Questions about Minimig future

[freqmax]

It's been mentioned before:

"It's likely possible without any hardware modifications to run Atari ST, Macintosh 68k, Sega, Early x86, Proberbly most 8-bits. With some fpga tricks even early Sun, SGI, NexT aswell.
Then there's the possibility to do demos coded directly in HDL (like vhdl) and really exploit the fpga power. Or even use the fpga capability to interface with other electronics as logic analyzer etc.."

So there IS candidates besides Amiga. And it should be possible. And any 8-bit should be definitly be doable.

Any Z80 as a auxillary cpu is no big deal either. Unless it have a complexity on par of m68k..

[freqmax]

I meant a HDL-Z80 ofcourse. No reason to buy a physical one in this case.

[freqmax]

alexh wrote:

ChuckT wrote:
why be stuck with one or two gigs when you can now buy cards up to 16 gigs?

I've seen MMC cards upto 8GB and they make SD cards upto 32Gbytes but I'm not too sure they work with MiniMig.

Creating SDHC support should be easy.
Doesn't require any hardware modifications asfaik. So an MCU software update should be able to do it.
And you can use (non-SDHC) 4GB cards right now in minimig asfaik.
Even FAT16 manages 4 GB. (anyway 4GB is the limit of FFS anyway asfair).

ChuckT wrote:
I want it to have an HDMI port or cable for modern televisions

Why HDMI? Modern budget TV's dont have HDMI. They do however have component or VGA.

MiniMig as it shipped has two output modes, 31KHz VGA and 15KHz RGB (SCART). Add to that I am 80% sure I could change MiniMig's core to support component too.

That covers vast majority (all?) modern TV's![/quote]

Even budget TVs now get DVI or HDMI. In Europe component is not as common as SCART. The Xilinx Spartan-3x series can produce dvi/hdmi out of the box asfaik. Provided proper LVDS termination & impedance is used (yes I have investigated the matter in depth).

ChuckT wrote:
If my Amiga was working, I would consider getting a Minimig as a backup but without me being able to get files over to the Minimig, getting one doesn't help me port the files over.

You could use the 4x spare minimig IOs and a MCU (like PIC) to fairly easy create something along the lines of CatWeasel.
Other than that there's the Amiga floppy reader project. Or get an Amiga and use rs232, or use Amiga with an HDD, then connect the HDD to the PC (so I did).

[freqmax]

When I looked at the TMDS spec (from the DVI spec). I found it 's essentially the same electrically wise. What TMDS does is to send 8-bits and then add 2-bits that relate to coding. One bit indicate if the other bits are inverted in order to balance DC. So it should be doable.
Faster memory might be needed.

Btw,, Anyone knows a surface mount switched regulator that use a small amount of external components and with builtin switch transistor that:
Vin = +5V or +12V
Vout = 1.2V - 3.3V   (will use 1.2V 1.8V 2.5V 3.3V)
Iout >= 2.3A

[freqmax]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMDS
"In the first stage each bit is either XOR or XNOR transformed against the previous bit, whilst the first bit is not transformed at all. The encoder chooses between XOR and XNOR by determining which will result in the fewest transitions; the ninth bit is added to show which was used. In the second stage, the first eight bits are optionally inverted to even out the balance of ones and zeros and therefore the sustained average DC level. The tenth bit is added to indicate whether this inversion took place."

bit0-7: Data
bit8: XOR or XNOR
bit9: Invert ..or not

I think bit8 might be a challenge to accomplish in a fast logic.

"The physical layer for TMDS is Current Mode Logic (CML), DC coupled and terminated to 3.3 Volts."

Essentially LVDS asfair. I think the docs said +/-100mV. So wikipedia is proberbly wrong at the volts level.
Xilinx Spartan-3/3E i/o mode LVDS25 should do it.

[freqmax]

First one to try will find out :-D

Spartan-3A  TMDS out-of-the-box is only available in non-handsoldering BGA packages.

[freqmax]

@nBit7:
You think it should work?, if not what would be needed to make it work do you think?