Minimig user feedback required

[Belial6]

When it comes to attaching new devices to the MiniMig, I would still like to see an Ethernet port added, but instead of using it directly, build all other ports into the FPGA, and tunnel them over the Ethernet.  This would allow access to any device that could be built in the FPGA and emulated on the network (including a network card).  The beauty is that for anyone wanting a real device attached to the MiniMig, all they have to do is build a small board that receives the tunneled data, and passes it to a real port.

So, if you wanted an IDE drive, you would build a virtual IDE connection in the FPGA core so that the as far as the software is concerned, it is a real IDE port.  This gets tunneled over the Ethernet port.  You then either run an emulated MiniMig IDE drive on your server (which could be a share, a disk image, or an entire drive) or you build a small board that has the sole purpose of receiving the tunneled data and converting it to be used with the real IDE connector on the board.

This approach would solve a lot of problems.  Namely:

* The number of spare pins would no longer be an issue, as once the Ethernet was hooked up, all other device connections would be on the single Ethernet port.
* Improvement to the MiniMig would have the hardware and software upgrades decoupled.  Something like scanner support could be added via software/firmware only by making it connect to a server, and then if an industrious hardware developer wanted to make it stand alone, a board could be built after the fact.
*USB devices would be accessible to the MiniMig.  By attaching the devices to a server, the server side emulation layer could take the entire load of the USB stack, and present the MiniMig with access to the device as something as simple as a serial device.
* Any device could be turned into a wireless device with the addition of a standard off the shelf wireless bridge.

Given the nature of the MiniMig, being able to add devices without having to build a physical board, and only building the physical port if there is enough demand, would be a huge benefit.

[Belial6]

bloodline wrote:
@Belial6

Not that clever an idea... It simply isn't worth using a MiniMig then, just use UAE...

Why?  I don't see any connection...

[Belial6]

On very small priority as wishes come, I was thinking about what Belial6 suggested.  I would do it slightly differently as I can't see his point exactly but his concept is good food for thought!  

The point is to take a very  small number of I/O pins that are available, and make an interface that is standard, cheap, can add an unlimited number of devices with no need to change the basic MiniMig board, has very little cpu load, and can work with all of the software that is looking for hardware that is directly hooked to an Amiga.

Right now, I don't hook printers up to my desktop.  I put them on the lan directly, or hook them to my files server.  I also don't put all of my disk storage on my PC.  My scanner is also sitting directly on the lan.  Why?  Because I want to be able to put these devices anywhere in the house.  I don't want them all sitting on my desk.  I also don't want to limit these devices to a single computer.  By putting these components on the network, the MiniMig can access any device that a PC can access.  Heck, I would thing MiniMig users would be MORE concerned with not having all of the devices sitting next the the computer.

For those that don't want their MiniMig to be stand alone, they can have that with greater functionality than making dedicated ports.  As I have said in other posts.  Just make a small board that untunnles the virtual port, and hook up your device.

[Belial6]

That is exactly what I have been suggesting except using an Ethernet connection.  Both would be dandy, but there are some features that Ethernet could support that USB cannot.  Of course, in theory, I suppose that you could run an Ethernet USB device.

[Belial6]

Since you said that you were already considering adding an ethernet connection with a TCP/IP stack to the new ARM PIC replacement board.  I have a suggestion that would really make it slick.

Add the ability to download disk images from the network via HTTP.  The way that I was envisioning it was to allow RSS feeds to be downloaded and displayed in the configuration menu.  Then when an entry is selected, the disks are downloaded to the SD card.  Also a way to delete the files from the menu would make it very usable indeed.

By using RSS, we could easily use existing tools to publish lists of our disk images from our file servers.  The crown jewel of this would be to get Back2Roots.org to publish their downloads via RSS.

A good example of what I am thinking of is the way that the Gametap player downloads and caches software.

This could also be done running on the Amiga side of the MiniMig if the base file system of the SD card were made available to the running MiniMig.  Having it run on the ARM would have the benefit of allowing new disks to be downloaded while running a game or AmigaOS.