Questions regarding Apollo cards

[matthey]

On another note; Marcel verdassdonk is working on a new chipset, albeit a hobby project, its aiming to be an evolution of the ecs/ocs amigas. If finished could this in theory be added to Gunnars proposed standalone system, I wonder.

There are several Amiga chipsets available or to become available which includes the MiniMig ECS, Marcel's ECS, SAGA (Natami) and fpgaArcade AGA (currently unreleased but license requires release). Most of the Apollo Team would like to see good AGA compatibility with a few enhancements. Unless Marcel adopts better AGA compatibility, it's unlikely that the project would use his chipset implementation, as is, although some ideas, register maps and enhancements would be considered for adoption. I would like to see a documented standard for enhancements beyond AGA which I believe is important to Marcel as well. The team will have to evaluate different chipsets and licenses. It already has an AGA compatible chipset.

[matthey]

I don't want to write anything that discourages Gunnar from continuing his work on the 68k softcore, or Apollo boards, but wasn't it Gunnar and his many claims about Natami that created the rift between the original Natami developer (sorry I can't remember his name), and Gunnar's team that were working on the 68k softcore and maybe other parts?

Thomas Hirsch is the Natami creator. I believe you are correct that there was friction between Thomas and Gunnar. They had different philosophies of how Natami should evolve. They have very different personalities. I believe there was also problems with the hardware design and Thomas may have had doubts about financing. The problems were not all Gunnar's fault even though he gets blamed. It is Gunnar's fault that the Apollo Team persisted in creating a 68k fpga CPU. Gunnar and Thomas are still talking so don't be surprised if there is some cooperation yet.

Maybe I am mistaken, but I thought there were one or two people on the Natami team posting to the forums who were always making claims about the fantastic performance the Natami would eventually have, in advance of their work being finished.  It seemed to me that these claims increased the pressure on the original Natami developer to expand the project beyond his original vision, which finally caused him to withdraw from, or shut down the project and to go work by himself on his ideas.  Of course I have no knowledge what went on behind the scenes, or what really led to the breakup of the Natami team, only the Natami forums that I would scan from time to time.

The Natami would have been awesome if it had been produced and the problems worked out. Maybe the fpgaArcade can come close in performance and functionality but the Natami could have been ready much sooner. It is time consuming to prepare projects like this. Thomas was working at his pace perfecting everything he wanted while Gunnar was trying to push the project forward when he could have been more focused on the CPU.

If it was not Gunnar, I apologize for my bad memory.  If it was Gunnar, no matter how brilliant he is at writing code, or designing hardware, I would strongly suggest that he waits until his product is actually selling to promote it with claims of fantastic performance increases.  

The Amiga community has been let down too many times to be receptive to that kind of promotion by anyone for any product, sad as that may be.  I still am open to anything happening in this community and believe that there are still many brilliant minds working on Amiga related projects.  Unfortunately, there are a few who have more negative attitudes, and they post often to many different forum sites.

The Amiga community is a bit jaded from all the years of vaporware. Most have learned not to get too excited until there is something for sale. I hope they treat this project the same and maybe it will turn out to be like Christmas this time .