FPGA Replay Board

[mikej]

Nice to see the site/forum getting some love!
It says the boards are shipping, so who got his!?

Mainly active developers - thought you guys would like stuff to run on the boards

[mikej]

Can I refer you to the forums on FPGAArcade while I am writing up some notes on this - basically to save me doing everything twice.

The svn server is a development server for people actively working on projects - this is to stop it getting overloaded. Every user has write access. When we near code release I'll start taking snapshots to the main website.
If you want to contribute just send me an email with details. I am prioritizing board shipments to people working on porting cores etc for obvious reasons (they need something to work on).
Best,
MikeJ

[mikej]

So how much does it cost?

I need to add this stuff back to the new website
~199E + VAT for the base model.
Prices from resellers will vary.

[mikej]

Any idea when we will see this product in AmigaKit.com or is this going to be a Natami clone?

AmigaKit have a sample already. Commercial discussions will take place when volume pricing is finalized.

Final software tweaks are being put into place - we found a minor issue with the boot loader recently.

There are nearly 200 boards manufactured now, which is somewhat more than Natami.
/MikeJ

[mikej]

AmigaKit have a sample already. Commercial discussions will take place when volume pricing is finalized.

Final software tweaks are being put into place - we found a minor issue with the boot loader recently.

There are nearly 200 boards manufactured now, which is somewhat more than Natami.
/MikeJ

I should also say that

Laurent aka Faranheit
AMEDIA COMPUTER FRANCE

have had a PO open with me for a long time and will be the first to receive bulk shipment.
/Mike

[mikej]

Mike do you have a rough idea when we can get a board to test from you? Weeks? Or into the new year?

weeks.
/Mike

[mikej]

Maybe I can get someone to purchase on my behalf and then send to NZ? Seems crazy though, hoping it's made available for us at the bottom of the world :-(

For regions not covered by the resellers, I will sell direct to.
Drop me a mail, details on the website.
Cheers,
Mike

[mikej]

Sounds good Jim. Any news on the performance of the CPU soft-core? And on the performance of AGA modes?

Keep an eye on the FPGAArcade forum. I'm working on a few last issues with the blitter/AGA code, and I want to get that stable before I turn the CPU cache on again.
I hope to get a stable, feature complete, version out next week.
I'm moving flat (again) on the 22nd, then I can start testing and shipping boards again.

/MikeJ

[mikej]

Last time I checked it seemed to be the optimization of the hard drive and floppy emulation that was holding things up on the Amiga side.  There's also plenty of news there on how the other cores are progressing.

Floppy (including SCP) and hard disk stuff all done - including direct block transfers to speed thinks up. RDB synthesis is missing still.
Main focus is on tweaking CPU/chipset access speeds and graphics glitches in AGA mode.
It should remain usable now as it was the disk stuff which was disruptive.

/Mike

[mikej]

Cheers Mike.  So I should be OK to look at reflashing my board and using the new core?

Yup. Remember to update the ARM firmware and the ini file as well.
/Mike

[mikej]

Not to be an ass.... but any ETA on when us "non-developers, but enthusiasts" can get our hands on this board?

"2015" is a valid answer to this question, I'm just looking for a ballpark here

ASAP. I currently have over 100 boards in stock and I'm setting up a production run now.
I'll start shifting boards to distributors in the next two weeks.

[mikej]

Hi Mike,

Im still unable to get this board working at all.

Hi,
I haven't heard from you in a while. Drop me a mail again and I'll walk you through it.
I recommend the SD card is used to update the firmware.
Did you wire up the RS232 debug port?
What did you do in your first attempt, did you overwrite the bootloader?
If so, and it no longer boots on the RS232 port, we can use BOSSA over the USB port to reflash the bootloader.

/Mike

[mikej]

Hi,

Will bring it home this weekend and give you a shout.

Great. I am moving my work area Sunday/Monday to the new flat, but I should be able to talk you through it.

We'll start a new thread on my forum as well to document the process!
Best,
Mike

[mikej]

Hi Pampers.
Most of the information you need should be on the Replay forum.
The svn.fpgaarcade.com repos is public. There is a user name/password (displayed on the webpage) but the release area you can get to directly. This is just to reduce server load from robots.

The latest Amiga core is in the Amiga status thread, I'll push this to the release area in the next day or so once I've fixed the RTG blitter.

In general more monitors cope with VGA rather than DVI/HDMI (the Amiga output is a bit non-standard). You can use a DVI to VGA adapter which picks off the analog signals.

In the ini file you can change the default sync format (composite or separate h/c) and enable/disable double scan.
/MikeJ

[mikej]

Thanks Mike

You recon that DVI-VGA adapter and then VGA-HDMI cable would work with my monitor or not too much chances?

Also is there any update on daughterboard or at least some network solution?

No, either DVI to VGA will work on pretty much every monitor (you will probably need to enable doublescan). DVI/HDMI works with the RTG, and on some monitors with the native output (ironically with doublescan off). There is a big thread about this on the forum.

/Mike

[mikej]

This is a joke. I talked to Mike 2 years ago, and not 1 thing he told me has happened. It's been 12 years in the making in. 12 YEARS!!!. 12 years of empty promises.

I does not take a smart Man to understand this garbage.

Hi.

A few points.

In the last 2 years a lot of things have happened. Volume production (2 batches) of a complex six layer board. Sourcing and supply chain. Manufacturing and production test of 200 boards. Writing and debugging of 1000s of lines of complex code.

All of this done in my free time, at my cost. If I tried to do this as a business, the cost of the boards would be 10x what they are now, maybe more.

We have a stable, working 020 AGA Amiga with 64MB and RTG. That's not bad for the last year to be honest.

How are you contributing?
/Mike