AMIGA Coldfire FAQ Version 1 - Non Technical

[System]

I'd imagine if put in a production run perhaps £100-£180. That would be with a processor, AGA chipset, chipram and some other stuff - but this is all guess work. I hope we can get a basic board under £100!

The Accelerators will be first out though - we'll try and keep those as cheap as possible.

PJ

[System]

Not valid - the emulation layer is in ROM so is active from the start, commands are patched from the start - I'm taking going through whats patched and whats not as we speak and will list my findings on my web site - I'll e-mail you with what I have and you can see wat you think.

PJ Matthews

[System]

You mean along the lines of the Inside out? Its a possibility - are you guys after one of these? Tell me people or you don't stand a chance of seeing one

[System]

Q – The AGA chipset is dated.
A – Yep, its there for compatibility, stick with your regular graphics card or an alternative GPU for everything else. One possibility is to raise the AGA chipsets CHIP RAM limitations above 2mb. Most signs say we can’t do this, however a jumper on the AMIGA 4000s motherboard suggests this may well be possible, but no promises.

Interesting story, I once had an A4000, and I also noted the whole 8mb jumper thing. I slotted 8mb simm in the graphics memory slot jumpered it to 8M and what happened... I blew up my Alice.

Shortly after I saw a sig in someones email which was a quote from Some Amiga engineer, which was about not playing with jumpers.

The truth is to take 8MB you need to redesign a whole bunch of the custom chips, this was a possible future possibility so was marked out on the A4000 Motherboard and no doubt you could have just swapped in the new chips a la angus.

To be honest getting your promises from jumpers on the A4000 motherboard sounds a little bit silly.

[System]

The V4 core is the first one really capable of working and it hasn't been out that long.

The V4e is the new core that might implement dual stack pointers, which will be necessary to run Amiga OS on this accelerator.
The V4e core has been announced, no part actually exists which implements the technology. The V4e core is vapour itself you see.

Most of the people I've heard talk about it have done little if any research, don't have the proper training or background and are generally without a clue. It is very possible... any chip prior to V4 would have been a nightmare to do it with. The current project these guys are undertaking sounds feasable but they need to do some more homework before they get too far.

Dave Haynie has posted on it I consider him to have a little bit of knowledge on the subject.

These people seem to have very little knowledge, some of their claims are wildly innacurate.
Their whole plan is ill concieved. Its like they were taking this degree in computer studys and discovered that Motorola still sells a chip similar to the 68k, and thought it would be a great idea to create an Amiga accelerator on these lines.
I dunno maybe I'm wrong and they've done plenty of computer hardware design and manufacture.
And I suppose Amiga fanatics are entirely within their rights to get all excited about nothing, and then to be disapointed when it doesn't pan out.  
I'd be more inclined to believe in them if they didn't start saying slanderous things about Amiga and its OS4.0 plans, etc. when they obviously know nothing about it.
Its a nice idea for a project but its a stupid idea for anything else. And if it is just a project why would it be posted all over the Amiga news sites, like its some legitimate thing?
It says to me, "hey were a bunch of guys that want to take you for a ride"
Its the new Iwin, listen to our new super wonder machine, it'll revolutionise the Amiga... etc.

At least thats my point of view.

[System]

I have read the FAQ and viewed all of the threads concerning the Coldfire that I could find, and now I am just plain synced! Folks, there is a phrase what is now unfolding and it is called "serious fun". I wish I could find a way to help with this project, besides purchasing one of the processors. By profession, I do component-level troubleshooting of electronic test equipment, like spectrum analyzers as an example. The closest thing I ever did to this was designing a memory add-on to an old Z-80 type processor. It  never got implemented, but in theory would have required very little software/firmware overhead. Like this project, it was "serious fun".  I say "bravo!" to PJ.