MiniMig with AGA

[mikej]

Of course, no problem.
/Mike

[mikej]

Just a quick update. I'm still waiting for an assembly slot.
I decided to get the prototypes built locally, for a quick turnaround ironically, but they are really busy. It's going to be early July before I get a working board.

I'm off to Glastonbury music festival so I'll be out of touch for a week or so.

/Mike

[mikej]

If you find a matching LCD + keyboard + box it sure will work.
LCD is usually LVTTL or LVDS. Keyboard with small size might be worse, and a box fit for the purpose even worse.

I've had the hi-res LCD/touch screen up and running with the board, there's a picture of it somewhere on the FPGAARCADE front page.

I'll stick up some pictures when I fire it up again. Looked nice!
/Mike

[mikej]

It's a 800 x 480 panel and 24 bit lvttl.

[mikej]

"How long before that Minimig AGA is ready?"

Xilinx have pushed out the Spartan3 delivery again, should arrive this week.
Production is scheduled for the week after, but as I haven't got the FPGAs yet they can't start kitting the job, so it may slip.
One problem in Sweden is everything shuts down for a month in the summer...

I have found a production partner in China now, so after the first 60 boards the components will be sourced and assembled in China, so costs will be lower and lead times will be shorter.

I wanted to get the first ones built locally so I can see if all the bits fit - it's much easier the handle production problems when you can see the board
/Mike

[mikej]

The Xilinx's (FPGAs) have just arrived!

[mikej]

Well, I can post a picture of the chip package

I certainly won't be soldering 60 of these, the machines will be doing that!

If I can, I'll film the production....
/Mike

[mikej]

The FPGA is a Spartan3E - these are still available.
Connecting a A1200 keyboard would no problem.

Most interest in the board is actually from the arcade game community where it is used as a multigame JAMMA card - or with the vector output board as a multi-vector game which hasn't been done before, to my knowledge.
/Mike

[mikej]

BGA packages are far better electrically, and they are actually easier to assemble than fine pitch QFPs. The next generation board, if I do one, will be Spartan6 and DDR2/3.

I haven't got the Amiga data with me, but if I remember correctly the keyboard is 5V, gnd and serial clock/data - so you can probably wire it up to the PS2 connector and modify the interface block which handles mouse/kb to also handle the Amiga protocol.
/Mike

[mikej]

ah yes, I was thinking of the ST keyboard which has the MCU on the keyboard.

There are 30 odd IOs to the Amiga Keyboard, so you would need to wire it up to the main expansion connector if you wanted to do this.
/Mike

[mikej]

It's a bit hard to say how fast it will go. The current TG68K will need to gain a simple cache in front of the DRAM to speed things up otherwise it is locked to the memory cycle time.

I have got about half way through a new 68K implementation which is table based and pipelined. It runs well at the moment, but it is not complete. It currently runs at over 40MHz with a two cycle pipeline and instruction prefetch. I am running it against the real 68K to make sure it is well behaved.

It is a background project, I'm not sure I'll ever get a chance to finish it at the moment. If I do, I will see how fast it runs on a small Virtex6 (high performance part).
/Mike

[mikej]

The expansion board has a higher performance processor with local memory, for those who want a bit more speed...
Exact spec of processor to be determined.
64MByte of RAM on the base board at the moment.

[mikej]

The USB to PS2 "convertor" is passive, the keyboard does the prototcol switch.
but yet, it should work. I'll try one.
/Mike

[mikej]

True, but we are on a roll now.
Besides, I have parts for 60 boards in a box under my desk which is too much inventory not to get the boards made in a hurry.

I am still waiting for production

(The Chinese firm could do it tomorrow and I have agreed a quote for the next batch, but the parts are already in Europe so it doesn't make sense to send them back to China.)

[mikej]

I've been on holiday the last week, back on it end of this week.
Production is moving ahead as far as I know ...

[mikej]

Back from holiday so I will harass the production company.
It's certainly talking longer than I expected, but we are in the home straight now.
/Mike