Hi Illuwatar, FrenchShark et al.
Illuwatar wrote:
If You find a way for homebrewers to mount a BGA to the PCB in a cheap and simple way that could be performed at home, I will be more than happy to design the board...
As it is now, the largest Xilinx FGPA in a hand-solderable package is 500k gates. Any larger uses BGA.
Good point, most people won't be confident usen a toaster/re-flow oven at home :-(
If you don't mind having a 2-tier board, something like this:
http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/darnaw1.htmlcould be used.
They sell the PGA Sockets to match.
PGA socket could be mounted on the underside of a mini-mig specific adapter board which could plug onto the top of the darnaw board.
Avnet also do a *VERY* small virtex4 mini-module, which could be similarly employed.
Thank You for the tip. I could look into that Altera chip. For me, it doesn't matter what is written on the FPGA as long as the code could be ported. Regarding IDE - isn't that what the PIC should do (emulate harddisk-files from UAE)? And for AGA, 24-bit VGA should be enough? Finally, who are willing to take the task of implementing AGA into the FPGA? And if we are into it - going for AGA (A1200) would require a swap of CPU, from the 68000 to a full 32-bit one... (and there we lost the "Mini" in this thing).
The idea of using a development board is fine for developing and testing, but for a final solution, it is not the best option.
24bits is correct for AGA, 8bits/per colour = 16.7M colour palette.
Prefer the Altera tools myself also.
Xilinx still don't have X64 support for their EDK software, plus I get sick of downloading 1Gb+ service packs every couple of weeks for their ISE :getmad:
Having said that, I am currently tinkering with porting the minimigtg68 to the Digilent Nexys2-1200 board.
Have modded the board for 12bit colour, few pics can be seen at:
http://gamesource.groups.yahoo.com/group/minimigtg68/Really like what you are doing with the PCB's anyway ;-)
Cheers,
Red
