FPGA on a zorro card?

[MrZammler]

Hi,

I was wondering if a generic FPGA core could be implemented on a zorro card? We could then have practically anything running on them and use the rest of the system for display, input, etc?

I was thinking for example a C64 emulator, running on WB, without any 68k usage, or maybe some side-utilities?

I'm not familiar with the general FPGA side of the world, dont really know if it is do-able, or makes any sense at all, but I had to ask  :-)

[AJCopland]

Probably. I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be possible as Zorro is just a bus.

There are FPGA pci cards and an FPGA PCI VGA card out there.

The real question would be what would you use it for?

Andy

*edit* fixed typo & grammer

[MrZammler]

Dont know, I'm not sure of the practical uses myself, but I'm sure we could come up with some if we try  :-)

What about mp3 decoding? Is there enough power?

[AJCopland]

I'd say yes, simply because if you can fit an entire computer into a 400k gate FPGA then why not a decoder? I keep finding references to FPGA implementations of MP3 decoders via google as well but I can't find actual sources or anything :crazy:

There'd be potential other uses that would be neat, such as crypto hacking etc but perhaps more interesting uses would be: low-end physics hardware, video processing/encoding/decoding, sound effect processing, chipset extensions (like a gfx card).

I mean there are things you could do with it. Just from a cool point of view but I wonder if theres anything that people would actually find useful.

Andy

[biggun]

MrZammler wrote:
Hi,

I was wondering if a generic FPGA core could be implemented on a zorro card?

Here is a generic FPGA on a Amiga Zorro card.
http://www.natami.de/pictures.htm

This FPGA was used as GFX card development system to build 2D and 3D acceleration.

So yes you can add an FPGA on Zorro to your Amiga.

[bloodline]

biggun wrote:

MrZammler wrote:
Hi,

I was wondering if a generic FPGA core could be implemented on a zorro card?

Here is a generic FPGA on a Amiga Zorro card.
http://www.natami.de/pictures.htm

This FPGA was used as GFX card development system to build 2D and 3D acceleration.

So yes you can add an FPGA on Zorro to your Amiga.

Is that Zorro II?

[AJCopland]

biggun wrote:
This FPGA was used as GFX card development system to build 2D and 3D acceleration.

So yes you can add an FPGA on Zorro to your Amiga.

See now thats immediately a much better answer than the ones I gave :-D

[JimS]

I had this idea once for a carrier board that would plug into a Zorro slot and hold one of the stock FPGA development boards. It would need some bidirectional buffers to translate the Zorro 5v bus to the FPGA 3.3v bus. The more I think of it though, it seems like a better idea would be do build something that plugged into the CPU socket, then the cpu plugged into the board. Then you could put the RAM on the FPGA card into the 32-bit address space. Handy for GVP owners who can't find those expensive simms. ;-). The FPGA could be a graphics card or whatever else you could squeeze in there.

[MrZammler]

Yeap, I know about the natami. Thing is, would anyone consider building a few of those?  :-D

And then of course, it would be another task finding or writing some cores to make them actually do something...

[alexh]

MrZammler wrote:
I was wondering if a generic FPGA core could be implemented on a zorro card?

Of course. Almost every Zorro card is implemented using an FPGA (or it's smaller brother a CPLD).

Deneb, Mediator, GRex, X-Surf, Picasso IV, Delfina, all use programmable logic chips to implement their Zorro bus masters. Just look for names like Xilinx, Altera, Lattice and MACH on your Amiga cards. All programmable logic devices.

Most of them just bridge bus standards, Zorro II (or III) to PCI or ISA and use a regular PC chip for the GRUNT of the logic. It would have been too expensive (not to mention time consuming) to have implemented an entire gfx card, or network card in an FPGA.

The upcoming Deneb from E3B is I think is an entire USB 2.0 host core and Zorro III bus master in an FPGA.

Dont forget, hardware doesn't work on it's own. Anything like this requires software drivers which are almost certainly as complicated a task as the hardware.