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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Topic started by: SysAdmin on January 01, 2013, 11:57:14 PM
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News from elwood (amigaworld.net)
Dear customers,
The Minimig is now back online! Also the ARM controller is available again.
We thank Jakub Bednarski for his great work and for releasing his design for every Amigans.
Order your items now before it's too late. Go to our online shop. It will give you the total including shipping to your country. http://www.acube-systems.biz/shop/
We'll start to process orders the first days of January.
Happy new year to everyone!
The ACube Systems team
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As a long-term Minimig owner/user who also has one of the prototype ARM controllers, I highly recommend these things to gamers who want an OCS/ECS A500 experience.
While you can access HDF files without the ARM expansion, the speed difference is massive, especially with large HDF files. Without the ARM you'll have to limit yourself to really small files (plus, the ARM makes updating much easier).
Also, buy the board with the 4MB installed. On my setup (4MB with ARM), I have a 2GB HDF file running ClassicWB with an endless supply of games installed to play via WHDLoad.
One more tip for those unfamiliar with the design: Don't buy the boards without the PIC unless you're also buying the ARM controller. You must have either a PIC or the ARM board for the Minimig to work.
Here's mine installed inside a eMachines PC keyboard:
(http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b134/darrin01311/100_1273s.jpg)
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As someone who is a minimig newb how does the arm work. And what is the difference bewteen a Minimig without the ARM and one with the ARM?
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As someone who is a minimig newb how does the arm work. And what is the difference bewteen a Minimig without the ARM and one with the ARM?
From the Acube website:
- emulates four floppy drives
- adds write support to harddrive and floppy disks
- allow increase of the CPU speed from 7.09 to 49.63 MHz with a 4kb zero waitstate cpu cache
- allows usage of long floppy file names
- allows usage of directories on the SD card
- allows unlimited number of files by directory
- support for 2 HDF files
- fast firmware boot
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You can write to HDF and ADF files without the ARM and have the CPU run faster than 7.09MHz (don't know what the speed limit is though)
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From the Acube website:
- emulates four floppy drives
- adds write support to harddrive and floppy disks
Is that real hard drives and floppy disks or emulated hard drives and floppies?
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Is that real hard drives and floppy disks or emulated hard drives and floppies?
Emulated. ADF images for the floppies and HDF images for hard drives. There are no connections on the Minimig to attach a real floppy or hard drive.
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Has there been a board revision, or is the 4MB still a hack?
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Has there been a board revision, or is the 4MB still a hack?
Still a hack. But a professional one :)
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Emulated. ADF images for the floppies and HDF images for hard drives. There are no connections on the Minimig to attach a real floppy or hard drive.
I was looking at the Pinout of a standard floppy drive only a few months ago, and pondering if I could write an arduino floppy drive controller... Might think think about that again if I have time :-/
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You wanted to add a real physical floppy drive to a MiniMig? For reading Amiga formatted disks using a standard PC floppy disk drive?
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You wanted to add a real physical floppy drive to a MiniMig? For reading Amiga formatted disks using a standard PC floppy disk drive?
The actual drive is standard, no!?
The only difference is the controller...
Pin Name Dir Description
2 /REDWC Density Select
4 n/c Reserved
6 n/c Reserved
8 /INDEX Index
10 /MOTEA Motor Enable A
12 /DRVSB Drive Sel B
14 /DRVSA Drive Sel A
16 /MOTEB Motor Enable B
18 /DIR Direction
20 /STEP Step
22 /WDATE Write Data
24 /WGATE Floppy Write Enable
26 /TRK00 Track 0
28 /WPT Write Protect
30 /RDATA Read Data
32 /SIDE1 Head Select
34 /DSKCHG Disk Change/Ready
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Can anyone recommend a power adapter for with it? The one on the acube site doesn't seem to have a UK socket option and wouldn't be very stable in an adapter.
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The actual drive is standard, no!?
The drives are not standard.
But the variations are probably controller dependant.
Amiga floppy drives spin at half the rate of a PC floppy drive when a HD disk is inserted because Paula cannot accept the data above DD rate.
There is something about the _DC & _RDY lines (missing on most PC drives) and DS0 & DS1 being swapped too.
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The drives are not standard.
But the variations are probably controller dependant.
Amiga floppy drives spin at half the rate of a PC floppy drive when a HD disk is inserted because Paula cannot accept the data above DD rate.
There is something about the _DC & _RDY lines (missing on most PC drives) and DS0 & DS1 being swapped too.
Hmmm... Have to disagree here: http://pinouts.ru/Storage/InternalDisk_pinout.shtml
The connector is standard on the PC side of things, I think it would be quite simple to write a floppy controller using an ATMega328 (arduino), that could encapsulate the drive signals in simple packets sent over a standard UART... That could be used to read an write any floppy disk, including Amiga disks... Obviously one would have to control the drive and do the MFM encoding all in software... But that's how it was done on the Amiga anyway :)
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What CPU is it, just a plain 68000? And chipset still ECS?
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What CPU is it, just a plain 68000? And chipset still ECS?
Yes and Yes. You can overclock the 68000 to 56 MHz from what I've read.
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Yes, Minimig is a really souped up A500+ in reality. Still a nice machine, but it's a few years old now I guess (anyone remember the key Minimig dates - first board, ARM board, 50MHz option, etc)?
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From the Acube website:
- emulates four floppy drives
- adds write support to harddrive and floppy disks
- allow increase of the CPU speed from 7.09 to 49.63 MHz with a 4kb zero waitstate cpu cache
- allows usage of long floppy file names
- allows usage of directories on the SD card
- allows unlimited number of files by directory
- support for 2 HDF files
- fast firmware boot
As some one who has two Minimig's a standard 1 with 2MB of RAM and PIC plus an expanded one with 4MB of RAM and ARM addon board the real differences are as follows latest version of the PIC and ARM software.
ARM upgraded features
- support for large hard files (100MB is about the largest usable size with the controller PIC)
- much faster hard disk emulation (PIC harddisk emulation is about as fast as an old 80MB as found in A600)
- Better Floppy disk emulation compatibility (use 2x Floppy on PIC for best compatibility).
The way I see it the my 2MB Minimig with PIC is like my A600 with factory fitted 2.5" 60MB hard.
My 4MB Minimig is like an A500 with GVP harddisk and RAM upgrade.
So if you want to play WHDLOAD games get the ARM addon board if not the standard PIC will do fine.
Additional note: ether way get the 4MB model as its far more flexible.
You can enable or disable the extra ram and configure the chipram, other memory split from the config menu then then reboot to have the change take effect which is grate for getting fussy old games and software to run. Changing kickstart version also works in the same way.
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Isn't Chameleon 64 with the latest Minimig core a better option like the Minimig 4MB with arm controller?
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What CPU is it, just a plain 68000? And chipset still ECS?
In turbo mode it pretty much runs 1:1 with an A3000/25mhz speed wise with much faster video speed.... even faster than AGA
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Isn't Chameleon 64 with the latest Minimig core a better option like the Minimig 4MB with arm controller?
I'm not 100% familiar with the support for the Chameleon64 but hardware wise it is much better than a MiniMig v1.1 PCB.
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Isn't Chameleon 64 with the latest Minimig core a better option like the Minimig 4MB with arm controller?
Depends. I have a chameleon64 too, but it uses a softcore CPU. Also, unless things have changed, you'll need the docking station to use joysticks as it doesn't (didn't) recognise the C64's ports. You can use the IR CDTV controller which is fun.
If you want maximum A500 compatibility then Minimig is best.
If you want AGA then get the FPGA arcade.
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Depends. I have a chameleon64 too, but it uses a softcore CPU. Also, unless things have changed, you'll need the docking station to use joysticks as it doesn't (didn't) recognise the C64's ports. You can use the IR CDTV controller which is fun.
If you want maximum A500 compatibility then Minimig is best.
If you want AGA then get the FPGA arcade.
I am already in waiting list for FPGA arcade, I hope it will be available for all soon. I was just thinking if to buy also Minimig, I hate waiting :)
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Depends. I have a chameleon64 too, but it uses a softcore CPU. Also, unless things have changed, you'll need the docking station to use joysticks as it doesn't (didn't) recognise the C64's ports. You can use the IR CDTV controller which is fun.
If you want maximum A500 compatibility then Minimig is best.
If you want AGA then get the FPGA arcade.
A quick look at the schematics for MiniMig 1.1 and I can see the video seems to be generated by three 4bit resistor ladder DACs (though their form is not what I'm used to).
This is fine for OCS/ECS, but AGA needs 8bit DACs... Couldn't the three 4bit DACs be replaced with a single 8bit one and simply (de)multiplex the three signals via that?
Perhaps some electronic gurus here could help me here :)
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Perhaps some electronic gurus here could help me here :)
That wouldn't be me then. :D