Where are all the Minimigs?

[alexh]

I bet that 99.99% of the PCBs are still wrapped in cellophane waiting to be soldered.

[alexh]

I fear that over 80% will probably stay in that state for the remainder of their lives :-(

[alexh]

I was thought I was being rather generous.

[alexh]

It's too much money up front for any small company to take the risk. Coupled with the possibility that MiniMig is in violation of copyright. It's not going to happen any time soon.

Add in the minor incompatibilities and the low capability of the v1.x design and you dont have a great product.

Shame cos it's so close to being viable.

[alexh]

freqmax wrote:
It's not a minimig it's just a "FPGA developer platform based on MC68000". I think as long as that claim is made and nothing else it would be hard to touch legaly.

But there would be a small chance the MiniMig source code and all the binaries could be forced off the net, and with nothing to load onto it ;-)

It's been too long now. If any company was seriously considering a "jump-n-run" with the MiniMig 1.x boards they would have done it by now.

$50k for 1000 units (MOV) is too much for an individual or a small company to gamble with.

A design partner with someone like TerASIC is perhaps the best idea.

[alexh]

Colin_Camper wrote:
Could you specify exactly how the minimig could possibly be in violation of copyright?

It is a translation of the copyrighted & published work "Amiga Hardware Reference Manual", English to Verilog.

As a homebrew project I doubt there is anyone left who cares enough to bother, but as a fully commercial project no company could take that risk.

[alexh]

Colin_Camper wrote:
You are in the U.K. You should know that reverse engineering is perfectly legal in the EU including Holland.

I also know that publication of copyrighted material in translated form is a violation of said copyright.

Colin_Camper wrote:
You are wrong.

No I'm not.

Are you saying, AMD, Compaq, Dell, Digital Research - none of these are commercial companies?

All of these companies try to observe patents and copyrights owned by their peers. And whilst they reverse engineer IDEAS, they dont copy things 100%, register for register, bit for bit. If they have to, i.e. for compatibility, they license the technology from one another, usually through patent exchange etc.

You dont see AMD selling chips with 100% clones of an Intel P4 in them, and vice versa.

It's all very well talking rubbish on forums - but sometimes these witterings can add power to the bullies and intimidators like Scamiga Inc.

I've worked many years as a hardware engineer developing many chips, I've written many ASIC related patents and worked with many patent lawyers etc. I've done reverse engineering and been told how close I am alowed to copy another companies designs. While they are my opinion, they are not witterings. I'd be interested what experience you have? Ah.. yeah.. thought so :-)

Have you not heard of ReactOS - the Windows clone OS built from the ground up using publicly available documentation.

Publicly available NON COPYRIGHTED material?

[alexh]

MiniMorph wrote:
It seems you know little about copyrights and Patents.

You'd be suprised.

Looking at your site, (assuming you are fordp) you come from a technical background?

Cloning the hardware does not infringe copyright as the function of the Amiga has been copied NOT the design itself.

The design is described in detail in the HRM, it has numeric constant values, state machines, timing diagrams etc. The author has said that he converted this documentation into what became MiniMig.

If it had been an abstract, high level description of the function of an Amiga, I dont think we'd be having this debate.

That said, there are quite a few subtle differences between the Amiga chipset as described by the HRM and MiniMig, maybe enough to differentiate them, maybe not. I'll leave it upto someone trying to sell it commercially to work out if it is enough.

Patents in most places last a maximum of 20 years so anything on the market on or before 1988 is fine from a patent point of view.

Yeah, sometimes 20, sometimes 25. I mentioned it several times in the past in other threads. If there are any patents covering AGA I speculated it would be a few more years for them expire.

But we weren't talking patents, we were talking copyright.

I was just trying to offer one possible explaination as to "Where are all the MiniMig's?" and why no company had picked up the manufacture, the point of this thread ;-)

[alexh]

itix wrote:
But then WinUAE would be illegal too. And so would be AROS and MorphOS. AROS is Amiga Rom Kernel Reference Manual translated to C ;-)

Heh, yeah maybe ;-) But if you were the company considering manufacturing them would you take the word of anyone who wasnt a qualified techie lawyer? Me neither.

Especially marketing because Minimig can not be labeled as Amiga unless Amiga Inc loses its trademarks.

I dunno anything about trademarks. Not something an engineer ever deals with. I would have imagined they could get away with the phrase "Amiga(TM) compatible" on the box and put appropriate TM acknowledgement bits in small writing?

But then again if "Lindows" and "Mike Rowe Soft" were trademark infringements who knows?

Like I said before, if no-one at Amiga Inc. cared about the classic then there would be no problem. However they have a track record of trying to milk their ownership of Amiga for everything they can.

[alexh]

Colin_Camper wrote:
I imagine you never are wrong.  :-D

Hey you've met me ;-)

I am wrong all the time and openly admit it, like all good  engineers. You learn from your mistakes and you go on. Makes you a better engineer.

they dont copy things 100%, register for register, bit for bit.

Nor did Dennis. Did you even read the minimig thread?

I think he did or it wouldnt be compatible? The underlying bus structure is different (he said he merged chip&slow) because of his CPU-RAM interface. It's these differences I talked about earlier in this thread.

They[AMD] sell (effectively) 100% software compatible chips

Ah, yes but to get compatible (and they are still not 100% compatible) they license technology from one another SSE, MMX etc..

Twenty five years in commercial electronics and IT.

As an engineer? Blackpool eh... not much there in terms of ASIC stuff... (I know I grew up around there) Hmmm, BAE systems?