Excitement about NatAmi

[Darrin]

What really.  The guy out of an office and a gentleman and a Hamster

I think if you look carefully you'll see it is actually Richard Gere and a gerbil.  

[Darrin]

I think they're waiting for the Minimig AGA to be released to copy their code.  

[Darrin]

I thought that this would be possible but the Minimig license renders it unusable by the team.  Yes, I've asked this on the forum.

Why is that?  The Minimig is Open Source isn't it?  Does that prevent the NatAmi team using the code for a retail product?

The reality is that the board went from 4-layer to 6-layer to add onboard add Gbit-ethernet and USB.  Hence, going from LX to MX has taken longer than originally planned.  A PCI slot was removed and 2 more memory chips were also added...

...but I suppose someone looking for actual answers would have gone to the official forum and discovered this for themselves...
[listens for the wolves to cry 'feature creep']

No one wants to buy a computer today that can't get online out of the box...the Natami team included.

The problem is that we keep hearing "NatAmi will have this", "NatAmi will have that" on these forums, but we never see pictures or hard specs.  With regards to the FPGA Arcade/Minimig AGA, we have pictures posted, we see Workbench running, we have production updates and we have SysInfo screen grabs.

I've visited the NatAmi set several times and the only real updates I see are to the site graphics.  Quite honestly, I have no idea what the current specs are, how far along the board is, who is working on it or what the plan forward is.

[Darrin]

No!  The problem is you don't look for answers.  Post your questions on the actual Natami forum where someone who actually can answer you will.
You also conveniently forget that their is a video of the LX board running OS3.1 and running A500 games back in april or may.
The MX board is the final board.
Go back and look at when the "Minimig with AGA" thread started and where it's at.
Too many people have selective memory around here it seems.

I look for answers, but I don't expect to have to dig for them.  If this is a commercial product then they must be using ex-Commodore PR staff.

Too many people don't know what "passage of information" means.

[Darrin]

No.  Too many people think passage of information is a requirement every 5 minutes.
You don't hear about a new iPhone being released until it's already in production.
Natami MX is not in production.  That seems to be all you really want to hear.

Whereas "every 6 months" is acceptable?  You are aware that it is now November so "a video in April" is somewhat old news?

[Darrin]

@Darrin

The reasons the LX board never went to market are as follows:

• The Altera Cyclone III FPGA was too small to hold all of the cores.
• The dual-bus architecture wasn't saturating more than half of the bandwidth of the DDR2 memories.
• The I/O pins could be put to better use with a single memory bus, making the whole thing smaller and cheaper.

The main deal-breaker for the LX board was that the 68050 is a larger core than the LX could hold with all of the rest of the features added to the SuperAGA core.

The MX board design has all of these things corrected and more.  The Cyclone IV chip has nearly twice the capacity of the earlier Cyclone III.

See, that's the sort of interesting stuff I like to read about.  The AROS Team manage an update thread at least twice a day (or does it just seem that way).  There's so many people interested in the NatAmi that you would think there would be regular updates as goals were met or features agreed upon.

[Darrin]

Not much effort, but the designer said he removed 1 PCI and added USB/Ethernet option onboard.

I believe Piru's point is that instead of f'ing about with the mobo and delaying the project, stick with what you have and use a cheap USB PCI card in order to get the hardware out of the door and into the hands of the consumer.  USB on the motherboard could wait until the "NatAmi-II".

[Darrin]

Seems like I didn't miss the "holy wars" after all, some points of view expressed on this site are very strange indeed, I could jump in here and start dissing the MiniMig but where's the point in that just cos it's not my personal choice, so why do you diss  the Natami...

Dunno what age half of you are but you obviously weren't around when the Amiga was at it's peak and folk held user groups where you met up with real Amiga users, we didn't diss each other because one person liked one bit of Amiga hardware and the others didn't...

Seem's to me like there's a hell of a lot of Windoze and PC users here who'd be better buggering off back to their PC's and let real Amiga enthusiasts enjoy themselves in peace...

Well back then we had plenty of Atari ST owners to dis.

[Darrin]

We only had one in these parts and he spent most of his time at our group meetings, but we never dissed him, reckon we just felt sorry for the poor little chap...

Every village has one.  

[Darrin]

The hardware-banging functions of the Natami should be well documented by the time of release so updating drivers from the AROS 68k sources should be a simple matter.  At first we'll be using AfaOS though.

Cheers for the update.

Is there any chance that someone could do something with the NatAmi website and update that to show the current status?

[Darrin]

It shouldn't be too long now...  ;-)

Also, the use of AfaOS may be a stale statement but since the AROS Kickstart Replacement Bounty Phase 2 requires some changes in the AROS kernal, it seems likely that we'll have to wait a bit for a free OS to run on the Natami.

To be honest, if I can get my hands on a NatAmi then I'll be looking at loading something like Classic Workbench AGA or AmiKit.