FPGA Replay Board

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Hmm.. Amiga Demo via SP-dif and HDMI on a 50" screen. Now that's quite a different experience than the enviroment under which they were created.

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Amigabook soon

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Make a daughterboard with another FPGA. Load 68060 softcore. Then we don't need to source any unobtainium

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Nice work!! Is that the 060 from the Axx card I sent ? Is Q4 an approximate release-date ?

Let's see if the base board actually becomes available first

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kedawa, CP1 and  System 16 should be doable.
Provided you don't loose the "keys" in the NVRAM first

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I wonder if the replay board will run even for 24/7 without having any issues.

That depends on the skills of mikej

In practice if the mechanical stress between the BGA package and the PCB is greater than the solder bonding.. there is trouble. Same if power consumption makes the voltage regulators exceed their power dissipation and thus thermal limit. Dust, moisture or smoke can also mess with the stability. Unusual bit patterns may cause electromagnetic interference within the board, especially if the power capacitors and inductance isn't properly designed. The link between the FPGA and the DRAM may be especially vurnable. Transients or earth loops from external connections is another gotcha.

I hope he does some 24/7 testing to see what fails first.

Some practical things to do:
 * Get a power supply with proper AC-line filters
 * Measure and remove and ground loops between screen, audio amplifier, power supply, etc
 * Fix an enclosure with enough venting holes
 * Use ESD protection at ALL times

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You can immerse it in fluorocarbons like fluorinert. Even alcohol, or mineral oil works. Just be careful with the lighter....

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Gawd... what a waste of good alcohol, much better to immerse ones self in it...

It has to be pure alcohol or else the ingredients that makes it taste will stick to the circuitboard wires ..

So the tasty variant can be used for other purposes

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The purpose of the 68060 board is to reverse engineer the CPU asfair?, so it really doesn't matter too much unless that's the purpose.

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Source for the A-Replay isn't released.

mikej/yaqube, How much power [W] does the Action Replay board use at average and peak? (and the 060-board?)

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Free from memory. The Action Replay uses an ARM cpu. It's a simple matter of loading the core of choice. Cores are written in VHDL or Verilog.
Cores designed for other board designs should be easy to adapt (wishbone?). So a massive amount of cores should appear soon after the release.
Macintosh 68k and 80386+VGA based demos ought to be quick. All 8-bit variants should pose no problem.

It's unclear weather the default firmware for the ARM will allow programs to be loaded into it and then executed. (mikej?)

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The ARM CPU that configures the FPGA with bitfiles and fakes floppydisc.

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I think Atari-ST, Macintosh 68k, 80386+VGA+SB

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It ought to be possible to create a working 68060 softcore, however it might be slow. Anyway a 68020 uses 200k transistors, while the 68060 uses 2500k transistors. Assuming linear size relations.. The 68020 softcore according to yaqube, takes about 60% out of the Xilinx Spartan-3E 1200 with 19k logic gates in total. Using two of the newer Spartan-6   XC6SLX75 for 120 USD each with 75k logic gates each it should be posssible to implement a 68060 softcore with the free Xilinx ISE Webpack synthesis software.

Any takers?

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Self modifying code can have significant perfomance gains when cycles are hard to come by.

Btw, does self modifying code put pipelined cpus into an undefined state?

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Btw, anyone with a schematic + synthesis software can write software for the board.