Scanning the original chips

[Digiman]

This begs the question if you committed to producing at least a million units minimum how much it would cost per unit to produce a working 100% compatible classic Amiga motherboard of A500 and A1200 specs?

(no case/keyboard/psu/floppy etc)

[Digiman]

The PCB has already been done. So for the chips you seem to need 100k - 200k USD in addition each chip maybe cost 1 USD per chip?
Btw, have a look att EFF DES cracker.

What I meant was how much a single A600 (or A1200) compatible drop-in compatible motherboard with Agnus/Denise/Paula would each cost to manufacture today from scratch inc tooling up for mass production and all R&D. Assume you commit to producing one million units and exclude CPU costs. Go to China, give them the specs for everything and add R&D cost to invoice they charge for producing a million units. £100? £200? less?

It's far from easy to do, the first Amiga Technologies A1200 motherboard that rolled off the production line run at the factory in France was defective in the mid 90s!

[Digiman]

Jeez I just wanted an idea of cost today using every possible advance in cost reducing production/technology, as Sony and Microsoft frequently employ, to make a board with surface mounted AGA/OCS reproduction chipset for absolute minimum price.

I never said it was a viable business, it isn't, and 1 million unit is a realistic quantity in general for making a go of a new mass market piece of electronics. I never said the market potential = 1 million. 10k units doesn't give you true mass market product costs in the world of bespoke electronics.

You can run WinUAE to A4000/030 speeds on a complete AMD 1.6GHZ Mini-ITX motherboard today anyway for £90 retail, that's cheaper than Minimig, and both are simulating an Amiga.

To compare, if you ordered a 1 million minimig Chinese production run tomorrow how much could you get the price down to? Assume Peter Jones from Dragon's Den fronted the required cash advance regardless and forget market size. Remember this is about finding out absolute minimum production costs nothing more.

(This is the first thing any investor needs to know anyway, minimum cost is finite....market size is down to talent of marketing depts)

[Digiman]

@Digiman

I think the point is, if you were to make an "Amiga Classic" compatible machine now, due to the complexity of the Amiga (when compared with machines of a similar age), to fully take advantage of technical advances and keep costs down... You would go the MiniMIG/Replay route rather than try and clone the original machine "chip for chip" (so to speak).

I agree, and chip reproduction is financially  only worth it for spares/repairs industry like the company in USA reproducing DeLoreans. They could build a new one from scratch but financially that's a dead end for same reasons.

I was interested in 2 things for comparison ie min technically possible cost for Minimig vs minimum possible cost for a 100% compatible non FPGA method. I know how much an x86 C-USA style x86 emulation based Amiga 600/1200 would cost.....very cheap.