MiniMig + PowerPC = OS4 Hardware for all

[AeroMan]

Hi,


     The 680XX family is way expensive. By the same price of a  68060, you could get a bunch of PPCs... The numbers below came from Freescale´s site:

     MC68EC060RC50 (cheapest) - $102.09
     MC68060RC60 (really expensive dude) - $524.99
     MC68EC040FE20A (cheapest) - $61.51
     MC68040RC40A (expensive dude) - $309.30
 
While a PPC system on a chip comes from...

     SPC5200CVR400BR2 (most expensive) - $19.71

Quite nice for 760 MIPS and OS4 possibility. We just need AGA in a FPGA to be really nice ! :-D

[AeroMan]

downix wrote:

Hrm?  The 68k I just priced was $24.94, the 200Mhz MCF547x.

Yeah, but MCF547x is a ColdFire. There are some differences. It is a optimized chip, but not 100% compatible.

[AeroMan]

Wow,

    I must say that Jethro Tull's "book"  ;-) below is just amazing. I agree with him in every point.
    There is another thing also that I think is important. We are talking about AGA compatibility using FPGAs. Those are reconfigurable chips. This means we can have AGA if we download the right stuff on then, but if we need something faster, we can write a better graphics display and download it. With FPGAs we are not stuck with physical AGA all the time, you can change it on the fly.
    Using a MPC5200 (I just loved this chip..  :-D ) we also get AC97 audio, which means we could use the audio part the FPGA to be part of graphics stuff when reconfigured. I'm pretty sure it would be no match for a top of the line PC Graphics board, but if you really want one of these, all you need is PCI or AGP.
    A nice FPGA, a MPC5200, RAM, a codec, and some glue logic would make a very small board at a nice price. It could even be portable if we connect it to a LCD.

[AeroMan]

No way to do a 2 layer board, but i think that using a embedded chip like the MPC5200 could allow to use less layers. Four or six, maybe. It is something to analyze.
Why use soldered DDRs ? Put a cheap PC memory slot

[AeroMan]

freqmax wrote:
DDR is an electrical pain. An sdram slot maybe. But DDR, nope.

Many things are possible, if you are willing to spend the right amount of money.

I agree with you. soldered chips are simpler, but the pain with the memory will be related to track lenght, in trying to avoid signal reflections, not exactly the connector itself. Soldered chips will be more reliable, for sure.
There is still another problem: the PPC is a BGA, which is a pain to solder. I can always ask my boss to pass some boards in the company's oven  :-D

[AeroMan]

But I was talking about whether modern hardware have these same features. By saying "Minimig, if available on PCI cards, offer Amiga graphics facilities to modern, fast CPUs. They still have features that are not present on modern 3D accelerated gfx cards", I was reading that as suggesting this would offer something to PC users? Or did he just mean in the context of running old Amiga games?

Modern graphics boards are way more powerful than AGA was. AGA had some features that are not reproduced today, like many modes on the same screen, sprites and dual playfields, but these features are nice to memory limited systems. Sprites are quite useless today, as 2d games are rare, and they can be reproduced.

I think PCs could use some Amiga like techniques, like screens. They can simulate this using modern hardware (why Aros doesn't have this ? Or am I having problems to find it :-D )

I Would like also to have genlocking stuff in modern gfx cards. That was really cool stuff !