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Author Topic: Natami started and stopped again  (Read 19021 times)

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Offline SamuraiCrow

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Re: Natami started and stopped again
« on: July 05, 2014, 04:24:25 PM »
Quote from: alphadec;768260
That would be fantastic if they did that, but dont think that would happen becouse then they would sell less AOS4 and AmigaOne.

Don't be so sure!  Trevor opened up the X1000 to all Amiga-like OSs at AmiWest 2012.  The MorphOS team and AROS teams just haven't taken him up on the offer.

I was in the audience that day and I wouldn't be surprised if Trevor wouldn't buy himself an FPGA Arcade Replay board and a few of the Apollo Team projects (meaning the remnant of team NatAmi).  After all, Trevor owns a MiniMig already!  In fact, he said he owns at least one of every model of Amiga to date!

I was one of the members of the NatAmi team though I am not currently a member of Team Apollo.  I would gladly buy either an FPGA Arcade Replay board or a Sockit board with Amiga core if I had the money to do so.

One interesting possibility is the Apollo Team's proposed accelerator card since I could buy that for less than an '060 accelerator for my A1200 and get better performance.  Since it would have access to the existing AGA chipset that way, I could use it out of the box and not have to wait for both the chipset core and the processor core to get the bugs worked out.

Also interesting, the FPGA Arcade Replay board is slated to support an '060 daughterboard.  If Gunnar (BigGun) and Mike (mikej) would be willing to cooperate, a harness to use to use the Apollo Team's Altera Cyclone 5 FPGA-based accelerator in the place of the '060 daughterboard for the FPGA Arcade would allow the CPU core to grow in a separate FPGA from the next-generation AGA compatible core on the Replay board.

Since Individual Computers is the only RoHS compliant A1200 trapdoor slot socket supplier, it may depend on how cooperative Jens Schönfeld wants to be.  If he makes a big stink about the card-slot adapter for the A1200 it might be more practical just to do a Replay board harness instead!

So many possibilities!  One bad thing about the Sockit board is that VGA is analog only.  The NatAmi prototypes and Replay board both support digital DVI as well as the possibility of analog DVI to VGA adapters in the same port.  Also, the proposed Apollo Team accelerator is supposed to have HDMI which is strictly digital and supports both audio and video signals on the same (smaller) port simultaneously (though DVI to HDMI converters drop the analog and audio signals in the port adapters).

I can't wait to see what comes of this anyway!
« Last Edit: July 05, 2014, 04:28:21 PM by SamuraiCrow »
 

Offline SamuraiCrow

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Re: Natami started and stopped again
« Reply #1 on: July 09, 2014, 10:35:13 AM »
Quote from: amigadave;768526
It is a real shame that the Natami team fell apart after one or two of its members pissed off the man with the original idea, who has since gone into hiding and is now working alone on his ideas, probably to be released under a different name (if he is ever able to complete any of it).  The Natami project captured the imagination of a large segment of our community (including myself) and I think that it could have generated a large amount of enthusiasm and renewed programming interest on 68k Amiga.  Hopefully the Apollo boards will have a similar effect and besides being just FPGA accelerators, they will be expanded some time in the future, to include much of what the Natami had aimed for.


It was more than one or two.  I balked too when I found out the NatAmi MX might cost as much as a SAM.  That said, I've learned second-hand that Thomas Hirsch is still working on a new NatAmi.

About the Apollo accelerators, there's a locked thread about them on EAB.  Gunnar posted there that the accelerator boards will have FPGA usable HDMI and Ethernet ports on them.  The idea that some Amiga chipset core with graphics card features will use the HDMI port is very likely.