Wither Natami?

[JimS]

the_leander wrote:

By no definition I know of (given their respective creators words on the matter if nothing else), could these two projects be called "real" amigas, since everything is being done by an emulator coded into an fpga.

You need to understand what an FPGA is before you say something like that. It's basically a huge pile of chips on solderless breadboards with a huge pile of wires to make the interconnects. The design software lets you specify how those chips are interconnected. Nothing is "emulated" unless you build a cpu on the FPGA and do emulation with it. (The port of   Minimig to the Altera DE1/2 boards does this for the PIC processor - replacing it with a soft Z80.

The best comparison I can think of is that the minimig, and it's cousins are like the Amiga Lorraine prototype- where the custom silicon was implemented with hard wired low level gates.... It's just that the FPGA makes that process faster & smaller.

[JimS]

bloodline wrote:
If the reimplementations in the FPGA were gate level accurate, to the Original Chips, I would agree.

But they are not.

The accuracy of the reimplementation in the FPGA doesn't have anything to do with whether the minimig & friends should be called "emulators" or "clones", "reimplementations" or what have you. It's the technology being used that I'm quibbling about.

[JimS]

bloodline wrote:

Ok fine. We can call it Brian if you like :-) But that doesn't make Hardware clone of an Amiga more or less accurate than Software clone of a Amiga. Some people get confused by that simple point.

No argument from me... Of course it's possible for a good software clone to be more accurate than a given hardware clone. Like I said I was quibbling about the terminology. UAE- software, Minimig & similar, hardware.