FPGA Replay Board

[ChaosLord]

I have no idea when Replays will go on sale so I just sort of casually started shopping for bits and pieces to make my Ultimate Tactical Assault Replay Business Computer of Death(tm).

Here is a 32GB Micro SDHC card for $14.39 with promo code, limit 5 per customer.  And Free shipping.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313184&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL022113&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL022113-_-EMC-022113-Index-_-FlashMemory-_-20313184-L016A

Would that be acceptable for use in a Replay?  Yes/no/maybe/depends?

- its only 32GB
+ its cheap at $14.39 so even a poor lamer like me can afford it :laugh1:
+ it doesn't feel like I am getting raped by the exchange rate. :rofl:

If it will work... what would be the advantages of buying multiple ones?  

All u guys out there who have CF cards and such on ur Amiga, how many cards do u use and what do u use them for?


Would this card work on both the Replay board itself and/or the daughtercard?  (atm I am all mixed up about it... trying to remember... my brain have a stack overflow

[ChaosLord]

After a brief check it seems like the 64GB versions are $41.00 and the 128GB versions are $100.00  so the 32GB cards give the most GB per $

So even though I need and can use 128GB storage space I will probably just buy the 32GB ones since they are dirt cheap.  I will try to survive with a tiny hard drive...  I just hafta decide how many to buy....

[ChaosLord]

It's only a class 4 card which only guarantees a minimum or 4MB/s. 28MB/s has been quoted for max transfer rate. Highly unlikely you'd hit that but I'd go for a class 10 to make the most of it. Cheap cards tend to be a waste of money. I'd rather get a smaller card of higher quality.

Aha!  Thanx for the tip!

I am happy to pay extra $ for extra quality.   A 28MB/s hard drive would be more fun to drive around than a 4MB/s one even though it'll probably cost twice as much

[ChaosLord]

@cunnpole

This one is only $20.00 for 72 hours.  32GB of space.  Writes up to 35 MB/s and reads up to 50 MB/s

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820178536&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL022113&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL022113-_-EMC-022113-Index-_-FlashMemory-_-20178536-L016B

20 bucks seems cheap enuff.

[ChaosLord]

Note it is around 28Mbit/sec from the SD card in SPI mode. Limitation is ARM and SD card max clock freq.

So we can only get around 2.8MB/sec hard drive transfers which I think is about 2x the speed of an A1200 with an IDEfix attached.  So I can only write games that are twice as big as an A1200 game before I get accused of slow-loading "bloatware" :lol:

[ChaosLord]

Dear AmigaClassicRule:

I was quoted a price of 1015 Euros for a fully loaded Replay with all bells, whistles and gizmos and case and power supply and 64GB SDXC memory card, Mark VII Flux Capacitor and a little cage with Oomp Loompas running around to power the Replay during an electrical blackout.  (no mouse or keyboard, I have plenty) It was just a price estimate.

That was $1364.00 at the time.  I would have to sell a lot of TotalChaos's to pay for that :hat:

But due to changes in the exchange rate the price has now dropped to $1305.00 + I think I should downgrade to a 32GB memory card as they were cheaper per GB the last I checked a few months ago.  That could save me another $20.00 for an estimated price of $1285.00

So don't feel bad about the price you found.

What ppl are saying to you is that since you live in North America you can get standard cases and powersupplies and memory cards super super cheap.  Since you are in Canada you may have a real severe problem with Canadian Taxes from importing a product.   Canadian Government is very evil and they search most items coming into the country and charge you a giant tax for being evil and buying stuff (their opinion, not mine).  They don't like you to buy electronics from "evil" foreign countries so they punish you for it.  I have known ppl who had that problem decades ago.  Furthermore I read a lot of msgs on forums about the same problem happening in the modern times and they were buying from Britain, which is practically the same country!

If you decide to buy your own parts then please be sure to post here exactly what parts you bought, how much they were and how well they work.  Let us know if there are any little problems.  Some of us might copy you and buy the exact same parts as you.

[ChaosLord]

I don't see it listed at http://www.vesalia.de
I looked under hardware/complete systems and some other categories but I just don't see it listed.

[ChaosLord]

Would the 060 accellerator card fit into the X500 Plus case?

I won't buy an X500 Plus case.  I need a detached keyboard.
I am only asking for AmigaClassicRule's consideration.

[ChaosLord]

I may have been unlucky in the first couple I tested. On one the ARM seems to have died, and the other has a bad power controller. These can both be easily replaced.

Board 3 without the bootloader runs perfectly and passes all tests. I will leave it on soak test and fiddle with the loader. I have identified a few issues with it...
/MikeJ

[BusinessManagerMode]

So you must spend 1 hour of labor testing every single board that works perfectly?

And you must spend 6 hours of labor testing every single board that does not work perfectly?

And I assume you have a 10% failure rate?

Or do u have one of those C64 30% failure rates?


Learning these types of things from my own experience is very stressful to me.  But learning these types of things from your experience is fun, relaxing and enjoyable.

When I used to buy floppy disks, I always had a 2% failure rate or higher.  Crappy disks would be a 5% failure rate.   Once I had a box of disks with something like a 50% failure rate.

With DVDs I always had around a 20% failure rate, which was really annoying.  But once they burned, they lasted forever and never failed.

My hard drive failure rate is uhmmm... I never ever ever had a hard drive fail on me, no matter how old it was or how much I grinded the head.  Except one drive: A Western Digital Green drive 1.5TB which was used in an external BlacX thingy.  So it spent most of its life OFF.   It was on for a few hundred hours of very mild use then just gave the CLICK OF DEATH and died.

When I sold C64's we always had a very high failure rate of 20% to 30%.  I think that was in 1983.  I sold hundreds of them and testing all those returns was really annoying to me.  Yikerz.

[ChaosLord]

 * Chip mem 512kB - 1MB - 2MB
 * Floppy drive(s) 1 - 2 - 3 - 4
 * PAL - NTSC

Degrader should handle all of the Above.  If Degrader does not work for disabling floppy drives then FPGA Arcade is not 100% compatible.

As far as floppy drives goes tho.. you can control them with the OSD I think.  So you should be able to just have one floppy if you need.

@MikeJ
There are various weirdo-coded games that won't work with extra drives attached or extra chipmem or certain versions of kickstart.  Yes it is stupid.  But that's the way it is.

Thankfully there are not many games like that.  But on the Amiga "not many" means a couple of hundred.

Regarding PAL/NTSC there are thousands of games that require the gamer to use a util to boot into PAL (or NTSC) before loading the game.  Degrader can do that.

Degrader is free from Aminet and can happily sit on your hard drive until you need it.

[ChaosLord]

Here is my msg from another thread that inspired Freqmax's latest posts

A game that works on OCS will work on ECS too. ECS is a big Win \o/.

Some badly coded games are incompatible with 1MB chipram tho. So u can use Degrader or other similar tool to disable the extra memory temporarily and get such a game working.

Some games are incompatible with extra floppy drives attached. So u can just use Degrader or other similar tool to disable the extra drives temporarily.

I used to hardcore test game compatiblity with a giant stack of different Amiga models and I kept a list of all the games and what their requirements were so when I had a game party I could quickly get any game in the universe working.

There are a few games which are tremendously badly coded and they just won't work on Kickstart 1.3, you MUST use Kickstart 1.2 on those few games. And there are a few others, mostly old EA games that require KS 1.1 (Arctic Fox, etc.)

There are probably at least 24 games that won't work on KS 2.0+ and MUST be started with KS1.3 but I did not really test for that. I was mainly testing 1.2 vs. 1.3,
512K chip vs 1MB or 2MB chip,
1 Floppy drive vs. 2 floppy drives,
PAL vs. NTSC. (huge numbers of games won't work in the wrong video mode)

Sometimes a game will work perfectly on your machine but then when u install a trainer suddenly the game has bizarre limitations (such as one of the things listed above). So u hafta watch out for "Virgin Game" vs. "Trained Game" differences.

There were also a couple of games that would not work if you had a modem plugged in. DOH!

[ChaosLord]

My bank account is overflowing with a backlog of money that I have saved to purchase an FPGA Arcade Replay with 060/MMU daughtercard.

[ChaosLord]

How many people would be interested in purchasing the FPGA Arcade from a source in the U.S.?  I am considering buying a bunch of them, so I am curious how many U.S. buyers there would actually be.  I would hate to get stuck with a pile of boards!  I figured the U.S. retail (at today's exchange rate) is ~$299 for the version with the SVHS option.  Let me know!  Thanks!

I want one!  But only when I can get 060 with MMU card with it.  I am a developer and I simply must have 060 MMU otherwise it would be a downgrade from my current Amiga.  And I hafta run MuGuardianAngel, etc. anyway.

[ChaosLord]

I plugged a DVI to HDMI cable into the Replay board but my LCD TV says "No Signal" is there anything I can do?  If you need more details let me know.  Thanks Kamel

Turn on the Replay?

Try a different monitor?

Try a different cable?

[ChaosLord]

I have found that a great many TVs and monitors have buggy instruction manuals.  The manuals say one thing but the reality is  the opposite.  Sometimes the tv is better than the manual says it is and other times it is worse than it says it is.

Can this TV be upgraded to a new version via its USB port?

Maybe they released a bugfix patch for the TV OS?

A lot of TVs have an upgrade feature.  Mine is upgradeable but I never dared to try it.  I don't want to risk blowing up my $2000.00 monitor/TV.

[ChaosLord]

@Kamelito

Can you switch your Workbench into NTSC mode and it works?

Can you switch your Workbench into Dbl_NTSC mode and it works?

When you answer these questions then we can go to the next step.