Contaced a Factory in China about producing a run of fully populated Mini-migs

[alexh]

AJCopland wrote:
You're idea of producing an ASIC based on the MiniMig at the moment is probably an easier legal target than we currently have as the MiniMig hardware at the moment is just a reprogrammable device.

I'm not sure that is true. The Amiga OCS patents have expired and that was the protection of the ideas about making a chip with these capabilities. The original chips themselves are no longer protected http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_work

Wikipedia wrote:
According to 17 U.S.C. § 904, rights in semiconductor mask work last only two years (if unregistered) or ten years (if registered).

This means that you could make an ASIC Amiga, say you copied the original mask work (honest guv!) and there is nothing that the original manufacturers can do as it is more than 10 years after they were made.

The copyright issue I previously brought up applies only to the translation of the HRM from English into Verilog. That is a copyright issue and copyrights last 70-95 years.

I think an ASIC (and maybe even an FPGA binary) would be beyond the scope of copyright. To be sure, some legal would have to read the 1996 WIPO treaty & the Berne convention on copyright.

[alexh]

Hattig wrote:
I'm in two minds about creating an ASIC...

Dont worry you wont be doing it, at between £30,000 to £1,000,000 NRE per ASIC only a large company will be looking at this.

[alexh]

asian1 wrote:
"eASIC [snip] a maskless customization approach aimed at eliminating NRE [snip]

What they dont tell you is the average price per user gate. I bet it is better than FPGA but 10x higher than ASIC.

Still an interesting alternative to FPGA / CPLD for low to medium volume (more than 10k and less than 100k units).

[alexh]

If minimig hardware was available, it would be relatively easy to modify the FPGA and PIC code to emulate an IDE hard drive, (probably through a HDF file at first), just as it does now with a ADF image.

With lack of MiniMig hardware, there is no real incentive to develop for it.