MiniMig the no bull thoughts on this device

[gaula92]

I'm HIGHLY passionate about the Minimig V1.1 board. It's awesome, period.
It's hardware and feels like hardware, it's very different from a software emulator. It feels like a souped-up Amiga 600 to me.
If you just want to use ADF images, you don't need the 4MB upgrade or the ARM controller.
You just need the basic board and ask Loriano (TheDaddy) about a case, because he makes incredible ones.
As an extra, even without ARM, you will get 2 disk drives and hard disk support (a 50 MB HDF will be pretty fast!). You can HD-install those games with crazy floppy numbers anyway (Monkey Island II comes to mind)

And yes: buying old hardware is wasting money when you can get totally new Amigas like the Minimig.
I've yet to find a game or program that doesn't work with current core releases.
Go for it, you won't regret (unless you consider getting MikeJ's FPGA ARCADE... but I've yet to see the new cores for it).

[gaula92]

It can also enlarge your pennis, but that's an undocumented feature

[gaula92]

@Darrin: do you know if those 4MB Minimigs Acube is selling are 2MB ones with the piggyback 4MB mod, or do they have 4MB RAM chips on board?

[gaula92]

@smerf: You have no idea of how the Minimig feels. I have several Amigas here (A600, A1200), the Minimig and UAE wich I can configure myself because I have a barely normal brain and I already paid for my KS ROMS when I was 10.
From UAE to a physical Amiga, the difference is enormous: even if I use 50Hz modes and I get perfect smooth 50Hz scroll in demos and games, UAE feels laggy, something's not  right. I have shown this solution to friends and they all thing the same: it's not the same, there's a difference in control input, a noticeable input delay that affects games. Occasionally, there are also desyncs in the image: it's very hard to have a system with the bare minimal services running and configured priorities so UAE has the CPU all the time, but I have souch a system: a dedicated Linux system built from scratch where every kernel module and every service is put there by me and I know when they take over CPU. But even so, there's the ocasional frame desync: it can take half and hour, but it WILL appear.

Now don't take me wrong: UAE is an awesome program to interface with the Amiga HDDs in FFS format and with the Minimig HDFs. It's great to test whdload slaves, and even to compile C programs very fast with SASC.
But it's NOT an Amiga. It doesn't feel like one: it feels like an emulated one running inside another OS, wich can be useful for some needs, but that's all. It's a tool, so to say.

The Minimig however FEELS like an Amiga. It's as snappy, elegant, responsive and precise as the Amiga. It's light, small and it won't drain a thermonuclear plan to run Lemmings, as the lame X86 noisy pigs do. It drains a ridiculously small amount of power and it feels RIGHT.
It's NOT that expensive, you just sum everything it has included:
-A FAST 68000 on board, actually slightly waster that a 030 @ 50mHz in TURBO mode. It can run at stock 7'58mHz for perfect CPU compatibility.
-Full ECS chipset.
-3.5 MB of RAM.
-Virtually endless HDD space.
-Perfect scandoubler: fully VGA-compatible chipset modes!
And count it as new hardware, totally new: no aging overpriced hardware from the 80's with failing caps some idiot will try to sell you based on it's "retro and rare" state.

[gaula92]

If you are having problems, you should try WinUAE, I hear it's the most mature of the UAE versions.

I don't use Windows programs for personal reasons. Needless to say, I don't own a Windows machine and nevel will. No one in my house does. We all use Linux for daily computing.
That said, I use FS-UAE, wich is a port of WinUAE to standard libraries (OpenGL, etc) vs privative scumm (DirectX), based on the latest stable sources.

This is all on a 2.8GHz single core PC. Trying to emulate a "simple" 68000 A500 is, in comparison, even easier on my system.

You're missing the point. It's not a throughput problem, but a timming problem: on a Minimig, Amiga software runs ON the hardware: no undelying software, abstraction layers in form of backend, system libraries, etc... On an emulated enviroment, Amiga software runs on top of a HUGE pile of layers: the Amiga emulator, system libraries wich rely on different backends, etc... Even if you have RAW power, you don't get fine-grained input response. There's an inherent delay in software emulation wich hardware reimplementation (FPGAs) don't have, just like real hardware.
It's not about raw power or "I can render in seconds": it's about "I press a button on mu USB joystick and it takes WAY longer to be processed by the emulator+variours abstraction layers+os libs+kernel than it takes on real Amiga hardware, be it ASIC (Amiga 500, 1200) or FPGA (Minimig).

Quite why I need to run something that requires a 400w PSU to play Lemmings is beyond me.

Oh, and this, of course