Amiga One X 1000 and Xena/Xorro

[A6000]

I have no axe to grind on this subject, but I must say that the prototyping board is far too expensive to encourage experimenters.
Maybe A-EON could put an XMOS chip on a ZORRO card to increase the number of potential experimenters.

[A6000]

Curently, people seem to be having a hard time finding uses for the XENA that require the chip to be inside the Amiga(one) case, putting XENA plus a prototyping area on a ZORRO card is intended to encourage "inside the box" thinking.
It may be that classic Amigas need XENA more than the Amigaone does.

[A6000]

classic Amigas need XENA?

XENA without official support by XMOS including the development tools is useless, on whatever form

It's possible, it would be interesting to see what uses people could find for it in a classic Amiga.
Audio applications have already been suggested, XENA could give us a 16/24 bit sound card, speech recognition perhaps, can XENA implement an Ethernet port?, how about an SD card interface, USB port, it could drive a pair of ultrasonic transducers to give us similar functionality to that MS device whose name escapes me at the moment. EDIT: Kinnect.
XENA could give us a multifunction card that could evolve as people developed the software to implement new interfaces and ideas.
Software support would evolve faster if more people were trying to use XENA.

[A6000]

a soundcard? As I understand it XENA is a special chip to manipulate streams independent of the processor so you basically develop a program and upload it in the chip where it is executed independently and reacts on events but no interaction with the host system (if I am wrong then someone can explain it). So how do you want to program that soundcard then? In a FPGA it is different because everything is included and interacts with each other but XENA works different. You can automatically manipulate sound streams (perhaps convert them?) but it would be not a real soundcard.

Digital audio is just a stream of 1's and 0's, XENA has one third of its pins dedicated to a local bus for communicating with the system, downloading the XENA program and then transferring data and instructions as required, it could be paula's big sister., with a Retargetable audio driver, data compression/decompression optional.

[A6000]

But XENA is not that. It is just renamed XMOS chip. XMOS chip itself is capable to do many tasks and projects you suggested are more or less possible. But it would be just piece of electronics.

Instead of XMOS chip (XENA) also FPGA could be used or off the shelf network interface chips. They are relatively cheap, was it XMOS, FPGA or some other chip. But designing Amiga expansion card with any chip is expensive. You need good knowledge of Amiga hardware (which kind of knowledge is fading) and you need someone to write drivers so your favorite TCP/IP stack can use your new ethernet card.

It is also reason why there are no Xena applications for X1000. It is easier to buy supported sound card from ebay than design one yourself from the scratch including drivers and electronics work. It could be fun but those who find it fun are rare.

I agree that there are better, easier and cheaper ways to do things, but my posts are about getting XENA to do them.
Developing expansion cards is expensive, I agree, so it makes more sense to develop a programmable, multifunction card that can change when requirements or standards change.

[A6000]

@slayer,
If you don't mind my asking, what do you use three X1000's for?

[A6000]

OK,Thanks.

[A6000]

Interesting, I'd heard mention of a board (or riser?) which allows user access to the i/o pins for interfacing homebrew electronics etc. That should make it a little easier to use for hobbyist work.
I look forward to hearing more details.

It is available now from Amigakit here http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=43&products_id=1135

For a blank board, I think it is overpriced, but you may think differently.

[A6000]

X-Core already exist on PCI, and Amiga can be expanded with a PCI bus.
What would be the advantage in developing a Zorro based version?



That is really confusing as I've not heard a single Amiga user crying out for the lack of a Xena slot, or even wondering if there are X-Core PCI drivers for Mediator/G-Rex.

More users have Zorro slots than have PCI slots,
If the Xena chip is as useful as A-EON say it is, then why would classic users not want one in their machines also?