It would be cool if some major company picked up the rights to use teh FPGA Replay board for other purposes aswell. Even if they did change the design a little, I bet the core could be adapter (or maybe even did not need adaption at all) so the world could get a nice FPGA Replay board for whatever-use whilst use Amigans could load our beloved minimig-core on it and use it for our own purpose. That way the production could be streamlind by someone else, while the retro-user gets a niftly board to use and Mike would not have to do so much production-stuff.
What we need now is decent cores which is usable for every retro-fan out there, so that the question of what board to use is not important, but what fpga board has the MOST cores out there which are maintained and fully working.
I think the key factor to succeed in the fpga-board fight is simply how many cores we get and how well they work. More cores = more users = more money = more development =
We need to get an Atari Core at least to get the Atari guys to jump on this board. Hoperfully, the fpga-replay board won't be promoted as a "Amiga Board". We need ANY user out there, no matter what core they like to run. And we need people to make and maintain good cores.
Personally, I want a C64 core aswell. The ones out there is not quite there yet.
It would be nice if FPGA board developers could concentrate on the cores instead. I would love to pay for a nice C64 core -- but I would not like to pay to have a proprietary fpga board to run it on when I already have my Replay board :-D
Then you have the fpga board which are proprietary like the Chameleon. It's a great product, but it will have to compete with minimig, replay and any other design out there. And frankly, there is NOT enough money out there to make all FPGA board happy. Just scrap the crap and focus on the best board and make cores for that. If you can sell a Core for a $10/30 fee to be a registered user (and gets updates etc), then that would be a great idea. I think all FPGA board users should contribute with a little cash to the developer of the core so that they can continue to develop it and make it better.
After all, they do it on their spare time....
Maybe someone could setup a FPGA CORE wiki and have links to all the cores and keep track of them and have links to download etc ? That would have been nice. A CORE LIBRARY ... not just for machines, but also for ARCADE CORES or any other core for that sake.
Keep up the great work!!!!!
