MiniMig V 2.0 - board interest check for a PCB order

[1985BMWK75]

This is all quite interesting :-D I was thinking to get myself a MiniMig - until I saw the price of the little thing :-( I was also thinking to do a run of the MiniMig V1.1 PCB's. Until I saw the price of having fifty (50) of them made. Although it is not that expensive, it is for me, because I am quite poor at the moment. On the upside, I have been keeping my IC supplier busy getting quotes for me on the IC's that make up the MiniMig. The quotes I have been given so far are a hell of a lot cheaper than what I have seen on the net! So who knows, one of these days I might bring out a cheap MiniMig V1.1 - the poor mans version :-P

@Illuwatar

Would you like me to get a quote for the IC's that make up your MiniMig v2.0? It may save everyone some money. I also noticed that you are using fancy coloured soldermasks. Although they look nice, it just adds to the price. Plain old fashioned green is the cheapest. As is HASL to finish the copper. Although, I couldn't resist to use ENIG to plate the copper on my ROM switcher PCB's, as it wasn't much more expensive. I was originally going to make the soldermask on my V2.0 ROM switcher black, and have the silkscreen paint red. And with the ENIG (lovely gold :-P), it would have looked real pretty. But when I saw the price, I thought why make people pay more. And it sits inside the case of the Amiga anyway, so it wouldn't be able to be admired.

Anyway, good luck with your project ;-) Your skills are way beyond mine!

Nathan

[denli]

What is a Mini MiniMig going to be?

http://www.illuwatar.se/project_pages/mini-minimig/mini-minimig.htm

[Illuwatar]

Sorry for not being active on this for a while, but mu mother just went away this week after two years of fight against cancer. So, as it is now, the MiniMig isn't top priority.

But the project will not stop - just some delay. And there are five board made blue on the way (these will be the final verification run before they are considered final - and I want to see how the blue comes out compared with the black). One of the current issues now is the FPGA - Digikey had zero in stock when I needed a few at the last order. So, if someone could find a cheap and reliable source for these (and the other expensive parts: SRAM, CPU, PIC and video converters/buffers) would be nice.

[Firedawg]

My condolences to you and your family Peter.  No rush on the board.

Mike  

[Darrin]

Illuwatar wrote:
Sorry for not being active on this for a while, but mu mother just went away this week after two years of fight against cancer. So, as it is now, the MiniMig isn't top priority.

But the project will not stop - just some delay. And there are five board made blue on the way (these will be the final verification run before they are considered final - and I want to see how the blue comes out compared with the black). One of the current issues now is the FPGA - Digikey had zero in stock when I needed a few at the last order. So, if someone could find a cheap and reliable source for these (and the other expensive parts: SRAM, CPU, PIC and video converters/buffers) would be nice.

Damn.  So sorry to hear that.  Condolences to you and your family.

[Illuwatar]

Thank You - this is rather some hard time now, specially as the funeral has to wait to until after Christmas.

But to light up some shine in this darkness, I put a 10ns board together using the Cypress SRAM that was earlier recommended in this thread (managed to get some samples from Cypress). And the experiment seems to be a success: I ran one of my favorite games, SilkWorm, for a few hours without any problems (using the original updated core from Dennis). And yes, the game is still as fun as it was in the good old days...

And the blue boards have been shipped from PCBCart...

[Illuwatar]

Update: got the blue boards today. And they are just awesome! Those who prefers blue did not get it wrong, specially with the yellow print - a true Swedish product...:-)





Note that the color may be little off due to the poor lighting when the pics was taken.

I have five of these... (and no FPGAs :-( )

[countzero]

Illuwatar wrote:
a true Swedish product...:-)

I thought PCBCart was in China  ;-)

[JLF65]

Crumb wrote:
@Illuwatar

I'm curious about one thing... would it be possible to use TobiFlex 68k core instead of the real 68000? Would the design allow 24bit output if it was updated to AGA later? What about extra memory... adding 16MB would increase the cost much?

I ask these questions because I've seen Tobiflex core reaching reaching a 42Mhz 68000 in benchmarks and perhaps in the future someone adds support for AGA, 020, fast memory or uses the extra memory to emulate other machines.

There's a conversion of MiniMig for the Altera DE1 and DE2 developer kit boards. These boards use the Altera Cyclone II FPGA. They also use the TobiFlex core instead of a 68K (which obviously won't be found on a Cyclone Devkit  :-D ).

Their yahoo page is found here: http://gamesource.groups.yahoo.com/group/minimigtg68/

Seems to be pretty active, too. They just recently updated their design to v1.3.

The DE1 is the cheaper board, selling for $150. The DE2 uses a Cyclone II with more LEs plus a few more bells and whistles, so it goes for $270.