FPGA Replay Board

[JimDrew]

I am definitely interested in this project for emulations.    Please let me know where to get this hardware.  Thanks!

[JimDrew]

I realize that, which is why I want the hardware.  I have written a few emulations in my day, and I just so happen to know VHDL.

[JimDrew]

As an emulation author, using both hardware and software to perform emulations, I can tell you that if the device is not the original then it is being emulated... period.   To emulate is to mimic.  So, an emulator reproduces the original object.  Sheesh, I am not sure why the terminology matters to some.   I am just interested in making some emulators using the FPGA hardware because of the accuracy that is possible.

So, I will ask my original (non-emulated) question again... where can this hardware be purchased along with the 060 add-on?

[JimDrew]

Thanks, Mike.  I will check out the site and email you.

[JimDrew]

By the way, any device that is not the original hardware and is able to run original software, is an emulator.... period.  No matter if you like it or not.  

FPGA based devices are emulators by definition (English).  In the case of the Amiga, if you made a tiny double sided circuit board with the original chipset, it would not be an emulator.  But emulating, recreating (or whatever you might try to call it) that chipset makes it an emulation of the original.  There is simply no arguing with the exact definition of "emulator".

[JimDrew]

The thing is, for regular ppl on the street, your average Joe Blow thinks of "Emulator = laggy, with wild speed fluctuations like they have experienced over and over and over and over again in WinUAE and other software-based emulators"

Wow, maybe using 486 machines this might be the case, but WinUAE runs faster (and consistantly so) on modern PCs than the original A4000 hardware.  Likewise, my emulations on modern PC hardware run circles around the original Mac/Apple II/Atari computers they are emulating.

So, regular people on the street, at least in the U.S., think of emulators as often faster and perhaps less compatible than the original hardware.  This is one big advantage of a FPGA based emulation platform, and the very reason why I am interested in this setup.  FPGA setups allow you to easily make cycle exact chipset emulation, something that is much more difficult to do with software emulation.  So, this FPGA hardware with 060 should be able to emulate an 060 Amiga setup exactly.  Like mentioned previously by another forum user, I would like to get rid of all of my original Amiga development systems (A1000 through A4000) and have a single box capable of emulating them all.

[JimDrew]

xyzzy, you are 100% spot on!

[JimDrew]

In the U.S. you most certainly could use the name NES as long as you recognized the name as a trademark in the information referencing it.  This is allowed under the fair use laws.

Emulations are not illegal.  I spent a great deal of time with attorneys back in 2000 dealing with this issue.  I had emulations that specifically named Apple Computer, IBM, Intel, Atari, etc.  I always gave full credit to trademarked names, and never had a single issue with any company trying to threaten me - and keep in mind that I had millions of downloads of the demo versions through downloads.com, so there was huge exposure.

[JimDrew]

@JimDrew
I'm a bit surprised no one ever sued you. I expect Apple was the most upset about an Amiga emulator with 68060 being faster than any Mac they sold for awhile. Did you feel like they deliberately added 68060 incompatibilities to MacOS 8.x roms to keep the 68060 from running? I have heard this rumor before and MacOS 7.x seems to be more compatible with the 68060.

Apple didn't have a problem with the emulation.  I demostrated it to Scully and others at their facility in Cupertino.  I was trying to get Apple to make ROMs available for sale (by them) to make it easier for emulations to be made.  Their only concern was compatibility and how it was perceived.  When I showed them the A4000 running circles around their Mac Quadras their concerns were centered around the fact the Amiga was a better architecture.    But, at no time did they ever attempt to stop what I was doing.

[JimDrew]

ive never fully understood, why trapping substituted instructions have been impossible, but since everybody broke their teeth on it i guess its not worth to explain to noobs.

Traps are REALLY slow.  The Mac OS is run on traps.  I patched the crap out of the OS so that it used jumps in place of traps - and that is how I was able to dramatically increase the speed of the Mac OS... well, that and better hardware.  

[JimDrew]

Some good news. All the components are in place now and I'm paying the bill.
The last parts should join the PCBs within two weeks, and I am hoping they can get them built before the China spring festival holiday. I should get boards by end Feb.

This is a big step forward as I can now remotely order and build as many as I want. This will also mean the daughterboard can go directly into volume production.
/MikeJ

Great Mike! Let me know as soon as I can get a dev board!  Thanks!

[JimDrew]

@JimDrew -

Oh, wow, you're THAT Jim Drew?  There's a name I hadn't heard of in a long time.  Really missing my Amiga days...

LOL.... yep, it's me.. and I am back into producing new (and some old) products for Commodore computers.  I am looking forward to doing some FPGA work too.

[JimDrew]

The 68020-68060 user mode integer instruction and addressing modes are practically the same. The 68060 and 68040 have MOVE16 but I'm not aware of any compiler that ever used it.

There were a couple for the Amiga that did when you turned on the 040 optimizer, and all of us assembly guys used MOVE16 whenever the 040/060 was present.  Also, the Mac OS used it extensively on their 040 based models.

I still think emulating the supervisor/user modes and some other simple added  instructions would go a long ways with the FPGA core to make it 020 compatible.  This is something I am interested in looking at when I get ahold of one of these boards.

[JimDrew]

@mikej ... or any HW guru

Is it possible that FPGA Arcade will work together with KryoFlux for reading/writing or maybe booting real Amiga disks?

I am getting one of the FPGA boards from Mike to develop with.  I am releasing SuperCard Pro (SCP), which is a flux level disk copier, emulator, and other 'things'.  It is a similar form factor to the KryoFlux.  It uses nearly double the resolution of the KryoFlux and has 512KB of static RAM on board for track buffering.  It also has a micro-SD card slot so you can create and store raw or converted disk images.  For my USB interface, I am using the FTDI FT240X USB FIFO chip which has drivers for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.  I have already released preliminary information on the command structure for SCP.  Besides having a USB port, it also has a serial port (up to 1Mbps) that uses the exact same command set.  So, no USB interface is required.  You can connect a 3.5" PC floppy drive to the SCP (power comes from the floppy drive connector, via Y-cable) and use it as a stand alone device controlled by a PIC, AVR, ARM, etc. micro - or an FPGA device like Mike's.  There are commands to read the data at a flux level and convert it to Amiga MFM format, after which the data can be transferred via USB or serial.

As some of you might know, I released hardware and software disk copiers for the Amiga - in fact, that is how I got into the Amiga market before doing emulations.  So, I have a LOT of experience with Paula, having actually designed a replacement ASIC for her back in the day so we could change the data rate and do flux copying without needing two drives.

[JimDrew]

This sounds cool But a little unclear. Can you please type a bit slower for us slower folks and explain a bit more ?
We will be able to connect this SCP to a Replay board, right ? And a PC floppy to it, right ? And read/write real floppies ?

Technically, any device that has a CPU of some kind can control this device.  Yes, you can use any real 5.25" or 3.5" floppy drives with this device to read/write various disk formats.

Thanks Mike!