FPGA Replay Board

[Darrin]

PCB B2 about to go to fabrication (tomorrow).
This is the optimized for production board and fixes the power-off issue and improves the DVI to audio spacing.

I'm off to China on Monday and will pick the boards up.

/MikeJ

Nice work Mike.  Have fun on your trip.  Unfortunately my board arrived 2 days after I left for my trip so I should finally get to play with it Saturday morning for a couple of hours before I fly to the UK.

[Darrin]

I was going to ask you, it seemed to be taking a while to get across the pond.
Ah, so we will both be in th UK on Monday, I'm passing through on my way east.
Cheers,
Mike

I'll be in London Sunday, Swansea on Monday and Cardiff Tuesday.  I'll try and pop in and visit AmigaKit...

[Darrin]

I am assuming this is the non-complete list of the different FPGA amigas

Minimig  <---The start
Minimig AGA  <---has this been produced yet??
Chameleon (C64 cartridge, that has Ethernet and can run Amiga OS) <--- This is perhaps the most confusing to me.
C-One <--- isn't this developed as a c64 board
Multi Classic Computer (looks like it has a nice small package, but........)
FPGA Arcade  <---- in beta, can have emulated or a 680x0 daughter card (looks like everyone is excited about his one)
Natami <---- looks to be very complete (including floppy controller), can have emulated or a 680x0 daughter card
more???

The Minimig is tried and tested, but I'd tell everyone to make sure they buy the 4MB version and not the 2MB.  I have one with the extra ARM board (which provides faster hard file access and easier upgrading).

Minimig AGA and FPGA Arcade are the same thing.  I have one of the last beta boards and MikeJ is off to China this week to run off a batch of "gold" boards for general sale.  It will also run other cores to give you other classic computers and arcade machine games.  A 68060 board with USB and other features is in development and running.

C-One needs a "Minimig" module to act as an ECS Amiga and can even use a real 2.5" hard drive.  However development is dead, some of the boards are buggy and it has been superceded by the Chameleon64.  I have one of these gathering dust.

Chameleon64 recently got a "Minimig" ECS core with a 68020 processor.  I haven't had a chance to load the core onto my cartridge and test it yet, but others have it working with a hard file and it should outperform the original Minimig v1.1 boards and have extra RAM.  You will need to plug it into a real C64 to have joystick ports but I've seen mutterings about the possibility of an adapter to provide these in "standalone" mode.

Multi-Classic-Computer:  I've seen pictures of it and adverts for it, but I have no idea if it even exists.

The Natami should be an advanced version of the basic FPGA Arcade with the most of the features of the FPGA expansion board included along with some other goodies.  It looks to be an advancement of the classic A1200/A4000 chipset.

As I see it, we have choices for everyone available:

Minimig v1.1:  Cheap ECS/68000 board for classic A500 gaming.
Chameleon:  An advanced C64 for power users with the bonus of a ECS/68020 Amiga included.
FPGA Arcade:  An AGA/68020 A1200 replacement with a 68060 expansion card option to make it an A4000 replacement.  Has the ability to load other cores and reproduce classic arcade machines.
Natami:  The Amiga 5000!

Exciting stuff!!!

[Darrin]

The FPGAArcade (Replay board) Amiga codebase has diverged significantly from the Minimig code - and will continue to do so as I am re-writing all of it to improve area and timing at the moment. It also has different video / audio / memory interfaces.
It has been tested with 1920x1080P (HDMI) and 24 bit 192KHz audio. The 68020 core is also new of course.

The Natami is a very interesting project, but I do not see a need for legacy interfaces like floppy and IDE. A large SDHC card on the Replay board will support 4 virtual floppy drives and two 4G hard disks - and the transfer rate probably out performs old IDE drives.

I may do a floppy interface to play with my Atari disk controller, but I really can't be bothered to dig out a drive. I would rather fix the remaining disk capture problems. I have been rescuing a lot of my old code from amiga/atari floppies recently and some of the disks are not readable after 20 odd years.

My aim is to get the cost down and end up with a board which can actually be produced. That's why it's so small (6 layer PCBs are expensive) and the features on the base board have been chosen for as wide an audience as possible while keeping the components used to a minimum. A lot of techniques used for "real products" have been used here, such as stress testing the memory to test the operating margins and high-speed measurements using 20Gig test kit to measure eye-patterns on DVI, clocks etc. Also, the entire board is impedance controlled to get good signal integrity.

The other big difference between the Natami and Replay board is the use of the ARM controller. Not only does this do the bridge to the SD card file system, it also acts as a boot and configuration controller - so you can choose your platform and options using the on-screen display.

You don't need to "reflash" like the Natami. You can take the SD card out, replace the core binary file, stick it in again and do a soft-restart of the system.

You can change from an Amiga to an Atari to a Spectrum without powering down.

Anyhow, I've got to finish the DRC (design rule checks) for the boards...
Cheers,
MikeJ

Thanks for the clarification Mike.

I think the big "pull" of the FPGA Arcade will be the simple way it just flips from being one machine to another which will also widen the market for it as it won't just be an Amiga.

[Darrin]

Swansea and Cardiff eh
 
Not comig over for the play-offs are you

Yes.  I've got tickets to both home matches.  

Are you going?

[Darrin]

Nah, even though I am a Cardiff boy Married to a Swansea girl, my Father is from London so i have always been a goooner

LOL.  Well I'm looking forward to the matches although if one or both teams makes it to the final then I won't be able to stay for it.  I wonder what the chances of today's first leg against Notting Forest are of being shown on American TV?

[Darrin]

WHDLoad should work. But someone else maybe knows more?

I can confirm that it does indeed work as I use it on my Minimig v1.1.  I've built a hard file to test it on the FPGA Arcade, but haven't had a chance yet.  There is no reason why it shouldn't work.

[Darrin]

Not very likely.  Though I am sure that you can find it on the net somewere.
 
My predictions for the first two rounds
 
Nott forrest 0 - Swansea 2
Reading 2 - Cardiff 1
 
 
Not sure about the second legs yet

Fox Soccer Plus has shown quite a few Cardiff and Swansea games throught the year "Live from Cardiff in England!" so there is hope.

Yep, I feel the Swans should win today too.  Cardiff need to find their form again fast.

[Darrin]

Sorry everyone for this massive ot

Is that with british commentary or american, I cant imagine american on football

British.  :-)

Whew!  That was close!  93 minutes with 10 men and still had 48% of the ball.  Forest must be kicking themselves.

[Darrin]

so could i use my usb floppy drive with the daughterboard then and use real floppys on fpga replay

You should be able to use PC Formatted 1.44MB disks just like I do with my A4000+Deneb+USB floppy drive.

Trust me, you'll quickly convert any Amiga disks to ADF format and never want to use an Amiga floppy again.  Backing up your floppies just means a quick copy & paste into another directory.

[Darrin]

I'm going to this tonight. It's going to be tough but hopefully Forest can give you a bashing.

Perhaps if we get THREE players sent off after 1 minute.    

[Darrin]

I think there is an opportunity here for someone like Elbox to produce a Zorro/PCI daughterboard along the lines of the one I have in my towered A4000 for any "power users" who wish to expand the hell out of this board.

It might be something for them to think about.

[Darrin]

Hum... It's not enough... With faster 060 (about 100 Mhz), software will be more complicated and will need more ram !

Add 384 Mb, Yaqube ! SDRAM in China is cheap these days...

Users don't want slowdown with HD partition swap...


The Natami team should add 512 Mo of fastram too on the Natami...

Who on Earth would want more than 640KB?

I think 128MB is fine for now until we actually see some applications being produced that require more, or at least slots that can be added to later.

[Darrin]

While you can never have enough memory, we also need to keep in mind that machine specs are always a tradeoff.  Getting a working product out now is better than having the promise of a product in the future.

This seems to be one of the problems facing Natami.  Changing specs keeps it from ever making to to production.  I will happily take 128M memory on the FPGAArcade, and if that turns out to be too little in a few years, I will happily pay to buy a new FPGAArcade with more memory at that time.

This way I can play today, AND play tomorrow.  As opposed to hoping that some day I will get to play with the perfect board.

agreed.  I'm happy to upgrade every so often, just like I do with my PCs.  feature creep is a killer.

[Darrin]

No matter how much power Mike puts on the board, it will always have the potential to need more.  By allowing feature creep to prevent a proper roll out, the only way that adding more memory would prevent someone from running out is by having the board never completed in the first place.

Yep, I'm always reminded of the old wives tale that whatever size hard drive you buy is will always be exactly half of what you need - so just buy it and upgrade later.  

[Darrin]

No feature creep on the main board - the B02 board is production ready as far as I can tell. Everything seems to fit and we are processing the manufacturing data.
FPGAs should be delivered next week then we are good to go.

I added some pics on
http://www.fpgaarcade.com

Note I also have the new ATX power control board back as well. The chips to build it with arrive at the weekend.
/MikeJ

Hi Mike,

are these the FPGA Arcade boards in China ready to ship or do I have you confused with someone else?  


(Sorry, I couldn't resist)