Excitement about NatAmi

[Bennymee]

They are for different markets for sure.

The Replay (fpgaarcade) board will have a connector for standard arcade controllers (JAMMA or is it JAMBA) and is not specifically for the Amiga market.  It can be a slightly souped up Amiga for sure but it's performance is below the goals of NATAMI.

Natami is designed to be an Amiga PC.  It will have a PCI slot(s) and a cpu slot, ethernet and USB and 256MB or ram or more.   I can't recall if it will have SATA or PATA IDE.

here is a quote from Thomas the designer:
http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=6¬e=28597&z=Xyqlpy

I'd much rather have ethernet and USB onboard rather than have to waste 2 PCI slots for them.
This is a positive delay.

Add another 8+ months delay I would say and why invent the wheel again, there are Ethernet / usb / firewire  combocards on the market. Why not add another PCI slot ? Just pop in a USB3 card and you're ready again, without redesign, aside from the drivers offcourse.

And if FPGA's become cheaper, add a new FPGA to the Natami and add Gigabit/Fast-ethernet VHDL-code to the core.

[Bennymee]

How much effort is adding a PCI USB controller to a board when you've already designed the PCI bus interface? The same goes for ethernet. It's hardly "insane" in my opinion.

And Natami without USB would be a strange beast given that it's meant to be a more up to date classic Amiga, and USB stacks exist for the Amiga already, and most peripherals are USB connected?

I think that the Natami people have realised about feature creep, although they did get carried away in the past with things like that 3D core. They cut back the 68070 initial plans to the 68050 too, which shows the ability to cut back to more attainable targets.

And bugs? It's an FPGA, they can get these sorted out down the line when they turn up. As long as the first release can run Aros 68k, AmigaOS 3.x, DPaint and many (if not all) AGA games and OCS/ECS games that great.

Not much effort, but the designer said he removed 1 PCI and added USB/Ethernet option onboard.