Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: blanning on June 21, 2014, 01:13:54 AM
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... or from someone else I guess...
I think it would be really cool to create a bridgeboard that plugs into the raspberry PI, or maybe plug it into the CPU slot or 500 expansion slot.
The PI has ethernet, usb, an SD card slot, memory, HDMI and composite video output, audio, and a lot of memory... It would be great to give the amiga access to all that.
Maybe the video could even be used to emulate an amiga RTG board.
It could plug into the amiga board through the gpio port and pass it through so other things can be plugged in.
You could probably even hang a low profile PCI slot off the board.
Maybe even emulate a powerpc chip.
wishful thinking...
brian
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... or from someone else I guess...
I think it would be really cool to create a bridgeboard that plugs into the raspberry PI, or maybe plug it into the CPU slot or 500 expansion slot.
The PI has ethernet, usb, an SD card slot, memory, HDMI and composite video output, audio, and a lot of memory... It would be great to give the amiga access to all that.
Maybe the video could even be used to emulate an amiga RTG board.
It could plug into the amiga board through the gpio port and pass it through so other things can be plugged in.
You could probably even hang a low profile PCI slot off the board.
Maybe even emulate a powerpc chip.
wishful thinking...
brian
I think Jens should produce something that every Amiga lover buys and actually make a good profit for his efforts, support and loyalty. I wish I knew what that product was, If I did I would tell him. I don't think he should make anything people would "like" to see because that's just not financially viable. Not that I don't think the product you've outlined isn't a good idea. I think most of it has good merit.
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I think Jens should produce something that every Amiga lover buys and actually make a good profit for his efforts, support and loyalty. I wish I knew what that product was, If I did I would tell him. I don't think he should make anything people would "like" to see because that's just not financially viable. Not that I don't think the product you've outlined isn't a good idea. I think most of it has good merit.
I realize if it's not cost-effective, it will never happen. I'm just wishing out loud.
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You could perhaps do it quick & dirty. The Raspberry-Pi runs att 700 MHz. The Amiga 500 (bus) runs at 7,14 MHz. So 98 cycles available to catch I/O signals. Connect enough Raspberry-Pi GPIO to the Zorro bus or parallell port. Then activate interrupt-on-change on the ARM CPU. Capture the bits and use them.
And the ARM CPU has some really good but complicated DMA engines. It's even possible to chain RAM --> DMA --> VGA video etc.
A quick feasability study is to measure the response time of the RPi. Let it watch one I/O using interrupt-on-change and the interrupt routine will then toggle another I/O. Wire to an oscilloscope and catch the result which you can dump here..
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Getting the hardware side of this working would be a big challenge, but don't forget that the software component could be even harder. Just like with the Bridgeboards, the Amiga and Pi sides would need to find a way to talk to each other and any Amiga drivers for the Pi's hardware would probably need to go through that software interface...
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Could this be done by linking a PC emulator or pi emulator to the 68k Amiga. You could access the disks on the Amiga. What about the other resources.
I'll try and find out what is involved.
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The easiest way to do it would be: remote desktop connection. I don't know which software you would use for that.
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I think Jens should produce something that every Amiga lover buys
simple: universal turboboard for every amiga multiple times faster than any existing accelerator and that for affordable money. am i right or am i right?
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simple: universal turboboard for every amiga multiple times faster than any existing accelerator and that for affordable money. am i right or am i right?
I thought that was already planned with Majsta's next accelerator for the 500/2000/1000 and using the Apollo core ;).
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New production run of 6581 and 68060 .. ;)
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Hi freqmax, et al.
New production run of 6581 ... ;)
You could theoretically already make "replacement" 6581's.
VHDL code for 6581 equivalent is available here:
http://code.google.com/p/netsid-papilio/source/browse/trunk/doc/original_sid_src/sid_6581.vhd?r=2
Use a GODIL module:
http://www.trenz-electronic.de/products/fpga-boards/oho-elektronik.html
(250 model should easily suffice).
They're a great little product for replacing obsolete/impossible to find DIP parts.
I've used them a couple of times for repairing late 70's pinball machine boards.
Not a trivial solution, I grant you, but do-able. :)
Cheers,
Red
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You could theoretically already make "replacement" 6581's.
VHDL code for 6581 equivalent is available here:
http://code.google.com/p/netsid-papilio/source/browse/trunk/doc/original_sid_src/sid_6581.vhd?r=2
But would the all digital fpga sound the same? It may sound too clean where many SID enthusiasts prefer distortion. Even the different versions of the real SID chips sounded different. The VHDL for a 6581 is small enough that it has been considered for adding to at least one Amiga fpga board. The SID has some unique abilities that Paula can't do. It would make an interesting combination for sound as well as making C64 emulation easier.
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Exactly, all digital 6581 replication solutions won't cut it. They just don't have the same sound.
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Hi freqmax, et al.
You could theoretically already make "replacement" 6581's.
VHDL code for 6581 equivalent is available here:
http://code.google.com/p/netsid-papilio/source/browse/trunk/doc/original_sid_src/sid_6581.vhd?r=2
Use a GODIL module:
http://www.trenz-electronic.de/products/fpga-boards/oho-elektronik.html
(250 model should easily suffice).
They're a great little product for replacing obsolete/impossible to find DIP parts.
I've used them a couple of times for repairing late 70's pinball machine boards.
Not a trivial solution, I grant you, but do-able. :)
Cheers,
Red
Repairing or restoring old Pinball machines, now that sounds like a fun hobby that could make a person some good spare cash. :)
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New production run of 6581 and 68060 .. ;)
http://www.swinkels.tvtom.pl/swinsid/
http://www.sinchai.de/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=90
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I thought that was already planned with Majsta's next accelerator for the 500/2000/1000 and using the Apollo core ;).
sounds like majsta run into problems:
project was put on hold since imagine I didn't had A500 keyboard to perform some tests I wanted
Problem was with IDE controller and it seems to me that I didn't design it properly in hardware part
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=68459&page=2
however jens has actually proposed help with the project (in therms of hardware i guess), if it turns out genuine, even though remaining rather aggressively sceptical for the time being:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=44199
i dont know if and how it progressed since.
also thor is supporting the case (within limits):
http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=44678
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The problem I have with these kinds of ideas is that you'll end up with a 'modern' computer with a very slow old computer attached to it ;)
The main appeal of Classic hardware to most people is in running the original 68k games/demos/apps and a modern expansion doesn't fit into this appeal.
I'd personally draw the line at a really fast accelerator with an on-board HD controller but that's just my personal opinion. I think as soon as you replace the original chipset (eg AGA) then it becomes pointless (see above).
:)
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The problem I have with these kinds of ideas is that you'll end up with a 'modern' computer with a very slow old computer attached to it ;)
The main appeal of Classic hardware to most people is in running the original 68k games/demos/apps and a modern expansion doesn't fit into this appeal.
I'd personally draw the line at a really fast accelerator with an on-board HD controller but that's just my personal opinion. I think as soon as you replace the original chipset (eg AGA) then it becomes pointless (see above).
:)
I'd like to see a new cpu/graphics card combo for the A1200 trapdoor slot. How rare are those blizzard ppc's with blizzard vision? Far too rare in short.
Even an 030 card with RTG would be nice...
Suppose you could argue that there's big-box Amiga's for that sort of thing, but I'm sure a card like that would sell like hot cakes.
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@nova
i agree. also i dont see much necessity to speed up any particular tasks by dedicated but otherwise limited hardware. general purpose accel is all im interested in so far. im also fine with living with amiga chipset bottlenecks. one can circumnavigate it with rtg solutions as an option.
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I already thought about exactly the same some months ago while I was building yet another Z80 DIY computer. I think it would be somehow easy to use an SRAM as buffer between the Zorro bus and the raspi. In fact I've already connected an SRAM chip to the GPIO pins of the raspi with transfer rates up to 80 MB/s (peak). This even works with a 5V SRAM without level shifter.
On the other hand, it depends what you call a bridge board. If you just want to use remote desktop or VNC just connect a raspi to the LAN. In contrast a classic bridge board is something that uses ISA (not possible with raspi) and can talk to VGA board, disk controller etc. Or that uses the gfx of the Amiga but indeed this would require a lot of software not just VNC. In fact this was the original idea of a bridge board, using a PC that utilizes as much amiga hardware as possible to reduce costs. Since a raspi has everything, it is basically not a bridge board, just a computer you can connec to with VNC.
However, very interesting project. Question: How to connect something to the Zorro bus? I'm not familiar with AutoConfig and a logic analyzer, Zorro prototype board etc. would be needed.
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sounds like majsta run into problems:
It's not like he has made it this far without struggling at times ;).
however jens has actually proposed help with the project (in therms of hardware i guess), if it turns out genuine, even though remaining rather aggressively skeptical for the time being:
"Aggressively skeptical" is putting it nicely. Jen's legitimately seemed to believe that good performance from a 68k core in an fpga was not possible. It seems you were right about Jens being set on MIPS or ARM for a future CloneA type project before the news of Phoenix/Apollo. Now he is probably less skeptical and more open to a 68k fpga core. It makes a lot of sense for them to work together. It's not cheap to buy hard 68k chips in quantity anymore for accelerators. Jens has the experience and skills to make high end accelerators and standalone fpga boards. The Apollo Team has a fast fpga 68k that would make them sell. I believe that Jens and the Apollo 3 live in the west/southwest of Germany (black forest area?) making it easier to get together too. Jens and Gunnar are very head strong though. I don't know how that would work out.
also thor is supporting the case (within limits):
I never doubted that ThoR would help if there was going to be any kind of functional MMU. I hope ThoR gets more involved with an MMU design. That thread wasn't very long but it might not be over yet. I wish my German was better.
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Hi Matt,
our new Cyclone 5 accelerator cards are done already.
Cheers
Gunnar
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Cool to know, Gunnar!
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Jens is smart enough to realise you don't need to mess around with attaching a totally unsuitable ARM SBC to an Amiga to get stuff you could get with an SPI master on the Amiga and some of the shelf parts.
I'm surprised that while you guys think up these "OMG you know what would be really cool" ideas you don't think outside of the box enough to realise that an ARM SoC many times more power than the fastest m68k Amiga could just emulate the whole thing.
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...think outside of the box enough to realise that an ARM SoC many times more power than the fastest m68k Amiga could just emulate the whole thing
Rasberry Pi can only emulate basic A500 because pi operates at the speed of 200...300Mhz Pentium PC.
Other than that...
>I think it would be really cool to create a bridgeboard that plugs into the raspberry PI...
Absolutely futile.
But there are already implementations where RPi simulates A500 FDD or ethernet card.
A lot of stuff can be done with simple RPi-A500 adaptation. No Jens needed, just DIY soldering + load of SW work.
>Maybe even emulate a powerpc chip.
RPi should be able to emulate PowerPC @ 20Mhz speed or so.
For ARM deviced, AEROS or ARIX for 1.7Ghz ODROID might be damn usefull.
For Jens to do:
-FPGA card (PCIe client) to do AGA+more emulation
-FPGA card (PCIe host) to do 68k+more emulation
-Passive backplane to house those two and perhaps to provide a few more PCIe slots
-parts to built that into ATX or DTX case
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Rasberry Pi can only emulate basic A500 because pi operates at the speed of 200...300Mhz Pentium PC.
Other than that...
>I think it would be really cool to create a bridgeboard that plugs into the raspberry PI...
Absolutely futile.
But there are already implementations where RPi simulates A500 FDD or ethernet card.
A lot of stuff can be done with simple RPi-A500 adaptation. No Jens needed, just DIY soldering + load of SW work.
>Maybe even emulate a powerpc chip.
RPi should be able to emulate PowerPC @ 20Mhz speed or so.
For ARM deviced, AEROS or ARIX for 1.7Ghz ODROID might be damn usefull.
For Jens to do:
-FPGA card (PCIe client) to do AGA+more emulation
-FPGA card (PCIe host) to do 68k+more emulation
-Passive backplane to house those two and perhaps to provide a few more PCIe slots
-parts to built that into ATX or DTX case
thanks to the development of new options for FPGA and ARM we today have a lot of new options and I see it fairly optimistic. Hopefully Jens and Gunnar will work together in future.
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Hi Matt,
our new Cyclone 5 accelerator cards are done already.
Cheers
Gunnar
for what system? a 600?
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for what system? a 600?
For A500/ A1000/ A2000 / CDTV.
Card specs are:
* very fast 68K CPU
* 128 MB DDR3 Fast-memory
* SD-card usable/bootable as IDE-device
* Network interface
* RTG Graphics Card (chunky/Hicolor/truecolor) with HDMI out
The physial card design is done.
Testing / Driver development needs to be done.
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so is it designed or is the prototype already fabricated?
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so is it designed or is the prototype already fabricated?
The boards are in production/shipment.
We expect to receive them this week.
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good luck and keep us posted.
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CDTV.
For a second I thought that said CD32 and I almost died. The A500 will be happy and I will certainly appreciate your effort.
I know better than to ask for CD32 support to be added :)
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Is the Amiga chipset so complex that it can't be replicated directly rather than via an FPGA? I have limited knowledge of hardware engineering - but I imagine with modern manufacturing methods it would easily be possible to build the AGA chipset into a single chip. However, this would likely require extensive knowledge of transistors and to have it manufactured it'd probably need to be ordered in bulk to be cost-effective. I imagine this is why FPGAs are used rather than actually doing it like this.
The 68k CPUs however should not be difficult to get at all - cannibalizing old 68k macs would be quite cost-effective as there are probably millions in old US educational warehouses - I was able at one point to get over 500 computers used in a school system in Petersburg, Virginia for the cost of hauling it away - sold it to a computer recycler for scrap metal and made a decent killing on it. Lots of 68k and PowerPC macs I had in that stock.
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Well Said Paul 1981. I too would like to see the replication of some blizzard PPC. Those that do exist are way over priced (if you can get one) and then the integrity of the boards because of there age is another issue. I have bought three or four products of Jens and have been very impressed. This is someone who has done some fantastic projects for the Amiga community. Thanks Jens wherever you maybe.
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Is the Amiga chipset so complex that it can't be replicated directly rather than via an FPGA? I have limited knowledge of hardware engineering - but I imagine with modern manufacturing methods it would easily be possible to build the AGA chipset into a single chip. However, this would likely require extensive knowledge of transistors and to have it manufactured it'd probably need to be ordered in bulk to be cost-effective. I imagine this is why FPGAs are used rather than actually doing it like this.
The 68k CPUs however should not be difficult to get at all - cannibalizing old 68k macs would be quite cost-effective as there are probably millions in old US educational warehouses - I was able at one point to get over 500 computers used in a school system in Petersburg, Virginia for the cost of hauling it away - sold it to a computer recycler for scrap metal and made a decent killing on it. Lots of 68k and PowerPC macs I had in that stock.
I am no hardware engineer either but...
AGA is not easy to emulate. Doing it in transistors is possible but also costly if you do not produce millions of devices. FPGA is more flexible and you can add features (difficult in transistors I imagine). And you cannot use used processors (still in old computers) for new devices. And even if they would still be 68060 at 60 MHz. If the processor is in the FPGA it will become automatic faster with every FPGA generation.
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For a second I thought that said CD32 and I almost died. The A500 will be happy and I will certainly appreciate your effort.
I know better than to ask for CD32 support to be added :)
i think the range of devices gunnar mentioned is a sensible choice, if its really possible to support them all with a single board. these are pre-aga models but contrary to a600 rather popular which should secure a good crowd for testing and debugging. after that the aga models could be supported with a a more extended model, like double ram amount or whatever occurs reasonable while testing the previous one.
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And you cannot use used processors (still in old computers) for new devices. And even if they would still be 68060 at 60 MHz.
Why can't you cannibalize old processors for new devices - They did it for the Treamcast ( Cloned version of the Dreamcast, but portable ) they cannibalized the hardware and reengineered it. Not saying its cost effective, but I doubt 68040s and 68060s are still produced, unless I'm wrong...
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Why can't you cannibalize old processors for new devices - They did it for the Treamcast ( Cloned version of the Dreamcast, but portable ) they cannibalized the hardware and reengineered it. Not saying its cost effective, but I doubt 68040s and 68060s are still produced, unless I'm wrong...
they are rather exotic. I think for FPGA Arcade they sourced some in china (but not cheap, kind of spare parts of oldtimer). I do not know how much it would cost to get old devices and get the processors from there but I guess it would be not cheap either. The only realistic option is to have the processor in the FPGA from my point of view.
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Why can't you cannibalize old processors for new devices .
We use a new processor for several reasons:
a) The new processor is a faster than existing 68K processors.
b) The FPGA solution allows a lower price than a 68060 CPU solution would have
c) The new processor in the FPGA needs less power.
Therefore the card can run in a normal A500.
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Is the Amiga chipset so complex that it can't be replicated directly rather than via an FPGA? I have limited knowledge of hardware engineering - but I imagine with modern manufacturing methods it would easily be possible to build the AGA chipset into a single chip. However, this would likely require extensive knowledge of transistors and to have it manufactured it'd probably need to be ordered in bulk to be cost-effective. I imagine this is why FPGAs are used rather than actually doing it like this.
On the scale of the customer base/market for such things, it's far less expensive to do this in FPGA. To convert the Minimig, aoOCS or Clone_A chipsets from FPGA into a custom ASIC (the holy grail "custom chip" for some people", isn't terribly difficult. It IS terribly expensive. Jeri was able to do the 64DTV as an ASIC due to large volume. As the FPGA implementations work very well so far, I'm not sure why it would be worth such an expense for the available market to go custom ASIC. Especially as FPGA allows updates to improve things, go from OCS or ECS to AGA, etc. I'd rather be in a reconfigurable FPGA than in a fixed ASIC at this point. Show us a flawless AGA with Apollo and maybe at that point it would be more interesting to go ASIC for even faster CPU. Even then, I yself would do ASIC for Apollo and leave AGA in separate FPGA or separate ASIC, unless the full SoC thing could still adapt into an existing 680x0 socket.
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The only interesting chip to reproduce is likely the 68060 because it's hard to replicate in FPGA right now.
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Honestly the project I'd like to see the most out of a guy like Jens with his considerable talents is a high powered "Amiga on a card" that fits inside a PC.
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For A500/ A1000/ A2000 / CDTV.
Card specs are:
* very fast 68K CPU
* 128 MB DDR3 Fast-memory
* SD-card usable/bootable as IDE-device
* Network interface
* RTG Graphics Card (chunky/Hicolor/truecolor) with HDMI out
The physical card design is done.
Testing / Driver development needs to be done.
The boards are in production/shipment.
We expect to receive them this week.
Sounds good. That would be nice if we could get it to work in all Amigas with a socketed 68000 chip. I don't have a CDTV for testing but I do have a 500, 1000 and 2000 :).
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aha. the card is supposed to go into the cpu socket. too simple for me to figure out..
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Ho ho ho, the Christmas seems to be coming early this year :)
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For A500/ A1000/ A2000 / CDTV.
Card specs are:
* very fast 68K CPU
* 128 MB DDR3 Fast-memory
* SD-card usable/bootable as IDE-device
* Network interface
* RTG Graphics Card (chunky/Hicolor/truecolor) with HDMI out
The physial card design is done.
Testing / Driver development needs to be done.
cha ching...magic word for me was finally something for the one and only AMIGA, The Amiga 1000:knuddel: now if you tell me it's goona give us A1000 owners more chipram then i'll really be over the moon:insane:
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aha. the card is supposed to go into the cpu socket. too simple for me to figure out..
The 68000 socket should give a reliable connection. The number of Amiga computers with socketed 68000 processors is quite large too.
cha ching...magic word for me was finally something for the one and only AMIGA, The Amiga 1000:knuddel: now if you tell me it's goona give us A1000 owners more chipram then i'll really be over the moon:insane:
Sorry, no chip memory, but RTG gfx instead. Well, technically, it may be possible to create a whole AGA chipset in fpga with it's own chip memory and outputting to the DVI/HDMI but that would be a lot of work. A chunky buffer with P96 driver output to the DVI/HDMI would be a lot easier and provide more usable 16/32 bit screen modes. We will have to see what can be done with the kickstart loading on the 1000. Some kind of networking interface for the 1000 is interesting also. Making a 30 year old Amiga usable again would be quite the retro time warp B-).
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Jens is smart enough to realise you don't need to mess around with attaching a totally unsuitable ARM SBC to an Amiga to get stuff you could get with an SPI master on the Amiga and some of the shelf parts.
I'm surprised that while you guys think up these "OMG you know what would be really cool" ideas you don't think outside of the box enough to realise that an ARM SoC many times more power than the fastest m68k Amiga could just emulate the whole thing.
First off, I'm a software guy, not a hardware guy. So I really have no idea what it would take to create this sort of thing.
Having said that, it seems to me that a $40 board attached with some mysterious chips to the CPU slot or something similar mixed with some drivers that talk to software running on the RPi would be cheaper and/or easier than implementing all those things from scratch.
Then again maybe not. I'm thinking like a software guy and not a hardware guy. ;)
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Honestly the project I'd like to see the most out of a guy like Jens with his considerable talents is a high powered "Amiga on a card" that fits inside a PC.
Yeah, this is clearly the way to go, like a minimig type thing in an ATX form factor... maybe with a DSP for audio processing, USB, ethernet, memory, indivision, memory cards, etc. Maybe steal the chipset from a dying machine.
Or maybe make it fit a 500, 600, or 1200 case with a keyrah.
brian
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Since most projects seems to end up with a super computer with an Amiga attached ;-)
Perhaps it's time to have a look at FPGA Replay again?
It's a full Amiga with chips that can actually be bought. And many periphials can be synthesized in FPGA. Way less unreliable connectors and card stacking.
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The problems with Amiga on a card: Not many people have a desktop system anymore. Why don't use just use a software emulator?
I imagine it would be a lot harder to have an Amiga bridgeboard in a PC.
I hope someone does do a bridgeboard project though.
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Perhaps it's time to have a look at FPGA Replay again?
It's a full Amiga with chips that can actually be bought.
It can be bought now? The website doesn't show any way of buying one and I've been on the list to get an FPGA Replay for ...a couple of years now I think.
I know that Replay isn't a Natami mess/situation but it's taking a really long time from our perspective.
Ideally this could be an upgrade board for the Replay instead of the '060 board it might one day have. FPGA chipset and modern board + FPGA CPU card.
Andy
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Ideally this could be an upgrade board for the Replay instead of the '060 board it might one day have. FPGA chipset and modern board + FPGA CPU card.
Andy
Yes - in theory.
On the other hand, all you need is make a standalone system out of the CPU card
is to add "Joyport", audio jack, and a keyboard connector.
This is no rocket science.
This solution would be very cost effective and for the saved money you can get yourself a big ass Flatscreen. :-D
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It can be bought now? The website doesn't show any way of buying one and I've been on the list to get an FPGA Replay for ...a couple of years now I think.
I know that Replay isn't a Natami mess/situation but it's taking a really long time from our perspective.
Ideally this could be an upgrade board for the Replay instead of the '060 board it might one day have. FPGA chipset and modern board + FPGA CPU card.
Andy
I have the impression that there were more news about FPGA Arcade + Amiga when the Natami project still was a threat. But perhaps I am wrong there...
@thread
I think the new accellerator card will have advantages and disadvantages compared to FPGA Arcade. It is not reimplementing AGA/ECS chipset, not adding more chip memory or similar like FPGA Arcade. It is a accellerator card with more memory at a very affordable price adding RTG and a high-speed 68k. When not using RTG you get a fast Amiga with 128 MB but you can only use the chipset that is on your Amiga. I think it is a good compromise adding a new playground for developers like Novacoder and replaces many aging and expensive extensions, at the same time it is affordable (on eab 150 EUR were mentioned) that really everyone can afford it (in opposite f.e. to Natami what would have been much more expensive). So it is partly if not fully replacing FPGA Arcade if used in a A1200 (which is also promised to be supported in future) and cheaper. So Mike should hurry up a little with his project :-). I know that FPGA Arcade is supporting more than Amiga but I assume that most Amigans here are mostly interested in the Amiga core. And there are not many news in recent years (at least what I have heard about).
I hope that Aros 68k (+Roms) will run on it and that developers use the new capabilities (expecially regarding true color modes in RTG).
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Hi Olaf,
Lets be totally open and very honest about the project.
Who we are, where we are and where we are heading.
Today there is the Vampire600.
The Vampire600 has 64 MB fastmem and an FPGA which you can load a new fast 68K CPU into it.
The next card, the new Cyclone5 card is in production right now.
The Cyclone 5 card offers
* Faster FPGA = about twice as fast CPU compared to the Vampire600
* 128 MB Ram
* Video out HDMI
* SDcard / IDE
* Network
As soon as the Cyclone 5 card is fully tested and we see that all works without yellow wire
and as soon as the sales/distribution is set up - it will be sold and
we will offer the CPU upgrade file for the Vampire600 owners to speed up their CPU as free download.
Then Vampire600 owners will then get a CPU comparable to 68060 in speed for free.
If the A500 card runs fine we will make card for A1200,A4000 all other models etc.
We as team have recently bought several A1200 and have already stocked up mostly every made AMIGA here for testing the cards: E.g A500,A1000,A2000,A3000,A4000,A1200,CD32
Lets be honest:
The APOLLO CPU is an envolvement of the 68050 CPU done for the Natami project.
The RTG Chunky/truecolor display is basically a steal from the SAGA/Super-AGA chunky stuff we prepared for the NATAMI.
You don't need to be an Einstein to see that you can also take the CPU card out of your A500, and if you add a Joyport to it - and you basically have a new NATAMI - for little money.
To be clear: I'm not promising anything here.
This is not a market announcement.
The post was started as question whether we need help to design a new CPU card - and the answer to it is "No" we have designed it already and the above is our current status....
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Hi Olaf,
Lets be totally open and very honest about the project.
Who we are, where we are and where we are heading.
Today there is the Vampire600.
The Vampire600 has 64 MB fastmem and an FPGA which you can load a new fast 68K CPU into it.
The next card, the new Cyclone5 card is in production right now.
The Cyclone 5 card offers
* Faster FPGA = about twice as fast CPU compared to the Vampire600
* 128 MB Ram
* Video out HDMI
* SDcard / IDE
* Network
As soon as the Cyclone 5 card is fully tested and we see that all works without yellow wire
and as soon as the sales/distribution is set up - it will be sold and
we will offer the CPU upgrade file for the Vampire600 owners to speed up their CPU as free download.
Then Vampire600 owners will then get a CPU comparable to 68060 in speed for free.
If the A500 card runs fine we will make card for A1200,A4000 all other models etc.
We as team have recently bought several A1200 and have already stocked up mostly every made AMIGA here for testing the cards: E.g A500,A1000,A2000,A3000,A4000,A1200,CD32
Lets be honest:
The APOLLO CPU is an envolvement of the 68050 CPU done for the Natami project.
The RTG Chunky/truecolor display is basically a steal from the SAGA/Super-AGA chunky stuff we prepared for the NATAMI.
You don't need to be an Einstein to see that you can also take the CPU card out of your A500, and if you add a Joyport to it - and you basically have a new NATAMI - for little money.
To be clear: I'm not promising anything here.
This is not a market announcement.
The post was started as question whether we need help to design a new CPU card - and the answer to it is "No" we have designed it already and the above is our current status....
As I said when used in a AGA machine like A1200 I do not see many advantages for the FPGA Arcade anymore (as someone mostly interested in Amiga). I also hope that people will use the added RTG/Truecolor capabilities that will work on any supported system. It is the first time in recent years I see a realistic way to go and not just dreaming or overambitious projects that are doomed to fail.
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the big showstopper i see for fpgaarcade as well as natami was exactly adapting amiga chipset softcore to the particular hardware. such task can take years, there is always more quirks to take care of and this is effectively delaying release forever. in another five years we will still be waiting for such projects to complete.
a turboboard for existing hardware removes at least half of the problems if not the most, and therefore i always hammered on that as the furst thing to do, also as i still visited natami forums. gunnar and others may remember..
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the big showstopper i see for fpgaarcade as well as natami was exactly adapting amiga chipset softcore to the particular hardware. such task can take years, there is always more quirks to take care of and this is effectively delaying release forever. in another five years we will still be waiting for such projects to complete.
a turboboard for existing hardware removes at least half of the problems if not the most, and therefore i always hammered on that as the furst thing to do, also as i still visited natami forums. gunnar and others may remember..
*bow to you*
We see on the failed or delayed projects that it is too complex to emulate the amiga chipsets. Better make a clean start and adding new features and motivate developers to use them.
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and one other thing i wanted to mention due to it is a popular mistake around here. this project as well as any similar will be (if they continuues) work in progress for years to come. same as aros is. same as os4, fpga arcade or whatever else is. it will not be fully completed any soon at least not to the point of total satisfaction for the whole audience. therefore the audience needs to be involved. also thats where the fun is. testing, submitting reports, reading what commits have been submitted day by day. discussing issues.
to succeed the project needs to be as open as it gets.
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*bow to you*
didnt intended to lecture anyone. just feel pity, because the project taking another course could be much further by now and sustain itself the motivation of the developers and the interest of te audience.
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didnt intended to lecture anyone. just feel pity, because the project taking another course could be much further by now and sustain itself the motivation of the developers and the interest of te audience.
It had different goals and was basically done by one developer primarly because of personal interest. Too ambitious and finally too expensive (if ever completed).
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of course thomas had a different goal, namely to build a complete system, but i was speaking of the "softcore" part of team.
what happens just now, could have happened in parallel to developing natami board, so to say in different thread to be eventually merged back in. im not saying the softcore team has lost any time, but there might be more buzz around it and therefore more motivation and more dynamics.
lets take majstas vampire project as example. the board doesnt seem technically superior to other similar solutions like fpgaarcade, tobiflex his own experimental de2 (?) accelerator, mist (or how the other fpga board is named?). it is middle range, someone else could have done it if attempted, but none did, and a lot of people argumented against. what is good about that (and apparently intentionally) is that the development happened in open. it met and has proven interest, and kicked others in to contribute. thats pretty an achivement in my eyes.
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of course thomas had a different goal, namely to build a complete system, but i was speaking of the "softcore" part of team.
also thats where the fun is. testing, submitting reports, reading what commits have been submitted day by day.
Actually this is exactly how the Softcore is tested/developed.
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Actually this is exactly how the Softcore is tested/developed.
but since it happens in some closed circle the general public doesnt get involved and cannot even observe the progress and thus may easily come to conclusion that there is no progress.
again as my favourite example: aros. even though not taking part in development one can read the developer ml to know where its aiming at and also you can observe what commits been done day by day. lets admit im a complete noob and am annoying people most of the time for no reason, surely creating unnecessary noise from developer perspective. now, even though i submitted a pfs3 problem report few days ago along with a log and i immediately see a fix submitted by toni another day, now i checked back today and can confirm the bug is gone, my a1200 booting fine all the way to aros-wanderer. i think it is quite rewarding to see and be able to support the development in what ever ways one is able to. sure it has handicaps too, as said noise generated by the noobs and unnecessary discussions, but lets face it, the community is at a point where noobs are probably in majority, but the game has to go on anyway, we have to find ways to take advantage of just any resource available.
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I've like to see a CPU slot board that has a fast x86 CPU emulating an 060 and/or a PPC that appear to the Amiga as a CyberStorm/CyberStormPPC.
Wishful thinking I know but I reckon it would sell if the performance was better than existing cards.
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> fast x86 cpu emulating
It'd be faster per Hz to emulate a PowerPC CPU via ARM, SPARC or MIPS CPU since with x86 you're having to cross endianness, and architecture so you're not only going to incur a performance hit, but power consumption and voltage requirements would likely be too high for an Amiga if it was x86. Heat is a consideration too. I'd personally vote MIPS since thats my favourite RISC architecture, but thats me.
Since there are some PowerPC chips being made ( Mostly SoCs ) it may be best to just get a cheap PowerPC with extended logic and libraries and plop that into an Amiga CPU slot. Using old Macs as donors, you could easily sell 68040/PowerPC cards for around the same price as the CSPPC goes, and I bet you they'd sell. I looked at 68060s, but according to Freescale's product page they ceased production and the last CPUs are EOL. Maybe someone has a Chinese supplier that can make them though. Making the boards in China may actually make it affordable.
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> fast x86 cpu emulating
It'd be faster per Hz to emulate a PowerPC CPU via ARM, SPARC or MIPS CPU since with x86 you're having to cross endianness, and architecture so you're not only going to incur a performance hit, but power consumption and voltage requirements would likely be too high for an Amiga if it was x86. Heat is a consideration too. I'd personally vote MIPS since thats my favourite RISC architecture, but thats me.
Since there are some PowerPC chips being made ( Mostly SoCs ) it may be best to just get a cheap PowerPC with extended logic and libraries and plop that into an Amiga CPU slot. Using old Macs as donors, you could easily sell 68040/PowerPC cards for around the same price as the CSPPC goes, and I bet you they'd sell. I looked at 68060s, but according to Freescale's product page they ceased production and the last CPUs are EOL. Maybe someone has a Chinese supplier that can make them though. Making the boards in China may actually make it affordable.
I said x86 only because it's cheap, easy to get hold of and faster than anything else available at the same price point.
Regarding the endian issues, an x86 JIT emulating a 68k is currently faster than a PPC JIT emulating a 68k so it's not really a issue. See WinUAE vs E-UAE-JIT for OS4/MorphOS.
ARM would also be cheap and easy to get hold of but not as fast as x86 at the same price point. The power consumption would be the major selling point here.
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I said x86 only because it's cheap, easy to get hold of and faster than anything else available at the same price point.
Regarding the endian issues, an x86 JIT emulating a 68k is currently faster than a PPC JIT emulating a 68k so it's not really a issue. See WinUAE vs E-UAE-JIT for OS4/MorphOS.
ARM would also be cheap and easy to get hold of but not as fast as x86 at the same price point. The power consumption would be the major selling point here.
I do not think that this would be cheaper than this solution. Here you can use a off-the-shelf solution and create a connector, for your solution you would need a custom board and that makes it expensive again. Or do I understand something wrong?
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@nicholas
I do not think that this would be cheaper than this solution. Here you can use a off-the-shelf solution and create a connector, for your solution you would need a custom board and that makes it expensive again. Or do I understand something wrong?
there was some person on this board thinking along and also there was discussion about such alternative. quite a lenghty one but i dont remember where.
however it appears nothing came out of that so better to support ongoing projects. as stated jens apparently is in favour of emulating cpu, but not on x86 but on mips, also it seems he is in favour of complete new system instead of an add on, which is probably partly due to easier servicing and warranty, which is likely quite important element from his perspective.
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@nicholas
there was some person on this board thinking along and also there was discussion about such alternative. quite a lenghty one but i dont remember where.
however it appears nothing came out of that so better to support ongoing projects. as stated jens apparently is in favour of emulating cpu, but not on x86 but on mips, also it seems he is in favour of complete new system instead of an add on, which is probably partly due to easier servicing and warranty, which is likely quite important element from his perspective.
Can anyone tell me what are the fastest MIPS CPU's that can be had in quantity for reasonable prices?
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Can anyone tell me what are the fastest MIPS CPU's that can be had in quantity for reasonable prices?
I have an R14k powered SGI Fuel that is fully 64-bit, 600MHz that outclasses an Intel Core Solo in general purpose computing, and thats a 10 year old CPU vs a slightly younger one. I don't know what the current MIPS specs run, but the last I used was a brand new 1GHz quad configured MIPS processor (R16k?) and that was screaming fast.
New ones I'm not quite sure on specs though.
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i think its this one that is taken into consideration:
http://www.broadcom.com/products/Processors/Enterprise/BCM53003
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Those specs put PowerPC to shame. :(
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Those specs put PowerPC to shame. :(
do they? also remember cpu emulation comes at a cost. still..
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What has to be taken into account is also the amount of expensive and complex support circuitry to support various CPU:s. Doing GHz signal routing between CPU and memory ain't fun!
A single chip core with CPU+RAM is way simpler to deal with.
A few vendor caveats. Watch out for Intel EOL:ing chips and Broadcom tend to have their own brand of NDA and secrecy hell.
Majastas (http://www.majsta.com/) A600 accelerator is now being done by @biggun (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=767468&postcount=55) here? and Cyclone-5 being the descendant?
Has the source for the FPGA Arcade come out yet? I think it's a great platform. But stuff that actually gets used is even better ;)
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Majastas (http://www.majsta.com/) A600 accelerator is now being done by @biggun (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=767468&postcount=55) here? and Cyclone-5 being the descendant?
Has the source for the FPGA Arcade come out yet? I think it's a great platform. But stuff that actually gets used is even better ;)
Majsta is working with Biggun on the accelerator project because the original softcore used in the A600 accelerator was not as fast as the Phoenix core developed by the Apollo team (which is lead by Biggun).
I suspect that (based on previous conversations and threads on various forums) the new Cyclone 5 based accelerator is just a 68000 chip socket harness for the Sockit board and other harnesses are in development for other Amigas.
The FPGA Arcade Replay board is only in tester's hands right now. I wonder how likely a Replay board add-on version based on the Sockit would be, given that the Cyclone 5 is likely more advanced than the FPGA on the Replay board. I'd love a solution like this because it would free up space on the Cyclone for MMU and FPU while freeing up space on the Replay board for better graphics card emulation. ;-)
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The FPGA Arcade Replay board is only in tester's hands right now. I wonder how likely a Replay board add-on version based on the Sockit would be, given that the Cyclone 5 is likely more advanced than the FPGA on the Replay board. I'd love a solution like this because it would free up space on the Cyclone for MMU and FPU while freeing up space on the Replay board for better graphics card emulation. ;-)
The fpgaArcade fpga is big enough for CPU+MMU+FPU+AGA. Fitment might start to get tight with more advanced and pipelined versions of the processors. The Cyclone V should have even more room which makes development easier and allows for larger caches.
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What FPGA does the Cyclone-5 use?
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What FPGA does the Cyclone-5 use?
The Cyclone V is an Altera fpga.
Vampire 500/1000/2000/CDTV fpga
Brand: Altera
Family: Cyclone V
Model: unknown (to me)
fpgaArcade fpga
Brand: Xilinx
Family: Spartan-3E
Model: XC3S1600E
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Guess that makes doing VHDL/Verilog development on Linux a hard choice.
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Guess that makes doing VHDL/Verilog development on Linux a hard choice.
Why? Gunnar uses Quartus under Linux for development.
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Yeah there is a licensed pay version asfaik. Xilinx is free for all Spartan-3E (XC3S__E).
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Yeah there is a licensed pay version asfaik. Xilinx is free for all Spartan-3E (XC3S__E).
I believe Quartus is free for the whole Cyclone family. You may have to pay to synthesize for the Arria and Stratus.
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Those specs put PowerPC to shame. :(
? BCM53003: 600 MHz (1200 DMIPS) ?
To me it seems similar to PPC440 in performance.
A few years back multicore MIPS chips were a little behind PPC in some performance issues like in memory handling latencies. And they were hot @1ghz.
IMO: Best thing about MIPS (&Cavium chips) is that it has made Freescale to do something after so many years of too little progress. It looked that Freescale is not going to fight back, but now the fight is on. To my understanding MIPS crowth has slowed down since.
(within one year ARM starts to shake Telecoms market, therefore we see new chips sooner also from Cavium (ThunderX) & Freescale (AMP and NGcore))
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crowth?
What is the most nice one to program when it comes to MIPS vs ARM?
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crowth?
What is the most nice one to program
The most nice to program is 68k - by far.
Clock by clock a good 68K can also stand its ground and even beat the other performance wise (clock by clock).
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Will that stand even to other one-chip embedded architectures like C28x, Coldfire, CPU32, 603e, 200e, 300e, M-CORE, MIPS32, MPC500, RISC, TLCS-900, TMS320C28x, TriCore, TX19A, MSP430 etc ..?
And will also be available as a single chip in LQFP for less than 10 EUR per single chip and go into 1 µA @ 3,3V power usage when at sleep?
But if 68k does beat both ARM and MIPS on doing DCT, FFT, convolution etc.. And can be had for a reasonable price then I'm all for it ;)
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Will that stand even to other one-chip embedded architectures
A good 68K can outperform them, hands down - on a clock per clock comparison.
But what do you really want?
If you have an A500 or A600 or A1200 then you ideally look
* for a good CPU card that does not run to hot in your Amiga case. Am I right?
* and you want a card which works well with your Amiga power supply,
so that you do not need to use a 100 Watt PC power supply for it.
This means for many chips your AMIGA does not have good enough cooling and not good enough power supply.
An FPGA based 68K would be happy with this cooling requirements.
And performance wise it can beat PowerUP PPC cards
and does beat hands down stuff like 240 Mhz Coldfire or low clocked ARMs.
So with the low end chips a good 68K has no problem to compete.
Do you want to run 68K code?
Then this means you need to run 68K in emulation on your ARM.
In this case a good 68K can easily compete and beat the absolute high end ARM chips.
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A good 68K can outperform them, hands down - on a clock per clock comparison.
But what do you really want?
If you have an A500 or A600 or A1200 then you ideally look
* for a good CPU card that does not run to hot in your Amiga case. Am I right?
* and you want a card which works well with your Amiga power supply,
so that you do not need to use a 100 Watt PC power supply for it.
This means for many chips your AMIGA does not have good enough cooling and not good enough power supply.
An FPGA based 68K would be happy with this cooling requirements.
And performance wise it can beat PowerUP PPC cards
and does beat hands down stuff like 240 Mhz Coldfire or low clocked ARMs.
So with the low end chips a good 68K has no problem to compete.
Do you want to run 68K code?
Then this means you need to run 68K in emulation on your ARM.
In this case a good 68K can easily compete and beat the absolute high end ARM chips.
I have an A500 (stock, since I sold my GVP A530), an A600 (w/ACA630, A604, Subway USB, & wireless NIC) and an A1200 (w/Blizzard 060 & SCSI, Subway USB & wireless NIC), as well as many other Classic Amiga models in my collection and both flavors of PPC NG systems, using an X1000 for AmigaOS4.x and several G4 & G5 Mac's for MorphOS. But even with all of these options available to me, I was quite saddened when the Natami project became stalled, or stopped (I don't know if it is cancelled, or just on hold).
Do you know if there is any work still going on behind the scenes on the Natami project with the few developers who actually were lucky enough to get a Natami MX motherboard? Is there any chance that it will get restarted, revived, or taken over by other developers who are working with FPGA's?
Or is it more likely that something different, but similar might be produced by the people like you who are currently working on FPGA systems to run AmigaOS and software?
Even though I like all of the variety and capabilities of all the Amiga Inspired platforms, I still would prefer the Natami approach, if we could get a working SAGA, or AAA, or what ever you want to call an improved graphics system. It does not have to be "State of the Art", or compete with any modern systems, it just has to be one order of magnitude better than the last Commodore AGA system, plus it needs to have some modern connectivity ports and drivers. Some programming tools would be a big help too, or just update the old 68k programming tools to make it easy to create new software for this imaginary new updated Amiga system.
I would love to read that people are still working on making the Natami, or a similar system a reality, and that something will be finished within the next few months.
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I was quite saddened when the Natami project became stalled, or stopped (I don't know if it is cancelled, or just on hold).
Thanks, this is nice to hear.
Let me answer it this way.
Our plan is to bring out the card for every AMIGA model.
We also plan to then create a stand alone version of the card.
As you might know the people doing this CPU card previous worked in the NATAMI team...
Does this answer your question?
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... or from someone else I guess...
I think it would be really cool to create a bridgeboard that plugs into the raspberry PI, or maybe plug it into the CPU slot or 500 expansion slot.
The PI has ethernet, usb, an SD card slot, memory, HDMI and composite video output, audio, and a lot of memory... It would be great to give the amiga access to all that.
Maybe the video could even be used to emulate an amiga RTG board.
It could plug into the amiga board through the gpio port and pass it through so other things can be plugged in.
You could probably even hang a low profile PCI slot off the board.
Maybe even emulate a powerpc chip.
wishful thinking...
brian
Low cost and compatibility with Classic PPC 603e PUP/WOS software.
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC5200B
http://www.freescale.com/files/microcontrollers/doc/user_guide/MPC5200UM.pdf
http://www.amigawiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/PowerVixxen_LT
This video shows the speed emulation CPU 68060 on MorphOS (603e 240MHz)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuzY7pXTQ10
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To me the next Amiga would have become more and more like a pc. Natami never settled on a goal.
I would like it if FPGA 68k could emulate all Amiga models including CD32. If you want modern, it's better to start legacy free.
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Low cost and compatibility with Classic PPC 603e PUP/WOS software.
which means compatibility with almost nothing as long as amiga is concerned. the subject of these ppc chips, even if it was practicable, was beaten as a dead horse for a decade and some, why must that be brought up in every conversation again and again. this option is expired, lets live with it.
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The point of the Amiga was that you could do something that wasn't possible at all previously for that price.
To then go for a more expensive route that does less than the current options seems to be wrong and is also part of the explanation for the irrelevance in the market place. Competing for raw performance is hard against a 4 GHz CPU with high ops/Hz rating. So something that does new things is likely make use of existing technology in a clever way.
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which means compatibility with almost nothing
All which requires a lot of computing power.
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All which requires a lot of computing power.
what would that be? the few datatypes that have support for warpos? the few applications that have been compiled for it or powerup? i have an accelerator with a ppc cpu companion, that has been idle since few years and i cant really think of what i have been missing all this time.
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I never understand comments that are against things like this.
I do understand that *you* might not want it, or that *you* might not favour a particular approach.
So don't comment, because there's the people making it who *do* want to build it, and there's clearly a lot of people who *do* want to buy it.
Majsta has already proven the idea, and made an implementation that you can buy today (http://kipper2k.com/amigaforsale/). That's more than a lot of people have done. Even the source code for the FPGA is open source and online (http://www.majsta.com/) for those willing to hack on it.
The only thing that I want these guys to do is finish the board & core, ship it. Nothing else.
Just an accelerator, everything else from then on is just icing on the cake.
If there was one thing I'd love to see from this it's that it would go open source, so many of these projects just disappear down the toilet and _everything_ is lost forever. However that's only something I would personally like, it certainly won't stop me buying one.
Andy
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Everyone can take what he/she wants.
If you want an 68K fine.
If you want a PC, fine too.
My view on ARm is this:
I own both AMIGA and Archimedes since their beginning.
When A500 came out the 68K run at 7 MHz and most instructions needed 4 - 20 cycles.
The average instruction was around 8 cycles maybe.
When the Archimedes came out it ran at 8 MHz and each instruction needed 1 cycle.
Yes the 68K supports more complex instructions.
For some 68K instructions the ARM needs 1 instruction.
For many it needs 2, or 3.
Sometimes the ARM needs even many more like 4, 5 or 6
But even when the 68K in the A500 could do the work of 5 ARM instruction with a single 68K instruction - this single 68K instruction took like 20 cycles on the 68_000
This means the ARM was always faster.
If you compared the 8MHz ARM with the 7MHz 68000 the ARM was always much faster.
And at this time it good some myth of performance.
Now today the situation is very different.
Today a good 68K CPU can execute even complex 68K instruction in a single cycle.
For example:
ADDI.L #1234567, $1234(A7)
A good 68k can execute this instruction in 1 single cycle today.
A good ARM needs about 6 instruction to do the same work.
As you see today - clock by clock - the 68K is much stronger.
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@ biggun
68k all the way:laughing::knuddel:
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A single chip 68k with a standby current of 5 mA and sleep current at 1 µA, 128 kB RAM, 1024 kB flash, would be nice. Now where does one get that below 10 EUR ?
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Thanks, this is nice to hear.
Let me answer it this way.
Our plan is to bring out the card for every AMIGA model.
We also plan to then create a stand alone version of the card.
As you might know the people doing this CPU card previous worked in the NATAMI team...
Does this answer your question?
Thanks for that answer biggun. And YES!, you should be proud of the work that has been done so far and if most of the Amiga community does not show their appreciation for your work, take it from me, there are hundreds and probably thousands of people who appreciate your work and were really looking forward to the Natami project being completed. They now are looking forward to your project to bring us accelerator cards for all Amiga models.
I am guessing that your stand alone FPGA motherboard will NOT be the same as the Natami MX motherboard, is that correct?
It just seems a shame that so much work went into the Natami MX motherboard design, and it seemed to be so close to being completed enough to be released to the public for sale, even though there were some design goals and software components that had not been finished.
I see it as no different than my X1000 and AmigaOS4.x, which is still a WIP, while we wait for AmigaOS4.2 to be completed, with the many major design goals that are planned and being worked on.
If the Natami MX motherboard had enough drivers completed, and was capable of running AmigaOS3.9 (with or without any of the proposed improvements to the AGA graphics system), I would want such a system. Specially with all the improvements you and others have made in softcore 68k CPU designs.
I am sure I am not alone and many others would also purchase a Natami MX motherboard (or its successor, if you have designed a new stand alone motherboard), if we knew that development work was ongoing and would continue until all the design goals were completed.:)
Edit: As one or two other Amiga users may have written already in other threads, it seems like the advancement of softcore 68k CPU design and Amiga custom chipset duplication in FPGA, is reaching a point where we should soon see an FPGA Amiga clone that outperforms any Classic Amiga system and 060 accelerator card combination. Plus it should have the advantage of integrated Ethernet & USB ports and drivers, more memory, perhaps increased "Chip RAM", and some day in the future, enhanced graphics resolutions & color depth. I think someone wrote that it is so close to happening, they can almost taste it. When this finally happens, I expect to see renewed interest and development of add-on enhancements to AmigaOS3.9 that will begin to match features that have already been added to AmigaOS4.x and MorphOS and AROS. The 68k programmers will come back, put their teeth back in, comb over their last few remaining hairs across their heads and use their walkers to get across the room to their computing desks, so they can start coding again. :lol:
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if most of the Amiga community does not show their appreciation for your work
..community not showing appreciation??? i wonder how possibly have you missed the feedback the project receives here, on a1k or particularly on eab. these are most popular and lively threads. okay, there are some unrealistic wishes and a little bragging as always, there are different strong opinions, but mostly if there is criticism, its a constructive one, people, especially the knowledganle ones, take this project definitely serious, just dont want it to be in vain.
It just seems a shame that so much work went into the Natami MX motherboard design, and it seemed to be so close to being completed enough to be released to the public for sale
natami was initially a private one-man hardware project. it doesnt look like there ever was a plan how to build this hardware in numbers, distribute it and handle support. it may have been advanced as a prototype but releasing it is the whole other issue.
I see it as no different than my X1000 and AmigaOS4.x, which is still a WIP, while we wait for AmigaOS4.2 to be completed, with the many major design goals that are planned and being worked on.
it is completely different in my eyes, starting with the amount of funds involved, the experienced companies and the distribution channels involved in it. and exactly here it shows that even such entities may get over challenged by the complexity of such projects.
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..community not showing appreciation???
I did not say that he was NOT getting support, I meant IF he did not feel he was getting enough support. Most users remain silent and don't post to any forum sites, though they may read them every day. So, I just meant that IMO, he has great support of the community, even if he does not see it often. (Edit: Sadly, I don't have time to visit EAB or A1k forum sites, except for rare occasions when a link in a forum post on A.org or AW.net takes me there)
it is completely different in my eyes, starting with the amount of funds involved, the experienced companies and the distribution channels involved in it. and exactly here it shows that even such entities may get over challenged by the complexity of such projects.
My comparison was not the companies or individuals behind each effort, but the fact that both systems (as far as I could tell) were working well enough to let users begin playing with them, but that some of the major design goals were still a WIP.
That was the only part I was comparing. Even if the work on 68k soft core CPUs and boards like the FPGA Arcade Replay, or biggun's accelerator boards and stand alone motherboard, were to go Open Source and users had to make small production runs of the pcb's themselves (I don't think that either are planned to go Open Source, just saying if they did), I think the situation would still be similar, in that most of the design work has been completed, to the point where both are usable, but some goals are still being worked on.
It appears that there are enough developers interested in making an advanced FPGA Amiga clone, and certainly enough users still interested in buying and using one, to keep these projects moving forward and they should very soon produce a system that surpasses the best Classic Amiga we have so far had to use. Exciting times for users wanting to stay with 68k based Amiga systems.
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Hi Dave.
thanks for the nice words. its appreciated.
The Amiga commity seems a lot smaller to me.
Its hard to estimate how many people are still around.
Would be good to know how big the market really is today.
Producing 100 or 2000 boards would make a difference in the price.
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The Amiga commity seems a lot smaller to me.
judging by the activity on forums one could come to such a conclusion, yes. while the lack of motivation and the ageing process will surely affect all parties, the genuine amiga fraction is likely to sustain this best, since it has least at risky stack but their since twenty years verified values, and therefore is probably least affected by disappointments. im not even talking about the forum crowd. however will be difficult to estimate the target audience nevertheless.
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I'd like to see a turbo card for A1200 owners. Around the speed of a 060-50 and with a rtg on board so that we can use 1080p resolutions, +hardware decoders for picture, video and audio formats and 16bit audio. If such a thing was created and was priced between €400 and €600, I'm sure every single active Amiga1200 user would buy it. There can also be a bounty in which people could pay some of the price (cost?) and if the product were to be canceled, the money people gave could be taken back from the pool.
(Oh. Don't forget to add the sata controller which doesn't choke the cpu when reading and writing)
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This is not the NatAmi MX board. Thomas made that as stand-alone. This is an off-the-shelf FPGA dev-board called the Sockit board (based on past discussion with Gunnar) or a derivative and an accelerator harness. Getting SuperAGA added would require distribution rights from Thomas but it is possible. There are other cores under development that may surpass SuperAGA. Since an accelerator has access to the chipset, functions required by a stand-alone unit can wait.
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Motorola 68060 is the last Amiga hardware beast to conquer ..
There is (http://www.cpu-world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=186997) a die shot (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/MC68060RC50.jpg) (1851 x 1757) but translating that to HDL code is another matter.
As for quantity. 1000 is the magic number when there's enough units to order directly from manufacturers.
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Would be good to know how big the market really is today.
Producing 100 or 2000 boards would make a difference in the price.
I'm not one to really buy any expansions, but I probably would buy what you are describing. I love the thought of pimping out an A1000 with the modern conveniences. For me the hard drive/CF support and network are most important as floppies make things too unbearable to use these days. The accelerator, memory and RTG should really rev it up and make all sorts of other things practical for daily use that otherwise wouldn't be. Good luck with the project!
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Well, I've been looking for a reasonably priced 040 accel for my 1200 and this maybe why I've been waiting so long ;)
+1 for my 1200
and, if it is as awesome as it is made out to be
+1 for my future 3000 that I've yet to get
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Its hard to estimate how many people are still around.
Would be good to know how big the market really is today.
Producing 100 or 2000 boards would make a difference in the price.
How about crowd funding?
Kickstarter as an example would be interesting for organizing order of some 2000 boards?
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OK lets be very honest, ok?
We do this thing not to make a lot of money. ;-D
We do this because _WE_ want it ourselves.
We work on our CPU Core for about 5 years now.
Frankly, I regard the Motorola 68060 Core as very good core,
but I strongly believe that our Core is better.
And our Core is faster, its even faster than all overclocked 68060.
We do this project because we want to use our Core together with in a nice OS.
I personally regards Amiga OS as much nicer and friendlier than Linux.
I think that our CPU Core has enough power to do quite a lot of interesting stuff.
I believe its strong enough to play games like Wing Commander 4, or Northland or Diablo 2.
And for me also playing 640x480 AVIs is an important goal.
I speak here a lot about "me".
Because I want you to understand what my and my friends motivation is.
We want to surf internet a little bit, to be able to download some ADF or buy something on EBAY,
And we want a low cost, silent harddrive,
also I want a nice screen resolution when working with my computer.
720p minimum screensize with 16bit colors is what we want.
In this resolution you can play games in nice quality, and have a nice looking Workbench ...
And we want to attach a big LCD TV's without loosing quality over scart.
These are the features that we personally want from our "toy" computers.
And this is why our card is like it it.
There are certainly many wishes other people might have.
But if we start adding the stuff that others like - then this will be a project which will never end.
Frankly, we did put all the stuff and the card which WE need and WE want.
And we added nothing else because we want to start using our cards next month - and not next year.
This is the honest story behind this.
If you like our card then you are welcome to join our boat and sail along. :-D
Lets also be honest what we want to do in the future.
This card is our toy system to continue to develop the CPU core.
We believe that we have by far not reached all that is technically possible.
And we also have our own "work in progress" version of a next Gen AMIGA chipset.
I call it Super-AGA, and the card will also also us to tinker around with it.
Please get me right: This does not mean that we will ship the card with this.
I just tell you what we want ourselves to use the card for next year...
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OK lets be very honest, ok? .... we want ourselves ....
Be aware, if the crowd likes it, and you (for some reason) deside to keep it (only) to/for yourselves, Amiga-Gaida will get you. ;-)
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I have a design question.
If I understand correctly, the new card will go into the cpu socket.
Is there any impact to not use the CPU slot (when it's avaible)?
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I have a design question.
If I understand correctly, the new card will go into the cpu socket.
Is there any impact to not use the CPU slot (when it's avaible)?
The card goes into socket in A500/A1000
This means the card is internal for these AMIGAs.
While a card using the A500 slot would be external
For the A1200 the card will be adapted to use the CPU expansion connector.
This means the card is internal here.
For the A4000/A3000 the card would use the CPU slot.
This means the card is internal here.
Does this answer your question?
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Low cost and compatibility with Classic PPC 603e PUP/WOS software.
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC5200B
http://www.freescale.com/files/microcontrollers/doc/user_guide/MPC5200UM.pdf
That is nice. It's fast enough for using the internet.
What would be nice is to get all Amiga platforms to remain compatible. 68k is there by default. PowerPC has the 2nd most software.
The only time it isn't an Amiga is when you have to use another OS to set something up.
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Does this answer your question?
Partially because I have a A500 and A2000.
This is fully justified for the first.
But the second, as A3000 and A4000, was designed with a CPU slot.
So, I just wonder if the solution chosen for the 2000 is optimal.
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Partially because I have a A500 and A2000.
This is fully justified for the first.
But the second, as A3000 and A4000, was designed with a CPU slot.
So, I just wonder if the solution chosen for the 2000 is optimal.
from design point of view the best solution is the most universal one, and how close you can integrate a new cpu into the system if not in place of the old one?
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"from design point of view the best solution is the most universal one"
I know, I shortened my original question.
"how close you can integrate a new cpu into the system if not in place of the old one?"
So why a CPU slot ?
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Going back to the original topic:
I would like to see from Jens an A1200 68030 accelerator that had a socket for an optional FPU and that didnt require any mysterious motherboard fix to work, nor custom software to switch it on.
It would also be nice if it could have a real time clock built-in, and not available separately (which now costs more than 10% of the value of the accelerator itself).
21 years ago a company did that (Phase 5), but somehow, today (2014), it seems it cant be done for some odd reason that eludes me.
And hey, I am not even talking about a SCSI interface!
I just dont get it why we get inferior products despite all the technical progress that has been done in these past decades.
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Going back to the original topic:
And hey, I am not even talking about a SCSI interface!
Why not a standard sata interface so we don't have to hunt down expensive, small, failing scsi drives (which for example I have huge trouble finding here) or scside adapters worth $250.
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Why not a standard sata interface so we don't have to hunt down expensive, small, failing scsi drives (which for example I have huge trouble finding here) or scside adapters worth $250.
Because despite being the year 2014, we still get something worst than what was available in 1993!
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S-ATA is the way to go these days. Because the ATA interface has evolved to have some technical decency and it's the option with reasonable prices. SAS (serial SCSI) cost a fortune in comparision.
Regarding the 68060. To compete with the real thing any CPU would have to be as fast as 68060 @ 75 MHz. And then one has to make the decision if one should skip those instructions that Motorola did. Not doing it may cause incompabilities but it may actually be a better processor. So perhaps an configuration option would be suitable.
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Why not a standard sata interface so we don't have to hunt down expensive, small, failing scsi drives (which for example I have huge trouble finding here) or scside adapters worth $250.
Why bother with a hard drive at all? Stick on a USB host port or even a SD card port and boot away.....
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Why bother with a hard drive at all? Stick on a USB host port or even a SD card port and boot away.....
From Gunnars post:
Card specs are:
* very fast 68K CPU
* 128 MB DDR3 Fast-memory
* SD-card usable/bootable as IDE-device
* Network interface
* RTG Graphics Card (chunky/Hicolor/truecolor) with HDMI out
and for all amiga systems
this is the hardware. The team is busy with getting it run with AmigaOS, testing, writing drivers and so on. It shall be available very soon so there will be certainly no changes at the configuration. I am already looking forward to it, first time to have new amiga hardware with a modern specification for many years. I accidently found the Natami project years ago and regained interest and was disappointed when it stopped and now I am happy that finally there will be something for the community.
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S-ATA is the way to go these days. Because the ATA interface has evolved to have some technical decency and it's the option with reasonable prices. SAS (serial SCSI) cost a fortune in comparision.
Regarding the 68060. To compete with the real thing any CPU would have to be as fast as 68060 @ 75 MHz. And then one has to make the decision if one should skip those instructions that Motorola did. Not doing it may cause incompabilities but it may actually be a better processor. So perhaps an configuration option would be suitable.
I hope my posting I just made answers your question. The hardware will not be changed, they want it out soon and if they would start to make changes because of every additional wish the project would end like many others before.
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My post was more regarding wether to use SCSI or S-ATA in general terms. And the 68060 in long term. Once the CPU is in FPGA. Incremental changes are easy, in comparision when producing silicon or hardware.
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S-ATA is the way to go these days. Because the ATA interface has evolved to have some technical decency and it's the option with reasonable prices. SAS (serial SCSI) cost a fortune in comparison.
SATA would be nice but the high speed transceiver lines require a more expensive fpga and are limited. PCIe also need the same lines. A standalone fpga board may get these later but an SD card is adequate for most retro storage space requirements, it's tiny, it's common and it's low power (Hopefully no need to upgrade the power supply of a 500).
Regarding the 68060. To compete with the real thing any CPU would have to be as fast as 68060 @ 75 MHz. And then one has to make the decision if one should skip those instructions that Motorola did. Not doing it may cause incompatibilities but it may actually be a better processor. So perhaps an configuration option would be suitable.
Competing with the 68060 in speed shouldn't be a problem. Apollo will have several advantages:
much larger instruction fetch
stronger integer pipes
more instructions that can execute in both pipes (pOEP|sOEP)
code fusion/folding
some OoO instruction execution (MUL and DIV)
link stack (faster rts)
upgraded ISA and 64 bit MUL/DIV integer instructions return
much faster bit field instructions
much bigger caches (helps a lot with big programs)
faster memory
Phoenix will probably be available first without some of these advantages but most of these are in or provided for in the current Apollo design. The 68060 was a great processor for back in the day. It solved most of the 68k limitations with limited resources. It should have been the foundation for a series of new 68k processor designs but it was not fully optimized internally yet and was not given the resources to become more powerful. There is significant room for improvements.
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I think this is the wrong thread ? Jens would never make advanced HW like this, he is bringing us back to the past, giving us HW from 1991. The funny thing is this core is called Apollo...
This is the best thing since Vampire board !
I hope it will be available soon and make another revolution in Amiga hardware like Vampire did.
Please lets start another thread, just to make clear who made this possible....
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I hope it will be available soon and make another revolution in Amiga hardware like Vampire did.
Amen.
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Please lets start another thread, just to make clear who made this possible....
the serbian guy? :D
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the serbian guy? :D
No, but it isnt Jens thats for sure.
If Jens made this he would put SCART on this coz its more stable :)
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Alright Jens is not a serbian. Good to know. Now my Amiga will run faster ;)
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"(...) In addition to the binary license, Hyperion will grant Individual Computers access to the source code of the IDE driver for further development which may facilitate installation of AmigaOS 4.1 ..." http://icomp.de/news/news144_e.htm
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That is nice. It's fast enough for using the internet.
What would be nice is to get all Amiga platforms to remain compatible. 68k is there by default. PowerPC has the 2nd most software.
The only time it isn't an Amiga is when you have to use another OS to set something up.
Kioea Amiga 68k Demo on MPC5200B (http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC5200B) PowerPC
http://youtu.be/oKXgiS4nXZs
[youtube]oKXgiS4nXZs[/youtube]
Till I Feel You Amiga WarpOS Demo on MPC5200B
http://youtu.be/mjsGVkDjBOc
[youtube]mjsGVkDjBOc[/youtube]
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You know what would be hilarious? Turning FPGA's into manufactured ASIC's!
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What about the Amiga 2000?
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Yeah, turn an A2000 into an ASIC!
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What about the Amiga 2000?
This CPU upgrade card fits several AMIGA models:
A500
A1000
A2000
CDTV
This image is from the first batch of boards.
For the production run we will evaluate a breakout options to allow moving the HDTV and NETWORK connectors to a plate e.g for the backside of the A2000.
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This CPU upgrade card fits several AMIGA models:
A500
A1000
A2000
CDTV
This image is from the first batch of boards.
For the production run we will evaluate a breakout options to allow moving the HDTV and NETWORK connectors to a plate e.g for the backside of the A2000.
Not sure it will fit CDTV, theres not much room.
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Going back to the original topic:
I would like to see from Jens an A1200 68030 accelerator that had a socket for an optional FPU and that didnt require any mysterious motherboard fix to work, nor custom software to switch it on.
It would also be nice if it could have a real time clock built-in, and not available separately (which now costs more than 10% of the value of the accelerator itself).
21 years ago a company did that (Phase 5), but somehow, today (2014), it seems it cant be done for some odd reason that eludes me.
And hey, I am not even talking about a SCSI interface!
I just dont get it why we get inferior products despite all the technical progress that has been done in these past decades.
You could try and persuade DCE to start up a batch of blizzard 1230..... :D
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Not sure it will fit CDTV, theres not much room.
I am hoping that it will fit into the CDTV, as I have a brand new, old stock, CDTV that I bought from Carl Sassenrath a few years ago during one of the AmiWest Shows. I would love to upgrade it with a fast CPU expansion and more memory, so it could run almost any OCS & ECS software.
Gunnars claim that he may be able to make expansion boards that upgrade an A500 to AGA and increase Chip RAM above the 2mb limit are also very interesting. Would this require additional hardware added to this CPU upgrade card, or is this card pictured that will fit into the CDTV capable of doing all of these things?
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Not sure it will fit CDTV, theres not much room.
This picture is the CDTV mainboard right?
From the mainboard the card will fit fine.
Is there anything on top/ over the mainboard wich could give problems?
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This picture is the CDTV mainboard right?
From the mainboard the card will fit fine.
Is there anything on top/ over the mainboard wich could give problems?
Yes, some of the CDTV units, like mine, come with a daughter board for the CDTV special ROM chips. This is close to the CPU, so it might not work on CDTV's using that ROM daughter board. Also, the clearance above the 68000 CPU to the top case is small. How high is this new CPU accelerator card?
I will open up both of my CDTV's to look for any other obstructions and let you know.
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How high is this new CPU accelerator card?
it has a height of about 2 cm from the 68k socket.
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OK lets be very honest, ok?
We do this thing not to make a lot of money. ;-D
We do this because _WE_ want it ourselves.
[...]
Well said the entire post, I've always found it strange over the years why some people are so passionate about trying to influence what other people are trying to do - if people who are doing it ask the question then that's fine but if they don't don't offer them your opinion... so much noise, it's maddening...
anyway, since we are all hijacking this thread
I just wanted to say that this could be a very useful expansion... my vast collection of older Amigas could be moved on equiped with these boards...
I'll be watching carefully
do you have a direct url I could use to monitor for announcements and/or purchases? sorry for my ignorance but I haven't been following this although I think I've read through a thread or two at EAB.
Cheers
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it has a height of about 2 cm from the 68k socket.
Then it properly wouldn't fit (not with the planned extra board), I have to check my CDTV (with Carl Sassenrath goodies) when I get chance, maybe the week end.
Give me the full specs height wise and I will measure it. Be nice to upgrade this CDTV as I can't play any WHDload stuff on it, :(. Just gives blank screen.
Being able to upgrade it to AGA would be just WoW!!!.
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Hi Olaf,
Lets be totally open and very honest about the project.
Who we are, where we are and where we are heading.
Today there is the Vampire600.
The Vampire600 has 64 MB fastmem and an FPGA which you can load a new fast 68K CPU into it.
The next card, the new Cyclone5 card is in production right now.
The Cyclone 5 card offers
* Faster FPGA = about twice as fast CPU compared to the Vampire600
* 128 MB Ram
* Video out HDMI
* SDcard / IDE
* Network
As soon as the Cyclone 5 card is fully tested and we see that all works without yellow wire
and as soon as the sales/distribution is set up - it will be sold and
we will offer the CPU upgrade file for the Vampire600 owners to speed up their CPU as free download.
Then Vampire600 owners will then get a CPU comparable to 68060 in speed for free.
If the A500 card runs fine we will make card for A1200,A4000 all other models etc.
We as team have recently bought several A1200 and have already stocked up mostly every made AMIGA here for testing the cards: E.g A500,A1000,A2000,A3000,A4000,A1200,CD32
Lets be honest:
The APOLLO CPU is an envolvement of the 68050 CPU done for the Natami project.
The RTG Chunky/truecolor display is basically a steal from the SAGA/Super-AGA chunky stuff we prepared for the NATAMI.
You don't need to be an Einstein to see that you can also take the CPU card out of your A500, and if you add a Joyport to it - and you basically have a new NATAMI - for little money.
To be clear: I'm not promising anything here.
This is not a market announcement.
The post was started as question whether we need help to design a new CPU card - and the answer to it is "No" we have designed it already and the above is our current status....
You had the first shipments in June.. Any update? This could/should be a massive piece of Amiga news.
But is A500/1000/2000.. not A600 or 1200?
Would love to see a LOT more info... get an idea of which of my children I need to sell to get one.. that sort of thing.... And is there a dedicated thread for it to sub to?
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I would like to see stand alone Chameleon board in a nice case and HDMI output.
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Chameleon is already stand alone...
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...And I think the small yellow case is nice. Granted it in only VGA output, but a VGA to HDMI converter only runs in the $20 USD range.
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Then it properly wouldn't fit (not with the planned extra board), I have to check my CDTV (with Carl Sassenrath goodies) when I get chance, maybe the week end.
Give me the full specs height wise and I will measure it. Be nice to upgrade this CDTV as I can't play any WHDload stuff on it, :(. Just gives blank screen.
Being able to upgrade it to AGA would be just WoW!!!.
2cm is probably going to be too high to fit into the CDTV case without modification (cutting a hole in the top case), which I really don't want to do.
Too bad, as I was hoping to put one of these Phoenix accelerators into my CDTV, but maybe we can talk Gunnar and team into designing a low height version just for CDTV owners some time in the future, when they have made tons of money selling the first Phoenix accelerators for A500 & A2000 owners, since the A500 is obviously the most common Amiga ever made (or was it the A1200?).
Personally I would love to see a complete CDTV replacement motherboard with a standard CD/DVD drive & controller (Read & Write capable), instead of the propietary CD drive and controller Commodore used. The CDTV is a cool looking case and with the right replacement motherboard and drive mechanism, could be a fantastic retro Amiga system.
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I'd like to see Jen's build a Lunar mission (to make up for Apollo 13) based on an ARM CPU that emulates the whole thing in a FPGA while proving that the Nobel prize winning Compton Scattering Effect can coexist with the Bernoulli's principle in micro-gravity, with HDMI output.
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Or, we could just get realistic.
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...And I think the small yellow case is nice. Granted it in only VGA output, but a VGA to HDMI converter only runs in the $20 USD range.
That wouldn't work. For HDMI@50hz to work on a PAL TV, the source has to be digital, not converted from VGA.
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Chameleon is already stand alone...
What I mean is that it is a complete board in a box, not a C64 cartridge that connects to a dock. Also, USB support for controllers would be nice too.
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Or, we could just get realistic.
What is realistic or not for a hobbyist to accomplish using an FPGA of sufficient size and speed, plus all the work that has been done since Dennis of MiniMig fame showed us that it was possible to create a very compatible Amiga clone, added to the ease of creating custom cases with a 3D printer, has changed drastically over the last few years.
Most ideas are not cost effective for production and sale to other people, but so much more is possible for an Amiga hobbyist to do for just themselves, if they don't mind spending the time and money to make almost anything they want.
Definitely a very interesting time to be an Amiga enthusiast, no matter what part of our community you prefer, or are interested in using and supporting. It is a real credit to how inspiring the original design(s) were 30 years ago. I hope that everyone of us will participate in the 30th Anniversary of the 1985 release of the Amiga next July and celebrate all that has been accomplished, and what continues to be worked on and improved, after all of the failures and let downs we have suffered. I hope that at least some computer media outlets will take notice and give the Amiga some credit for all of it's innovations, and all of the people who it has inspired over the last 30 years.
More news about a planned event & banquet dinner for next July will be released, when we have the details worked out. Events are also planned in Germany (and I hope other countries around the world), so if you can't attend the banquet dinner and museum event in Mountain View, California next July, I hope you will be able to attend a 30th Anniversary event closer to where ever you live. :)
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Well, you can live in a fantasy world (say hello to the unicorns), or live in the real one. When you talk with Jens (who live is the real world with red & black ink in his ledgers), he thinks about practical products and then plans them over years before they go into production. Each of his decisions are calculated and involve the risks of economic success or failure.
Go ahead, he answers his email and posts on EAB.