Minimig/FPGA question

[Darrin]

Interesting, thanks for that. How much would the above setup cost?

Nobody can answer that until the 68060 board has been finalized.

[Darrin]

Without the 060. Needless to say that'd be out of my price range anyway.

The problem is that it is still being tweaked and no mass production run has started (on the expansion board) so it is hard to even guess.  The good news is that you can have it populated or unpopulated.  Keep an eye on eBay for any 68060 processors going cheap or even an old broken computer or expansion card that contains one.

I don't think the price will scare people at the end of the day, and it will certainly be a lot cheaper than putting together a similar A1200 based system from scratch.  I hate to think what I've spent on my A4000 alone in the last 12 months.

While I can't say what I paid for my FPGA Arcade (It was a prototype and thus more expensive than the production run units), I thought it was a real bargain.

[Darrin]

But what about all the programs that bang the hardware and rely on chip timings and things? Games etc? Even OctaMED started messing up on me when I installed my Picasso.

FPGAs are effectively recreating the hardware, unlike software emulation such as UAE.

However, you do have a good point about timings because in some ways the FPGA recreations are faster in some respects (blitter, RAM access, etc) and as my music abilities are about zero, I couldn't comment myself on how that might affect OctaMED.

I have OctaMED myself.  Is there something I can run for you in order to test it?

[Darrin]

Will boot times and load times etc be the same as orginal Amigahw or will it be accelerated (like UAE does).

Booting from the SD card's HD image is as fast (or even faster) than most Amiga setups.

Will CD only games work, like OnEscapee,Napalm,T-Zer0 etc?  (i did see that hdfiles are supported so i guess they will.

YOu can use WHDLoad, or connect a CD ROM via the expension board's USB port.

Which filesystems do they use?, which GB limit on bootable device partition etc?

I've used FFS, SFS and PFS3 on hard files.  I haven't personally created a hard file >3GB though because I'm using 4GB cards (I'm a cheapskate).  Others have larger hard files on up to 32GB cards IIRC.

ETA?, before summer or after?
Resellers ?
video manual?
Kickstarts? (will the os4.1upd4 kickstart's set which is included there work?)

Any time now.
Not yet, just directly from Mike.
?
No idea.  I use an A1200 KS3.1 and the option to switch to an A500 1.3.

[Darrin]

@Nostromo, @Darrin

thanks for the answers, helped quite a lot!, i will contact mike as soon as possible and order one!.

As for whdload etc, yes i will ofcourse use those but i want to slow them down a bit as games like Uridium2 etc loads too fast so you won't be able to enjoy the wonderfull loading music lol
i know how to edit that in whdload so no worries with that :-)


thanks again guys!

I know what you mean.  I still use ADFs for a lot of games.  You have the choice on whether you want the "floppies" to run in "normal" or "fast" mode.