Home grown A1200 accelerator project

[skurk]

alexh wrote:
That would barely pay the license for the PCB layout tools and the tooling costs for the A1200 connector. You can forget about the salary of the person doing the work.

How about royalties?  That could make a neat sum after if, say, 200 boards were sold.

Oh, and it should have two connectors (selectable with a jumper) - one for the A1200, the other for A4000

Double the action, triple the excitement!

[skurk]

stopthegop wrote:
I, for one, would love to be able to slap a 512M DIMM into my A4000T so sign me up if someone qualified decides to build it!  Question is, are there 149 others?

Make that 148!

[Daedalus]

stopthegop wrote:
The CT-63 goes for ~340 Euros, just to give a rough idea what a hypothetical classic Amiga board might go for.  I think it safe to say there would need to be a minimum 150 orders, probably more like 250, with at least some of the money in advance, to spark anyone's interest in creating such a board.  I, for one, would love to be able to slap a 512M DIMM into my A4000T so sign me up if someone qualified decides to build it!  Question is, are there 149 others?  

How many of those boards would have been made and sold? They're just as custom as a 1200 board would be, and I'm not sure, but I would've thought there was a *smaller* market for Falcon boards? €340 is a decent price, I'd go for it!

[alexh]

AJCopland wrote:
You seem to know a little about this sort of thing, how complicated would reworking the CT60/63 for the A1200 be?

You really think Rodolphe will release the source to his 680x0 SDRAM controller?

The Falcon bridge in the CT60/63 looks quite a bit more complicated than the Amiga equivalent would be.

skurk wrote:
How about royalties? That could make a neat sum after if, say, 200 boards were sold.

Not quite sure what you mean. Surely the person doing the design will also manufacture and sell the boards. Any/all profit will go to them. However I would bet that even with 200 sales it will be a negative number, or the retail price would be unacceptable.

I have said it several times before, if someone who used to work for Phase5 / DCE came forward with the schematics, layout and firmware source code to the last versions of the CSPPC/BPPC then a new accelerator project instantly becomes viable.

[stopthegop]

I'm not by any means certain about this, but I think for the initial run of Falcon accelerators he wanted (and apparently got) around 75 orders??  That would have been for the Centurbo or CT-60.  He's improved the design (its now the CT-63) and done at least four additional production "runs" since the first bactch..  Guessing again, but I imagine each additional production "run" was for 25 orders or more.  My guess is there are at least 200 CT's out there somewhere.  I agree with you, too, that the Amiga audience is probably quite a bit larger.  Certainly not "large" by peesea standards..  But 300-400 boards x 340Euros each... ain't exactly peanuts.  

[Ratte]

skurk wrote:

OK, here's a crazy thought:

A CPU accellerator board with an Intel CPU.  Before you all start kicking and screaming, let me explain.

The whole thing should behave like a 68060, because it's basically a CPU emulator.  No Intel instructions are available from the Amiga.

The board also holds 128MB RAM which behaves like the fastram, and is accessible at the board's local bus speed.  The chipram, located on the Amiga motherboard, will be as slow as before.

So, picture a 4 GHz Intel CPU doing nothing but 68k emulation.  No Windows hogging resources in the background, no multitasking.  Just one mission: Emulate the 68060 at full speed.

I would not be surprised if something like this would measure in the neighbourhood of a 7-800 MHz.  Only stuff in fastram would truly gain from this, but still - things would be *a lot* faster.

Hell of a project, though.

http://www.a1k.org/forum/index.php?mode=viewthread&forum_id=2&thread=334
sorry, its in german

[skurk]

Ratte wrote:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/index.php?mode=viewthread&forum_id=2&thread=334
sorry, its in german

Wow.  You had the exact same idea, nearly exactly one year before me.

What are the odds?

[alexh]

stopthegop wrote:
My guess is there are at least 200 CT's out there somewhere.

Quite possibly.

the Amiga audience is probably quite a bit larger.

Probably.

But 300-400 boards x 340Euros each... ain't exactly peanuts.

You are forgetting one KEY thing. There were no 060 accelerators for the Atari Falcon at all and very few 040 accelerators. It was a unique product in the Falcon community with a high percentage wanting one.

There are LOTS of 060 accelerators for the Amiga platform already out there. Demand will be a lot lower than you think.

€340 is too much for an 060 Amiga accelerator. You either have to have significantly more features than existing accelerators, or a price differential.

[Louis Dias]

Why not see if Transmeta has a 68k implementation?

[AJCopland]

Because interfacing between a 68060 and the existing miggy buses etc etc is a solved problem that people know how to do.

The Transmeta/Intel/AMDx2 etc are totally impractical as replacement cpus due to radical differences in the buses requiring extensive bridge logic to allow them to communicate.

(from the little that I can remember / understand.)
(Also the Wii does NOT have shader hardware. I'd have replied to your thread on AW.net but I have no account there.)

Andy

[HammerD]

I personally would rather see a PPC accelerator so you can either run MorphOS or OS4 on your classic amiga.  The phase5/DEC ppc cards are rare and expensive, and I think you could probably sell a more modern PPC accelerator card to a reasonable number of classic Amiga users.  

I'd say a PPC accelerator with a G3 on it, a local ram socket and anything else that fits (like a video chip).  Would be very nice...

[jj]

Why bother, OS4 has been released, so any second now elbox should be releasing the Sharkppc  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:

[CannonFodder]

JJ wrote:
Why bother, OS4 has been released

Link to where I can buy it from please.

[jj]

you cant buy os4, but it was released to people who had an A1 (sorry not alowed to call it an A1 anymore, cause according to Ainc it wasnt)

So I am just waiting for the shark to come out, shouldn't be too much longer for the dragon either

 :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:

Think I just burst something laughing

[Ratte]

skurk wrote:

Ratte wrote:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/index.php?mode=viewthread&forum_id=2&thread=334
sorry, its in german

Wow.  You had the exact same idea, nearly exactly one year before me.

What are the odds?

Rom wasn't built in one day.
(or should i say Babylon?!)

[Fransexy_]

AmigaNow wrote:
Does anyone in our community have the skills and tools such as hSpice or similar to design a new accelerator ourselves? I'm thinking of something similar to the Efika, with the same PPC, with maybe a 68060 @ 75Mhz, 2 Dimms for up to 2 GB Ram.

Would prefer to have it work like the Blizzard 1260+PPC. I noticed both are from the 603e family...

With the design in place, couldn't we contract the boards manufacture like the MiniMeg?

Also, would be great if Morphos could be ported to it. :-D

Lets take away the waiting and vaporware. Lets make this ourselves...

AmigaNow

I had more or less the same idea