Vlabguy1 wrote:
I think the MiniMig is great, I think the new A1000 replacement board is great..but I ask WHY..and have not gotten a straight answer.........
I have been on the PCB manufacuring end of things..its a huge task (re) designing a circuit board and costly, and for what?? Perhaps the designer of the new A1000 board could chime in here, as well as the MiniMig guy..
I ask a simple question WHY?
I doubt that Georg or Dennis will take any of their valuable time to respond to your questions, but I will attempt to give you a simple answer to your "simple question WHY?"
First, the MiniMig was started as a project just to see if Dennis could do it, I mean put all the Amiga custom chip functionality into one FPGA. Once he had succeeded he decided to reduce the size and put it all on just one board to create a small, low cost replacement of the A1000/A500 OCS Amiga. There was so much interest in his work, he finally agreed to release it as open source. So the WHY of the MiniMig in my opinion is two fold. 1. to prove it could be done. 2. to allow hobbyists the ability to create their own Amiga clone with their own hands. It is unclear to me if the MiniMig inspired the NatAmi project, or if the NatAmi was perceived before the MiniMig was announced, but it could be a third point of praise for the MiniMig, that it has inspired others to create other new projects related to the Amiga experience. Lastly, the MiniMig is current hardware to run nostalgic software and eventually some years down the road it will be more difficult to find the original hardware. (that was not nearly as simple as I intended)
Now for the GB A1000 replacement board, the developer/hardware designer obviously likes the original Amiga case design for his own reasons. There are many German fans of the A1k as can be seen by the website dedicated to it, the Phoenix A1000 replacement board that was revived in 2005 and now with the GB A1000 board and continued development of peripherals for both. The Phoenix and the GB A1000 boards provide a huge increase in performance and functionality for the A1000 computer that so many of us are very fond of. The "WHY" is because we enjoy and appreciate the design of the A1000 and want to continue using one. The GB A1000 allows us a way to use them for more things than would be possible otherwise.
As for the Amiga community being divided, that has been a fact of life for many years. There just has not been any ONE thing to come along that has caught the imagination of all of us to work together on, and there probably never will be, but most of us are perfectly capable of being interested in and supporting many different Amiga projects at once.
If all Amiga enthusiasts were the same, maybe we would all be supporting AROS and it would actually be able to run all the older Amiga software and have a whole raft of new AROS software to run as well, or 15,000 A1's would have been produced and sold instead of the few hundred.
