Home grown A1200 accelerator project

[alexh]

200 orders is not enough to pay for the development costs.

With re-creations of the classic chipset just around the corner any hardware developer would be mad to make an accelerator for classic Amiga's.

[alexh]

-D- wrote:
If 200 people donated $50 each, there would be a 10k kitty for r&d. That's probably peanuts for this type of project

That would barely pay the license for the PCB layout tools and the tooling costs for the A1200 connector. You can forget about the salary of the person doing the work.

BUT... the 68060 is rare and very expensive these days.

$100 isnt too bad

[alexh]

AJCopland wrote:
You seem to know a little about this sort of thing, how complicated would reworking the CT60/63 for the A1200 be?

You really think Rodolphe will release the source to his 680x0 SDRAM controller?

The Falcon bridge in the CT60/63 looks quite a bit more complicated than the Amiga equivalent would be.

skurk wrote:
How about royalties? That could make a neat sum after if, say, 200 boards were sold.

Not quite sure what you mean. Surely the person doing the design will also manufacture and sell the boards. Any/all profit will go to them. However I would bet that even with 200 sales it will be a negative number, or the retail price would be unacceptable.

I have said it several times before, if someone who used to work for Phase5 / DCE came forward with the schematics, layout and firmware source code to the last versions of the CSPPC/BPPC then a new accelerator project instantly becomes viable.

[alexh]

stopthegop wrote:
My guess is there are at least 200 CT's out there somewhere.

Quite possibly.

the Amiga audience is probably quite a bit larger.

Probably.

But 300-400 boards x 340Euros each... ain't exactly peanuts.

You are forgetting one KEY thing. There were no 060 accelerators for the Atari Falcon at all and very few 040 accelerators. It was a unique product in the Falcon community with a high percentage wanting one.

There are LOTS of 060 accelerators for the Amiga platform already out there. Demand will be a lot lower than you think.

€340 is too much for an 060 Amiga accelerator. You either have to have significantly more features than existing accelerators, or a price differential.

[alexh]

AJCopland wrote:
If the bridge (I assume you mean the connector)

Nope I mean bridge. The Falcon bus and the Amiga bus are not 100% the same as the 680x0 bus and some logic must live between the two.

would it be fair to assume that the task of porting the CT60/63 design to an A1200 would be simplified?

Possibly. However other parts of the design may have been created to be optimal with the falcon bridge which might be sub-optimal with an Amiga bridge. Needs some more research. But as this is almost a pointless exercise (due to the number of 060 boards already in circulation) I doubt anyone will do it.

adonay wrote:
Is it even possible to get amiga 1200 expantion connectors ? I wonder if it is possible to contact jens about that ...

Yes, Jens has the tooling to make A1200 connectors. He made some for ACK who never paid him (according to Jen's blog).

adonay wrote:
*edit* but for my own experiments and study i would like too obtain a few connector say 10x

I would imagine that Jen's wouldnt supply less than 100. Most companies dont make less than 1000 when it comes to injection moulded connectors. Ask him, he may have some lying around.

When I made my CD32 FastRAM addon I could only get 3x connectors (free samples) without paying a fortune.

[alexh]

No it's not. There is no viable solution. MiniMig has brought us a lot closer though.

[alexh]

You think only in 2 dimensions.

If you want to think as MiniMig as an object then yes, the MiniMig v1.1 PCB isn't very good.

However the IP behind MiniMig is open source, any hardware engineer capable of creating an Amiga product of any complexity (with an ounce of buisness sense) is now thinking MegaMig. They are not thinking A1200 accelerator.