MiniMig Questions

[Darrin]

Hey all...sorry to bother, but am I correct in thinking that the Mini-Mig hardware is totally open-source?  That is to say, if I wanted to change the board layout (say, to a mini-ITX style configuration) and have my own made up I could download the PCB files and do that?

Yep, and there has already been a limited edition Minimig v2.0 board made:
http://www.illuwatar.se/project_pages/minimig2/minimig.htm

And with that said, is it possible to fix a single Zorro 2 slot to such a configured Mini-Mig?  Does it have the right circuitry incorporated in its design, or in the softcore to allow that?

If you're redesigning the board then you can add what you want, but you'll need your own (revised) core to take advantage of whatever you cobble onto it.

[Darrin]

why was i never told about the itx design?

how do i get one of those. it would suit me perfect...

Illuwater was the guy who designed and made this board and you can find him on most of the Amiga forums.  As far as I'm aware, he only made a handful  of these boards and that was a long time ago, so I doubt he has any left.

It is a shame that the latest batch of Minimigs from aCube used the v1.1 design instead of this 2.0 board.  It's a great looking design and the port headers on the board make it easy to put inside a custom case.

[Darrin]

Quick question on topic:

Should one setup a Minimig and an Amiga 500, next to each other, both with an RGB/Scart cables connected to identical CRTs and hide the machines under a table - would one be able to say which is which after playing the same game on both computer simply from the audio and graphics?

I've never had a working A500 set up, but I do have an A2000.  Saying that, I haven't sat there with a stopwatch timing them, but I would say that you wouldn't know which one was which.  There may be timing issues because the Minimig doesn't have the same 68000 CPU as the A500 and RAM access is supposed to be faster.  Add to that the fact you can run the Minimig CPU at 7MHz or almost 50MHz then you certainly could tell the difference if you were running Frontier or a flight sim (the Minimig experience would be much better).

If you run the same game on an A500, A600 and an A1200 hidden under a table then can anybody see a difference?  

By the way, I have asked Acube if they are making more Minimigs (they have run out of 4MB versions) and I was told that they are still not sure if to make another batch. I assume they are planning for the launch of a newer version.

Shame.  The 2MB versions can be user upgraded (I have some spare RAM chips) and AmigaKit used to offer a service (they did mine because I bottled out of doing the soldering myself).