FPGA Replay Board

[Hattig]

Thus, the port of the MiniMig Core to VHDL may not be the best for the MiniMig core since the five other ports/targets are currently in Verilog and changes done to a VHDL MiniMig port will get out of Sync and be unique. This could cause support/updates to cease for the other targets.

As Jakub does a lot of the work for the other boards anyway, I'm sure that they'll all be switching to the VHDL version down the line as a result of this conversion to VHDL. However I don't know how much work is being done of the OCS/ECS versions of the core now that AGA and more is the central concern.

I'm glad that progress is being made, and am hopeful of a shipping final board later this year!

[Hattig]

Put me down for one as soon as the testers report all is well in the world of the FPGA Arcade :-) and there's a few screenshots and videos on YouTube showing off its capabilities.

And I have an old spare 1280x1024 LCD, so hurrah :-) - although could it support 960x1080 (half full hd) or 1920x540, or 960x540 I guess, as my new monitor is 1920x1080 and has a spare VGA and HDMI input.

[Hattig]

I like the idea of the daughterboard.

Hope everything is going well with the board bring-up and the Amiga core!

[Hattig]

In 5 years I hope we will be making Replay3 boards based on Spartan8 or something..
/MikeJ

Sounds good to me!

[Hattig]

I'm still in China but I have got almost enough parts now to build another 50 boards. Jakub has his up and running. I'll post some vids when I get home early this week.
/Mike

Awesome, great news.

[Hattig]

Awesome news - I take it the full 68020 core is Yaqube's enhanced TG68 core?

Can't wait to get one of these!

[Hattig]

Awesome to see those demos running. Is that a copper palette bug in Odyssey?

It looks like good progress is being made!

[Hattig]

The base board's enough for me. I am assuming that in the course of the next couple of years the FPGA '020 core will evolve to '040 levels of performance too, but even if not a ~50MHz '30 isn't to be sniffed at! I'd rather chunky graphics were grafted onto the FPGA AGA core first.

[Hattig]

Can we move the Coldfire recompilation posts into a different thread please.

[If you're patching a few, incompatible instructions, then you're surely better off doing this once up front, and making the fixed binary available online, or integrating the patching mechanism into the loader (presumably whdload does a similar thing for Amiga games). No need to over-engineer a solution here.]

[Hattig]

There is no "ROM" in the FPGA Amigas, the kickstart image is copied to DRAM at boot. You can split the 32MByte of memory in any way you like between RAM and ROM.
/Mike

I think it was more an issue for the original Minimig with 2MB RAM! But assuming that all Minimig owners have sorted out a Kickstart, and that not many new Minimigs will get made with FPGAArcade and NatAmi arriving on the scnee, I guess we don't need to worry so much about Kickstart sizes in future.

[Hattig]

The AROS "ROM" gets you free of copyright issues, and is thus very important to users of FPGA Amigas and emulators.

It can also provide new features for classic Amigas if used, although there are also projects out there that rebuild the classic Kickstarts with bugfixed, up to date features too. However with the 1MB ROM limit (or 512KB for some) it's always going to be a squeeze on a classic Amiga.

If you have an A1200 or A4000, you've got a ROM already and don't need to worry. If you like you can use a patched Amiga Kickstart instead. AROS is just an interesting thing, not a necessity.

[Hattig]

Can you point me to one of these projects?

Sorry, I don't have a direct link. I think there was something recently on EAB - someone is enhancing some core Kickstart libraries and making ROM images.

[Hattig]

If you put something in the ROM socket, there is no direct way around the space limitation if you want everything in ROM/flash, as the limit is because of the number of address lines available on the various models.

Mumbles something about wires and soldering to CPU address pins... It must be possible, especially with something like that German EPROM board where you can solder the other end to the wire to the spare EPROM pins.

[Hattig]

Yeah, I think that's the person I was thinking of. Thanks for finding it!

[Hattig]

Compatibility and providing a functional workbench clone in ROM are being worked on. We'll have to wait and see where WorkBook gets to, but it would be nice if it evolved into a simple icon-driven space-efficient desktop file management and application launcher. But it is good to talk about what people would want to see included by default in the ROM, and what extensions (non hacks, we need a proper API to extend the tool) would be desirable - custom menus, launcher-bar, etc.

Hey, maybe we could have a mock-up competition! Mock up your best WorkBook icon/lister/etc window, and WorkBook screen, with an aim on simplicity ('cos of the ROM thing).