New project for the benefit of all classic computing!

[ChaosLord]

Yepp but you do not have my keyboard layout and where I live it's rare to find replacements

Do you type a lot of texts in the Secret Proprietary Encrypted Language of the Kingdom of Swedonia?

I ask because all Swedonians seem to be expert English writers and any Amiga keyboard can type any weird (and kewl) Swedish chars.  Its just a matter of how easy or hard it is.

A US Amiga keyboard using US Layout and US Keyboard driver can type all Swedish chars but it requires typing "special key combos".  Of course u probably already knew this

[ChaosLord]

@som99

11 of your keys have 3 symbols on them!!!!

WTF?!?!  Why don't US keyboards get 11 keys with 3 symbols on them?!?  Or how about 20 keys with 3 symbols on them?  That is much much more useful!  That way you can actually type out kewl symbols without having to memorize complicated key combos!!!  I feel so cheated now.

p.s. u have no Amiga keys in your layout diagram.  I can't live without my Amiga keys.  

[ChaosLord]

First preference would be the following:

1) A new 60860 accelerator with 1 or 2 gigs of RAM and an integrated P96-compatable RTG card with > 4 megs of RAM with a fast bus to the proc.

I am all for it... but... by adding an RTG card onto the accelerator the project suddenly becomes 10x more complicated.  I believe it will be complicated enough that he will just keep delaying and delaying and delaying it and then... it never happens.

...if that is not possible, the following would be nice:

2) A new 68060 accelerator with 1 or 2 gigs of RAM.

That sounds 10x easier.  And I would rather have a real 060 card with 2GB of RAM on it than a theoretical version with RTG on it that doesn't exist and has no drivers.

Elbox will happily sell you a Mediator board with PCI slots on it and a 256MB PCI gfx card with drivers for Amiga computers today.

I don't see any compelling reason for him to just duplicate what Elbox already did for us.  Duplicating Elbox does not advance the Amiga community.  Elbox has a website.  They will accept your money.  They will give you a working product.  I have a Mediator that is around 13 years old and still works great.

If he tries to add RTG onto the board then he will right away spend 200 hours shopping around for a gfx chip to put on the board, reading comments about it, looking at source code of drivers, trying to find a good price, etc. etc.  then he has to work out how to control access to the RAM since the gfx chip and the 060 will be fighting each other for access.  It becomes real hard work and will take forever.

[ChaosLord]

@som99

I luv ur naked keyboard.  It soooooo beautiful  :knuddel:

Wow!  You have 4 symbols on some of your keys! :banana:
Reminds me of the old 8-bit days when keyboards had real character (pun not intended)

My only complaints are:
1. I don't like the return key.
2. I don't like that there is no scroll lock key so my KVM switch won't work on it

KVM switch saves me the cost of another monitor.  And saves me a ton of space in my small humble abode.

p.s. Never mind!  There is a Scroll Lock key on the numpad!  Silly me!

[ChaosLord]

* cheap adapter to plug USB whell mouse
* cheap PS1/2/3 joypad adapter
* cheap Scandoubler/FickerFixer or something equivalent so that we could use these damned LCD without blur

The solutions already on the market and publicly available for sale today are as cheap as you are going to get.

[ChaosLord]

@Plaz

Jens Schoenfeld has never made an 060 card that I have ever heard about.

However 2 other persons in the Amiga community have recently made 060 cards:

Thomas Hirsch made 5 working 060 cards for the Natami prototypes.

That FPGAreplay guy (I forgot his name) has made at least 1 or 2 060 cards for the replay and will probably start cranking them out en masse before long. But his 060 card only has 128MB RAM which is like exactly what I (and various friends) already have.  So if I buy one its a sidegrade, not an upgrade. :/

[ChaosLord]

@TheRogue

Holy Crap!(tm)  If you can make something like your block diagram that is just
Freaking Awesome!

About your "expansion area".  What is easier for you hardware guys to add these days?  An oldsk00l  PCI slot or a newfangled PCI Express x1 slot?

I bought a Gb Ethernet card 1000/100/10 for a PCI Express x1 slot the other day for like $40.00.  I did not check if they make combo cards with Gb Ethernet and USB all in 1 card.

In any case if the card had some sort of way to plug in an off the shelf Gb Ethernet and off the shelf USB solution then that would be really really great and would solve a whole lot of problems all in 1 go.

I am not personally a fan of USB 1.1 to 2.0.  I can't stand it really  But I respect that other people need it for stuff.   But I do love USB 3.0 :knuddel:

[ChaosLord]

Well actually Georg Braun who made GBA1000 mobo also made a 060 accellerator that plugs into a 030 cpu socket. I personally think this is way way cool, and could potentially give, every one who has a 030 in a socket, a 060 board.

I respect his invention.  It is very clever.

But I just looked over all my AGA Amigas that I currently own + all the ones I gave away and none of them has an 030 in a socket.

So I looked over all my current ECS Amigas + reviewed all the ECS Amigas I gave away and none of them has an 030 in a socket.  I currently own 2 Amiga A3000s with 25Mhz 030s but they are soldered onto the motherboard.

So I fear that his invention will be of limited usefulness to Amiga users.

But hopefully he learned some secret trix for making 060 cards that maybe he would be willing to share with TheRogue?

[ChaosLord]

re: discussing memory speed of "Modern" ram vs. "Oldskool" ram.

Except that the modern memory is likely up to 2x as fast as SIMMs in the old accelerators

I think that the Apollo 1260 and Blizzard 1260 both accessed memory 32-bits at at a time.

But Replay and Natami access memory 16-bits at a time.

So I would not be all that surprised if the memory access speeds of an old Apollo 060 were the around the same as for one of the newfangled fpga systems.

All I am saying is that someone would have to do timing tests to see which one is really faster.  New memory chips can be a lot faster but it is not a guaranteed thing.

It is a lot of complicated work to try to get "modern" memory to actually go fast.  It is very very hard and complex work that requires a lot of thought and cleverness.  This is something that TheRogue will be forced to come to terms with when building his DDR3 2GB 060 card.  If you just use the free memory controller software that comes with FPGA chips then you get, how shall I say this... "slow" or "sad" memory speeds.  Other people might use other words that start with "s"

[ChaosLord]

@TheRogue

New Project for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Amiga

I hereby request an 060 card with 32GB of RAM.

32GB is the Amiga's hard limit.  My brand new bgcpc came with 10GB in it.  Its just not right for my windoze box to have more ram than my Amiga box.

Any other limits are BS nonsense that can be worked around with some simple patches.  There are tons of Amiga programmers who can, and have, patched a zillion things in AmigaOS.  Making a few new patches to make use of the whole 32GB is no problem and the programmers will go crazy and jump for joy. :knuddel:

You will be the most loved person since Jay Miner.

I figure by the time you get around to actually making the card, you won't be able to buy less than 32GB at a time anyway :p

I wrote a msg here about how old ancient never to be updated software can make use of 32GB.  I know you don't have time to read the whole thread about 128MB Amigas so here is the 1 important message:
How to use more than 2GB of RAM with old Amiga software that wasn't designed for it

[ChaosLord]

@Chaoslord the actual hardware limit is 4gigs...

No.  The hardware limit of an address register is 4GB.  That is because each bank has 4GB in it.

Or another way to say it is:
There is only 4GB of directly addressable RAM but 32GB of indirectly addressable RAM.  You remember bank switching from the C64 and Intel days, right?

The 68k can never see more than that due to the 32 address lines maximum the

Who says there are only 32 address lines?

You are forgetting about the 3 lines that select what bank you are in.

Motorola thought waaaaaaaaaaaaaay ahead.

(and most Amigas only had 24 address lines = 16meg limit).

8 banks of 16MB actually.  Of course the hardware has to be made in the correct way to support wiring the banks into actual different banks of RAM which no C= machine ever did.  There was no particular reason for them too.

But the point is, the 8 banks have been there since Motorola 68000.

All the 8 banks have always been wired into the same 4GB address space.

But there is no longer any reason to do that.

We have the technology.  We can go bigger, faster, stronger.

Software can be patched to use larger word sizes... Hardware can't.

I don't know what this comment means.  I think it has no relevance.

[ChaosLord]

@Chaoslord.
I have 8Gb on my pc and it is more than enough.

Then why did you buy it?

If 8GB is too much for you then why didn't you stay at 1GB?

Why do you get to buy 8GB of ram for your pc but I don't get to buy 8GB of ram for my Amiga?

Discrimination! :insane:

[ChaosLord]

Wait, are you referring to FC0-FC2 function code pinouts?

That is what they seem to be labeled.  I had always assumed that these "banks" were on 020+ but when I went back and reread the book it said 68000 and I didn't believe it until I looked up a Pin diagram of a 68000 and there were the pins. :eek:

 They aren't for "banks" in any conventional sense,

I had figured that out.  It seems they work differently from good old C64 banking out the ROM to get at the RAM underneath.   But nevertheless my documentation says they are usable.

 they are used to indicate to any external hardware that cares (eg external MMU) what class of memory access is being made.

From the 68K documentation:

0 0 0 (Undefined, Reserved) *
0 0 1 User Data Space
0 1 0 User Program Space
0 1 1 (Undefined, Reserved) *
1 0 0 (Undefined, Reserved) *
1 0 1 Supervisor Data Space
1 1 0 Supervisor Program Space
1 1 1 CPU Space
* Address space 3 is reserved for user definition

I don't think you can arbitrarily hijack them for your own nefarious bank select *especially* on processors where the MMU is already on board.

I see what u mean.  The internal MMU could conflict with this idea.

More research needed.

I can say one thing tho.  A 68060/040 that has no MMU does still have an MMU.  Its just not the super fancy one.  It is real basic and coarse.  Anyway maybe that could make a difference in all this.  or not

All I know is, the first 680x0 Asm book I ever bought  (1985?) described this as separate usable banks of RAM that could be wired separately to literal different banks of RAM.  But it says you can't use all 8 banks (don't know why, maybe because they were "reserved").

I reread it a few hours ago.  Its all in there.  It is of course possible that he did not word things quite right or that I am misunderstanding something....

But what is the purpose of the pins on 68000.  u r saying they are like for an external MMU to write protect the CODE bank and that would be about it.  

I say if the pins exist on an 060 then they can be wired up on the ram card as extra address lines.  And the MMU could still do its thing.  I don't see any reason why one must conflict with the other.

[ChaosLord]

I can't find those special pins on any 040 diagram.  Either they renamed them, deleted them or I went blind.  Not sure which

[ChaosLord]

We will never know if it works because they took the pins off the 68060.  Why would they put pins of awesomeness on 68000 and chop them off on 68060?

Or did they just rename them?

[ChaosLord]

Naturally. The organization would work however you want it to work, since you'd be rolling your own MMU (or adapting an existing one) in any case; all the CPU cares about is that it gets instructions when it asks for instructions, and data when it asks for data.

THOR, Phil and others will tell u that on the Amiga there is no clear delineation between code and data.

1. Any data could suddenly be run as code.

2. Any code could suddenly be used as data.

I am sort of morally opposed to #2 but oh well.  Ppl do it.  They say they have good reasons.  C'est la vie.

Legally u can do both as long as u flush the caches correctly.  That is the trick.