GBA1000 Order

[Rodomoc]

As taken from EAB:
The initial outlay would be approx $46 per board with an aim to order at the end of February. Once they have arrived a final invoice would be presented for shipment to your country. We are aiming for a minimum of 30 boards.

So please state if your interested.
(Mods could this be made a sticky for a while?).

I will purchase 2. Thank you for the V4 of this.

[Rodomoc]

Theres a couple of guys that can program them - kipper included and he is looking to see what he can do to help at the moment.

Excellent.....

A few questions, In looking at GBA1000 website, some general version 1 specifications are given, as well as for unreleased version 5. I did notice some V5 basic documentation so this looks fairly recently displayed to public. What are specific V4 specifications. I am assuming that it is much like the V1 but having some fixes or optimizations. Can you confirm?

This is an exciting project. I have all Commodore manufactured donor parts needed.

Anybody know if 3rd party hardware is compatible with the GBA1000?

[Rodomoc]

It is mainly bug fixes, but the new board is no longer tied to a specific version of the Agnus chip so you have a few options there now. It can also now take the Indivision ECS flicker fixer. Some additional hardware will work, but it is a seriously feature rich machine anyway. His website even has a Picasso II card you can build and an additional ram expansion plus the front and side slots for other kit.

It is a nice board for sure. More Ram = merrier even if a separate board has to be built. Looks like one could get up to 32MB this way. Use of Indivision ECS is huge. Not sure what the IDE is capable of at this point. I wonder what the Zorro II would handle in regards to hardware? Keep us all posted on this. I look forward to ordering the 2 boards (maybe up to 5 depending on demand and further price breaks)

[Rodomoc]

Reading through the various posts on this thread and the other one. Also took a look at the various Braun materials. I know that it is nice to think about the possibilities of added features or a change in board format, but it is best to manufacture the v4 board as is. It is soundly engineered and good to go. Should Braun release eagle and BOM info on the v5, well obviously that would be the way to go in the future. I have 2 A1000 machines. It looks like one of them is going to run real good soon.

[Rodomoc]

In studying the schematics between V4 and V5, much is the same when it comes to general Amiga chip set portion of the circuit. Obviously the V5 CPU and memory is radically different than V4 and also the IDE. Braun did a lot of detailed electrical engineering as evidenced by reviewing the eagle files for V4. A ton of work was done, so hats off to him for basically reverse engineering the general Amiga circuit.

I see Braun does not speak too highly of the IDE in the V4 board. This must have been his inspiration to go into an A600 IDE design in V5.

I also compared initial board release schematics with V4. Various small changes were made, but overall it is quite the same.

One other thought comes to mind...That being a small hacker board containing clock ports being added to a V4 board. Might be possible, thus giving the V4 a nice feature boost w/ 3rd party add ons. (Subway USB, Delfina, ?) Maybe someone clever can work on something along these lines?

I am confused by Kickstart version. The V4 looks to be a straight up 2MB based ECS design to me so one would assume that 3.1 Kickstarts would be a possibility.

[Rodomoc]

And, like some others, I'd like to see new designs go AGA, perhaps with Prometheus built-in (non-profit style only) or Mediator bridge slot for PCI rather than ISA inline on big-box type boards. And 040/060 socket would be nice too. Actually, I'd probably prefer an A3000/4000 CPU slot over a CPU chip socket, and then we could even get CSPPC for OS4. AGA would be a big do over from scratch anyway. And then at some point consider Minimig-AGA in an FPGA rather than actual Amiga chips, once Minimig-AGA is available from Yaqube and MikeJ. (I'm assuming that will be GPL as is original Minimig)

Significant changes will require a lot of engineering, hence for an immediate result, use Braun's V4 as is.

Regarding PCI...A new design in 68060 combined with PLX9054 chip is far superior to anything currently employed on Amiga. Reference the R Czuba designs made for Atari (CT60. CTPCI). Big engineering required to get this into Amiga. Even adapting AGA into the equation will require a bit of effort. Hence I remain content for now with the Braun V4. Not that I wouldn't like these other possibilities in the future however...

[Rodomoc]

Theres actually a now open-sourced AMIGA 4000 PCI expansion so it wouldn't be that difficult if based around the hardware from that. But thats not the point as this thread is about the GBA1000.

I am aware that Prometheus went open late last year. But it is no match for a 68060 talking directly to a PLX9054. I believe Czuba had transfer rates at near 100mb/sec. But as you rightly said, not a point of this thread

So what is the current status on the V4 then? Looks like plenty of people will pony up. Looks like Braun-based component BOM is already good to go. My only question is in the gory details of firmware, etc.... One thing for me to build this thing, but getting system running beyond my expertise without some serious instructions for dummies