New project for the benefit of all classic computing!

[anglosaxonusa]

I'm with the others calling for a new 060 card with 1 or 2GB of RAM. It would be even better if the card included a P96-compatible RTG chip with at least 4MB of graphics RAM and a fast bus to the 060 proc.

Also, the 060 accelerator should include SATA ports rather than the old 50-pin SCSIs used on the Blizzards.

Please target the A2000 in addition to the A1200 and A4000, et. al.

Sounds like a winner.

[anglosaxonusa]

1) An RTG solution for the A1200. maybe a small pcb that fits between the mobo and the accelerator board.
2) A cheap USB solution for the clockport.

I second this, but for the A2000 as well.  A USB card would be very useful for users of A500, A600, A2000, and A3000.  That may be where you want to start.  Zorro ethernet cards will also be in demand.

First preference would be the following:

1) A new 60860 accelerator with 1 or 2 gigs of RAM and an integrated P96-compatable RTG card with > 4 megs of RAM with a fast bus to the proc.

...if that is not possible, the following would be nice:

2) A new 68060 accelerator with 1 or 2 gigs of RAM.
3) New Zorro II and Zorro III RTG cards with > 4 megs of RAM.

...the end goal should be to give classic Amigas enough power to browse the web, hence the push for 060 accelerators and RTG cards.  These expansions are in demand and often sell for hundreds of dollars online, so there is an incentive in creating them.  Also, the Amiga community should fund a bounty for a native port of Netsurf.  Again, the goal is to get classic Amigas surfing the web and at higher colors and resolutions.

If you do take a stab at creating a new motherboard, please target the layouts of the original systems and not new PC cases.  Much of the joy of owning a classic Amiga is in keeping the old girls up and running for as long as possible.  An new motherboard in a new case is a new machine.

[anglosaxonusa]

That block diagram seems to almost describe a complete computer. Why even bother with the Amiga part?

I've always asked myself the question: Why? Add a graphics card and a sound card, and you've got a PC with a 680x0 CPU. Not cool

Keep it Amiga, guys

That does bring up a good point.  It would be nice if the original system could be productively used as much as possible.

@TheRouge:

Given that the Zorro buses on the old machines are locked at a certain Mhz, is there any way around the bandwidth limitation by on-the-fly compression and decompression of the bits sent over the bus?

Say a new accelerator is introduced and it want's to communicate with a new RTG card on the old Zorro III bus.  Would it be possible for both the new accelerator and the new RTG card to have a chip which very quickly encodes and decodes data, in effect increasing the amount of information carried over the bus per-bit?  Perhaps something like this would allow the bus to handle more traffic?

Sorry if this is elementary or the way things already work.  I'm sure someone else has already done something like this, but I'm not sure if its been applied to the older Amigas...