Hi all,
My name is Dennis and this is my first post to this forum, although I've been reading it for quite some time. :-)
I am a long time Amiga user and I've owned an A500 and an A1200 with BPPC/Bvision. My current Amiga is an A3000 with Xsurf, Cybervision/3D and a recently diseased Cyberstorm MKIII. :-(
I am posting now because this forum inspired me to begin the biggest hobby project I have ever done.
Some time ago (january this year) there was a disccussion on this forum about implementing the Amiga custom chips in an FPGA. The more I though about this idea, the more it fascinated me.
So, I bought a Spartan-3 FGPA development board, learned Verilog (after finding out that VHDL was not my cup of tea) and started working on Minimig. Minimig stands for (very originally :-) ) mini Amiga. My aim with Minimig is to built a complete OCS A500 (with some extra grunt and features like 4Mbyte ram and fast 68000 processor) on a circuit board about the size of a floppy drive. Loading of programs will be done by means of a MMC flash card, which holds the .ADF images of the floppies like a sort of hardware UAE!
I have been working on this for almost a year now and so far I have the OCS Agnus, Paula, OCS Denise and both the CIA's running in the FPGA. The only thing that is missing is sound and keyboard support. All other parts of the chipset are functioning.
It currently runs Worbench and some games like New Year Lemmings quite well although there are still some bugs in the copper and disk controller that prevent other programs to function correctly. I am building this thing mainly for my own challenge, but I was wondering if there would be interest in the community for this kind of machine?
I have uploaded some photo's and screenshots to the assorted hardware forum but they don't show up yet. As soon as they do, I will post some links to them.
Cheers,
Dennis