natami

[Digiman]

I can't spend £400-450 on an FPGA Amiga.

The reason is classic 2D Amiga games all run the same whether you have an 060 or a 7mhz 68000.

I'm not even sure how much FPGA Arcade or Minimig costs but to be honest this whole FPGA thing is a dead end unless Jeri Ellsworth mass produces her system for the equivalent of £50 it's just not worth it.

Probably be a better idea to make this 68050 FPGA softcore into an accelerator and sell it for £150-200 for high sales volume.

(Sorry if this offends people, just my opinion given how good WinUAE is)

[Digiman]

Jeri had already done alot of the work for the C-One before the DTV. So most of the R&D time had already been paid for or written off. It probably wouldn't have happened if they'd had to pay her for all her time up front.
 
The C64 was a much better known computer than the Amiga, so the cost of hardening the design into an ASIC and mass production was worth it. I don't think we'll see the situation repeated.

Exactly, Jeri told me that whilst the Amiga was a more complex machine than the C64 it also had less undocumented features to replicate in the FPGA code so was actually easier once she got started. Paula Agnus and Denise were replicated in record time and running an A500 motherboard with those chips missing. I think the production costs were going to be a bit higher ($20-30) so the project was cancelled because they wanted it to be more or less the same price as the 64DTV.

The thing doesn't have to go in a joystick but I guarantee you if the 64DTV was $50 the Amiga DTV and hence the small circuit board for it a la Minimig would come in easily under $100.

The fact that Jeri has only been hired for a Commodore or Amiga related project shows what a load of rubbish these licensees are churning out, and at 4-6 the cost of equivalent x86 running Amithlon and OS3.9 setup really.

[Digiman]

@Digiman

Far be it for me to tell you what to think or say, but Ive gotta say, your obsession with licences is getting pretty weird by now. Let it go guy, sheesh. Rhetorical (ie. please dont re-itterate), but did Cloanto kidnap your puppy or something? I just dont get why what others spend thier time and money doing is of any real consequence. DOnt like it, dont buy it, pretty simple. Your need to defame others simply because its not your kettle of fish is more than a little weird.

Are you on crack or something boy?

The only sentence referring to licensees is to HARDWARE projects for anything to do with Commodore branding or Amiga branding on hardware. Amiga/C64 Forever is just software and has no connection with the tinkering genius of Jeri. WTF are you talking about?

[Digiman]

WinUAE on a standard x86 PC. Hero. And - by the way - irrelevant and off topic.

On topic: I really would welcome a Mini-Mig on steroids - it doesn't have to be the "wonder machine" that was PR'd by some of the team members.

I agree WinUAE is just an application, an incredible one, but not a physical product like Natami or Minimig so comparison is unfair.

There is nothing wrong with Natami except the price IMO. However you would need to invest something like $1,000,000 to do an FPGA Amiga from scratch to full mass production run as a product to get it well below the magic $100 price barrier. However would you quickly sell 50,000-100,000 units even then to recoup your initial investment from your first batch?

Maybe you might sell more if the machine could connect to something like Apple App store/XBLA/PSN Network style service to buy legally authorised copies of games to use on said machine for a similar price to MP3s on iTunes?

Cost of investment vs potential maximum sales is the issue.