Looking for W3D_Picasso96MU.library v4.2 (17 Feb 2002)

[OlafS3]

Make a gosh-darned Kickstarter for it.  I'd throw in a couple thousand bucks, I'm sure others would as well.  I thought Natami died due to in-fighting and petty squabbles, however?  Just like all (most) good Amiga projects.  *sigh*  

Dreaming about cheap CSPPC's and whatnot is pointless, for all the aforementioned reasons.  Pricing to buy the board designs, ROHS, etc., etc.

No Natami was (in opposite to public impression) a one-man project by Thomas Hirsch, he could have published it in recent years but obviously did not manage to. I think I heared there were RAM-timing problems but do not know the "hardware stuff" too deep . In short... reason certainly was not because of natami forum discussions or other people.

[OlafS3]

Thanks for the clarification!  I'm sure I will forget and post erroneous information again, maybe I should just bookmark this comment, lol.  

Still disappointed about how that all played out.  I have very little interest in MiniMig, MiST, FPGA Arcade, and whatever all the other gazillion Amiga clones and derivatives are.  But I would've bought the heck out of Natami.  

Natami would have been very expensive in fact, you would have get a very good equipped PC for that (part prices without soldering) so I do not think that the market would have been very big. Some would have bought it of course. A standalone device would be nice in future and is one of the future ideas for the apollo project. But first they should get the accellerators out.

[OlafS3]

Thomas was making the Natami with the high quality and many features he wanted. Yes, it would have been expensive in small quantity orders that were expected but cheap compared to AmigaOS 4 hardware. No pre-order numbers for production boards were gathered that I know of but I believe the interest was under estimated. The Natami MX bringup thread has 729k reads!

http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=1¬e=33366

If everyone looked at the thread 100 times, there would be 7296 interested people with no advertising! Natami cost estimates were likely conservative and based on small quantities. The Natami value is highly dependent on the performance of the CPU and the FPGA CPUs at that time were not as mature or fast (a real 68060 was much more cost). The price of FPGAs has dropped significantly since then. It may be affordable to use an FPGA with SerDes now for SATA/PCIe which may allow the board to be smaller and cheaper. It may be possible for the ethernet chip to be removed and driven by the FPGA directly as planned for the Apollo sandwich accelerator. The board would probably need at least a partial redesign depending on availability and price of parts like DDR2 to DDR3. The Natami, like the original Amiga, was ahead of its time but it would be easier to offer more value today.

http://www.natami.net/gfx/NatAmi64_MX/natamipinout.png

Weren't the Natami problems cache coherency problems? I had the impression that Thomas was trying to speed up the custom chips to what the hardware is capable of. Even the gfx speed up of the FPGA Arcade or Mist over AGA is huge and more would likely be possible in a higher spec Natami.

a lot of "if" in your sentence... of course in bigger quantities production and component prices are cheaper but I have seen no realistic calculation of it only the situation at that point of time. And at that point of time it would have been too expensive for many. We need a lift of the whole hardware base and not just 100 or 200 sold systems.

Regarding problems I think I read RAM timing problems but I cannot say more about it because not being involved there. In any case the problems obviously were so relevant that the whole project stalled.

[OlafS3]

Not really RAM timing, but the problem was to pipeline the blitter *and* stay compatible with the original. The current FPGA implementation does not really use the full power of the FPGA for blitter emulation, it is more a step-by-step implementation. It could be made much faster by bundling the RAM accesses and fetch several words at once, similar to bursting (as far as I understand it).

The problem is that this also limits compatibility. With the original blitter, you can in principle configure your output register (channel D) such that it writes "in front of" the input registers (A,B,C), i.e. the input channels can see what the output writes, *if* you know the exact timing of the blitter, and which channel allocates which DMA time slot.

With any type of pipelining in place, this type of "trick" no longer works. The input registers would have their input already buffered since a long time before the buffered output ever appears on the bus, and hence blitter functionality would then be different.

As always "no sane programmer" would have done that, but a lot of insane programming (called "hacking") was done on the Amiga... So it was again a problem of finding the right balance between speed and compatibility. With blitter prefetching active, probably a handful of "programs" (as in demos) would not run anymore correctly, but this would again cause an outcry of those who love that stuff...  

Thus, one of the big problems here is really of finding the "sweet spot" between compatibility and speed. All Os4 and friends/foes cut compatibility at "source code level" (as in "you have to recompile"). This would be ok for an open source platform, but Amiga was none. Natami tried at "hardware register level", but maybe that's already asking a bit too much, and probably the cause for its failure.

Having a blitter is probably a "must have", but do we really need to emulate every nonsense that was done back then in the early days? *That* is the big question.

thanks for explanation

interesting read

my personal 2 cents... who prefers compatibility as highest priority is better off with FPGA Arcade or Mist. The new apollo cards (and Natami) should be for new software mainly so in doubt having faster and more advanced hardware implementation is more important than that every old game or demo works correctly.