It's definitely impressive, and an interesting project.
Personally, if I were re-producing an A1200 board with some minor improvements, I would want to retain full backwards compatibility with the traditional A1200. So that would mean retaining all the outgoing connectors (power, DTYPEs), retaining the PCMCIA, etc. The only connector that I might consider ditching would be the standard video output, in which case I would look at replacing it with a more modern scan-doubled output. Not sure if I'd go full modern with HDMI or stick with VGA for compatibility with older CRT monitors, I'd need to have a think about that.
I like the forward thinking for an RTG board development. It would be even better if there could be auto-switching between this (for, say, Workbench) and the standard AMIGA modes (for games and legacy software etc) via a single graphics output.
I don't feel like I approve of the relocation of Gayle, Budgie and the DRAM to a daughter board. I could be totally wrong here but my intuition tells me that this could end up being a source of trouble in the future in terms of worn connectors etc. It's generally troublesome to have boards hanging off parent boards via connectors, as anyone who has used the trapdoor slot for accelerators will know - especially in towered A1200s. The choice of connectors is good, it looks like these would tend to limit the movement of the daughterboard once plugged in. Still, my intuition about trouble with this is not quite satisfied.
What is the main driver behind this decision? I guess there's an advantage to the relocation of these components that I am failing to consider. If it's important to have these on a daughterboard I would probably look to have a mounting solution whereby the daughter board can be secured to the motherboard via screwed-in posts so that it's not flapping around and causing grief.
I know I'm feature-creeping here but some on board networking would be nice, especially since the PCMCIA slot has been removed. I see that this has been considered via a terrible fire compatible SPI port but I don't have knowledge of how that would work in practice.
An upgrade from IDE to SATA would be good too, although possibly a non-trivial exercise and I guess many A1200 owners use a simple CF card solution which is quite well suited to IDE.
Anyway, I'll keep an eye on this to see how it develops. I've got a couple of those new cases produced by A1200.net and some replacement keycaps on the way, this is the kind of thing that would be well suited to a revamped A1200 desktop build.
