FPGA Arcade and Minimig overview

[amigadave]

No more waiting for FPGA Arcade Replay boards.  At least not to order one.  It may take MikeJ a few more days/weeks to finish assembling the batch of 48 that he just produced, but he has asked that people email him if they want to purchase one.  The price (IIRC) is 229 euros without composite & S-Video output and 249 euros with it included.

MikeJ hand assembles the through hole solder components on the pre-assembled boards and then tests each one before he sends them out, so this takes a little bit of time to do.  I am sure he will step in and correct any mistakes I have made in this reply to your questions.

Last weekend I had MikeJ's personal FPGA Arcade Replay board (now mine, as he sold it to me) at the AmiWest 2011 Show and many people got a chance to sit down and play some games with it.  Seems Dune II was the game of choice to try out.  I was so busy with other things during the show, I forgot to get out my Amiga joysticks and hook them up to the Replay board, so the people playing with it were limited to games that use a mouse.

It is a great little system, but what I like most about it is the inventor and his willingness to listen and provide feedback to potential customers frequently, and his obvious hardware talent coupled with his foresight to provide an expansion connector that he has already designed a daughter card for with a 68060 socket, USB ports, Ethernet and more RAM.  MikeJ is a wizard and has got me thinking about selling many of my Classic Amiga systems (not all) and replacing them with the Replay board.  It has almost as much expansion possibilities at the not yet released Natami, so I would highly suggest that you get yourself a FPGA Arcade Replay board, or continue to wait for the Natami system.

Edit:  I think MikeJ is considering a much larger number of boards for his next batch of FPGA Arcade Replay boards, if enough people show interest in buying one, so if you can't get one of these first 48 boards, it should not be too long a wait to get one from the next batch (maybe a couple of months).

[amigadave]

@fishy_fiz
Here's how I see the fpga boards...

MiniMig = Amiga 500 with massively overclocked 68000
fpgaArcade = Amiga 1200 with 030@50MHz or 060 accelerator
Natami = Amiga 4000 with 060 accelerator

An fpga Clone-A from Individual Computers could make a surprise appearance with who knows what specs. The Natami will be fully AGA backward compatible so even if you don't use the new SAGA features, they won't hurt compatibility. It should have a FPU, the best RTG (chunky) support, 3D at some point, and the most expandability but at a significantly higher price.

I am a huge fan of the FPGA Arcade Replay board, but I am puzzled why so many people forget to include the C-one that can also run the MiniMig core (not sure if it needs additional hardware or not), or the Chameleon and few mention the MCC16, when discussions about FPGA based systems that can run AmigaOS1.0 to 3.1.

MiniMig was the first, so it gets remembered, but the FPGA Arcade Replay & Natami seem to get the most attention and the rest are fogotten, or overlooked.

Let's not forget the possibility that the Clone-A may show up some day as well, as Jens has spent a ton of time on it and with his track record of making ideas into real hardware, I would be surprised if he did not put all of that prior effort into a product some day. (I see that you did mention the Clone-A)