NatAmi 68070 design draft

[tiffers]

@vloodline

The MiniMig was good in the Amiga Market, it was a cheap, simple design and generally compatible with most existing software.

The NATAMI is looking to be expensive and incompatible with features that are not required by the amiga software base.... How do you sell this to an investor?

How do you figure this? Sure the prototype, and the planned developer boards will be using a FPGA based board which are expensive for the features they offer.

However, they are investigating the coldfire option in order to lower that price barrier. Once they started looking at coldfire, and incompatabilities in the instruction set, they started looking into ways to work around those incompatabilities. First they suggested a .library file, or modifying code (hard to do when you don't have the source)

Next they discovered that they could get their SuperAGA FPGA stuff programmed into the Coldfire package, giving a low-cost ($20 / 'chip' was a price quoted) solution, which would result in a very affordable ($100 for a working board) product. Of course then someone said, it'd be cool if you could stick a 68k into the FPGA code, then you wouldn't have to bother with coldfire issues. This is where the 68070 effort began.

Now, how do-able this is, I don't know. But if they could get a $20 SuperAGA + 680x0 on Coldfire solution done, and licence it out to whoever wanted to build a board to go with it, how many do you think would sell at $100 / board?

The NatAmi team is claiming 100% AGA compability (not including timing) so they say just about anything you care for (maybe not demos) should run as normal on it. Then they're extending it to have a larger CHIP RAM address space, and that chip ram is SRAM not DRAM, so it's much faster, allowing them to run an extended instruction set in their SuperAGA 'chipset' to give better audio, better CG (including 3D) and other features, while remaining 100% compatible.


So it's compatible, faster, more featured, and planned on being very affordable. How many people out there do you think would get one? How many people bought C64DTVs?

I know I'll get a NatAmi if they can attain these goals.

tiffers

[tiffers]

@bloodline

I was just quoting what Gunnar/biggun has said in other threads, on other forums.

You (and others here) certainly seem to have much greater knowledge than I, about the specific technologies being discussed. I was just trying to show that NatAmi (according to Gunnar) is really placed to be cheaper than the MiniMig (in the CPU + chipset + Coldfire all-in-one configuration) and more compatible than the MiniMig in it's current state, and thus shouldn't be slammed too hard on the 'incompatible and expensive' claims.

Sub-$100 NatAmi And another

The proof, as I have heard said, will be in the pudding.

tiffers.

[tiffers]

If they did go for a ColdFire based option then it'd be up within the speed range of a PSP/PS2.

I'm not really sure how you are making this comparison... I simply don't know where the information for such a conclusion could have come from?

Speed like a PS2

tiffers

[tiffers]

NATAMI seems to have some crazy idea about making a better Amiga, for no discernible reason...

Because he [Thomas Hirsch] wanted to? He's obviously very capable to have gotten this far, on his own. If he decided to make an A4000 replacement, then partway through realised he could extend it, and make something that could 'realistically' have been the next gen back in 1994, why _shouldn't_ he do it?

That he's told the community and everyone's getting excited / annoyed about the idea is beside the point. It's his project, he's doing it his way. Of course he now has community input and that may be making some impact, but I believe the SuperAGA was planned before the 'meeka' demo which started the current craze.

What's wrong with him doing it? If he pull sit off successfully.. sweet. If not.. egg on his face. No real affect on you, nor the Amiga community, except perhaps some disappointment. I think it's great someone has the balls to give it a go.

bloodline, are you in the group of people who say the AmigaOne isn't a real Amiga, because it doesn't have the Amiga custom chips in it?

tiffers

[tiffers]

@alexh

I wonder who this guy is. Either he's the best novice HDL programmer in the world. He used to work in a hardware company which developed 2D and 3D HDL and borrowed upon his knowledge from projects gone by.

Or it's bollox.

Have you any idea how long it takes to develop a rasteriser from scratch?? Add in filtered texture mapping and shading and Z-clipping and you are talking a good years worth of research and work.

I know, designing hardware 3D accelerators was my first job.

It's certainly not a two week task working evenings and weekends.

Looks like he was involved with designing 3D accelerators too

http://www.greyhound-data.com/gunnar/

tiffers