FPGA Replay Board

[Hattig]

I don't think I'd survive the stress of a self-build!

Can't wait for the FPGA Arcade though, glad to hear that things are moving along.

[Hattig]

Ah ha! That'd be the 4 bottles of Leffe and 1 pint of Cider effecting my judgement then. Possibly a good time to bow out of further posting before I'm too pissed to spell

Not the 750ml bottles of Leffe I hope! :-)

[Hattig]

Very true...

I could move just a few hours up north and have a pretty nice house for probably less than this small townhouse near Miami i just bought, but I don't think there are many programming jobs. Hard to imagine that it sold in 2007 for over 2X what I paid for it.

Right now Detroit area is very reasonable with property values around the same price of a new mid to high-end configured Apple computer.

I think in general the UK will cost more.

You could buy 100 Mac Pros for the cost of a small townhouse in London.

Then again, you pay off the house and retire outside London, and you've got yourself a nice pile of money to waste on beer. Assuming we're not at 20% unemployment or recovering from the plague.

[Hattig]

Other people are working on porting code yes, but I will be doing this as well.
I supply a wrapper which gives access to all the IO and then it is quite easy to drop other stuff into that and load it from the SD card.
/Mike

Brilliant, really looking forward to this. Glad you're settling into your new place too.

[Hattig]

Yee Haw! Now you're talking. Have you worked on or planned for a superscaler core? Will you put 64 bit integer instructions back in the 68060? Do you plan on adding any enhanced instructions or addressing modes? How about an FPU? Some demos use the FPU you know .

I'm sure these things will come along in good time - especially on the open source cores.

First up though I think we'd all be happy enough with a fast-as-possible '020 compatible core (as that's the easiest thing to create), then the cycle exact 68k (A500) and 68020 (A1200).

[Hattig]

Ok, this might be a completely moronic and stupid question, but I'll ask anyway

I see that more and more people use FPGA-stuff to revive old platforms. Are the cards somewhat compatible, or will complete rewrites be needed?

The thing I'm wondering in particular, is if we can use the Replay Board to run C64-stuff, since that seems to be relatively complete right now

http://www.syntiac.com/chameleon.html

So, will I need to buy the Chameleon to do C64-stuff, or will the Replay Board support the same cores? (most likely, there will have to be a few changes, but that should be feasible I hope)

Someone will have to port a C64 FPGA implementation to the FPGA Arcade, but once that's done, it should work fine. That's one of Mike's design aims, and he wants it to be easy to create new cores to recreate other systems besides the Amiga and various arcade games.

I expect that all systems up to and including fast expanded A1200s and Atari Falcons will be reimplementable on the FPGA Arcade. Maybe even the 3DO.

[Hattig]

Fantastic

Someone should really make a page with some generic info on the fpga; since most of the really good info is buried way deep in this thread, and probably a few other places aswell.

.. Or even a Wiki, with a few test-setups, howto's and so on. Does this exist already, or is it something that will have to be done? (and, is an outsider like me welcome to set this up, or should it be done by the devteam when they have the time?)

I think a Wiki would be a really nice feature to be added to Amiga.org actually. It wouldn't be the first time a forum website has added a wiki-based information base.

[Hattig]

Excellent news, looking forward to this :-D

[Hattig]

I do not mind it if it is static and not configurable (either) and you have to buy newer motherboard models for a Chip RAM upgrade or better yet, it have a maximum limit say to 32 GB of chip RAM or even 8 GB and you use a normal RAM DDR or whatever as a Chip RAM. Either way it is cool, but software configurable seems to me emulated (* shiver *)

The "software" in this case is a hardware description, not a conventional software language.  It's a re-implementation, not an emulation.

Also, is it me, or are all the Amiga.org images dead?

[Hattig]

I also believe it is a step down because it still use AGA as the latest custom chipset. We need something AT LEAST like AAA for a starter as a default build in to the motherboard custom chipset, with PCI slots to allow users to upgrade to video cards if they should need better and more powerful graphics ability. Imagine the awesome new games and apps that take advantage of the hardware if we at least add these two features!!!

IIRC the FPGA Arcade Amiga implementation provides a standard SVGA graphics card implementation alongside the AGA implementation, and in addition the AGA implementation is not held back by memory bandwidth issues, and can be clocked faster, and thus you shouldn't compare it with classic AGA. Indeed it can be coded to have a full 32-bit blitter I imagine, and multiple Paula audio blocks for more sound channels.

[Hattig]

What you are saying that I could enjoy the pleasures of AGA on a TV without its limitation? That this new AGA is actually a new build in custom chipset not emulated and build from scratch and in fact could be treated as AGA+?

I'm sure that there will be a cycle accurate version, but there is no reason (limits of the FPGA notwithstanding) that the core cannot also be extended to include more features and higher performance - "AGA+" as you mention.

I'm not sure how much work has been done in the FPGA Arcade cores along this line, except that there is a Picasso96 compatible basic graphics card implemented alongside the AGA chipset support.

[Hattig]

Some nice details there, thanks yaqube!

Does the RTG implementation have any other acceleration - line draw, block fill, etc (functions within graphics.library would be the best things to accelerate)?

I'll be buying a Replay just because supporting it now makes the likelihood of a Replay 2 in five years time higher. Never mind the chance of updates to the Replay implementing even faster features.

[Hattig]

Hi,

I don't know if my question was already answered, but this is ~300 page thread...

Will a 060 card for FPGA have MMU onboard? Or will this CPU be somewhat crippled for best speed?

I think this depends on what mikej can source - I believe he is trying for fully featured ones, but there is a massive remarking issue with these CPUs as they are now relatively rare.

[Hattig]

There is no "emulation"..

Indeed not, any FPGA implementation is a re-implementation of the hardware, not an emulation of the hardware. Emulation implies a software shim between the native hardware and the emulated hardware.

On an FPGA, there is no native hardware, it's just a collection of logic that has to be configured into BEING something, in this case a re-implementation of the Amiga hardware.

However, when I read his post I thought he meant running emulation software (e.g., a ZX Spectrum emulator) on the re-implemented Amiga. Heh.

[Hattig]

It's not an "emulator", as the commonly understood meaning is "software [-implemented] emulator". We then get people who think Minimig is just UAE running in an FPGA, when that is most certainly not the case.

I might grant "Hardware [-Implemented] Emulator". But you have to be specific in this case, because of the above.

[Hattig]

My only issue is that people, when they see "emulator" assume it's something like UAE and therefore not a real Amiga, and that it would have all the issues that software emulators have.

So call it a hardware level emulator, or hardware re-implementation, or FPGA implementation. But not 'emulator' in isolation.

Ask any Minimig owner if they feel they are running a real Amiga - they would say yes. There's no translation of CPU opcodes going on, there's no software implementation of the chipset. That's because it is running the CPU opcodes directly on the hardware, it's hitting the chipset registers directly in the hardware, and so on.  It's not the original hardware, no. But we don't say that AGA emulates OCS do we?

Next up will be someone saying it's running on software because the FPGA is programmed using a netlist compiled from VHDL, which looks like software to them.