New project for the benefit of all classic computing!

[matthey]

If you can fit 2 or 3GB on the board it would be really great!  It could be The Final Accelerator(tm)  If u can get 3GB on it then nobody can ever make one better than yours.  I know that 3 is an odd number so 2GB could be "good enuff".  I donno how big 1GB and 2GB ram sticks are these days.  I am just a lowly software guy.

I have been told that something like 1GB of the Amiga's address space is reserved for hardware addresses and addons and stuff.  So we can only ever make use of 3GB of RAM just like Windows XP 2003.

The AmigaOS 3.x has a few issues with memory over 2 GB. The most significant bit of the address is used by an OS function for something else. Some programs may have problems with memory over 2GB as this is a negative number if using signed math where it shouldn't be used for addresses. I have over 100MB of memory and I only run out when a poorly written program takes it all. I'd rather have 128MB of 1T-SRAM or RLDRAM to go with my 68060. Add a full speed PCI slot, SATA interface, 100MBit Ethernet and USB on a new motherboard or accelerator card and that's about all I need .

[matthey]

What does that mean?
You have programs that allocate memory they don't need just for no reason?

You have never had a buggy program allocate all your memory? Vbbc is the only program that has ran out of memory for me on a high optimization level but it also has some bugs.

The SATA interface is a really really good point. Would be nice to use modern hard drives, and be able to use them at a decent speed.  That requires the SATA controller to be on the accelerator.  But Thomas said that adding a SATA controller chip is very expensive or complicated or maybe it was both, I can't remember.  That was why he did not put one on the Natami MB.

As to Ethernet and USB, those are good ideas too but there are already readily available solutions for the Amiga so they are of lesser importance.  

I am not saying that having all those features on an Accelerator card would not be totally awesome, but I think we have completely exceeded the time and money he is willing to put into the project :juggler:

Actually, what would be great and practical would be full speed PCI slots for GFX card, SATA, ethernet and USB. A new motherboard fitting a common tower standard with empty 68060 CPU slot, fpga for the custom chips (MiniMig code is available), PCI 5-7 full speed slots, ATX power supply connector, 2-3 1MB MAPROM flash slots (AROS kickstart needs 1MB kickstart) and 1-2 GB of ram. It should be priced $500-$1000 U.S for the motherboard.

[matthey]

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

Except that the modern memory is likely up to 2x as fast as SIMMs in the old accelerators and the 060 should support full overclocking. That's up to a 4x performance increase over an older 50MHz 060 accelerator when using a newer revision 060. I think the performance would seem more like 2x as fast overall most of the time but that is still pretty good. The one thing the fpga Arcade lacks is a PCI bus for fast RTG including 3D.