New Amiga Accelerators

[billt]

Photographs are not going to tell you what voodoo magic is going on inside the FPGA, the ROM/flash chip, etc. It won't work without that stuff, even if you manage to reproduce the PCB layout and get the electrical characteristics of that layout working well for timing, signal integrity, etc. And to really recreate the PCB, you'll need to sacrifice at least one board, probably more, to get chip pin pads and internal layer routing scanned. Than you have a PCB, an empty FPGA, and missing parts that are no longer available or sellable in a product due to ROHS.

If you're going to go to that much expense/effort to re-engineer such an old and complicated thing, we're all better off if you instead use that time and money to create a new board, ROHS compliant, leave out the 68K chip, and give us some more recent features, modern clock speed, memory, etc.

[billt]

If its SO impossible and out of reach......how did PHASE5 accomplish this impossible task?

Phase 5 created a new engineering feat. This guy wants to reinvent someone else's photograph. Duplicating someone else's design, particularly the FPGA/CPLD magic, is a huge effort. Going by a photograph is laughable. Ha ha.

My main point is not that this is impossible. It's doable, but very difficult. My point is that, considering the time and effort required to actually duplicate the Phase5 PPC boards, that this time and effort would be better spent on giving us something more modern, better, faster, more modern features, etc. than in recreating something now so "old". It's easier to decide how to do something new and do it that way than it is to figure out how someone else did something and then redo it that way. The DCE boards aren't known for their reliability, design us something newer, simpler (no 040/060 chip), more powerful and more reliable instead.