on, I've just spent over £500 building an A1200 system!!! I'm sure the cost of manufacturing and distributing Dennis' Minimig wouldn't even come close to that, allowing a healthy profit margin and still sell at a price Amiga enthusiasts would welcome!

--
moto

[humppa]

I am quite sure Dennis Ellsworth will be contacted by a toy company soon. :roll:  
Better get in touch with somebody like Jens Schönfeld to get it done properly.  

[Doppie1200]

motorollin wrote:
So he's guessing?  ;-)

I think in a way that is true; you make an assumption on how you think that could have been implemented and then you prove your assumption. At least that is the way how I got things done not nearly as complex as this.

So now I'm guessing how he did it

But indeed :pint: bottoms up! Lets all get drunk!

[motorollin]

That is absolutely amazing. How did he know where to start  :-o

--
moto

[Colin_Camper]

This sounds fantastic!
A year ago you never touched an FPGA and now you have a working system running workbench.... and you APOLOGISE for not yet having sound! BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! :idea:

Do you realise Mick Tinker was trying to get the BoXeR working for YEARS and the holdup was the custom chip implementation in FPGAs.

Two questions - Well about 200 but we don't have all day  :lol:

Can you licence 68020 core for FPGA easily and cheaply or are you running with a separate 68K chip?

Apart from the dev board can you give a brief rundown in (how the hell!) you learned verilog and reverse engineering so quick. I'd be grateful.

Good luck with the project!

bty - to reiterate others here - people would rip your arm off for this stuff on PCI for OS4 and morphos. :pissed:

[Dennis]

A lot of the work I did was indeed some form of calculated guessing. Days of reading through the hardware reference manual and trying to find the out the logic behind things. Also, because Winuae and Winfellow already exist, I have the luxury of being able to look how they did it when I'm stuck. (which I did on some occasions)

However, Minimig is far from finished yet, a lot of custom track loaders choke on the disk controller and the copper is not perfect. But I have gotten this far and I'm determined to finish this! :-)

[motorollin]

Go for it don't stop now! I and many others would pay good money for this product.

Thanks again Dennis!

--
moto

[Colin_Camper]

Hey Dennis

I think your first post must count as one of the most, if not the most, awesome and impressive first postings I have ever seen in any Amiga forum!   :-P

[smartrod]

ME WANT ME WANT!!!!

out of interest, how much would something like this cost?

[chris]

This sounds fantastic, and so many possibilities (the current crop of "retro computer in a joystick", custom chips on a PCI card, a complete new Amiga etc etc)

The only problem I can see with making it commercial (not that you were suggesting this, but it certainly could do well), is licensing the Kickstart ROM image(s).  Amiga Inc haven't been too responsive or helpful of late, as far as I understand.

Good luck with the project, very interested to see the progress.  Perhaps you can take it along to a show or even a user group meeting near you, if there are any?

Chris

[GadgetMaster]

Dennis wrote:
Hi all,

My name is Dennis and this is my first post to this forum, although I've been reading it for quite some time. :-)  
I am a long time Amiga user and I've owned an A500 and an A1200 with BPPC/Bvision. My current Amiga is an A3000 with Xsurf, Cybervision/3D and a recently diseased Cyberstorm MKIII. :-(

I am posting now because this forum inspired me to begin the biggest hobby project I have ever done.
Some time ago (january this year) there was a disccussion on this forum about implementing the Amiga custom chips in an FPGA. The more I though about this idea, the more it fascinated me.
So, I bought a Spartan-3 FGPA development board, learned Verilog (after finding out that VHDL was not my cup of tea) and started working on Minimig. Minimig stands for (very originally  :-) ) mini Amiga. My aim with Minimig is to built a complete OCS A500 (with some extra grunt and features like 4Mbyte ram and fast 68000 processor) on a circuit board about the size of a floppy drive. Loading of programs will be done by means of a MMC flash card, which holds the .ADF images of the floppies like a sort of hardware UAE!

I have been working on this for almost a year now and so far I have the OCS Agnus, Paula, OCS Denise and both the CIA's running in the FPGA. The only thing that is missing is sound and keyboard support. All other parts of the chipset are functioning.
It currently runs Worbench and some games like New Year Lemmings quite well although there are still some bugs in the copper and disk controller that prevent other programs to function correctly. I am building this thing mainly for my own challenge, but I was wondering if there would be interest in the community for this kind of machine?

I have uploaded some photo's and screenshots to the assorted hardware forum but they don't show up yet. As soon as they do, I will post some links to them.

Cheers,

Dennis

Hi CU Amiga :roll:

[Dessimat0r]

I'm interested also. In fact, I registered just to register my interest! Hopefully, this will be the great beginnings of Amiga 2, a new-age homebrew and commercial platform.