Portable Amiga anyone??

[picman]

Having followed the Pandora project for the last 24 (?) months or so, I have seen how difficult it has been for a team of 4 dedicated people to develop a hand held device, similar to what you are proposing. And the Pandora still hasn't been delivered to the first paying customer yet.

Are you proposing something similar to the http://www.fpgaarcade.com/ but in portable form? If so then that is something I may be interested in, at the right price (i.e. cheaper than the a current complete minimig).

Yes thats prity much it, but it will be more basic ie not so many ports etc, but a bigger fpga (1.6M gates insted of 1.2M) and more ram(32/64MB Remember not just for the amiga), so it will be a simple design that can be prototyped and delivered much more quickly.

Psp has mini-usb, headphones, 2 d-pads, analog joystick, and we can add tv out.
but it also uses a 4.3" lcd, is a nice hand size, has a good battery, wireless (if we can find out any info on it) a home button, volume buttons, select button, start button, plus a few more buttons, and they are very cheap from ebay faulty. Not the newer ones the old 1003's. The udm is useless (i think).

I have had a look inside a psp, and think we can replace the motherboard. So if we go ahead, it just means buying a scrap psp form ebay for aound £20 and  
our new board, the psp uses the sony memory stick, so we might be able to use that too (insted of the sd).

Its by no means perfect, but its cheap, and it will work, and be up and running very quickly.



What do you think?

[picman]

I used to use Nokia phones all the time because they were super sturdy.  Went Samsung for a few phones, they seemed to last about a year (I'm hard on my phones) then went back to Nokia for the Xpress Music 5310.  Tons of features-also tons of flaws in the software, and the durability has been a disappointment-I'm on my fourth one of them in a year and a half.  The earphone speaker keeps blowing out.

So if this is indicative of current Nokia product durability, then I would be reluctant to throw down for another one.

With regards to the actual subject of this thread-yes please!  A portable Amiga would rock.  It would also be possible to sell them in Fred Meyer with a pre-loaded selection of Amiga games.  You know, it would actually MAKE SOME MONEY for someone.  Needless to say, The Name, Inc. were not hyped on the idea..

Making money is not the issue, this wont make anyone rich and i dont wish to profit from it, it will be totally open source, The boards will be put out at cost ( or as close as possible) .

The pandora took 2 years to develop because they did the full blown design from scratch, board case software etc, i have developed stuff for work from the ground up and it does take time,
What i am proposing is we miss out a lot of the steps, develop a small pcb with a big fpga, and lots of ram, to fit into a case that is well made and can donate lots of parts.

The software has been written (just needs modding) the firmware for the arm has lots done already, so i don't think its such a masive task to get a working unit.

[picman]

I'm pretty sure you are right about the UMD drive being useless in this instance. It's Sony's proprietary format and I'm not aware of anyway it would be useful in ths instance. They take up a significant amount of space and besides, if the UMD drives actually work they could be resold on eBay.

Lol i just thought, the space the udm drive takes up, you could fit a ipod hard disk in there........  40 gig amiga portable anyone..... :roflmao:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Hitachi-1-8-iPod-Video-60GB-HDD-Hard-Disk-ZIF-Connect_W0QQitemZ110474122518QQcmdZViewItemQQptZOther_MP3_Player_Accessories?hash=item19b8c55516#ht_500wt_990

[picman]

Why would you want a HD in there? A SDHC card is future proof and by the time you release will probably be bigger than any HD you could propose today. I think Minimig already utilises that.

Look at those NDS mod cards, which are expandable via MicroSD card. They are so awesome. I wish there was an Amiga in there instead though. If only you could fit an FPGA on the expansion slot, or something that would accellerate emulation significantly enough for an NDS to emulate an A500 adequately. Of course the screen has a lower resolution, but perhaps you could compress or crop the image to size.

Hey, I would consider destroying my NDS to put Amiga emulation internals in there.

Well for one at the moment the largest sd card is what 64GB?? The largest 1.8" hd is 250gb? as the sd card gets bigger so do the hard disks....
More importantly the data thru put is much better on a harddisk, udma mode 100MB/s vs 45MB/s on a x300 sdhc card.

It wasn't ment to be serious anyway..... :roflmao:

[picman]

Ok, this sounds more interesting. So all you would make is the board? And of course a very detailed set of instructions for people to customise their duff PSPs?

What sort of price are we looking at?

Well some of the main parts needed are:
from digikey Digikey:

FPGA Spartan 3e 1600 320BGA 122-1481-ND  £40.90 in 1's
64MB DDR Sdram 557-1212-1-ND £5.60
ARM7 LPC 2388 568-4323-ND £10.32

The PCB i think we can get for £10 (6 layer) ish if we buy 100 or more..
The FPGA would have to be mounted which would cost around £100 for 100 boards.

Then we have the psu parts and connectors so at a real guess i would say £120 ish for build 1, now this will come down quite a bit if we buy more than i part at a time, eg the arm7 is £7 in 25's...

So i would expect it to be around £100....

[picman]

I think you're way too optimistic. Have you ever produced such electric devices?

Optimistic How?
And yes I design boards every day...

[picman]

@tone007

I think he would need to contact the Natami team if he wants to produce a more capable system than the MiniMig.  The Minimig is only A500 compatible with only a few add-ons such as the processor core in the FPGA.

@PicMan

I like the idea of a portable device but you've left out the price of the screen in your price estimates.

The screen should come with the dona PSP, if not they are around £20.
There are loads of faulty psp on ebay with power faults, udm not reading faults or other faults but have an intact screen. Recycling is good.

I have bought 2 today for less than £44 all in.

This is a project, it won't be for everyone, you will need some skill to assemble it, if you can change a screen in a psp, the you will be able to fit a new board, but it will be fun, and thats what life is about.

Its also not all about the minimig, thats only part of it, because its a large fpga, a lot of other computers/video games machines can be implemented.

[picman]

Selling 100 units of a £100-£120 product that requires some technical skills and further equipment (PSPs aren't quite lining the streets as far as I know) to turn into a working device does sound a bit on the optimistic side to me.  For that kind of money, I'd want a fully working, guaranteed device with no effort on my part.  GP2X is only slightly more expensive, apparently, if they're still available.  Isn't the Pandora supposed to be in the £200 range, and far more capable?

So its not for you, fine. Buy a gp2x, and run the amiga emulator very slowly, i have one here and its not good.
Pandora will be out in april or may (maybe) but all the ones produced are back orders unless you can get one of the canceled ones) The price still has not been fixed, and its still twice the price.

This is not ment to be a commercial product, just a bit of fun to keep the amiga (among others) alive in a different form,

[picman]

The problem with the pandora and gp2x is IMHO, that you have (gp2x) dual core cpu running at nearly 300MHz to emulate a 7Mhz amiga, and it still can't do it right, the pandora will be able to but its running at what 600MHz??
If it cant do it i would be worried.

But a small fpga running at the same freq as the original amiga will take no power at all really, and its not being software emulated.

We could even do away with the ARM, but i would rather keep it.


So to the original question... IS it worth producing this small board, and is anyone interested in helping to develop it. I can draw the board, but then it needs producing and prototyping, and that takes cash, so pre-orders would be nessesery.