What's the point of the MiniMig?

[alexh]

skurk wrote:
- Brand new hardware, will last longer

ral-clan wrote:
When all the original A500s are gone

Homer wrote:
And what happens when the A500's have all gone  :-?

downix wrote:
How long will your A500 last, however?

Sorry, but I have to disagree with you. Apart from the floppy disk drive, the A500 and A600's (with the exception of the A500+) are like concrete. They will last for many, many years. Considering the MiniMig's are being home made, probably to a much lower quality standard to the factory built Amiga's the physical hardware may not last that long.

MiniMig was created for fun, and should be treated like that. If you start rationalising it, MiniMig cannot compete on price, expandability or compatibility.

Form factor is it's one true "Amiga" plus point.

Other plus points are that it is a reconfigurable computer. It can be reconfigured as an Amstrad 464, a Sinclair Spectrum, a C64 or even an Atari ST etc.

[alexh]

downix wrote:
And if the MiniMig breaks, you can make another, and another, and another....

1) Good luck finding some of the MiniMig parts in as little as 6 months or so. Several parts on the 1.x board are already no longer made. (Admittedly you could redesign another which used different components)

2) You could get almost any problem with an A500 fixed for less ;-)

I think MiniMig is cool, and if the price comes down, or the PCB features go up, I'll nab one.

[alexh]

Crom00 wrote:
The money you save by being able to use off the shelf, VGA monitors (50z of course), Keyboards, and mouse, and no scan doubler makes it worth while.

You're fooling yourself.

A flicker fixer alone costs $175.

You can get external ones for as little as $60 from Roy.

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=32365

RGB SCART cables for LCDTV's or Plasma's can be bought for as little as $1.98, I know I just bought 50 ;-)

[alexh]

Rob wrote:
Here's my A500 as it looked a few weeks ago

Get it right ;-) That is what your A500 PLUS looked like. Regular A500's, which make up perhaps 8/10 of them, dont have that battery. Check back in the thread and I did exclude the A500+ in my post.

[alexh]

This is the end.

[alexh]

AmiGR wrote:
You've completely missed the point. The MiniMig is Verilog, it's completely future proof.

And you've completely missed the point. You are correct, should you want a MiniMig board in the future you could design / build a new one with the components of the time.

The point was that for what it would cost you to do that you could fix any fault on an A500 motherboard and with the change buy a small villa in central europe

[alexh]

I would imagine it feels more like a real Amiga (if you've never seen WinUAE at 50Hz full screen 720x576) than an emulator up to the point where a bug corrupts the demo screen.

I dont think bugs will last long if MiniMig boards go into production and prices come down because more technically minded users will help squash then.

[alexh]

AmiGR wrote:
What are you going on about? There's nothing on the MiniMig that is expensive. The reason they go for $200 is the fact that they're built in single units.

Yes you are correct. That and they are being made by homebrew amateurs and not on mass so there are no discounts on quantities. But that isnt going to change any time soon. So if you were making one in the future (following on from our previous msgs) you'd be doing it in.. *da da* single units.

You could use a larger FPGA and put most of the peripheral hardware onto that, have it on a BGA package on a tiny PCB and it would cost next to nothing.

A phrase rhyming with "duck cough" comes to mind.

You dont know anything about BOM prices, availability or PCB design, so using phrases like "next to nothing" is just insulting to those who have been trying so hard to bring MiniMig to the masses. If what you said was true, everyone would be doing it, they are not, so you are WRONG!

The main reason no-one has used a BGA chip is because they are impossible to solder without expensive BGA IR flow equipment that no "homebrew" team will ever have.

Before you start cost reducing something that doesnt need cost reducing and redesigning a PCB (something almost certainly beyond your capability) lets try to get some of the MiniMig v1.1 boards made en mass and price savings that way!

If we could find a company/individual ready to stump up the time to talk to the manufacturer and the £2000 deposit required to get a batch of 200+ units made we could reduce the costs to the end customer. The profits from this could be invested to make more boards and future cost downs.

Walk before we run.

[alexh]

AmiGR wrote:

alexh wrote:
lets try to get some of the MiniMig v1.1 boards made en mass and price savings that way!

I fail to see your point here. You were complaining about the fact that it's expensive and saying that you could fix A500s for less, right?

If MiniMig's got mass produced at a price competitive with old A500's, then my argument goes away dont you think?

The C64 joystick for example can be picked up everywhere for about £5 or less. I myself have several. The mods can be done to play games from flash very easy. I wouldnt recommend getting a old C64 (or getting one repaired) over a homebrew mod of a C64 joystick in this situation would I?

It is a shame that no-one has organised a "mass buy" on components and sold them on. Everyone is buying them in singles from digikey which isnt helping

[alexh]

One of the "points" of MiniMig doesnt seem to be getting exploited.

I am suprised that there has been no ports of other "opensource hardware" to a MiniMig board yet? Tobiflex's Amstrad CPC core or Mike-C's VIC 20 or Sinclair ZX Spectrum

[alexh]

HenryCase wrote:
How easy would it be to port one of those examples mentioned?

It depends on what board it was intended for, what additional hardware it has, what clocks the design uses, if there is enough block RAM, how nice the I/O ports like keyboard etc. map to the MiniMig keyboard/floppy HDL.

I would imagine 10-20 mins to get something on screen. A couple of hours to get the keyboard working and "preload" BIOS ROM and snapshot data into the FPGA block RAMS and poking a start address.

Then maybe a couple of days for disk/tape emulation through the PIC, maybe less if you can wire up an old digitiser and pipe the Audio in through spare I/O.

Burrr Beeep. Burrrr, beep beep bur beep beep. (Me trying to phonetically type the sound of a Spectrum loader).

I've never researched Analog Tape but I imagine that there are several optimisations / cheats you can use when digitising that you couldnt get away with normally with normal audio.

I mean is the h/w they normally run on fairly similar?

Yup. All the standard I/O are there. Just Analog Audio in is missing.

[alexh]

alexh wrote:
Then maybe a couple of days for disk/tape emulation through the PIC

Sh!t did I say that ;-)

AJCopland wrote:
The internals shouldn't care where the stream of binary data was coming from as long as it was getting that data in the format that it expected.

At the data rate it was expecting etc. which would be the research bit that takes a couple of days. But you'd implement SNA (memory snapshots) and emulate floppy disks first.

[alexh]

HenryCase wrote:
Would it matter?

Yes.

HenryCase wrote:
I mean, I've used Spectrum emulators before that have tape 'snapshots' like the *.tap files for the C64 emulator mentioned by freqmax.

Snapshots are MEMORY snapshots, not tape snapshots. Spectrum emulators do have compressed tape samples but they are called *.tap or *.tzx files.

The games loaded instantly.

That's cos they are memory snapshots. Dumps of memory after the game has loaded. The dumped data is just loaded back into RAM (which on an emulator would be almost instantaneously) and jumped into. Definitely the easiest thing to try first on an FPGA implementation.

As long as all the data was loaded into the correct parts of RAM, I don't think you need to emulate the data rate too closely.

Snapshot no, tap / tzx yes.

Check this video out:

If you notice he quadrouples the clock speed of the spectrum (3.5 - 14) and then quadrouples the playback speed of the audio sample thus keeping the timing 1:1.

Might be a coincidence but he doesnt demonstrate a game with a turbo loader.

Leads me to think that data rate is still important.