If You Could Have An Amiga Replacement Mother Board

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beakster2 wrote:
Yes, give me an ATX mobo any day, that way it doesn't have to go in a 20 year old yellow case. :-)

If I could get a new ATX Amiga motherboard, I'd like it to be made by a reputable company, e.g. Gigabyte that make the x86 motherboards.

If the director of Gigabyte went a bit insane and decided to put some resources into a new 68k/coldfire/ppc Amiga compatible motherboard, you can be sure it wouldn't be in development for an infinite amount of time, and when it came out it wouldn't need sending back for hardware fixed!  :-)

Well, we already have that... it's called MiniMig and it's made and sold by ACube...

Anyway the original question is vague and unformed... Since Hardware is just a commodity now, what I'd raelly like to see is a PCI-Express2.0 backplane and PCI-E based CPU cards... then one could build a machine in any config you wanteded... not that I even think about desktops anymore... Give me my MBP any day! :-)

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PPC wrote:
If there is one model i would like to see it's an A4000 Mobo in ATX form factor with pci and pci express slots (for cheap and modern cards) with the custom chips in emulation on FPGA chips.
Two zorro 3 slots for using our old cards would be nice!

Zorro 3 is horribly antiquated and difficult to implement... are you really sure you'd want that?

The big problem with this is what to do with the 68K processor.

I do not know if 1: any FPGA is fast enough to emulate a 68K proc as fast as a real 060 or better.

No, not really. A 20MHz 020 would be a hard push... CPU's are complex beasts that require close integration between the fab process and architecture teams...

Second to that a PPC PCI card PPC expansion so you can run OS4 also on it (cresendo/shark ppc cards ?!?)

I think the cards are pretty cheap now, you just need to get Hyperion to port their OS t them... or use AROS... ;-)

And the 3rd problem is can anybody write decent drivers for new hardware in a reasonble time.

Use AROS drivers?