FPGA options for the A1200

[psxphill]

Waiting for the Vampire as well, although the standalone model interests me more since you don't have to rely on 25 years old electronics to power it.

Yeah, I'm kinda torn both ways. Having it fit an a500 case, use an a500 keyboard and use a 3.5" floppy drive would be quite nice.

[psxphill]

If there is going to be an FPGA accelerator for the A1200 with the same or similar speed as that of the Vampire, it is going to be a Vampire. It's not that FPGAs are magically fast at running 68k code. The other 68k softcores reach low to mid-range 020/030 class speed (without FPU and MMU, of course) in comparable FPGAs.

Or someone else improves the other 68k softcores. It's not like vampire is magically the only fast FPGA 68k emulator.

Apollo likely has a headstart, but you don't know what people are doing in private.

[psxphill]

so I see no real advantage to not going with the standalone board. I guess you could mount it in your A1200 case if you wanted...

AFAIK the standalone won't have PCMCIA or floppy, but the A1200 will still have these. You might not care, but I might.

If the standalone fit in an A1200 case and supported PCMCIA (and why not cardbus too) as well as internal and external floppy drives then it would be hard to resist.

[psxphill]

Compatibility has very little to do with timing. If a program is tied to the timing of a CPU, then it's going to have a bad time running on any accelerator.

That still counts as compatibility, the only way to really solve it is to allow the speed to be dropped.

Back in the 80's you could buy PC's that had a turbo switch, if you turn it on then the cpu runs at normal speed or turn it off and it slows down (to as slow as 4.77mhz iirc).

You can fix the software and a lot of it has been fixed when using whdload.

[psxphill]

Seems like everything that could be done with it could be done just as well (or perhaps even better) with a built in contemporary like SDCARD or ethernet or externally via USB.

Everything you can do on an Amiga can be done just as well on a PC, but we're still here. Your argument doesn't really work.