FPGA Replay Board

[vidarh]

Before using the RP9 format, check that it's copyright free.

You can't copyright facts, such as a fileformat. You can copyright the *description* of one, but that doesn't prevent re-implementing code to handle it.

[vidarh]

Just as I was promising myself to spend less money on electronic gadgets....

Oh well, will have to break that promise.

[vidarh]

Will you be able to produce 100 to 200 boards at a time, so that everyone that wants one will have a chance to buy one?

If I remember correctly Mike has said previously that the next run would be 500 or so. Of course he could've changed plans since then.

[vidarh]

They are getting expensive. I am talking to a supplier here.
By the time we include shipping, handling )and testing it will be around 60Euro + vat for the processor. (Worst case 70Euro I think) Is this a price people are willing to pay?

Not having to hunt it down myself is worth a bit extra. 70 euro doesn't sound bad to me. Especially if we'll ideally being able to order the daughterboard + CPU in one package and get it mounted and tested.

[vidarh]

I'm amazed you don't have a longer queue... Whenever you want to seriously boost interest, just write a blog post or something about the current status, and I'm sure you'll get help getting it posted various places.

E.g. Reddit, Hackernews would both probably have quite a few people who'd love to get their hands on one, including people not that interested in the Amiga cores but that would love to hack on various other platforms..

[vidarh]

It makes it annoying when you buy something from a country in the EU that has 20% VAT, but at least you don't get stung for the import duty and fee for presenting it to customs.

Yeah, countries like the UK... (UK VAT has been 20% since 2011)

[vidarh]

Yeah, I see the humor there... back in the day, I thought it was a hoot to run MS-DOS, Amiga OS, and Finder "simultaneously" on my Bridgeboard-equipped A2000 running shapshifter. ;-)

I always love to freak younger geeks out by pointing out I had a machine with 6 CPUs back then (of course, only 4 of them actually in use at any one time - the 68000 and 8086 would usually be disabled) of 4 difference architectures:

 * 68000 + 68020 accelerator
 * 8086 + 80286 accelerator on the bridge board
 * Z80 controlling my SCSI card.
 * 6502 variant controlling the keyboard.

These days, the RAID controllers in our servers at work have PPC's in them, and many modern hard-drives have ARM cores in them, so we're up to 3 architectures still (and one of the reasons why x86 ranks so low in number of units shipped).

[vidarh]

You could make the same observation for the previous generation of machines too. My Atari 800 had a CPU in each of the four external floppies and the 850 serial interface. There's 6 right there. ;-) 7 if you stretch the point beyond elastic limits and consider Antic (the gfx chip) as a cpu. ;-)

Yeah. Same with the C64 of course - lots of fastloaders worked in part by downloading their own driver to the 1541, which had a 6502 as well.