FPGA Replay Board

[psxphill]

PS3 controller outputs continous signal? ordinary Commodore joystick only generate Back - Forward etc.. plain binary.

ps3 pads have a d-pad as well as analogue sticks.
 
The last I heard the FPGA replay board wasn't just for emulating commodore machines either.

[psxphill]

yes, very easy at the USB level - just need a new handler for that device and send back the raw data to the fpga with a different header type.
The problem is how to handle it at the FPGA end. Currently, the mouse and keyboard are converted into amiga looking mouse and keyboard, so no driver required. The same could be done for button keyboards etc.
/MikeJ

Well ideally there would be a way of mapping everything, so the analogue sticks could be used as a mouse or digital/analogue joystick. keys/dpad could be used as mouse/joysticks (and obviously keys). Mapping a button to up to make jumping easier etc. But I know that would be a lot of work & I'd rather have the bare minimum than wait ages.
 
I'm not sure how standardised the buttons are on pads, I think all the buttons on ps3 pads are actually analogue. So even though they are HID, you might need to hard code stuff.
 
Even if the dpad was the joystick and every other button is mapped to fire then it would be pretty awesome.

[psxphill]

Guess the "soak" part confused me. I thought on dipping them in some chemical solution

Yeah, it's not a particularly descriptive name. I have never heard the origin of the term, but I expect there was some logical reason.
 
Burn in testing doesn't quite mean what it sounds like either.

[psxphill]

But if there's only one USB port for keyboard, where will the mouse go?

Hub

[psxphill]

@Kokos
I think MikeJ has made it to fit a half-mini-itx case

Like this http://www.envizage.com/products/cscitmtx006b-envizage-mtx-006b-black-mini-itx-case-with-300w-psu.html ?

[psxphill]

Sorry for not responding to emails this week - I am receiving lots but as I am travelling in China I haven't been able to keep up.
 
I will clear the backlog next weekend.

I've been on the waiting list since april, any idea how far down I am?
I have money waiting

[psxphill]

The VNC2 chip contains the translation table. So yes, it would behave just like an original amiga mouse / keyboard as far as the system is required.

If it could also map them to joystick inputs as well as mouse then that would be awesome. As the mouse uses the joystick ports (at least for buttons, but moving the mouse also affects the joystick direction inputs) then I would hope it wasn't too hard :-)

[psxphill]

Kokos, I am happy to send you the engineering drawings of the back panel if you wish to get your own fabricated.
Best,
MikeJ

Are you going to do a backplate that works with the usb option ? I guess if you don't have the svhs/composite option the holes will still be there, but the hole for the ps2 connectors isn't going to be the right shape for usb.
 
Also what about the daughter board connectors? I would prefer not to have to buy another back plate when that comes out....

[psxphill]

Had a strange thought... How does Replay cope with Widescreen monitors? Does it keep 4:3 aspect and use bars down side or stretch screen?

I imagine for PAL it outputs a 720x576 screen and it's up to you to tell your TV how it should be displayed. 720x576 is the resolution of PAL 4:3, the pixels aren't square so you can't calculate the aspect ratio using just the resolution (Pixels are 1.066:1 i.e. slightly wider than they are tall, not sure if NTSC is the same).
 
OCS Amiga's couldn't output "square pixels".

[psxphill]

@Everblue, I think I recall someone mentioning that certain inputs (esp VGA) won't support some resolutions that other inputs will.

A lot of TV's only list certain supported resolutions, however they can be made to display other resolutions if the timings are right.
 
1920x1080 is not listed for VGA on any of the Toshiba TV's that I've used but if you tell Windows that you're outputting to a Standard 1080p TV then it works fine.
 
The only shortcut I knew of in the Amiga chipset was that they ended up with non square pixels because of how they generated the pixel clock from the 28mhz clock.

[psxphill]

What about the core?

[psxphill]

Geez Mike... if you get Stargate ported to the FPGA Arcade I will throw away all of my gaming equipment and build a cabinet!

Rather than building a cabinet that has a non standard control scheme to put an FPGA arcade in, why not just get a real stargate cabinet?

[psxphill]

It is runs on pretty much Defender hardware? No problem...

The hardware is similar but the memory map is quite different.

[psxphill]

I consider purchasing a FPGA card for my A1200 but only if the speed is like winuae+JIT enabled (around 2400 mips)
also the card must have 3D GFX card,USB ,WIFI,scandoubler etc
otherwise I pass

You shouldn't consider buying one then.
 
WinUAE sounds perfect for what you want.
 

WinUAE can do Amiga things, but you cannot turn it into an Amiga computer.

Sure you can, it's just a different way. Both ways have pro's and con's.
 
A1200 has IDE and can have SCSI/Zorro/ISA/PCI slots added. FPGA Arcade has nothing like that, WinUAE can make a lot of pc hardware available to the emulated Amiga. I eventually expect WinUAE to support PPC emulation as well.

[psxphill]

...yet... but the expansion slot is fully capable of all of these things. SCSI is of particular importance to me.

I'd rather see SATA than SCSI support, at least you can still buy the hardware for a reasonable price. The command sets have become mostly common now to the point where Windows often refers to SATA devices as SCSI. The speed would truly be remarkable.
 
Adding SCSI-I is probably cheaper though, you could do a SCSI controller in the FPGA and run out some I/O to a connector on the board. You could do the same for a cheap ass IDE implementation as well (like commodore did).
 
The problem of course is going to be coming up with a one size fits all board. Realistically it's unlikely there will be more than one expansion board designed and manufactured & my guess is you're going to want mike's board with the full 68060 and extra ram and ethernet.
 
Adding an CD/DVD drive could probably be done using USB, but that is probably harder than adding SATA. I'm especially thinking about games consoles where you won't have a USB stack and the extra latency of emulating direct access would probably kill it (i.e. you're reintroducing the same problems that Windows has).

[psxphill]

As the Amiga sampling frequency may vary significantly but the output will not. A constant difference in frequency of course add another frequency, then there's aliasing etc.

I don't believe the Amiga sample rate does vary, all samples appear to be output relative to the colour clock.
 
http://blog.kebby.org/?p=11
 
http://eab.abime.net/coders-general/63227-low-level-workings-paula.html
 
3.58mhz is a little high to be outputting though. The Amiga will put that through some form of filter, even when the low pass filter is off.
 
From what I can tell the 2 bytes in the AUDxDAT register get output alternatively for 64 clocks, the audio changes when another 2 samples are loaded (either via dma or cpu). Which kinda sounds like it would cause a lot of noise artifacting, but apparently not (although paula does sound a bit crunchy at times).
 

You could do a SCSI-II controller in the FPGA (plenty of gates left), but I happen to have about 2000 53C80 chips sitting here to give me SCSI. SCSI is exclusively used by the Mac, and for the Mac emulation I will need SCSI support to access things like Syquest drives, CD-ROM drives, tape drives, etc.. all of the same stuff that is plugged into my A3000.

I would hope the Mac emulation will work without any real SCSI peripherals though, at that point you probably don't want to use a real 53C80 as you'd be limited to only having real peripherals or only having emulated ones. If you emulate the 53C80 then you can have a mixture of real and virtual peripherals, plus it would be nice if you could use the same interface for emulating any machine with SCSI whatever controller chip it uses.
 
Of course you can go ahead and make your own expansion board with a 53C80 if you like, but it is likely it will have a very small audience as everyone is likely to want the board with the real 68060 and the people who need an emulated SCSI controller chip will have to effectively redo the same work. While if we could persuade mike to just throw on some SCSI/IDE connectors (or even space for them) then it would meet everyone's needs (except your manufactured need of finding somewhere to put these 53C80 chips).