Amiga in an FPGA : Minimig

[Crom00]

There is an actual "retro arcade game" developers board I've seen out there. A minimig style board is soooo much cooler simply becuase of the Kisckstart and Amiga software library.

I have been asked by Toy Folk...about getting rights to the Amiga and when I give the history of the years since the demise folks shake their head and disbelief. I've been asked "Are they cursed"

I can tell you that an XBOX running AUEX amiga emulator was a hit at a toy company I worked at. Some folks had not heard of the Amiga yet we would stay after work and play Pinball dreams, Lemmings, and SpeedBall, even sword of sodan. And these guys have lots to do after work...

Goes to show you what we all know, with the propper support this Amiga thing could work on multiple levels.

Mattel, Jakks, Playmates, Hasbro would properly exploit the IP that Amiga supposedly have rights to into real products.

If apple had this IP library you'd be downloading Amiga game system to your ipod and it would be heralded as really hip, groovy retro yet still cutting edge stuff.

But what do we have? Really bad Breakout clones from Amiga Inc.... ooooffff.

Good Luck Dennis you deserve success with this item.

[persia]

If the Minimig is real it would be perfect to build into an ipod like device.  How about a Minimig phone?

[bloodline]

persia wrote:
If the Minimig is real it would be perfect to build into an ipod like device.  How about a Minimig phone?

No it wouldn't... it would be better to run UAE on the phone...

[JimS]

persia wrote:
If the Minimig is real it would be perfect to build into an ipod like device.  How about a Minimig phone?

I kinda liked the portable minimig pictured on one of the show reports. A small lcd panel, minimig board, some Li batteries, good to go. ;-) It's too slow to play mp3s like an ipod. But Futurlec makes an MP3 decoder board. It uses an SPI interface, so you'd need to put in an SPI port in the minimig source. I wonder if the 68000 could keep up with the mp3 decoder?

[Piru]

@Crom00

There is no "Amiga software library" as you imagine it. Amiga Inc does not have any special rights to Amiga games. The only way they could have any would be by purchasing the rights.

Amiga inc, does however have the rights to Amiga Kickstart ROM, and any commercial endeavour wanting to use the KS ROM would need to negotiate a license deal with them.

Additionally deals would need to be negotiated with the rights owners of all the included games (Public Domain games being the only exception).

[jkonstan]

The power consumption of a Spartan3 FPGA is pretty high and really not meant for a portable applications; thus, the battery would be pretty big and expensive such as a Lithium polymer laptop battery. Whenever someday the Verilog source code is in the GPL on source forge, lots of options would open up to actually use much lower power FPGAs such as Actel ProASIC3 or Igloo. Lattice FPGA ECP/ECP2 may also be lower power consumption than Spartan3 but higher power consumption than Actel. Power vs performance trade offs can be made for future derivatives made from the original MiniMig once MiniMig 1.0 is released to open source someday ....

 :-)

[persia]

Where's Dennis?  He hasn't checked in for a month!

[freqmax]

I have been wondering that too..

I guess his vacation was longer than 2 weeks. Or someone actually succeded to buy the project. Or he tries to get the quality of the hw/sw to some quality goal that took longer than thought. Or he just simple got caught up in other stuff that leaves the minimig on ice.

Should the worst happen one could always take an xilinx development board and use the existing m68k core and work from there. Should lowering the entry barrier.
Then once one have a working core it's possible to put one group of coders for each chip to accomplish parallel development.

[Repo01]

Dennis, when do you plan to release it? Please answer. Thank you!

Hi guys,

With regret, with 1265 replies, this thread is dragging the server down a bit and needs to be closed.  Please feel free to create an additional "carry on" thread to continue the discussion.

Wayne