Hello

[amimadman]

Hi all

Just a quick intro.

Been doing amigas since '92 and up until last year that is all I have allowed in my house, computer wise. I have conceided now though and do have a XP based laptop.

Currently my stock consists of my main Amiga 1200, 040 40Mhz, 64 Mb ram, mediator, voodoo5500 with homemade AGA monitor switch and 17" TFT, spider, fast ethernet card (broadband) and 10 mb ethernet card (laptop). Also kids amiga 1200, 040/40 32Mb ram and my amiga 600 laptop, homemade with 12" colour TFT, 030/50 32Mb ram. It is in bits at the moment though due its reincarnation to the mark 2 version.

There you go, thats me and mine.
 

[leirbag28]

Got pictures of that A600 buddy?

Im planning on doing the same to my A600.

[Cyberus]

Welcome to Amiga.org mate

:pint:

[Tahoe]

Welcome! You'll find lots of nice people here  :-D

And I must agree, I would also like to see pictures of your A600!

[Coolit]

Welcome to Amiga.org :juggler:

[amimadman]

Hey guys

Sorry, no photos available of the mk1 version of the laptop, I didn't have a digital camera at the time I built it but I will take some pictures of the rebuild.

The original was buililt in to a homemade aluminium and perspex case, very heavy and cumbersome but it worked.

It used a micro atx psu externally to power the whole system, I didn't bother with a battery, the current draw would have been far too large to make it worthwhile. It had a 12" colour screen from a desktop TFT, slimline laptop cd drive and floppy drive, 3Gb hard drive, apollo 030/50 32Mb. Built in stereo speakers, trackball mouse switchable to external amiga mouse. It also had a PCMCIA modem which worked great. I had 3.9 installed on it to. It wasn't fast but it worked well.

The rebuild is going to be inside a breifcase with the PSU built inside too. I also plan to use a touchpad instead of the trackball, but apart from that it will be pretty much the same. I hope to get cracking with it again later this year and I will take some photos this time.

Watch this space.

[Tricky]

Hi!  I'd prefer not to have any dirty PCs in my house either to be honest, but unfortunately they're quite a necessary evil these days.

Considering building myself an Amiga laptop now though.  An A1200 laptop... quite a task... just discovered you can still buy 68060s new, although they're like $300 each and you have to order more than a thousand.  I reckon it should be do-able these days though, with FPGAs for the custom chips and maybe a GumStix with a ROM emulator or something.  Building an Amiga from scratch... how does that sound?

I'll have to think about it.

[InTheSand]

Tricky wrote:
Building an Amiga from scratch... how does that sound?

Sounds great! We'd all like new Amigas! While you're implementing the custom chips in FPGAs, how about adding some higher resolutions and a native chunky screenmode or two?!  :-D

Seriously though, I think the Amiga's ageing custom hardware is best off being emulated in software these days and the effort (not to mention the expense) of re-implementing it as FPGAs on a new motherboard is likely to be considerable.

It'd still be nice to have a non-mainstream hobbyist machine built with and capable of using modern hardware, and I guess that's what has been attempted with the AmigaOne, apart from one thing - the prohibitive cost...

It's a shame the current owners of OS4 decided to restrict development of the OS to an expensive PPC-based product, rather than doing it for x86 hardware. Imagine a Mini-ITX x86-based AmigaOne at a fraction of the cost? Then again, piracy of the OS on an x86 platform would be a problem, as Apple is now finding out!

 - Ali

[Dr_Righteous]

I think the hardest part of reimplimenting the custom chips would be in building the truth tables. Once that's done, the whole set could concievably be crammed into a single FPGA, saving both money and space. Call the new custom chip "Medusa."

[Tricky]

Oh I think I know what processor to use anyway... Motorola (FreeScale) ColdFire MCF5407.  316 MIPS and you can get a free 680x0 emulator for it!

ColdFire is based on 68k anyway (it's sort of a RISC version of it), so a lot of the most common instructions it can just run as normal, so should be pretty quick.

As for the custom chips, that's going to take a bit more thought...

[AmigaEd]

I don't see what all the fuss is about custom chips, fpga's etc.

Just pay homage to Jay Miner as you customize the chips in your PC with a Pick-Axe. Apply Cold Fire processor, stick A1000 motherboard in gutted out pc case and there you have it!

 :smack:

-AmigaEd

[Tricky]

Well I don't have an A1000 motherboard... and it's not AGA anyway... and the idea is to build a laptop...

Other than that, it's really about the fact that Amigas are no longer in production, and so the original stock of custom chips isn't going to last forever and becomes increasingly difficult to find and more expensive.

[Nosferax]

This is something I don't understand now... Why try to revive the Amiga on another dying architecture (G3 & G4). I don't want to start a flame war or anything but I think maybe more effort should be made to make it on an x86 plateform instead.

First the cost would be lower and parts are more available.

Secondly, compatibility with the older architecture can be achieve via an emulation layer (amiga forever is a prime example). Aros is a step in the right direction but it isn't optimized for the modern chip like the P4 or AMD (using only the -i=386).

Hell, even Apple is leaving the PPC architecture.

[SamuraiCrow]

@Nosferax

The AmigaOS was designed for a big-endian byte order.  PPC is either big or little endian EXCEPT for the PPC 970 series which is strictly big-endian.  Intels and AMDs are all strictly little-endian with a BSWAP opcode to reverse the endian if necessary.

If you want to run Amiga software on an Intel PC without losing a lot of performance (running BSWAPs all of the time) then your only option is AROS.  AROS needs all of its software to be recompiled from AOS 3.1 compatible sources and even then there isn't much available for it.

As for the PPC being a lost cause, it wasn't when Phase 5 started making the PPC accelerators for the A1200/4000 and it isn't now.  The Cell processor will be commercially available soon and there is promise of open archetecture computers being made from it.  Best of all the internal archetecture is so different from anything else before it (except a RAM-expanded C64 :-) ) that only a flexible Amiga programmer will be able to support it well.  We'll see how it goes.

[Tricky]

Why not x86?  Well... because they're the enemy!

But seriously... the reason I'm thinking ColdFire is just because it will be easier.  It's basically just a cut down 68000 instruction set and there's a free emulator for the bits it's missing.  And they're not dear either.  Unless you consider $30 too expensive.  Or, err... free samples...  and they're just generally simpler to work with.

Speed isn't that much of an issue.  I just want it to work.  But it will be about 3x the speed of an 060 anyway and I'm happy with that.

Also any emulator for an incompatible processor is going to have to load from somewhere, and so the smaller the better.

Besides, look where all the money's going to go from now on...
http://www.activewin.com/awin/comments.asp?HeadlineIndex=29527&Group=1
Ohohoho if Microsoft have finally decided that PPC is a good idea afterall, I guess it must be.