XMOS chips and the FPGA Arcade Replay

[ChaosLord]

Kickstart ROM chips are slow, expensive and difficult to update.

We want machines that are fast, cheap and easy to update.

The whole point of an FPGA chip is that you can keep reprogramming it over and over and over again for free.  The XMOS chip is the exact opposite philosophy.

[ChaosLord]

Why do insist on reading things into what I wrote that simply don't exist?  I never implied nor stated that Kickstart ROMs were fast.  Do you have a reading disability or are you just looking to be difficult?

I wasn't being rude.  I am not making statements for you.

It seemed like you were not understand the really severe limitations of that chip and other posters were not getting thru to you.  So I simply tried to explain the problem from a totally completely different angle using different words.

I hereby solemnly attest, before the gathered witnesses of Amiga.org that ferrelsi did not imply or state that Kickstart ROMS were fast.


But you did seem to imply that because Kicstart ROMS can't be rewritten after having been burned and that since some Amigas have Kickstart ROMS that therefore chips which can't be reprogrammed are totally completely acceptable.

Kickstart ROMS are ok.  They have a certain level of barely being acceptable.  But Kickstart ROMS have a huge number of disadvantages.

In the A1000 days ppl got the idea that a Kickstart ROM would be wonderful and awesome because then ppl would not have to load kickstart off a floppy into RAM.  But that notion was only correct back in they days before cheap hard drives and cheap hard drive controllers.

In 1990 I bought an Amiga 3000 brand new.  And Thank Commodore it didn't come with a Kickstart ROM!  The Kickstart was a file in DEVS:  It could be easily expanded, modified, changed, patched and updated without having to buy expensive ROM chips!  That Amiga 3000 is so awesome!  The next year I bought another brand new A3000 and that one sadly came with a real Kickstart ROM and no way (that I know of) to load the kickstart from hard drive.  Years later my dad wanted to buy one of my A3000s: No way was I selling him my A3000 that had no Kickstart ROM.  I sold him the crappy one with the Kickstart 3.0 ROM chip.  Yuck.  The first thing he had to do was buy a Kickstart 3.1 ROM chip for $50.00.  $50.00 of the Earth's resources were senselessly destroyed by the use of this silly OTP (One-Time-Programmable) technology.   I don't want to destroy the Earth using primitive technology when there exists a better way to do things.

On My 1200T/060 I hafta copy the silly lame Kickstart ROM into proper FastRam so I can get a nice speedboost.

[ChaosLord]

Commodore used mask ROMs not OTP. They cost far less than $50 to make

Nobody cares how much it cost to make them.  They also have to be ordered by the customer and the customer must pay a profit and the customer must pay for shipping for all these new ROM chips every 2 years.  So yes the cost of stupid ROMS is massively more than just using some RAM and downloading a file.

And yes around $50.00 is what my dad paid to the computer store for his 3.1 ROMS many years ago.

 and used less of the Earth's resources than the equivalent amount of RAM would have.

You have completely missed the point.

The ROMS cost massively more than the equivalent RAM in money, time and natural resources.

First you start with a 2.04 KS
which then had to be upgraded to 2.1
which then had to be upgraded to 3.0
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1 with patches
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1 with even more patches
which then had to be upgrade to 3.1 with newer patches
which then had to be upgraded to 3.1 with still yet newer patches.  Remember there have been countless upgrades to the AmigaOS ROM since 1990.

8 separate ROMS costs a lot more than 512K or 1MB of RAM.

Just the shipping alone to order 8 separate ROMS might be enough to buy the RAM.

And if you live in any random left-wing country (lets use Britain as an example) then you hafta pay a whopping ridiculous 17.5% sales tax on all 8 of those purchases which means you have to destroy and burn more of the Earth's resources just to pay the tax.  (In fairness my Dad paid 0% sales tax for all his Amiga gear as ripoff sales taxes were illegal in the USA in those days.)

The moral of the story is that Write-Once technologies have their uses but they have many disadvantages.  Better to use Write-Infinite if the cost is close to the same.

Also, there was no 3.0 for the A3000, and your A3000 had a 1.4 Kickstart ROM in it.

I have a 3.0 for my A3000 so you are mistaken.  Maybe you are thinking about Kickstart 2.04 which I also have.