Any news on future release of OS4 netbook or on Natami?

[matthey]

I'm not that familiar with the dynamic..
Wasn't Gunnar the hardware guy?

No. My understanding is that Thomas Hirsch is THE hardware guy working on the new SAGA board and that no other hardware guys are helping with the board design.

Are there still any real low level hardware guys involved or is it all software guys left?

Jens Künzer and Christoph Hoehne are supposedly still working on the fpga CPU. At least Jens has made posts that indicate so and Christoph has bought Gunnar's proto board after he left.

Is the current board done enough that it doesn't need any more hardware work?

No. It's usable but not complete. Some features are not active as they are unfinished, untested or need bug fixing. I would imagine many can be fixed in the fpga or firmware without hardware changes.

[matthey]

So can anybody actually state for a fact what the new intended specs for the Natami are going to be?

Maybe, but he ain't talking :/. The release specs would be whatever Thomas decides is good enough when he decides to release it. My guess is that it will include:

-SAGA (much faster and better/larger chip memory, blitter, planar gfx)
-68060 processor board, 512 MB of DDR2 memory
-USBv2, PS2, Ethernet, IDE with DMA, CompactFlash/flashdisk, PCI and classic Amiga ports
-built in scan doubler/deinterlacer and DVI port

Probably included would be:

-optional N68050 fpga CPU
-chunky modes
-significantly upgraded audio (16 bit)

Maybe included:

-fpga FPU

Unlikely to be included:

-case
-complete drivers
-all bugs fixed
-3D
-fpga MMU

The later the release date the more that could be included of course.

[matthey]

@ matthey:
Thanks.  That sounds awfully close to what the FPGA Arcade is going to give us with the daughterboard expansion.  I'll be interested to see what (if any) expansion slots might be included in the design.

Yep. The fpgaArcade will be first and maybe a little cheaper. The Natami will have a PCI slot and should be a little faster. The big question is who will provide better support and updates. They both could win if they are done right. I've got money ready to support both if they can get their acts together .

[matthey]

I'm hoping a PCI slot is included just to allow a good PCI graphics card.

It's there in the real MX developer/proto board:

http://www.natami.net/gfx/NatAmi64_MX/natamipinout.png

I believe it would be the first non-bottlenecked PCI solution for the 68k.

[matthey]

Natami has no deinterlacer.

Claudio could maybe sneak a deinterlacer into the system but the last I checked he was too mad at Gunnar (as are many others) to actually put in the hours of work it would take to get it in.  So basically you can forget about it.

On Natami if you want a noninterlaced screen then your program must actually open a noninterlaced screen such as any normal 31.5 Khz mode.

I stand corrected but disappointed . That also means at least one other "hardware guy" at least worked on the main board. Of course you have the inside scoop being a "Natami Team" member. I still don't understand how Gunnar pissed people off so bad.

Make that 2GB addressspace and 1.5GB useable RAM as there are far to much function in the OS that return pointer as (signed) LONG with negative value pointing out some kind of error code.

Isn't there only 1 or 2 of those? I guess 1 is too much though. Why would the limitation be 1.5GB instead of 2GB? Not that I could imagine using that much memory on a 68k machine. I don't think TCL can use than much memory even if he buffers everything in Total Chaos .