The "Redback" CD32 Expansion (8MB + IDE + Clockports)

[psxphill]

I don't know anything about the circuitry involved but I wanted to share this idea with anyone who could potentially design the PCB and build them. I noticed Kipper show some interest once, and Jens has the tooling to produce the CD32 expansion connector and may be willing to help if we go through official channels.
 
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So which looks better, the red PCB and black connector, or black PCB and red connector? Personally I prefer a red connector on a black PCB since it resembles the animal its named after more, and it just looks a bit different.

The colour is irrelevant as it's going to be hidden away. You're not going to get more sales because of the colour and it could increase manufacturing costs, leading to a higher selling price.
 
I had an idea to produce an agnus replacement in an fpga for a500/a2000 that had 8meg of on board ram. It would require a connection to either gary or the 68000 for the extra address bits and you would be limited to 2mb of 16bit fast ram. However the chip ram would be as fast as 16bit fast ram, even when displaying the highest bit depths. It would also feature a header for a denise cable, you would remove the denise from the socket and replace it with the cable from the fpga board. This would then give you 8 bitplanes in super high res. Unfortunately you'd still be limited to 4096 colours on the 23pin video port, but otherwise you'd be able to run all AGA software and it would run faster than AGA. Most AGA software would assume 020, but we can worry about that in the next project.
 
I would also give it chunky pixel modes and a nice texture mapper. It would become the must have accessory. An a500+/a3000 version and an a1000 version would also be possible, but possibly not financially viable. Unfortunately an a600/a1200/a4000/cd32 would not be practical at all because of everything being surface mounted.

[psxphill]

After reading the whole thread, you think this idea started with the colour of the PCB? I may not have a solid product to market but sharing ideas is better than nothing, and I'm already doing my best to contribute to the Amiga community with my other projects. Have you anything else to add other than smarmy critique?

I came up with the plan of adding 8 meg of chip ram & AGA to OCS amigas.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azRzqI3BJ2A

[psxphill]

It's an interesting idea and very similar to how the IndivisionECS works. You can use high resolution modes in 256 colours (from a palette of 4,096 still) on Workbench and it has a chunky mode you can access if you write new software to take advantage of it. So far SCUMMVM and ADoom can make use of it.

It's not similar at all to how the indivision works, as that just replaces denise. You're limited by the speed and size of chip ram. The indivision works like the a2024. With it's own framebuffer you can have hires screens with high refresh rates, but the display can only be updated at the speed that agnus feeds it data.
 
Avoiding chip bus contention you'll have to run the agnus as if it's a 320x200 16 colour display @ 60 hz. A 256 colour display will therefore run at 30hz, hires will cut that to 15hz, doubling the number of scanlines without interlace will be 7hz. Replacing the agnus and chip ram would actually make it useful.
 
The IndivisionECS allows you to hook up to a VGA monitor, but I would use an old 15khz Amiga monitor or an LCD TV with RGB SCART input.

[psxphill]

It's similar in that it is such a custom reach-around of an expansion idea that even if it works you still have to start writing support for it in software because nothing that currently exists will be able to take advantage of it.

Support for the 8mb of chip ram wouldn't take much, you just need to make sure that auto config ram doesn't conflict with it. There are several ways that might work. A new kickstart rom, adding autoconfig ability to the hardware itself (you'll need a hook up to gary anyway for extra address bits,  hell you could even replace gary) or inject a resident module in the chip ram on boot up that does it.
 
Most of the other changes would be AGA compatible. Chunky/hicolour modes wouldn't be, you'd need to add the monitor prefs for those & some changes to graphics.library.
 
Support for texture mapping in the blitter etc is a bit more of a pipe dream and software that used it is more likely to just be demos.
 
Software support isn't what would stop this getting it off the ground. You'd need to make an fpga to PLCC board with headers to go to adapters for two chips, so just the component cost is going to be expensive. But it would be awesome.