FPGA Replay Board

[psxphill]

Different from SDIO I presume?
 
Toshiba FlashAir only mentions being able to read from the card when inserted in a digital camera. Same with EyeFi but Flucard seems to support some P2P receive mode. The control is done with manipulation of "picture files", definitly an ad-hoc hack.

Yeah my understanding is the cards are intended to sync pictures to a PC and when the card is full they delete old pictures that have already been synced. No device will expect the card to change in real time, so before making changes it will have to simulate the card being ejected.
 
They are expensive because they are aimed at professional photographers, they use them for instant previews on large monitors in a studio. They aren't that new, just rare because of the cost.
It's entirely possible that they are generic enough to work with any type of file.
 
I would imagine that you'll be able to get remote access to the card from your PC eventually anyway.

[psxphill]

Copyright destroys the scope of retro computing IMO.

Ironically enforcing copyright would allow your app store to make some money. Piracy is your biggest hurdle.
 
The saddest thing for me is the lack of box and manual scans.

[psxphill]

You could buy 100 Mac Pros for the cost of a small townhouse in London.
 
Then again, you pay off the house and retire outside London, and you've got yourself a nice pile of money to waste on beer. Assuming we're not at 20% unemployment or recovering from the plague.

Depends on the spec of the macpro, you might only get a studio flat. If you tick all options on the mac pro then you might stretch to a maisonette.

[psxphill]

I know that the MMU was required on the '040 and '060 to be able to use DMA-based hard drive controllers. I don't know if that even applies to the current Replay board designs.

You don't need an MMU, the ATC registers are enough.
 
There are limitations to this approach and that is that all of Zorro II space has to be set to cache-inhibited serialized.
 
It's nothing to do with DMA, it's Zorro II IO cards and chipram that causes the problem. If you have nothing in Zorro II space then it's largely irrelevant.
 
The same thing would happen with the Replay if it used an 060 without an MMU.

[psxphill]

The Amiga rarely needs cycle exact as it relies more on custom chip timing but the Atari is more reliant on CPU timing. I would think a cycle exact 68000 and 68020 would be all that is needed for game consoles, Atari and a few old Amiga games. In my opinion, a cycle exact 68040 or 68060 is wasting time and resources that would be better spent on making a faster fpga CPU.

There is very little software that relies on cycle accuracy on the Amiga, because software ralely used delay loops for timing anything. There are however some exceptions. Some demos started the blitter in hog mode and assumed that the CPU wouldn't be able to run until the blitter had finished, this falls down when you are running from instruction caches. Alot of the soundtracker players used a software delay loop for waiting until it was safe to write to some registers. Also some old software relies on 68000 stack frame formats & MOVE SR.
 
I can see the argument for a 7mhz 68000 profile, but anything other than that should just run as fast as it can. Even a 68020 is a waste.

[psxphill]

Different CPU speed should be no problem but different CPU cores might be..

Rough CPU speeds are not a major problem. To even begin to attempt to model every type of accelerator out there however is a huge problem. Not only do you have to simulate the cache of the CPU, but each memory board design has a different ram speed. The problem with cycle exact in this regard is that nobody really has a concept of what it means.
 
If the demo is really that timing sensitive then you have no chance at all of the Replay board to 100% accurately behave like the machine that each demo was written for, so it's not worth the effort to even try. I'd suggest either getting a video taken from the authors computer, or get them to fix the software.

[psxphill]

That is why I think a standard for 68k enhancements should be worked on now, which I have been doing. It's too late when everyone has conflicting and incompatible enhancements.

I actually think there should be no effort put into enhancing the 68k beyond what Motorola did. Potentially a CPU that does everything that an 020 to 060+68882 can do. But I wouldn't care if it's just an 060 that only supported the instructions an 060 did, it doesn't even need to be superscalar if the instruction rate was good enough.

[psxphill]

The fpgaArcade will *attempt* to run all software for a *stock* Amiga 1200 using the cycle exact 68020 CPU core.

What Amiga 1200 software will only run properly using a cycle exact 14mhz 68EC020?

[psxphill]

Probably not much. The 14MHz speed would slow some games down to a playable speed but I expect the following would matter more:
 
1) Caches the same as the 68020
2) VBR in original location
3) No fast memory

There are really games on the Amiga that run too quick if you have an EC020 faster than 14mhz? I thought everything was tied to the vertical blank, so the speed only changes depending on whether you're running in 50hz or 60hz.

[psxphill]

Yes, there are Amiga games that run much too fast although most are old games for the 68000 and early AmigaOS. Sometimes timing problems are because of bugs like failing to call graphics.library WaitBlit correctly.

I know about the problems some 68000 games had. That is why having a cycle accurate 68000 is useful.
 
My question was related to games that run fine on an a1200, but would fail if the instructions per second was higher (whether that's due to higher clock speed or more efficient instructions).

[psxphill]

I am not really clear if they will display right or if they would appear in the upperleft corner of the display and have the top and left flow off the screen in an incredibly annoying manner. (Just like I have seen a ton of million$ PC gamez do when connected to my modern HDMI TV).

Most amiga games run at 320x200 for NTSC & 320x256 for PAL, so it would be even worse if the replay worked like this. So no it won't be squished into a corner.
 
It sounds like your PC/TV aren't configured properly. The video driver on your PC will usually have an option to stretch the display to fill the monitor, if the output resolution is fixed to 1080p. My TV also has a perfect scan option available on HDMI, when this is activated it displays the overscan areas so that nothing is lost into the borders. If your TV doesn't, then you might have to configure the PC to output some dummy borders for your TV to ignore.

[psxphill]

I'm using my own server to relay mails -- 's got nothing to do with ISPs... But thanks for the suggestions...

I stopped running my own mail relay when all the servers I needed to send to started blocking me.
 
They use various algorithms, from allowed/banned ip address ranges to grey lists that are built up by rejecting emails and then waiting for the message to be resent properly.

[psxphill]

The "software" in this case is a hardware description, not a conventional software language. It's a re-implementation, not an emulation.

The term emulation has been used for hardware that pretends to be other hardware before software based emulators became widespread.
 
Emulation is an intent, not a method.

[psxphill]

The daughterboard is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO beautiful:
 
http://faranheit.dyndns.org:8080/FPGA%20Arcade/Pictures/060%20Daughter%20Board.gif
 
What are those ports in the daughterboard for? I can hardly wait till I get my hands on one of these babies too

Looks like
 
top (left to right):
3 x usb
mouse (ps2)
keyboard (ps2)
video (DVI)
microsd
 
bottom (left to right):
 
Power (molex)
Ethernet (rj45)
2xJoystick + Serial (9 pin D)
Digital audio (toslink)

[psxphill]

In the other end of Ethernet you can place a terabyte fileserver far away so you don't have to be bothered by it's noise but still can enjoy the file space

I have a 6tb NAS that is quieter than the TIVO and PS3 under my TV. So I just keep it all in one place.

[psxphill]

There is no "emulation"..

Please don't start this discussion again, emulation doesn't mean what you want it to.