Potential add-on board?

[Pat the Cat]

Pi is good for price, but for performance, Odroid is hard to beat.

You can either go FSUAE emulator, AROS, or wait for an ARM version of AmigaOS4.

I'm not in a rush.

[Pat the Cat]

What will comnect to what? Cpu slot to usb2? maybe enough gpio to make a "software bus" but that wound not likely perform well. I made apb and ahb bus before on gpio, was very slow but suitable for the unusual situation at hand. Ibwouldnt do this for something in the real world.

The Compute Module has the same form factor as a DDR2 SODIMM, so can be connected to Amiga buses.

Cheap graphics card, other goodies very connectable. Unlike Odroid or Pi.

[Pat the Cat]

I give all my Amiga systems a pi (zero), primarily to act as network bridge, giving them wifi (with modern capabilities) and hence avoid the need for cables all over. Bonuses are that the pi also can share filesystems and give Amiga access to USB storage (imagine if someone wrote USB-over-IP driver for Poseidon), playback of music files can be offloaded to the pi, it can act as web proxy and bypass the hurdle of resource hungry modern SSL/TLS handling, giving rsh/rlogin/telnet access solely to the Amiga, it's the "jump host" for ssh out to the world... it also acts as name server, ntp server and whatever else I find useful.

I am curious if it would be possible to network Amiga with Pi directly over parallel port, using the GPIO pins in the Pi. It is of course possible via Plipbox

Sounds like a very clever idea. Any chance of blogging or documenting it?

I've been trying to setup a connection via a high speed PCMCIA serial port and not getting much success. Ideally I'd like to use the A1200 as programmer and archiver for the various bits of Pi and Arduino that I have.

GPIO pins are doable (just my opinion) but you have to be careful if power for the Pi goes that route - there is no protection for reversed polarity or 5V going down the wrong pin to a 3.3V input. Link to the HAT I'm playing with, it's open source and giving me a few headaches...

http://www.watterott.com/de/RPi-FabScan-HAT

[Pat the Cat]

After checking the datasheet, you are quite right. The Computer Module has exactly the same connections as a Raspberry PI... so yes, people are pretty much limited to using serial connectors to talk to the beast.

So it isn't going to talk faster than say, an Indivision. Although it could probably execute graphics instructions quicker once it received them.

[Pat the Cat]

Not quite. It has a lot more IO pins on the edge connector, and these can be used as a local bus interface, similar to the original 68K.

That is what I thought until I checked the datasheet. The "extra" IO pins replicate the digital camera input on a trad Pi.

Nothing like the original 68K... although I guess maybe the Amiga video output could be routed to them. Very different voltage levels though.

Sorry? Me too.

EDIT: You do get some extra GPIO pins, but only 45 in total. Not enough to do to a full processor with on a pin to pin basis... but you are right in saying it does have extra pins.

Some potential, but not as much as you might think... Hmmm. Definitely something to mull over.

[Pat the Cat]

Yes... ISA / PCMCIA / Zorro are roughly equivalent to the transmit/receive speed of a Pi.

One outlandish thought that crossed my mind would be hooking it up to an FPU socket, so that it mimics a standard 68882 but running at much higher speed.

20 Mflops? Sounds like quite a good idea to me, compared to most Amigas. :hammer:

[Pat the Cat]

Hm, yeah, I guess I could do that. Nag me again in a few weeks ...

I was not aware that there are high speed serial port PCMCIA cards that work with Amiga? I have a Silver Surfer that connects to the clock port myself, have not used it yet though... :p

Two native types are Surf Squirrel/Whippet.

It struck me that PCMCIA serial ports from alien architectures have not been documented / investigated for years, so I thought that was a good area to explore and tinker with.