It made me wonder if perhaps by hooking into the amiga's datatypes image decoding libraries - if it would be possible to have hardware accellerated image decoding done on the FPGA? I've no idea if this is feasible or not - but i thought it might be a topic worthy of discussion. This would be a major speed boost for web browsing and image viewing on the Amiga and one thats not so dependent on CPU speed if it could be done by a dedicated part of the FPGA.
I would say that this is possible, yes. And potentially even better than my old idea of FPGA on a Zorro card to be a reconfigurable hardware CODEC. Better in that it's much closer to the CPU and main memory, not having to go through the Zorro bottleneck.
I mention reconfigurable as I would have had the FPGA change what it was based on current need. Such as if you are doing mp3, then it's an mp3 codec. If you are doing mpeg2 video, then it's an mpeg2 codec. If you're doing Quicktime, then it's a Quicktime codec, etc. Reconfiguration may or may nto be as big a deal now as FPGAs are very much larger now than back then. (At the time, 40000 to 50000 logic gates was pretty big and 100k was crazy huge, now FPGAs are in the several millions of gates...)
Now, this would depend on capacity of FPGA chip used. I'm not sure what Majsta uses or how full it is with the CPU and memory stuff. But possible the concept is.
