FPGA that upgrades Amiga 500 custom chipset or allow internet browsing...

[JimS]

I've been thinking about things along these lines for a while... not that I have the resources to do it... but it's fun to speculate about. ;-) I don't think you're going to squeeze an updated graphics chipset onto the joystick or printer port. I was thinking of something that ran in parallel with the Amiga's chipset but at higher color depth. The extended graphics would be supered over the stock chipset, genlock style. Maybe the thing could work at a VGA scan rate and delace the stock chipset.

The other thing I had in mind was a "Super I/O board". There are lots of little breakout boards made for microcontrollers that do some cool stuff. TCP/IP, MP3 players, WIFI etc. Many of these seem to use the SPI bus. I figured a Zorro card that could host a bunch of these would be fun.

Anyway, it seems to me a lot of these could be implemented on the Replay.


In other words, I'm with freqmax. ;-)

[JimS]

Perhaps the FPGA Replay board could be mounted into a Side-Car like case and interfaced to the left-side expansion port of the A500.  It could function as an accelerator/RAM expansion/HD (on SD Card)/De-interlacer and USB ports expansion.  If it takes up no more space than a GVP530, it would maintain its retro look, but with much more modern internal specs.

If you were going to do that, it makes more sense to use a generic FPGA dev board like the Xula2. It's has the advantage of being smaller, and cheaper because it lacks all the stuff that would be redundant when attached to a 500.

[JimS]

I believe SPI is planned (tentatively?) for the Vampire 500 or Vampire 1200.

And yes, you can get microcontrollers that run the entire TCP/IP stack internally as well as providing ethernet/wifi - which would take a huge load off the CPU in an Amiga.

That offloading is the primary thing that made the Amiga great in the first place.