FPGA Replay Board

[Darrin]

You're wasting your time.  I sent him 10 goats, 50 chickens, jesus' left pinky finger, a map showing the location of the fountain of youth, my first born son and a pair of Angelina jolie's used knickers for the same thing and he never delivered.  

[Darrin]

If MikeJ has just spent $20k to $30k on getting the FPGA Arcade Replay board certified, he must have some serious plans for mass production and sales to recoup that amount of investment.

Hopefully there is a cheaper method of obtaining those certifications for small scale inventors, or many small projects would never see the light of day (if these certifications are required to make them available for sale to the public).

I think it would be a great thing for public awareness about the Amiga and all of the great old games that were available for it, if MikeJ's Replay board ends up for sale in large retail outlets and sells in the ten's of thousands of units, but some how I don't think that is MikeJ's plan.  Unless he has been quietly working on such plans behind the scenes for a long time and has an investment partner with a marketing plan that includes advertising and packaging, including a case w/PSU and pre-installed AmigaForever with Amiga ROMs & lots of games and applications.  (I am not even sure that Colanto's license would allow such pre-installation of their product)

Any product that raises Amiga awareness and brings a few former Amiga users back to using this, or looking at other developments in the world of Amiga today, is a positive thing.  Any Amiga related product that can be successfully marketed in mass numbers will be a good for all other parts of the Amiga community as a whole.  With a little bit of luck and the right marketing, packaging and investment backing, the Replay board could maybe be successful in selling many thousand units (not just to Amiga fans, but Arcade fans as well), and with a little more luck, could even break into the realm of selling a few ten's of thousands of units, but it would not be easy and could be a risky investment if sales turned out to be not so good and too much stock was produced.  Packaging and marketing would be two critical items that will control how much success it can achieve.  That plus MikeJ's desire of how big he wants this product to be.  He might prefer to keep it small and completely under his control, without any influence from outside partners.

Let's face it, the beauty of Mike's board is that it isn't just a Minimig.  It can be whatever the user wants it to be and with multiple cores on a single card it could be the ultimate retro computer and/or arcade games machine.

Right now I have my Chameleon64 configured where I can select between a C64, Amiga or Spectrum on start-up.

I love FPGA machines.  

[Darrin]

I "think" it will run at full speed, the design is timing-clean now. However, I have broken write to SD card at the moment, so I can't save a config file.
I will recompile and change the defaults to check.
It is running with selectable scan doubler now and svhs output it working well.
Composite is a bit iffy in PAL but the sync's are not quite right. Using my test pattern generator I get a clean picture.
/Mike

I was wondering what the delay was.

Has the soft-68020 core been updated?

[Darrin]

The amiga core was delayed because of broken write to sdcard.
I,m also waiting for this because of core compatibility problems.
Lets hope we will be there soon ;-)

I dont know if there is a st core yet, but there will be it say so on mikes new site.

Meanwhile, the x86 Core is working like a charm.  The softcore Pentium 2 manages around 600MHz which allows the installing of WinXP if you put the ISO of the install DVD on the SD card and mount it.  The emulated Radeon 7xxx series graphics card allocates 64MB of RAM which is enough to play lots of games.  Just make sure you get a huge SD card as Windows needs a large hard file especially if you plan on installing lots of games.

Here's a screen shot of the FPGA Aracde running World of Warcraft in a 1024x768 display on WindowsXP (it is rather large so I had to link to it):
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b134/darrin01311/FPGA1.jpg

[Darrin]

Nice one Darrin ;-)
you got me going for a moment, like what have I been missing !!!
But yes runs smooth LOL

Sorry, couldn't resist.  

[Darrin]

Genuine MC68060RC50 with 41J mask work, others have bugs.

They are getting expensive. I am talking to a supplier here.
By the time we include shipping, handling )and testing it will be around 60Euro + vat for the processor. (Worst case 70Euro I think) Is this a price people are willing to pay?

If I buy larger numbers I can get a better price.
Where there any XC68060RC50 with the same mask set? Are there any faster versions?
Re-labelling is a major problem here, so I am talking to a friend who runs a chip testing company here as well.

/MikeJ

I'll have on at that price.  Please put me down for one (and the expansion board).

[Darrin]

I received yesterday a box of brand-new genuine MC68060RC50s ... but they were the 1st mask set so I have rejected them. The supplier is attempting to find more of the 41J revision. If we can't get them in Shenzhen, I don't think we are going to get them anywhere
.
We may have to accept the second mask set where all but one of the Errata's were fixed, but they don't go as fast as the 41Js. The young ladies are on the case here, I'll know more in a week or so.

/MikeJ

The young ladies are on your what???

[Darrin]

ha ha, I won't tell you what happened in the bar now
/MikeJ

LOL, I can imagine.  Remember, I worked in Shekou for a while.  

[Darrin]

I still hopeful to get boards in May. CPUs are proving the issue....
/Mike

How about an option for 68040 CPUs?

[Darrin]

I'll buy a bigger SD card and try it as well with the new firmware.
I'm running a different filesystem so it will be a good test.
/MikeJ

Talking of new firmware, I'll be home on Sunday and I'll have a week off... hint, hint.

[Darrin]

The FAT32 has also 4GB file size limit.

On your daughterboard design, will the card reader on there have the same limitations?  Would it be possible to use use 2 x 4GB HDF files via the FPGA card reader and another 2 x 4GB HDF files on the daughterboard card read to have 4 x 4GB "hard drives" available to Workbench?

Using the daughterboard USB, would it be possible to mount a large (>4GB) external USB hard drive using SFS or PFS3?



Edit:  Where did all of those typos come from???!!  I ned a knew ceybord!

[Darrin]

No, the daughterboard card reader is visible as Amiga hard drive and not as hard file emulator. You can format it with whatever filesystem you like. The limitations are imposed by filesystem handler you use.

Excellent.  So in theory I could put in a 20GB card and format it as a single 20GB PFS3 drive or a 2GB FFS and a 18GB PFS3, etc?

Meanwhile HDF files on the main FPGA board's card reader will still be available to mount?

Yes, USB host controller uses Poseidon USB stack so it is the limiting factor.

Excellent.  Having used Poseidon for several years now, it is a great stack and I'm glad we'll have it on the FPGA Arcade.  The expansions options it will add will be almost limitless.

[Darrin]

Exactly. I wonder if dedicated micro SD card reader is necessary because an USB micro SD card reader connected to daughterboard USB port reaches transfers over 13MB/s.

True.

I would say that if it doesn't add too much to the overall cost then the micro SD card is handy to keep the main components "all in one box" rather than forcing you to lug an external drive around have have one clutter up the desk.

From my A4000 point of view, I still use internal hard drives rather than an external drive attached to the USB port which relies on my correctly flashing the ROM on my Deneb for it to be detected at boot time or hoping that the USB stack doesn't go "tits up".  I assume this will be a similar case with the micro SD card and it will be immediately available to the system to boot from.  

[Darrin]

BTW: what is estimated price of full set, including replay board + daughter board + 060?
Any expected time of availability?

No idea.  Considering Mike is still trying to get his hands on a bunch of 68060 chips it will be impossible for him to say.  I'd recommend just get the main board when it is available again and wait on the daughter board.

[Darrin]

ah ha, we have struck E41Js apparently!
It remains to be seen if they are real ones ....

Woot!!!  Fingers crossed....  

[Darrin]

The new core looks pretty much the same as before, but a whole lot of infrastructure has changed to support multiple cores and dynamic configuration etc. A number of people are working converting different games or platforms to the board.

It has been a long journey, but we really are reaching the good bit now.
Thank you for your patience

MikeJ
http://www.fpgaarcade.com

Cheers for the update Mike.  I'm on a trip for 4 weeks.  I'm hoping for a new core by then...

Pretty please.