Sam460ex available with AmigaOS 4.1

[mbrantley]

Thanks, Philippe, for the update! I am most likely a future owner of this board, but I will be waiting for the audio driver and some further clarification of the SATA situation before purchasing. To serve as the desired drop-in replacement for my Sam440ep-flex board, I need the onboard audio working well for playback *AND* recording and the PCI slot free for my CatWeasel card. That means some kind of SATA solution that will work in the little 1X PCIe slot. I'm hoping that will be possible.

[mbrantley]

Taking as an example the custom hw emulation, an additional little board connected to the 80 pin expansion slot may reprogramm the FPGA (the jtag pins are replicated there)
This little board may provide additional joystick ports, aga/audio output etc..

Did you just say "AGA"? Sounds very intriguing. Even integrated ECS hardware support would be way cool.

[mbrantley]

What would be the point, dont say for running classic games from AOS4, because that as far as I can work out, and I could be wrong, would not be feasible/worth the effort

I have no notion whether it's practical or even possible. But, truth be told, I never spent a lot of time playing games even in the heydays of Amiga. The creative software was and is my bag, and I'm getting enormous pleasure from getting some of the old programs working on my Sam -- ImageFX, ADPro, VistaPro, LightWave, Personal Paint, TVPaint.

LightWave is running well for me except I can't use the wireframe animation preview feature because it depends on the old Amiga chipset to work. Similarly, no dice with Deluxe Paint short of UAE emulation.

Like I said, don't know if it's possible or worthwhile from a cost and manpower point of view, but it would be cool if a MiniMig coule be jammed in there somewhere.

[mbrantley]

I have wondered this way too often. So could you (or anyone else) finally explain to me, how does software emulation (UAE) become "hardware support", when basically the same SOFTWARE is running on a different kind of chip (FPGA instead of "generic" processor)?

I'll let a FPGA guru tackle the meat of that, and I'm not one.

But what I'm after is seamless emulation alongside native software so that I can't tell when it's native or emulated. Apple did this with two different architecture changes (68K to PPC and later PPC to Intel).

After this past weekend (and thanks to the assistance of number6), I have ADPro working pretty well in AOS4, and there is nothing that telegraphs to me that I'm not running native code. Seamless integration. On my Sam and with AOS4, LightWave is the same except it lacks the necessary emulation or hardware to handle the chipset work on the preview animations.

And when I'm running UAE (even with the excellent RunInUAE by Chris), it isn't really seamless.

But... this thread is focused in another direction and I guess we're straying a bit. But the subject is a worthwhile one, I think

[mbrantley]

Cool. Thanks, Hans, for the great explanation.

[mbrantley]

Next U-Boot versions for our board will include modifications on the DDR config code to achive higher speed transfers.

Great to hear, Max. Keep on tweaking!