Minimig AGA 060 RTG

[joemango]

MikeJ,

Is there an image for the Replay that executes MAME in its entirety, or just single machines?  If not, it must be possible, no?  At least to the point you reach max density for a given machine type..

Just dreaming of more stuff I want to do with this board if I ever get my hands on one.  My developer friend is itching to play with it.  Amiga is just a cherry on top.

[joemango]

While it's possible for the Replay to be configured to emulate arcade hardware, you can't use MAME to do this. Someone will have to code the emulations specifically for the Replay.

Right.  Definitely some work to be done there.  But assuming the building-block coding structure of MAME I figure a system could be set up to load a specific set of IC cores for a given game onto the Xilinx and emulate on the ARM whatever you can't do in the FPGA (which I doubt is much, except what isn't written yet.)  I'm figuring it should be able to at least run about 1994-vintage games at best (but what do I know?)

Does the ARM have the same access to all the i/o lines the FPGA does?  Or does it have some exclusive bus link to it?  I guess what I'm getting at is, could the ARM be used as a coprocessor or is it too busy managing other stuff to be any help?

[joemango]

I've never run MAME on an Amiga, but how does it run on a 68060?

Godawful slow.  Running MAME on even an 060 Amiga will barely give you enough speed to run a playable game of Space Harrier, even with 50% frame skipping.  MAME isn't worth running on anything under a 1.5GHz P4 and even that's a bit slow for my taste.  

I just figured a lot of the IC emulation code could be ported to VHDL (or just use modules available now) and offloaded to the FPGA instead of using CPU.  A 6502 "emulation" in FPGA runs clock-accurate with minimum system overhead, whereas a software emulation chews up lots of CPU overhead and screws up your signal timing (hence skipped frames.)  I guess I'm getting a bit off-topic.  Sorry.

[joemango]

MikeJ:

I've speculated about the possibility of adding a second (or third) FPGA unit to the ArcadeReplay through the daughterboard connector, but never actually asked you directly if such an idea is possible/likely.  

So here goes... Is it a bad idea?  I imagine you would much rather design a smaller add-on for your current motherboard to add horsepower than redesign the whole board to accommodate a larger FPGA, no?   I'm not saying your board isn't cool or powerful, I just want it to keep being cool a couple years from now.  I'm thinking about the future when I want to emulate a PSX  or Sega Saturn or maybe even a PPC Amiga with it.  The idea of adding a real 060 is great if your primary aim is to use it as a MiniMig but seems to conflict with the initial idea of the board being totally reconfigurable.

In case you didn't guess, I'm an expansion fetishist  It made me a prime candidate for Amiga ownership.  I really wish the Walker had made it to market with its center spine expansion bus.  That would have been almost as cool as my friend's Bodega Bay case