FPGA Replay Board

[Heiroglyph]

I've had some very nice communication with the NatAmi team and I wish them well.

This is great to hear.

The products don't directly compete and only help make the community better.

I can't wait until I can get my grubby little hands on both of them.

[Heiroglyph]

We went through HDMI licensing for a few of our products.  It's a severe pain to deal with but we had to have it.

Copy protection wasn't even an issue since we are outputting only unprotected video.  The issue was being compliant with the signal spec and proper detection and communication with attached devices, both video and audio.

I'm not sure that your board could actually qualify since it's intended to be user reprogramable.  They are very strict on every little detail and the user could easily make it non-compliant.

IMHO it would just drive up the price of FPGA Replay for very little benefit.

[Heiroglyph]

ive never fully understood, why trapping substituted instructions have been impossible, but since everybody broke their teeth on it i guess its not worth to explain to noobs.

They also removed some that we use a lot.  On these it will trigger an exception that you can trap.  Trapping the missing ones is too slow, making the CPU upgrade become a downgrade.

There are instructions that look like a certain 68k instruction that actually do something different on the Coldfire.  There's no way to tell when you hit one of these instructions because it is a valid Coldfire instruction, so your program just does the wrong thing with no way to fix it.

[Heiroglyph]

Considering it's almost finished and not yet optimized, those numbers are incredible.

Congrats guys, that's so much better than existing motherboards that you're really making me want one.

[Heiroglyph]

Do you have a particular game in mind?  Remember, you have a scan doubler, just not a flicker fixer..

I think that's the point that is not clear.  People don't distinguish between the two, they just know it makes their modern monitor work.

Regardless of deinterlacing/flicker-fixing, will it output NTSC/PAL in a way that a modern monitor can display?

[Heiroglyph]

Hey Jakub,

The NatAmi 68050 core (also known as N050) is going to be published under GPL license.

http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=6¬e=32232&x=5

Pozdrawiam

We'll have Natami cores just in time to use them on our BoXer boards.

[Heiroglyph]

I'd like to order from anywhere that I can see that it's available, place an order and have the expectation that it will be delivered or told it's out of stock.

The whole "if you've ever emailed me, you're in the queue" doesn't inspire confidence.  It might as well be vaporware as far as end users are concerned.

Not a slam on the accomplishment, but it's a frustrating experience.

[Heiroglyph]

He is a 1 man company with no profit.  You can't expect a smiling supermodel bikini girl to serve you your order in such a situation as this. :pint:

He's in "engineering mode" right now.  Eventually he will switch to marketing mode for a bit and you will become happier.

I totally understand, but that doesn't make the current experience any more pleasant.

If distributors can fix that problem without jacking up the price too much, then I'm all for it.

[Heiroglyph]

At what point can US buyers pay and expect to receive a board in a reasonable time frame?

The only reason I don't have one is that I didn't feel comfortable with the timeframes and the "if you ever emailed me, you're in the queue" nature of orders.