FPGA Replay Board

[billt]

The main problem is space actually on the expansion board, the processor is huge!
The second problem is tracking. It may be possible to stick rams on both sides which would double the capacity. I'm just starting to look at this seriously.
/MikeJ

Some memories have dual package options that mirror each other. Then the top side chip can connect to the bottom side chip with nothing but vias. Of course that may be in the way of your decoupling caps, but they must have a solution for that. I think it's popular with graphics cards.

[billt]

Where did you order the FPGA chips? (Digikey, Horizon, Avnet, Cedar)

Maybe it could pay to save upp enough money to buy 1000+ chips directly from the manufacurer. To get less lead times. And avoid further "shortages".

Lead times are part of life with these things. If Mikej is independently wealthy, perhaps he can afford to stock his own distribution warehouse, but very few people can do that kind of thing. I'm also not sure how big of a deal 1000 units is, that may still be a low-priority order from the vendor.

[billt]

unless it's patented, not that I think it is (but it's possible).

Didn't Microsoft give people hassle over their patents on FAT or FAT32 filesystems in flash cards and USB sticks?

[billt]

Good news, a big box of FPGAs has just landed on my desk!

And there was much rejoicing. Yeeeay.

[billt]

I cannot fit a HDMI connector due to licensing issues, and I can't buy (legally at least) the chips which support HDMI as they have HDCP support - and you need to be a member of the cartel to use them. Future hardware is likely to support display port instead.
/MikeJ

I take it that means Displayport is not encumbered by a similar cartel?

[billt]

The problem with DisplayPort is the amount of video displays that supports it. Especially those fairly priced.

What about display port output through displayport->hdmi adapter? Does the chip need to support hdmi for such adapters to work, or does the adapter do everything itself and the chip is ignorant of hdmi?

Though the hdmi cartel is suing people that make displayport->hdmi cables, licsinsing doe snto allow adapter combined into cable, only allows a dongle with separate cable. Dumb, but that's what cartels are for...

[billt]

Apologies for taking the thread in another direction but how feasible would it be to build a daughter board with Catweasel type functionality (and maybe a C64 disk port and for the hell of it, a c2n port)? Before anybody suggests 'why dont you do it' I cant even spell FPGA without giving it a huge amount of thought.

Learn it. :p

Presumably it's doable, but how it would be done is in question until we learn more about the expension port and if it's passed through the 68060 board from Yaqube or not.

Are there enough pins on this expansion port to do floppy port directly in the motherboard FPGA? Dunno. If not, then need an addon board with another FPGA or CPLD or or Xcore or something to bridge between the expansion port and whatever you imagine connecting to it, floppy or c2n (whatever that is) in your case.

[billt]

The FPGA Arcade (and proberbly Minimig too) have generic I/O pads which can be used directly with a using a few voltage level converters. And the usual power supply.

Yes, but how many?

And do they pass through the 68060 board for others to use as well or do they not?

[billt]

Read the schematics and check out the pictures.

OK, I didn't realize they were avaiable. best I've seen is a still kindof vague description here
http://www.fpgaarcade.com/dev/drupal/?q=node/5

[billt]

I realize it is frustrating, and it is taking too long.

I think we should all be impressed at one person doing all of this. I've had lots of ideas I've never been able to bring to completion, I wish I could finish something like you, regardless of how long.

[billt]

Please consider cooperating with the Natami team to create standard ISA enhancements to the 68k after you have the fpga Arcade soft CPU working better .

Are Natami team open to this as well, or are they a closed-project group wanting to do their own thing?

[billt]

but there is no way to reconfigure the FPGA in realtime.  In fact it cannot be reconfigured at all while it is in use.

Hopefully this will all become possible 10-20 years from now.

Reconfigurable computing is not new. Heck, old 40K tech Atmel FPGAs could be reconfigured on the fly. Spartan3 has an external bus for that, which can be connected to other FPGA pins to be controlled by itself. Spartan6 moves that bus connection inside the chip where it belongs.

There is of course overhead to this process. It takes time to read in a new configuration for that area of the FPGA chip. You have to wait for that before proceeding. I wouldn't want to do that frequently. If frequently is a must, it's probably better to just have both implementations in the design and choose them with a mux controlled by a software settable register. But then what do you do if you're context-switching between both kinds of software during operation, not just setting it and then running whatever one of those environments until some kind of system reset to change... Old software doesn't know about pushing this to stack to keep track. Maybe keep track of where in memory things come from and have a way to tell which memory pages are which instruction set. Ugh... New software could be made smart enough to handle this with a smart compiler for the situation, but old stuff would be a problem.

[billt]

I was under the impression we were in the business of re-implementing existing  Commodore computers. Not inventing new APIs for which there is no software for. Let the existing Commodore models be the "standard".

I think what he meant was that natami team are making a new CPU, intending to be compatible with 68K but may have something new in it, and that it would be nice if Yaqube's enhancements to TG68 would be compatible with those new things. Have the different groups working together to maintain compatibility between them for all new stuff.

I'm not sure we'll see that happen, and I'm not sure it's completely a bad thing. If everyone is agreeing on everything to be done, then we're waiting for committees to approve anything at all, and we may be losing out on some unique improvements that not everyone on the committee agrees with. Competition can be good for us. It can be uncomfortable and all that, but Hyperion's decisions have left us without any hope for an OS4 laptop, while MorphOS intends to demo one very soon. I wish it would come for an iBook G4 as I already have one of those, but it's more than the Red camp has been willing to allow to happen. (Note that Hyperion is not philosophically against an OS4 laptop, but their rules to get anything done have to date not allowed it to actually come to be. I've tried. If MorphOS on a laptop gives hyperion reason to adjust some of their rules and past decisions, then that might turn out to be a great thing for OS4 fans.)

Besides, if Natami does come up with something cool, if documentation is available then others can reimplement based on that documentation. It'll have to be somewhere. Will they make a nice datasheet? If not, will they use gcc? What ever they use will have to be in gcc sources somewhere... Perhaps not easy to decypher, but there. What about SuperAGA? If they want to see it used, it'll have to have a datasheet. Otherwise it'l be hidden in a P96 or CGX driver, and at that point who cares if it's an extension to AGA or something completely unrelated such as Yacube's P96 graphics thing, which is a parallel block separate from his AGA udpate to Minimig. It could be a simple VGA framebuffer, it could be OpenGraphics, it could be an ARM Mali core, a reimplementation of Voodoo3 from datasheet, whatever, and who cares at that point. (A P96 core would be great, I'm not denying that, but if you're marketing an extension to AGA in particular, then it's not any of these other things which are separate core blocks than AGA) There will of course be some delay in others absorbing whatever information they can find on a new unique feature in one of the various products, then time to reimplement it into their particular product, and for end users to benefit from that, but it is possible.

As I've mentioned in other topics such as the replacement for classic motherboard thread somewhere, if you're reimplementing something, why not add something new and cool to it? Why stop at the 1994 feature set, datasheets, etc? If you're going to all this trouble to make something new, sure, make it compatible so we can run old software on it. The entire point of Minimig and Natami is to make something compatible with our old Amiga software. But, while we're at it, why not add something new, for new software to benefit from? Why not add a P96 graphcis core to Minimig, so that it can run P96 games as well as ECS games? Why not add a PCI slot to Natami, so we can get a much better P96/CGX graphics than what will fit and run inside an FPGA? (I understand that OpenGraphics takes up a LOT of space, and their board has a huge FPGA) If you're going to the trouble to make a new A2000 motherboard, why not add an active 3.3V PCI slot? (like building-in a Mediator or Prometheus to the motherboard itself) If you're making a repalcement for an A4000T motherboard, why not have active PCI slots, plus a bridge to a PCI-Express slot so we can plug in an even newer graphics card? (even if it won't have full PCI-Express connection speed, it will still function) If you're making a new A1200 motherboard, why not add a MiniPCI slot for wireless network and an MXM slot for a modern laptop graphics card? Why not...

[billt]

The problem shows when you alter instruction sets, register structure, etc.. which will kill the capability to run exisiting software. Increasing memory, frequency, caches, etc..

Adding new features doesn't necessitate breaking old stuff. Removing old things will be a bigger problem. So add new things and don't remove old things. Do testing to see if ckock rates or something else causes problems. If a problem is found, we have the situation where with FPGA we can have a version with the new stuff, and an old version for certain things that don't like the new stuff. We can progress without breaking compatibility in many ways, and we can progress in incompatible ways, but still able to use finicky software with a reboot to a more compatible mode. Not  big deal IMHO.

[billt]

They are shipping now, just slowly as I work through the pre-orders.
It takes a lot of time to hand assemble and test each board.
Now I have FCC and CE approval I'm going ahead with mass production.
/Mike

How does one go about getting a product like this approved by them? And does that get you worldwide certification, or are there other things to be done for some parts of the world?

[billt]

I received yesterday a box of brand-new genuine MC68060RC50s ... but they were the 1st mask set so I have rejected them.

What happens if you reject them? Do they take them back and refund you, or do you have some unrefunded trash as part of your total costs?

Once we get the bigger softcore 680x0 going, I can imagine this problem going away, puttin gan FPGA on a small PCB with 680x0 PGA pins on the bottom to plug into any board with such a socket. Not sure if it would be relevant for FPGA Arcade at that point, put the softcore inside the mainboard FPGA, but interesting for others perhaps.