Minimig AGA 060 RTG

[Darrin]

Sweet!  Great work!  

[Darrin]

@ JYaqube:

Any estimates on what sort of maximum screen size you expect to get from this?  Could Ratte's experience with his Indivision "widescreen" screenmodes help you?

[Darrin]

Oh, and one more thought, can the code for the RTG be applied to unexpanded FPGA Arcade cards or do you need the extender card?

[Darrin]

1280x1024  

It's expected to run on an unexpanded FPGA Arcade board but right now the TG68K.C soft core isn't compatible enough to run Picasso 96 software.

Thanks for the info.  I've cross posted this on Amigaworld.net just to spread the word.

[Darrin]

Why do so many people use "Minimig AGA" to title threads about the Replay board?  Well, on to the beginning of this thread, reading the rest of it.

It's the usual confusion between cores and hardware.  The hardware is the "FPGA Arcade", but it is running a "Minimig AGA" core.  So, depending on how you look at it, "Minimig AGA" is technically both right and wrong.

[Darrin]

The ARM does floppy & hdd  I/O asfair. The rest of the capacity should be free. The communication with the FPGA is through a few I/O lines I guess. So they could cooperate, but I wouldn't place any realtime soundprocessing etc.. in the ARM. Btw, the ARM can tell the FPGA  what to do with it's I/O lines. If the FPGA is configured that way.

An efficient option might be to use MAME as usual. But code for software hooks for chips that are too hard emulate properly in software. And thus avoid unessary (re)coding for functionality that will work just fine in software.

I've never run MAME on an Amiga, but how does it run on a 68060?  If it works then the FPGA Aracde should be easy to set up with a Workbench installed with WHDLoad, MAME, VICE, Shapeshifter, DOSBox, etc.

Anyone drooling yet?  

[Darrin]

Godawful slow.  Running MAME on even an 060 Amiga will barely give you enough speed to run a playable game of Space Harrier, even with 50% frame skipping.  MAME isn't worth running on anything under a 1.5GHz P4 and even that's a bit slow for my taste.  

I just figured a lot of the IC emulation code could be ported to VHDL (or just use modules available now) and offloaded to the FPGA instead of using CPU.  A 6502 "emulation" in FPGA runs clock-accurate with minimum system overhead, whereas a software emulation chews up lots of CPU overhead and screws up your signal timing (hence skipped frames.)  I guess I'm getting a bit off-topic.  Sorry.

Cheers for that.  I've only used MAME on a PC.  

[Darrin]

Yeah, RTG makes a world of difference for mame. The older builds are also magnitues of times faster than newer versions. That said though even an overclocked '060 + rtg system using an older/faster build will struggle to give playable results with something like Double Dragon (as a random choice of game).

I'll settle for the ability to play Defender and Pheonix.