FPGA Replay Board

[mikej]

I emailed them through the web site and never heard anything. I hope I am on the list.

Email me again with your "ravard" user name, I don't think I received any mail from you.
use the support@fpgaarcade.com email address.

Just sourced some 68060 sockets. They were not easy to get in China!
/Mike

[mikej]

+1
Will there be an online order form ?
Sadly, I cannot buy one if it is only through email and PMs.

Yes, the new website will feature on-line ordering.
I am also talking to a number of Amiga distributors.

The fact my day job has gone crazy and I am spending 60% of my time in China has not helped recently. The new core is now working, and we are testing extensively.
I have 40 boards still in stock which are in Stockholm waiting for me to test and ship.
I am taking ~8 weeks off to get this thing done, starting on Monday.

The main board will be production released and be available in the next few weeks.
There were a few problems, but these are resolved now. The daughter board is in final layout stage. There are some design decisions still to be made, but I have sourced all the components for ~15 prototype boards now.

Again, sorry it is taking some time but I have invested a huge amount of time and money in this, and it will happen. It is just too risky to build many 100s of boards before I am 100% happy.

About 20 boards are in the field now, and all working perfectly. Let's keep it that way
/MikeJ
(Shekou, Shenzhen China)

[mikej]

I was under the impression that Jakub's 100MHz CPU was a full 68060 just overclocked and still running stable.

Correct, the final mask revision had greater timing margin and some chips can be run at >100MHz perfectly reliably.
/MikeJ

[mikej]

So in essence the fpga arcade should be a more powerful a1200 with a high compatability rate.What percentage of compatability to old software should we expect.Will it be able to function as essentially a new and faster aga amiga computer? Also the other accelerator ram upgrade thingy project for the a500 looks sweet.Lots of cool miggy stuff about now.What to buy.With lorianos case+daughterboard+fpgaarcade this will be a wallet drought.

We aim for 100% compatibility, but with additional features which can be enabled or disabled.
High resolution video out (DVI/HDMI), new audio DAC, USB, ethernet etc.
/MikeJ

[mikej]

Hi,
It's going well - moving flat next week finally so actually shipping boards again will be possible. The work on the new core is progressing well and I am working on it full time currently.
/Mike

[mikej]

What about the OTHER FPGA cores? Atari ST, C64 etc....

I'm also very interested in them

I was prompted to post because when clearing out old emails I found one from MikeJ to me in April telling me I was "the next" to get a Replay board

You are
I am still in moving hell, but unpacked the boards yesterday.
/MikeJ

[mikej]

I have been in discussion with several distributors. If the beta testing goes well we are ready to roll out. I have moved within Stockholm, but everything has been packed up essentially for the last two months, very frustrating.
Just getting back to normal now.
/Mike

[mikej]

There are three of us so far working on separate parts of the design.
Once we have a coherent working release (including new boot loader) it will be opened up so more people can help.
/Mike

[mikej]

Thanks for the kind words.
Jakub and I sync'd this week. We have both been kinda busy.
I have just moved flat which has caused chaos, but I have the servers and workstation up and running again, and a place to work.
I talked to the factory this morning, so it is coming together.
Swamped at the moment, but getting there.
/Mike

[mikej]

"I'm with y'all.... Sometimes it looks like people think it's still the glory days of Commodore, with a staff a full-time engineers instead of a few dedicated enthusiasts working in their spare time. BTW, It's my understanding that most of the cores are supposed to come from the "community" once the board is in wider distribution."

Other people are working on porting code yes, but I will be doing this as well.
I supply a wrapper which gives access to all the IO and then it is quite easy to drop other stuff into that and load it from the SD card.
/Mike

[mikej]

Just ordered another 100 more FPGAs...
/M

[mikej]

Yes Xc3s1600.
I am shipping one for to Daddy for the x500 case.
I am having problems getting enough 68060s of the correct mask set for the daughterboard. I am going to have to screen at the supplier, many of the chips are re-printed.
/Mike

[mikej]

I agree and I've decided to push the base board into production ahead of the daughter board.

The main reason for late shipping is low yield on the 50 production boards I had made in China. I needed to work out what was wrong with these  before making more.

There are two concerns.
1 - Backfeed through DVI. This was corrected in the B boards with a special regulator to the DAC. There is still some leakage and I need to make sure the additional load of the daughterboard would not fry anything.
2 - DRAM timing issues. The current core uses fixed timing and this does not work across a large run of devices. The new DRAM controller requires some software config and training, so this got tied up with the complete ARM code rewrite.

The ARM code is now up and running again. It is not universal yet (as in suitable for booting other platforms) but getting there.
I have just ordered most of the components and if my final memory testing goes well this weekend I'll get more boards assembled. Hopefully the 30 or so I have on my bench will also work fine with the new code and can be shipped.

Cheers,
Mike

[mikej]

I have no problem getting 68060's at a good price, just not the correct mask set.
I have 20 "fake" ones
So, plan is to get a tester down at the disti in shenzhen and screen every device.

I am looking at an adapter board which will fit in the pins of the 68060 daughter board and carry either a 680x0 or a much faster Virtex7 class FPGA running a soft CPU.

Full speed ahead chaps ....

[mikej]

@mikej
do you know how to identify the correct mask? i think there was a copyback issue that the previous mask were not capable of carrying up properly.

as for softcore in fpga, do you think this can be concurrent to a 060 already? has tg68 been worked on further, since tobias has given up? this is really a sad story this development has practically been killed by natami hype..

We are just reading the product code register which contains mask revision. If you have any data this is not reliable I would love to know about it.

The TG68 is still being developed, I am also running some tests.
I have my own core which is smaller and faster, but I have not had time to work on it for a while. These are both 68020 (lacking MMU and FPU) but can run faster than a 68060.

/Mike

[mikej]

I also was involved with demos on the Atari, and the idea is to be 100%cycle accurate for both cores. A1200 with 020 initially, then overclocked/060 mode.

It will not lose sync as the hardware is very close to the original hardware.
It remains to be seen if we can bend the timing from the original chipset to work with DVI without breaking it - or adding a frame delay which is not ideal. The high-res outputs have customized timing and work well with DVI/HDMI.
/Mike