Excitement about NatAmi

[commodorejohn]

That window will always be open at my house.  Besides, the two projects are not competing with one another.  Advancement of AROS, especially 68k AROS, only helps the Natami.

This. Hobbyist efforts are not a zero-sum game. What benefits one project can easily benefit others, as long as the teams involved aren't trying to wage turf wars against each other.

As for commercial availability, I think it would depend on whether they go into it with aspirations of making a lot of money, or just sharing what they've created. If they're trying to make a lot of money (like certain other hobbyist projects,) they'll likely over-price it and lock out all but the die-hard enthusiasts willing to spend, say, 1800 EUR just to have a new Amiga-compatible. If, on the other hand, they don't walk around with dollar signs in their eyes and focus more on just getting it available, I could see that working.

[commodorejohn]

The natami is a hardware emulation of the amiga architecture? Does this mean it is not a "real" amiga?

Depends on where you stand on the great "what makes an Amiga an Amiga" argument. Is it the architecture? The actual, physical hardware? The brand? The OS? Or some kind of intangible spirit thing? It seems like everybody has a different answer.

Personally, I'm beholden to the elegant hardware and software architecture of the original OCS/ECS machines, which NatAmi seems to be aiming to replicate/beef up, so it's right up my alley But I suppose if you don't consider an FPGA implementation to be a "real" machine, this isn't going to do it for you.

[commodorejohn]

Well, they are "programmed" to behave as other hardware, but it's in a direct, "arrange actual circuit elements to function as a particular piece of computer hardware" sense, whereas emuation proper is code running on one computer mimicking the CPU and hardware of another computer. Similar, but not quite the same thing.

[commodorejohn]

Only the Natami people can say how fast the Natami blitter is going to operate, but if they can run their 68050 core at 133MHz, then maybe they can run their blitter implementation at a similar speed...

I'd think if anything, the blitter would be able to run faster, as it's quite a bit simpler a circuit than a CPU on the 68k model. Still, only they can say for sure.

[commodorejohn]

Hmm, interesting. I presume then that the new blitter is able to keep up with whatever speed DDR2 they're putting in it, or there wouldn't be much point in the buffering. Given the estimates on CPU speed, I'd hazard a guess that it's 133MHz, but of course I have no way of knowing.

[commodorejohn]

Right, right. Guess we'll see how it shakes out, hopefully soon!

[commodorejohn]

In answer to the topic, totally excited about the potential and cautiously optimistic about the actual product. Never moved on from classic

[commodorejohn]

Good to hear! Send our thanks to the other team members (and yourself ) for their work!

[commodorejohn]

If the Amiga's design can accomodate it, would it be possible to add another copy of say the Paula chip, stripped down to just the audio portion, in order to have more audio channels?

Last I looked on the NatAmi page, there already was a severely beefed-up audio generator capable of a large number of 16-bit channels.

[commodorejohn]

I am really excited about the Natami, (yawn). How about upgrading the processor to something a small bit newer like a AMD 6 core cpu (1090t, 1055t or the 1075t) , why are we futzin around with something Motorolla gave up on a long time ago. I know why Amiga people aren't happy unless it is out of date junk that they can spend lots of money on upgrading for bragging rights.

Uh, maybe because that's the architecture that 90% of Amiga software runs natively on? Or that it's a perfect pleasure to program on when it comes to assembler, as compared to x86's "we'll just keep making our four registers even bigger!" approach? Or that every other damn thing is Intel these days except for small-scale ARM devices and PPC game consoles, and a little freakin' variety would be a nice change of pace?

As for the upgrading-for-bragging-rights thing, I have no interest in that, which is exactly why I'm looking forward to NatAmi - it's the best chance I have to get a more semi-modern Amiga-compatible system without having to shell out a couple grand for a 4000, video card, and PPC board :|