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Author Topic: New Amiga Accelerators  (Read 21840 times)

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Offline alexh

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Re: New Amiga Accelerators
« on: June 05, 2008, 09:31:22 PM »
Very unlikely that people would want anything less than a fast 060 board (faster than any available today) that would involve creating or licensing (from Rodolphe of Czuba tech) a 68000 SDRAM controller.

With a 100MHz 060 board you would increase your market by a large amount as owners of current 060 boards would consider upgrading.

Unfortunately you'll never source enough 060 chips to do even one production  run though, I've been asking around they just dont exist as NOS. Maybe if you could find a good recycling center who recycled a batch of telecoms equipment or something?

The next thing is that a lot of users are used to having an accelerator with a DMA capable SCSI controller. Unfortunately you'll never get these chips ever again. Your only hope is to make your own DMA capable IDE controller... many months work and increased cost as your CPLD/FPGA has to be much bigger. To leave out a "high speed" disk interface would alienate all potential 060 upgraders and most potential new buyers.

The development of any four layer board and a prototype run will cost in excess of $20k+

You will never make a profit. I very much doubt you will break even.

Have you even considered where you will get the edge connectors from? They havent been made for 10's of years. Tooling costs alone will be huge and the MOQ will run into the 1000's!
 

Offline alexh

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Re: New Amiga Accelerators
« Reply #1 on: June 05, 2008, 09:56:18 PM »
But the "casual gamer" doesn't need any accelerator!?

Just an A1200 and a RAM board.
 

Offline alexh

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Re: New Amiga Accelerators
« Reply #2 on: June 05, 2008, 11:50:06 PM »
Quote

Tron2k2 wrote:
new 68060s can still be had from Freescale in various packages and speeds

That (as I have found out) is not true. Whilst "on the books" they havent been made for many years and they are only selling off back stock... in limited numbers.
 

Offline alexh

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Re: New Amiga Accelerators
« Reply #3 on: June 06, 2008, 11:27:45 AM »
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countzero wrote:
A soft 68k core would be dead cheap compared to real 68ks

Yeah right... NOT. An FPGA large enough and fast enough to have a 50MHz 060 would cost $$$
 

Offline alexh

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Re: New Amiga Accelerators
« Reply #4 on: June 06, 2008, 05:05:49 PM »
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Make a PCI card for the NatAmi60 that can hold 16 Gigs of ram.

Is the PCI address space even that big?
 

Offline alexh

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Re: New Amiga Accelerators
« Reply #5 on: June 07, 2008, 09:10:58 PM »
Quote

Atheist wrote:
159 Megs a second transfer rate, sustained, can hard drives go that fast?

The SAS / SATA II 3G drives I design do 180Mbyte/sec average 270Mbyte/sec peak.

Never buy a PCI SATA card unless you want PCI to be the bottleneck.