natami

[JimS]

...and feature creep claims yet another victim

I'm still hopeful that something will come of this, but I'm not going to be holding my breath...

Babbage Syndrome. Get almost done, then think of something even cooler.

[JimS]

Of course it's an emulator.  It doesn't have an Agnus or Paula or Denise...
It uses an FPGA (The P is a clue..).

It's emulated in hardware.  Of course, LOTS of stuff is emulated nowadays.
The line is very blurry...
Lots of REAL chips have parts that emulate other things by design...



We need a "Turing Test" for these emulators.

desiv

Oh Mighty Zarquon! We're not going to start this "what's the difference between emulation and reimplementation" flame war again, are we? ;-)

[JimS]

Re:The NatAmi team
While it has been observed that a FPGA is an emulator, it is not a software emulator.  It is much more massively parallel than a multicore CPU and can run things much more efficiently.  More importantly, it is a step toward a baked chip and even an ASIC if the market will bear the design costs.  What the market wouldn't bear, I'm convinced, is both the NatAmi and FPGAArcade boards at the same time.

If I had the cash, I might have got both. But I think you're right. The folk here it seems see the FPGAArcade as the "AGA minimig", but it's more than that, with cores for many classic machines on the way. So it has a market much wider than the NatAmi. I'm sure down the road, many of those advanced chipset features of the NatAmi could be implemented in the minimig core for the Replay.

[JimS]

It was my understanding (could be wrong) that the FPGA on the FPGA Arcade wasn't as big as the one on the Natami.
I didn't think there would be enough gates to fit what Natami was trying to do???

desiv

I'm not sure about that either. I believe Natami uses the Altera FPGA and FPGAarcade uses Xlinx Spartan 3. Not that that makes a whole lot of difference, just makes it harder for amateurs like me to relate the sizes of these things. ;-) Minimig itself has been ported to a couple of Altera boards, might be possible to go the other way.
Probably over in that 100 plus page thread, someone asked how much of the FPGA is used by the minimig AGA core.