FPGA Replay Board

[espskog]

@Mike: Hi Mike -- been away from this board for a few months. Just wondering if there is  a releasedate for the beta of the daughterboards yet ?

[espskog]

Daughterboard is pretty complete and ready to be made, but it is on hold until the main board is in production.
I have the FPGAs and some other parts for another 100 boards.
The new firmware is running and finally this gives me the config options/ test I need for the DRAM controller. I am hoping the remaining 20 boards I have which have memory issues will be fine with the new firmware.

I am working full time for the next two weeks on this to get it done!
/MikeJ

Sounds great, Mike. Just out of curiousity -- how do you manage to keep a steady income when you work so much on the replay board ? Have you started to make money from the replay already or are you a killer multitasker betweek day-job and night-job (replay) ? ;-)

[espskog]

It is so cool to see that this thread exploded into a mega-thread It proves that the interest for this type of HW is what the market has a lot of interest in. Which again can mean Mike could earn some $$$ if he manages to sell a bunch. Hell -- he deserves it.

[espskog]

Finally I have a USB adapter which is soldered on in place of the PS2 connector. This has a VNC2 chip and adds one internal and one external USB port. Hubs, mouse and keyboard are currently supported. This is working on the dev board and the real PCB should be here tomorrow.

Is it possible for my beta board to get the hardware updates aswell ?

//Espen

[espskog]

I aggree with Darrin -- serial link is likely a feature not much needed anymore. Back in the days when "everyone" had an Amiga, we could link with our friends. Now we are a minority and is unlikely to find someone to link with within the range of the capabilities of a serial cable

[espskog]

So -- how are we doing with a C64 Core ? :-)

[espskog]

Will you ship the first daughterboard out with fitted 060 to us with the pre-released beta boards first ?

[espskog]

Of course, existing board owners who have been waiting for the daughterboard will be first. I can't promise 060s at the moment though (well, I can but not the final mask set).
/MikeJ

NIce. What would be the difference between the final mask and the one you can supply with the daughterboard ? What would be a guesstimate for shipping daughterboard ?
//Espen

[espskog]

How many ppl have Replays already?  Isn't it like 30 ppl?  Where are all these ppl?  Do they have some secret meeting place where they hang out and laff at all us oldsk00l A1200 lamers?  :lol:

The reason I ask is because if I am going to drop $1436.00 on a fully loaded Retro Replay Business Computer then I should probably make sure my game actually works on the Replay first.    Free download from Aminet here if anyone out there has a Replay and they want to check if it works:
http://aminet.net/package/game/strat/TotalChaosAGAr6

It really should work.  It is fully AmigaOS compliant and has been tested on a wide range of systems.  The only thing I am worried about is maybe if the Paula core has a tiny flaw in it then the music playback could go berzerk.  Mostly Octamed Sound Studio .meds and some good old protracker mods but modified to use a 1 line DMA-wait.

I don't use any weird instructions like movep.  I don't use weirdo lame addressing modes.  I don't even use bitfield instructions.  But I suppose maybe SASC might generate those in weird situations?  I doubt it but who knows?  I don't use any atomic Read-Modify-Write instructions.  So I am figuring it should work on the softcore cpu.  On the other hand, it is over 200,000 lines of code so...

There is a bug in the game so that soundfx playback can fail on SFS partitions.  Use FFS, PFS3 or ask me for the patch that fixes the problem.

Any place I could go to ask a Replay playtester to give it a quick test?

If there are any bugs, well... I have the source code to the whole game and a super powerful professional Source Level Debugger which displays both C and Asm sources simultaneously so I might be able to zoom right in on the problem and file a competent bug report.

I have one -- I have had it for quite some time. 2 years or so ?
At the moment it is just in the drawer. I am waiting for the daughterboard.
If someone really want to -- I could part with it and buy a new one when the daughterboard comes out as I will not use it before that anyway. Hwoever, this is a board which is one of the first 10 boards. It is even before mike started serialnumbering them

Someone make me an offer....the important thing is that if someone can use it, it is important so it goes to someone who needs it. I can wait for a new one...

Espskog

[espskog]

Great news, Mike. Will you put the core for DL at your web site ?
PS! Any new FW updates aswell or can I use the one I have ?

[espskog]

Mike: When do you expect to start full production on the daughterboard now that the main boards are shipping ?

[espskog]

Oh yeah, forgot about that we'd hiked ours. It's Sweden and Denmark with 25% that you need to watch out for.

You can for sure put Norway in that category too with 25% VAT. :pint:

[espskog]

Yes but FPGA Replay is not offering anything new over an A4000D though (like new custom chipset, major different like way faster CPU such as 500 Mhz+)! All it is offering is more CHIP RAM and default 68060 CPU upgrade skipping on the 030, 040 and so on....it is still AGA, and the RTG it offers can be obtained from a voodoo in an A4000D for example. It is still going with a 060 processor and pretty much the same speed as A4000D and last I check all software are developed with 2 MB CHIP in mind...what is FPGA Replay offers say that I cannot get on an A4000D,except say for a small space...and newer hardware...the specs are pretty much very close to the same.  In fact if WinUAE emulates FPGA Replay it will simply emulate it by  removing the 8 MB CHIP RAM on WinUAE to 512 MB Chip RAM and poof they are both the same spec (WinUAE vs FPGA Replay)
I will still face problems watching movies on an FPGA Replay say on an A4000D without having to go HAMP route.....

There is one thing you forgot. And that is that:

a) Not everyone has a A4000 anymore (Either never got one, sold it or it broke down)

b) A4000 is not portable...AT ALL :-)

c) You must admin that ALL the discussion and stuff going on around this project is actually keeping the Amiga alive. Maybe not directly (since it's a fpga-"amiga") but indirectly it keeps the community going.

And the most important fact is that Amiga is NOTHING without its community. It is all the social happenings, the good memories and the fact that us Amiga-fans NEVER give up. These are the things which are important. The hardware itself is a product of it all.

My FPGA-Replay is great for when my buddies and I want to play old-skool amiga games "On the fly" not having to bring the whole A4000/A1200 with us. This is a win-win for us -- as we can play games and have a blast using the easy-to-carry fpga-replay to hook up in no-time anywhere we like.

So who cares if its not the exact same as the old A4000 we used back in the days --- hey, neither are we. We got old too and are not the same anymore on the outside, but its what's inside that counts :-)


Thank you!