FPGA options for the A1200

[psxphill]

so I see no real advantage to not going with the standalone board. I guess you could mount it in your A1200 case if you wanted...

AFAIK the standalone won't have PCMCIA or floppy, but the A1200 will still have these. You might not care, but I might.

If the standalone fit in an A1200 case and supported PCMCIA (and why not cardbus too) as well as internal and external floppy drives then it would be hard to resist.

[orange]

I doubt that standalone will be much larger than vampire card, so it should fit the A1200 case easily. Not sure how would you connect the original keyboard and old IO connectors.
Isn't the point of standalone to have its own case?

[bbond007]

I doubt that standalone will be much larger than vampire card, so it should fit the A1200 case easily. Not sure how would you connect the original keyboard and old IO connectors.
Isn't the point of standalone to have its own case?

You would use a Keyrah

http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Keyrah_V2

[AdvancedFollower]

What kind of performance improvements can you expect from something that is intended to be as equal to original as it can? I honestly cannot tell the AGA on MiST apart from "real" AGA, except from the one well known horizontal shift bug on low screen modes. I understand from Chaos, that going from ECS to AGA was not really that much work (which echoes what I recall CBM engineers also have written before about AGA... a quick and cheap upgrade of the ECS chipset)

Improving on AGA is what SAGA is about.

Yeah, I guess improved performance and perfect compatibility are kind of mutually exclusive, due to the need to maintain exact timings and so on. I wouldn't mind a "Turbo" Amiga core for the MiST, with all stops removed, for those few demanding 3D games etc., but that's why I'm interested in the Vampire V4 as a complement to my MiST.

[johnklos]

Yeah, I guess improved performance and perfect compatibility are kind of mutually exclusive, due to the need to maintain exact timings and so on. I wouldn't mind a "Turbo" Amiga core for the MiST, with all stops removed, for those few demanding 3D games etc., but that's why I'm interested in the Vampire V4 as a complement to my MiST.

Compatibility has very little to do with timing. If a program is tied to the timing of a CPU, then it's going to have a bad time running on any accelerator. If it's written to use the Amiga's timers, then exact timings in an FPGA are unnecessary.

Only very poorly written software would be affected, so you'd probably boot off of the m68020 for those. Or, as you wrote, having a "compatible" slow mode and a normal, fast mode would be a good thing.

[psxphill]

Compatibility has very little to do with timing. If a program is tied to the timing of a CPU, then it's going to have a bad time running on any accelerator.

That still counts as compatibility, the only way to really solve it is to allow the speed to be dropped.

Back in the 80's you could buy PC's that had a turbo switch, if you turn it on then the cpu runs at normal speed or turn it off and it slows down (to as slow as 4.77mhz iirc).

You can fix the software and a lot of it has been fixed when using whdload.

[Rob]

That still counts as compatibility, the only way to really solve it is to allow the speed to be dropped.

Back in the 80's you could buy PC's that had a turbo switch, if you turn it on then the cpu runs at normal speed or turn it off and it slows down (to as slow as 4.77mhz iirc).

You can fix the software and a lot of it has been fixed when using whdload.

Dell PCs had a "compatible" stetting in the BIOS that did the same thing but well into the pentium era.

[bbond007]

If the standalone fit in an A1200 case and supported PCMCIA (and why not cardbus too) as well as internal and external floppy drives then it would be hard to resist.

I don't think I'd hold my breath on PCMCIA.

Seems like everything that could be done with it could be done just as well (or perhaps even better) with a built in contemporary like SDCARD or ethernet or externally via USB.  

The A1200/600 PCMCIA ports are not really internal anyway.. they stick out almost the length of the card

[psxphill]

Seems like everything that could be done with it could be done just as well (or perhaps even better) with a built in contemporary like SDCARD or ethernet or externally via USB.

Everything you can do on an Amiga can be done just as well on a PC, but we're still here. Your argument doesn't really work.