Home grown A1200 accelerator project

[Damion]

Some type of A1200 desktop turbocard with on-board video and a fast HD controller would be great. The prices for even lowly '030 cards is ridiculous these days.

Weren't there a few decent A1200 cards actually completed (AmiJoe)? Maybe it would be easier to build from something like that, rather than starting from scratch with a new design.

Anyhow, as much as I would love to see something like this, it's basically dreaming. Even a basic card with a 68060 would be crazy expensive due to the cost of the CPU alone.

[Damion]

I think we'd have to start some sort of "bounty" and acquire a bunch of money to cover r&d. ;-)

So, theoretically, an accelerator with PPC/JIT/MorphOS would run things like WHDLoad games due to the presence of the AGA chipset.

So we'd need:

Some sort of PPC
GFX chip ??
IDE controller
single SIMM slot (should be enough)
MorphOS port

Any takers on how much it would cost to design something like this?  :crazy:  My guess is there would be a market of *maybe* 200 units.

[Damion]

alexh wrote:
200 orders is not enough to pay for the development costs.

Exactly, some of the money would have to be put forth ahead of time. If 200 people donated $50 each, there would be a 10k kitty for r&d. That's probably peanuts for this type of project, but then again I really have no idea. Naturally, you'd have to find someone willing and capable, and that's where this silly dream ends (in my head, anyway).

With re-creations of the classic chipset just around the corner any hardware developer would be mad to make an accelerator for classic Amiga's.

For the most part I agree, but the reality is no one is taking this too seriously. Just BS-ing. :-)

@stopthegop

BUT... the 68060 is rare and very expensive these days. A PPC based product would be the best option IMHO, but then the design complexity increases.

[Damion]

I've been reading up on the AmiJoe a bit, and, ha ha, it seems like this is exactly what the ACK A1200 card was patterned after (complete with mini-PCI and all).

Anyhow, Haynie seems to think the designer of AmiJoe was a pretty intelligent fellow. The board contained some custom logic, was a *very* complex design, and still had some bugs to iron out before production. Not to mention the software aspect. You would need a group of far above average hardware and software engineers to pull something like this off, some very expensive equipment, people who know how to use that equipment, etc.

Bottom line... my perspective: honestly, there is a greater chance of hell freezing over than another A1200 PPC turbocard release. Let alone with graphics, LOL. (Though it was a nice idea to keep my thoughts occupied for a few days at work.) A "basic" (by comparison) 680x0 card is somewhat more realistic.

At this point, I'd be perfectly content to settle with an '030 + SCSI card. ;-)