FPGA Replay Board

[Ral-Clan]

You guys ever thought about joining forces with Loriano and offering a complete system for sale when everything is done?

I haven't been able to find any prices on this.  From the estimates I have seen online, it's going to be a lot more expensive than a regular MiniMig, right?

The price I saw somewhere was something like 600 Euro, is that correct?  That would work out to over $800 CAD for me.  Yikes!

[Ral-Clan]

Okay, I've just recently dropped into this thread and done some searching on the internet to see if I could get some FPGA Replay newbie questions answered, but didn't find much about this RTG 060 thing.  I couldn't find a FAQ, for instance, that dealt with what we are discussing here.

So what exactly are we talking about in this thread here?  Some sort of hardware attachment that goes onto the FPGA arcade replay to enable it to be an AGA 060 RTG Amiga?

Please bear with me, as I'm just trying to get the basic info sorted out from a 150 page thread.

I hear all this talk about a "daughterboard" but I don't know what that is in this context. I thought the FPGA was already a device that could be reprogrammed to be any sort of early computer, using different "cores"?  Right?  Why, then would it need a daughterboard?

Without this daughterboard, the FPGA Arcade can already turn itself into an ECS A500 with the regular MiniMig core. Right?

Now, someone is writing a new AGA core that will also allow RTG. Right?

But...to enable it to have a super 68060, you need to purchase some sort of daughter card?  Am I in the ballpark?

Does the daughter card need a real 68060 chip?  Does it come with one?  Do you need to purchase the 68060 separately?  I thought these were hard to find and expensive nowadays?  Can it do the 060 in FPGA?

I'm not really clear on why the FPGA Arcade, which already seems very capable, would need any attachment hardware to make it become an AGA Amiga.

Sorry for all the basic questions.  If someone could just send me in the direction of a FAQ that would be helpful.

[Ral-Clan]

Ah, thanks Darrin, that clears things up nicely.

I'd be interested in seeing the speed difference between the bare FPGA and one with the daughter board...i.e. AIBB.

Just where are people expected to get the 68060 chips for the daughter board, nowadays?

[Ral-Clan]

Oh Fiddlestix!

How can I play Stunt Car Racer datalinked between 2 machines with an FPGA Arcade?  It needs a compatible serial port.

Well, I've already been told that there will be a serial port compatible with MIDI interfaces a few pages back in this thread (I assume original Amiga MIDI interfaces, I didn't get an answer when I asked that)....so half of your problem is solved.

[Ral-Clan]

@Ral-Clan :

If you want to make your own opinion on different speed  between the base FPGA Arcade board and the daughter board, there are two  videos which will certainly be interested for you...

Thanks.  Soooo....in the first video you are running an AGA '020 core?
I didn't think the AGA 020 core had been publicly released yet.

Second video was good, but I'd like to see some Amiga stuff running on the 060 daughterboard.

I'd really love to see a benchmark utility compare the AGA '020 core with the '060 daughterboard (and both to a regular A4000/040).

[Ral-Clan]

What kind of stuff do you want to see? Just tell us and we will see what we can do.


There was published a screenshot of SysInfo running on my board with TG68K core at 28.36 MHz with data and instruction caches. The performance is comparable with 030@50MHz.

I'd love to see ImageFX, DeluxePaint and Lightwave or some other renderer being tested.  Some MIDI software like Bars & Pipes would also be useful.

[Ral-Clan]

I have a question - may seem naive but please bear with me:

It seems the standard FPGA Arcade running WITHOUT this special daughter 060 daughter card will already nicely behave as an AGA 68020 Amiga (essentially an A1200).

So, wouldn't it be possible for the FPGA (or future versions of the FPGA) just to run the 68020 at multiple times the speed of a regular 68020 to get speeds similar to a 68060?

I say that because in UAE, the instructions suggest that you set your emulated Amiga to 68020 CPU mode (because the 68020 is the CPU that has the best emulation coded for it - 68040/060 emulation still lags behind in development).

Even though the emulated Amiga in UAE is set to 68020, WinUAE can run your "virtual 68020" Amiga as fast as the host computer's processor will allow.  Because of this, an emulated 68020 A1200 can run much faster than an real hardware Amiga with a 68060 accelerator card.

So why not just have a faster 68020 CPU in FPGA rather than adding a real 68060 daughtercard?