Minimig AGA 060 RTG

[yaqube]

You can see here a working version of Picasso 96 RTG driver for the Minimig's built-in graphics card.
The Replay FPGA board with 060 daughter board was used as the hardware platform.
It's not complete yet and there is still a lot to do but at least you can see the picture .

[yaqube]

Any estimates on what sort of maximum screen size you expect to get from this?

1280x1024  

Oh, and one more thought, can the code for the RTG be applied to unexpanded FPGA Arcade cards or do you need the extender card?

It's expected to run on an unexpanded FPGA Arcade board but right now the TG68K.C soft core isn't compatible enough to run Picasso 96 software.

[yaqube]

Cloning one of the cards that there is already a P96 driver for is pretty trivial. The simplest cards are just framebuffers with very few registers. The emulation doesn't need to be very accurate, just good enough for P96 to work.

It's much easier to write a simple P96 driver than clone an existing SVGA chipset (the FPGAs are limited in many ways). This way you can optimize software for the hardware.

[yaqube]

@YAQUBE:
Can you also put 16:9 modes into the list of possible resolutions. I think Mike once mentioned that 1680x1050 should be possible. It would be cool to have WB run on a native (and today very cheap) 1680x1050 monitor as 4:3 1280x1024 monitors today are a bit harder to get hold of.

The resolutions of the Minimig RTG card are programmable. You can define your own 16:9 modes with standard Picasso96Mode setting program. Initially (due to pixel clocks limitations) you will be able to define 1680x1050 resolution with refresh rate of 50 Hz. The support for 60 Hz refresh rate will come later.

[yaqube]

Would it be possible to use miminmig's P96 driver with normal a1200?

Yes, but only if you can find an Amiga 1200 with an RTG card compatible with the Minimig's one.

[yaqube]

I belive that mimnimig RTG is AGA, just faster

The Minimig RTG card (embedded in the same FPGA as the main core) is independent from its AGA display engine. Although the Chip RAM is used as the display memory (there is 50 MB of it) it's much faster than the one found in real AGA machines.

[yaqube]

When can we learn more about this thing?

Right now it's not a high priority. I tried to make use of the extra DDR memory bandwidth and I was surprised how easy it was to implement a simple frame buffer and write a driver for it.

Is it something you made yourself, or an open core you found somewhere?

As I said before it's a simple frame buffer but in the future it will be expanded by a dedicated blitter engine. Everything has been made by me.

[yaqube]

I'm curious also why not a P96 driver for AGA direct.

Because Picasso96 was created to support chunky and high/true colour graphics. The AGA chipset is not capable of displaying these formats. That's why.

[yaqube]

I suppose custom chunky to planar conversions could make though a p96 possible?Nowdays with those fpga cores and and the faster speed they can achieve a chunky to planar could be no problem without any speed penalties.

Nowadays FPGAs are big and fast enough to integrate chunky/true colour display (RTG card) and AGA chipset in one core.

[yaqube]

Will the daughterboard work 100% with all its functions and glory even if no 060 is fitted ?

Yes, there isn't any hardware limitation which could prevent the main board from using daughter board peripherals when the 060 CPU is not present. But we haven't implemented this functionality so far.

[yaqube]

I have captured a short video showing ShapeShifter running on Replay FPGA board with Minimig AGA core and 060 daughter board.

[youtube]Ug4_yh3Q288[/youtube]

[yaqube]

- is there any way one could use serial or USB MIDI interfaces with this type of board?

You can use serial port to connect to a MIDI device.

- is there any way to attach a real Amiga keyboard to a device like this instead of a PC USB keyboard?  It would feel just right to have an actual A2000 keyboard attached.

In fact you need a PC PS/2 keyboard. To use an USB only keyboard you need an additional small interface board which Mike has just finished designing.
It's possible to implement support for real Amiga keyboard but since our human resources are very limited we hoped somebody from the community would do this.

[yaqube]

It is reported (on minimig.net) that the 1.1 minimig currently will work with a real Amiga keyboard, so you know the code for this already exists.

http://www.minimig.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=519

No, there is no support for real Amiga keyboards in current firmware. The person on the forum have been apparently joking. Amiga and PS/2 keyboards have  different protocols. But it should be relatively easy to add support for real Amiga keyboards (the ones dedicated to A4000 and CDTV can be connected directly).