3 more NatAmi's - Yippee!

[alexh]

Piru is the only one with a sensible head on his shoulders.

NatAmi is going to be fun (for those who can afford it) at least as long as the devs remain interested.

It's not going to replace your modern desktop x64 PC. I don't even think it will replace your Amiga in the short term as compatibility will be it's Achilles heel for the short term. Power benchmarks against anything other than accelerated classic Amiga's are pretty much irrelevant.

At the same time I am glad the devs are enjoying making the RTL code, (although I do worry about the closed source approach they are taking vs MiniMig) Maybe one day their work will find it's way into an ultra low cost "Amiga Joystick" type application which a generation of parents and their kids might enjoy (re)discovering.

Natami will be the closest thing ever to being a REAL Amiga that has been seen since the A1200... ta very glad...

Erm, if you're discounting UAE then MiniMig is the closest thing to a Real Amiga there has been since an A1200. Because it is erm... REAL

NatAmi's closed source nature means their FPGA core is still very close to being vapourware until their product lands in the hands of users. I have respect for Thomas Hirsch though, he's shown he's a true engineer. (Unlike one or two of the NatAmi crowd )

[alexh]

Alex you know NatAmi stands for Native Amiga right? The following is from the NatAmi website:

It's a re-interpretation rather than re-creation of the Amiga chipset. There are going to be issues.

All features documented in the Commodore Hardware Reference Manual, work as written there.

That's just it. That manual is incomplete. They don't have the original source / schematics. They are reverse engineering the chipset. They are going to miss subtle timing an exceptions not documented. UAE and MiniMig both suffer from these compatibility issues (although as development of both continues information is wriggling out). Toni & Yaqube have done great work tracking these undocumented features over the last few years. They have shared them too which I think is very cool.

The early Natami's will likely have bugs and worse compatibility than other classic Amigas BUT everything can be fixed.

Absolutely. And because MiniMig was open source, when the original developer Dennis van Weeren left the scene, other engineers and enthusiasts were able to jump in and pick it up. The original MiniMig compatibility wasn't great but thanks to Jakub Bednarski (Yaqube) and Tobias Gubener (TobiFlex) and others (Peter Wendrich, MikeJ) it is now pretty good.

Most projects seem to become instant collectors items for the handful of people who could actually beta one before the devs gave up.

Exactly, e.g. You can't really buy MiniMig v1.1 PCB's anymore. But it doesn't matter! People have ported the code to at least four different open FPGA boards. If you know what you're doing you can port it to any future FPGA board (with the right I/O) too. The death of hardware manufacturing isn't the death of open source FPGA designs.

NatAmi being closed source will hopefully not stagnate if the creators enthusiasm slows. Lets see how it works out.

If the N68070 was ever burned into a real chip, it should be competitive with low end PPC (and ARM) in performance while using very little electricity.

Erm how did you come to that? Electricity usage in ASICs is primarily down to the physical implementation. How it was synthesised, partitioned and routed. The logical design has a small part to play but it is a small part. And unless NatAmi thought about power upfront (they may have, but it would be strange to do so for FPGA work) then it is unlikely that they have designed the VHDL/Verilog for ULP.

[alexh]

you can use Reverse Engineering techniques, where you can use solvents to dissolve the ceramic of the chip and gain access to the core.

Eh? They don't do that in the case of ceramic chips. They take the ceramic off the chip mechanically and use solvents to remove layers of the chip itself. But this type of reverse engineer is unlikely to be used for Amiga. More likely observations on I/O.

Either way, It is still using FPGA, but Jens is likely to have more accurate timings between the custom chips in his version.

The fact that it uses an FPGA is irrelevant. You can make a 100% accurate recreation of the digital portions of the Amiga chipset using an FPGA.

MiniMig was/is the underlying HDL core. The logic definition files. The PCB which bares its name is just an FPGA board, nothing more. The fact you had MiniMig running on 3 different FPGA boards before it existed should point to this. Also the fact you can get MegaDrive, Spectrum, MSX and other cores which run on that PCB shows you that it is not tied to MiniMig.