Yesterday I had desire to write something about the topic but I give up but now I see that someone mentioned me so here we go. This is just my point of view and my experience. Here I will try to explain how stuff works in real engineering world and production of hardware and then I will try to explain why we can't go this way. Remember I m not an engineer and don't intent to become one.
Updating classics Amiga hardware:
I noticed that someone said that Amiga community is not so small. Well if we just consider that there are 10 000 active people in Amiga community and that economy says that 10% of those people are interested into new product you have 1000 people who would buy some product. Let's consider another thing that we don't have just one model of Amiga that we have lot of them so we need to cover lot of different versions but if we decide to cover just one version we need to again to drop for 10%. So now you have 100 potential customers in best case. So let's talk about the prices of parts. If you consider buying some compatible CPU at that quantity it could be impossible to order so low quantity. Seller will agree but price will be so high that your final product because of the price will reject another 5% of interested people. In other words people will start comparing your product and performance against much faster and cheaper PC peripherals and that is first mistake. Include free work in all of this because calculating how much an engineer earn per hour of work could drive this low quantity to unbelievable price.
Let's consider me starting Amiga 1200 FPGA accelerator project.
There are no trapdoor connectors and my conversation with every manufacturer was basically like this. Me: Can you produce large quantities of this connectors. Manufacturer: Yes we can how much? Me: 1000 pcs Manufacturer: It is too small quantity price will be high between 10 and 15 USD/pc
So first I need to buy 1000 connectors because that is lowest number you can order at most of the manufacturers. I need to invest 10 000USD in just trapdoor connectors and in the same time I will not sell 1000 boards. not to mention that I can buy PCI connectors for 0.20USD/pc. Now, FPGA if we targeting 300Mips we need to buy very fast and big FPGA and that FPGA can cost 150-300USD, again we can't drop the price because we are ordering just 100 of them because we won't sell more than 100 accelerators. So like you can see, not to mention 10 other components needed we are at huge investment and in the same time at huge price for potential buyers.
Creating new hardware
First problem is prototype board and one or two those boards can cost up to 3000USD, again quantity is the problem. Again serious engineers can earn 100 000USD per year and you need to assembly a team so you need to spend much money just to pay them.
After investigating all of this I made some decisions.
1. open source everything and people will join, experienced one will teach newcomers
2. test tons of parts and find optimum regarding price-quality,spend your money to test them all so we will not end up in situation others waste their time and money
3. earn money for living from something else don't expect to become rich from creating Amiga hardware
4. remove design dependence from all parts that will not be manufactured in future
5. publish all news in process of your investigation,again, not let people waste their time
So we are now not depended from MC68K series CPU, we are not dependent of specific FPGA model or anything else.
