Hello people, I am André from the Natami Team.
I will try to answer to the best of my knowledge
But first, the issue with Cammy. Cammy, it saddens me to read what you write. I was the person trying to encourage you to talk to us in that IRC log, giving you various options for participating in the project and discussing your involvement and your planned software, access to our version management and roadmap system, etc. You made it pretty clear to us that you simply did not want to communicate with us. Since this was in a public IRC channel, there were several witnesses to this discussion, so you cannot say we made it up in any way.
I agree that team management was quite sloppy - most projects involving restricted Subversion/CVS systems etc. would actually have removed your access almost immediately after hearing something like the above. But we gave you several months before deciding to remove your access privileges after your continued silence. Like Gunnar says - motivated people are very welcome to the team. You are of course welcome back too, but if you do not talk to us, what is the point of it all? Please do understand that this is nothing against you personally, but we have to set some kind of limit for a minimum amount of communication.
Having cleared that up, I should talk a little about the past and present state of the project. The first Natami prototype was a 68030-based card running on top of the C-One. This was shown to the public in 2008. Thomas Hirsch spent a few years before he reached this point - I am pretty sure he started even before Mr. Van Weeren started on his Minimig project.
In 2008 the Natami team talked about releasing a system based on an enhanchement of this prototype before the end of the year.
However, after considerations, the team decided to remove the real bottlenecks of the design - i.e., the outdated memory system. This resulted in a major redesign of the Natami, with the goal of implementing a DDR2-based pipelined burst memory system design. Thus the "missed release date" in 2008, that people like to bring up now and then.
Finishing this new memory system design resulted in the production of the Natami LX prototype card this year. After evaluating the LX board in various ways and adapting the Amiga chipset to the new Natami design, a process which is documented both on our forums and in the aforementioned Youtube video, lessons were learned and ideas on how to optimise the design into a board ready for public use have been implemented in the new Natami MX board design. Thomas Hirsch is currently occupied with the integration of a few new yet-to-be-announced components in the board.
Regarding the softcore 68k CPU, the N68050, development is going very well. The current softcore version has been "done" for quite a long time and the CPU team are in late optimisation and polishing stages, and are currently discussing which instructions it would be most beneficial to use the last unused instruction space for. Considerations and planning for the future N68050E and N68070 architectures are well underway.
Finally, a few small points
- A lot of people talk about the project being stalled by "feature creep". In fact, the only "feature creep" has been about adapting the Amiga chipset to DDR2 RAM, which took about two years of hard work.
The other side projects are just team members making themselves useful while Thomas is working on the chipset implementation and board designs. Discussing and working on various sub-projects related to the Natami does not slow Thomas down - he works at his own pace.
- The YouTube video posted does infact show AGA - several AGA screenmodes, including HAM8, are displayed. But full AGA support was not implemented in the LX board at that time, so that is why there are no AGA games in the video. Note that it is a "Stage 1" video - implying that there will be later stages.
- The "128 MB chip RAM" limit someone mentioned was for the LX board. The MX design contains 256 MB chip RAM and 256 MB fast RAM.
- We do not use the hardware designs and FPGA configurations of other projects, including but not limited to Minimig AGA.
A while ago, we discussed with the FPGAArcade dudes about sharing the softcore CPU:s, but this was quite a long time ago and did to my knowledge not happen.
The Minimig AGA and Minimig cores can stand on their own, and so can we. It is very good for everyone that those projects exist alongside Natami, because this means that there will be higher-end as well as lower-end options for people who want to run systems based on the classic Amiga chipset in the future.
Sorry for the great wall of text...
I am happy to answer any of your questions if I am able to. But please understand that the FUD and finger-pointing some people seem to be fond of posting is not really encouraging. Skepticism is healthy, but try to not be mean.
