FPGA Replay Board

[amigadave]

-Production difference ? (Handmade / Machine made)
Fpgaarcade has the PCB factory made and the FPGA machine soldered. The rest of the components are hand soldered.

This was the case for the RevA boards, but RevB boards are double sided and machine made. The manufacturing is completely set up and the boards can be knocked out in high volume.

The code and schematics are/will be open source, the PCB layout is not.

The Replay board also has a daughter board connector to add USB/Ethernet/CPU and more memory.
/Mike

Are there any pictures of the FPGA Arcade with the daughter card 060 CPU installed?  Does the daughter card sit on top of it in a perpendicular direction, or is it flat to keep the form factor as small as possible?

[amigadave]

boards #4 and #5 running here. I have the video camera out, but haven't had time yet to film it.

Very exciting stuff Mike!  You have our (almost undivided) attention and more than a few Amiga users are holding their breath, waiting for you to release the FPGA Arcade for sale to the general public.

What you have done is a great step forward from the original MiniMig (not saying that you built your design on top of Dennis' work, but it is a very similar device).

I will remain patient, as I am more likely to wait to purchase one of your boards after you have had the time to manufacture and complete the building of the second 50 boards.

Have you thought about ever trying to sell this as a complete product through regular retail channels?  I know that to do that would be a whole new world of headaches and hassle, as it would probably require you to obtain a license from Amiga Inc. for the Kickstart ROM and Workbench files, but it appears that Amiga Inc. might be more open to selling a limited license than they have been in the past.  (I know most people here will Boo & Hiss, saying screw Amiga Inc.'s license, but if you want to sell thousands of these as a commercial product, you would have to stay legal, unless you want to be added to the long list of people sued by Amiga Inc.)

You could probably sell this idea to a Chinese toy manufacturer and let them fight with Amiga Inc. for obtaining the license  and you could just walk away with a fat check in your pocket.  I am sure there would be some toy, or electronic company that would see a potential for a profit if they could reduce the production costs to get a complete FPGA Arcade product on the store shelves at a price below all the game consoles and advertise it as a complete retro-gaming device.

Getting licenses to run games for so many different retro gaming devices/computer systems might be very difficult, or impossible legally, but "Word of Mouth" advertising between the users of such a device would quickly have most of them searching the Internet for all the files they would need to run more games from Arcade consoles, C64, Amiga, Atari, Nintendo, Game Boy, etc.

Probably too much trouble for you to want to get into such a proposition, but if you put the idea into the right person's ear in China, the possibility is there that you could see a nice paycheck for all your efforts to create this great design.  Putting this idea into the wrong person's ear could have your design stolen from you and you could see someone else profit from your ideas and designs, with zero money going into your pockets.

[amigadave]

I think Cloanto is the place to be. The AresOne is sold with a Amiga Forever OEM version for the kickstart ROMs in the UAE emulation under AROS.

greets,
Staf.

Selling the FPGA Replay Board with an OEM copy of AmigaForever would probably be the simplest solution, until the Kickstart replacement is completed.

[amigadave]

Thanks.
I should say it is a joint effort between Tobias, Jakub, Dennis and I ....

Is Dennis still involved in this, or any other project that is similar to his MiniMig, or is he just watching from the sidelines now and admiring what has evolved from his initial efforts?

[amigadave]

Hang on!!! The YouTube Description says: AGA and an 020 CPU, when did the FPGA 68k core reach 020 compatability? My lust increases

They have been implementing 020 instructions into the 68k softcore for quite a while now.  I am not sure how close they are to completing that work, but I think, IIRC, they have done enough to allow the installation of AmigaOS3.9.

Lots of lust for this project as it gets nearer to a release date.

Has anyone found some great small case designs to put it into yet?

[amigadave]

AhhhHHHheeeeeeeeeee! Hawt!

I gotta sell some stuff...

Me tooooooooooo!

A Classic Amiga clone that is smaller & faster than most A3000/A4000 accelerator cards.  And it includes USB, RAM, micro SD card, DVi & S-video output, plus lots more.

Anyone want to buy the ACA030/25 accelerator for the A600 that I just bought?  I still haven't been able to fix my keyboard problem and think I need a new membrane for the A600 keyboard.  (any one have an A600 keyboard membrane they could sell?)

[amigadave]

I'd love specs on the daughtercard as well.  I'll buy one of these in a heartbeat if I can run my BBS on it - needless to say the Ethernet option has me very interested.

Lots of my questions about the daughter card are answered by MikeJ & Yaqube over on EAB at this: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=744483#post744483 link.

@freqmax,

Do you doubt that this project will be released?

I would think that the frequency and amount of information, including videos of the prototype running an AGA Workbench would have satisfied even the most skeptical members here.

[amigadave]

Yes, I must admit that I am getting almost excited about this project finally being ready for sale to the masses.

As I have said before, it is nice to have so many different  hardware projects that appear to be real and nearing completion.  I can't remember a time when there was so much activity, since the end of Commodore when we still had a few companies that were in business and making Amiga peripherals.  Not the same, but better than what we have had to choose from during the past decade.

[amigadave]

So should I shop for a full 68060 or the LC low cost models? Does that matter in this application?

Depends on what you plan on running on it.  For most Amiga games and other programs, a 680LC60, or 680EC60 will probably be fine.  There are very few Amiga applications that need the MMU and even less that need the FPU.  See Jens explanation for using the 680EC30 on his ACA1230 accelerators.

[amigadave]

Hello, this is André from the Natami Team.

lou_dias and vidarh kinda have the right idea here. No, the 68060 CPU card has nothing to do with reverse engineering. But it is useful in many ways.

First and foremost, the N68050 core is developed on a separate system and is not integrated in the Natami FPGA yet. This makes it absolutely critical having a physical CPU to get things up and running at first.
Secondly, our softcore CPU does not come with a built in MMU, since that would slow down the entire CPU too much to be acceptable. A MMU might not be very important for a normal user of AmigaOS, but a developer might want to use a MMU for developing and debugging purposes. Likewise, if you want to experiment with other operating systems that demand a MMU, the 060 card is there.
Thirdly, it is good having a physical Motorola CPU for comparision of compatibility and performance, both between a Natami system and an Amiga classic and between Natami systems using different CPU:s.
Fourth(ly?), The 68060 card will not be disabled once the softcore CPU is done, but will theoretically be able to be used as a kind of accelerator for certain tasks, providing that software is written for it.

The first stand-alone Natami board design actually had a physical 68060 directly onboard. But this design was scrapped a few years ago when the softcore project started.

Sorry for hijacking the thread with a long answer

Most people here would love to have more detailed answers from the Natami team members.  Trying to find information by sifting through the large number of threads on the Natami forums is difficult, plus it is hard to tell which posts there are made by Natami team members, or Natami fanatics making inaccurate statements based on wishful thinking.

So, feel free to hijack threads here with correct information about the Natami project any time.  I for one would like to see more frequent news updates on the Natami project that are straight from a team member.

[amigadave]

A question for Mike if he happens to drop in:

Are there any plans to include a "boot loader" similar to the C-One where you can select at startup which core you want to run?

I am pretty sure, as the name implies, that MikeJ intends it to run more than just an Amiga core and has planned to have the Replay board run as many Arcade machine cores as are available.  I don't know about such cores, but searching for them on the Internet should turn up more than a few, I would think.

I don't know if you would need a separate SD card for each Arcade machine, or computer system that you are cloning, or if you can fit several onto just one SD card and as you said, choose which one you want to load from a boot loader.

[amigadave]

Wish I hadn't said that now, I've been emailed to death.
Sorry if I don't respond to everybody, I'm keeping a list though.
Cheers,
Mike

40 boards aren't going to satisfy 1/5th of the demand, are they?  

Nice to have the interest and I hope you can ramp up the production rate to satisfy the demand for these great boards.  I also hope that MikeJ, or someone else, comes up with a nice case design for the Replay boards, with, or without the daughtercards that will come later.

Just think about how much the interest in this board will multiply when there are more Arcade systems that it can emulate/clone, as well as other computer systems.  You might easily have several hundreds of interested buyers, if not thousands.

[amigadave]

Has anyone mentioned in this thread about laptop option? I think we have but I'll do it again. It's pretty skinny, it could maybe become mobile Amiga. With the right kinda of kit. Would have keyboard, screen, a place to mount it down, power supply, battery solution etc.

Oh, people are all over that apparently

http://www.mini-itx.com/2007/01/19/the-itx-laptop

We could do better though.

Yes, it has been asked before.  MikeJ said something similar to what I have written below.

Some additional work would need to be done to manage the laptop battery/charging and integrate it into the OS, or make some kind of BIOS with the battery management built-in to it that would take care of energy management & charging of the battery in the background without effecting any of the different computer, or arcade systems emulated.

[amigadave]

Hmm..a LED/LCD TV which does not accept 50Hz on its VGA / DVI inputs ? Now that is very strange. I am not saying it is wong, but it just sounds weird

Ayway, I am gonna go back to the store if the monitor does not work. Or better, I will bring the replay board (now in it's rather fancy mini itx black cabinet) to the store and just plug and test until I find one funky screen that handles my digital demands

Can we see some pictures of your Replay in the new case?

[amigadave]

I'm just got back home.
I have the new boards and almost all the components to get them built
/MikeJ

That is good news!  Is this the second batch of boards that have the fix for the spacing of the audio connectors?  How many boards are in this second batch, another 50, or was it 100?  I hope I am on the list to get one of them?

I hope your efforts to turn this into a commercial product are going well and you will soon have the opportunity to sell thousands of them, but finding retailers that will commit to purchasing large numbers of them is probably a hard thing to do for any small startup company.  Plus the cost of packaging, marketing and peripherals, like the case, PSU, etc. all add up and may make the product too expensive for large retail distribution.

Still, I wish you luck MikeJ and I still think that the Replay board is a large step beyond the original MiniMig, so you might find that someone like ACube or AmigaKit is interested in selling them.

Edit:  What is the amount of time it takes to complete the production of this second batch of boards?  Is it a certain number per day, or does the production facility assembly all 50 or 100 boards in a few hours, since they are mechanically assembled, not hand assembled?