Natami style SuperAGA card for A4000/A1200?

[bbond007]

But I've been thinking about this for a while now.  My biggest complaint right now about my A4000D is the AGA chipset.  It seems to just fly when in 64 or less color mode, but in 256 color mode, work bench crawls, has weird redraws, etc.

I am simply dying for the Natami to come out, but the question always comes up "well when / if it ever comes out, what will be the damage to my wallet?"  I'm also wondering if it'd be easier to create a new, faster, better AGA upgrade somehow to allow for faster 256 (or more) work bench?

The FPGAARCADE is your only hope now that the Natami fire has fizzled out... but that is only going to support a GFX card mode, and not a superset of AGA.

Anyway, I agree that AGA was a little slow out of the gate - about 1/2 the speed of a mac of that era in 640x480 (multiscan) 8bpp mode. They were also less than 1/2 the price. Commodore probably expected most people to use a NTSC monitor like a 1084 anyway...

If you have an Indivision AGA MK2 you may see a driver in the future that does not slow down so much running in higher resolutions or depth. The driver would accomplish this by turning off screen DMA while writing to the video buffer. Normally this would cause the screen to blank out but the Indivision would frieze the image until DMA is reenabled. You could see a quicker ShapeShifter or WorkBench driver.

In higher resolutions and color depth the machine just spends way too much time being locked out of the chipram just displaying the screen. 256 color mode in theory should be 1/2 the speed of 16 color mode, but as you know, its much slower than that. Not only do you have twice as much memory to move, but you have to use a much smaller shovel.

Also screen changes would probably appear instantaneously and you would never actually see anything being drawn. That last part is just speculation on my part though.

[bbond007]

The blitter should be significantly faster (unless they slow it down for compatibility) and would work with the faster gfx memory to give even a bigger speedup. The RTG chunky modes will reduce the amount of work needed also providing a speedup.

On the older Minimig 1.1 you can enable fast mode and it does indeed make ECS really fast and nice. Blitter speed is really substantially increased and you don't get slowdown running in overscan mode. I run my Workbench and Cygnus Editor in 728x283 in 16 colors which would probably kill a real ECS amiga.

I am totally convinced FPGArcade is the future because our hardware is aging and really is pretty maxed out as far as expansion capabilities.

There's an idea, except that I have the original Indivision AGA.  Actually I kind of like that I got that anyhow, since I have the VGA of it, the DVI of the Radeon and HDMI from my main PC all connected to my 24" LCD.    But if it's just a driver update, the question is will it work with the Indivision that I have?

I don't think the original Indivision will be able to do the Graffiti mode(sorry). From what I understand the original and MK2 are totally different hardware which probably why the firmware and utilities for the MK2 are taking such a long time.

I don't even think the trick of turning off video DMA is definite yet, but if it pans out I hope we see a lightning fast ShapeShifter driver that uses the combination of that and the Graffiti...

If there was a workbench driver like there is for the Indivision ECS that would be really cool.

That would indeed improve the shortcomings of AGA (DMA slowdowns and lack of chunky mode) and probably be the closest thing to "Super AGA" as an add-on you'll see...