The most ambitious hardware proposal ever... UAU (wow)

[Dr_Righteous]

Here's an idea that'll never be built, but I thought I'd share it anyway... The Ultimate Amiga Upgrade or UAU (pronounced wow).

Designed with the A4000D in mind, a single "fatherboard" overlayed on top of the motherboard... Plugging into the CPU slot, the daughtercard slot, perhaps even the ROM sockets.

The idea is to create a whole new high-speed local bus for the CPU to directly access PCI expansion, ZorroII/III, USB, dual channel ATAPI interface, scan doubler/flicker fixer, 16550 UARTs and whatever else one can think of to modernize an A4000D.

All this connected directly to the processors (68060 AND 604e) and memory. OR perhaps a G4/G5 processor to run OS4.

Obviously, this would require a new tower case to house it all, but it'd be one HELL of an upgrade!

[Dr_Righteous]

Actually, I realized I was calling for a complete computer on top of the A4000 board right after I wrote that... Really I was just trying to come up with a way to get around the PCI/Zorro bottleneck. And then of course throw in all the other modernizations to help out the old gal.

Of course I'd really love to see a board built from the ground up... Custom chips updated and placed on PLDs. Of course that would require some serious reverse engineering of the chips... Or someone creative enough to turn UAE into hardware.

Oh well, a guy can dream...

[Dr_Righteous]

You know, there may not be that many of us A4000 users out here, but I KNOW many of us have A2000s... And there isn't a PCI upgrade, nor many high-end CPU upgrades for it... Perhaps a CPU/PCI combo could work here? Hell, it'd only take a handfull of chips.

[Dr_Righteous]

@billt

Hmm, I never knew the GREX 4000D existed... I'd only ever seen the one for the Blizzard. Excellent! Now I know what to save my pennies for. Then of course comes the real trick... Finding one someone'd part with.

PS: I remember that Outer Limits episode... Spooky as f&%$!

[Dr_Righteous]

I will say this... I'm a hardware guy. I like hardware. Software to me is simply instructions telling the hardware to do something cool.

When software talks to other software to translate the instructions to do something cool into something the hardware can understand, then it's sucking up my CPU time... Thus the whole point of the custom chipset in the first place: to take the load off the CPU.

Why do any of us own an Amiga at all? Why not just stick with UAE and toss out that old outdated machine? Simple, we're hardware junkies.

I want an Amiga. I don't want emulation. OS4 is great... A great step forward. But I'd rather run it on a CSPPC than an A1.

I'm sick enough to want a G5/060 accellerator. Or G5/ColdFire w/ the missing instructions routed to a PLD containing them.

No choice but to emulate? Fine, do it with a programable piece of hardware.

I am a hardware junkie.