Portable Amiga anyone??

[amigadave]

Well some of the main parts needed are:
from digikey Digikey:

FPGA Spartan 3e 1600 320BGA 122-1481-ND  £40.90 in 1's
64MB DDR Sdram 557-1212-1-ND £5.60
ARM7 LPC 2388 568-4323-ND £10.32

The PCB i think we can get for £10 (6 layer) ish if we buy 100 or more..
The FPGA would have to be mounted which would cost around £100 for 100 boards.

Then we have the psu parts and connectors so at a real guess i would say £120 ish for build 1, now this will come down quite a bit if we buy more than i part at a time, eg the arm7 is £7 in 25's...

So i would expect it to be around £100....

I would be interested in such a project.  Sounds like a good next step in the evolution of the MiniMig type projects.  Let me know when you are ready to order after the pcb design is finished and a prototype is tested and working.

[mumule]

"Just put in the spartan6 already on your board, saves you a lot of trouble changing it later anyway."
ha, tempting. I already changed from spartan3 to 3e, and if I start the change to spartan6 they will have brought out spartan7 before I finish the damn thing
/Mike

I know ;-)
Just redone a board which had a xc3s1400a on it, and put a xc3sd1800a on.
After I got the boards, the spartan6 were there ;-)

But you're right, if you wait, you never will be done...

However, the memory controller on the spartan 6 is tempting ...

Cheers

[coldfish]

How happy are you with the GP2X overall? I've been contemplating buying one. Mostly for the Amiga emulation, but a few other systems interest me as well. UAE on the PSP just doesn't seem to be smooth enough on a lot of the games, despite some tweeking of the settings.

I'm very happy with it, emulation of 8-16-32bit systems is very high quality. MAME, CPS2, PCengine, GB/GBA, SNES, Megadrive and C64. Amiga emulation is one of the sticking points though, the GP2X cant quite get full 100% emulation, but unless you need perfection it does a good job on ~80% of the titles Ive tried.  Some things dont work no matter how I tweak settings.

Pandora is already claiming 100% Amiga emulation and it has a keyboard and touchscreen (mouse emulation).

/partial hijack off.

[Vairn]

I'm very happy with it, emulation of 8-16-32bit systems is very high quality. MAME, CPS2, PCengine, GB/GBA, SNES, Megadrive and C64. Amiga emulation is one of the sticking points though, the GP2X cant quite get full 100% emulation, but unless you need perfection it does a good job on ~80% of the titles Ive tried.  Some things dont work no matter how I tweak settings.

Pandora is already claiming 100% Amiga emulation and it has a keyboard and touchscreen (mouse emulation).

/partial hijack off.

Umm, I don't think Winuae claims "100% Amiga Emulation", do they more mean in regards to Speed, that it can run the emulation at full speed?

[coldfish]

Yeah, that's what I was getting at, thanks for clarifying. Maybe I shouldnt have used percentages?

My point is, Amiga emulation on the GP2X is good enough (imo) to give the feel of a "handheld Amiga" and play (most) games at playable speed.

If emulating an Amiga in hardware works better, like this project suggests, I'm all for it.

[picman]

The problem with the pandora and gp2x is IMHO, that you have (gp2x) dual core cpu running at nearly 300MHz to emulate a 7Mhz amiga, and it still can't do it right, the pandora will be able to but its running at what 600MHz??
If it cant do it i would be worried.

But a small fpga running at the same freq as the original amiga will take no power at all really, and its not being software emulated.

We could even do away with the ARM, but i would rather keep it.


So to the original question... IS it worth producing this small board, and is anyone interested in helping to develop it. I can draw the board, but then it needs producing and prototyping, and that takes cash, so pre-orders would be nessesery.

[palemoon]

The problem with the pandora and gp2x is IMHO, that you have (gp2x) dual core cpu running at nearly 300MHz to emulate a 7Mhz amiga, and it still can't do it right, the pandora will be able to but its running at what 600MHz??
If it cant do it i would be worried.

But a small fpga running at the same freq as the original amiga will take no power at all really, and its not being software emulated.

We could even do away with the ARM, but i would rather keep it.


So to the original question... IS it worth producing this small board, and is anyone interested in helping to develop it. I can draw the board, but then it needs producing and prototyping, and that takes cash, so pre-orders would be nessesery.

Well, since my Gp2X went belly up last week...count me in!

I enjoyed my Gp2X, but it was notorious for corrupting my SD card if a game locked up. Which is ok if I'm at home, but sucked on the road.

I could attempt to help out (electronics background from the military). Although it's been awhile. My last big project was building an interface for the mobile Armatron and the C-64....many moons ago.

Ed

[Crom00]

I'd be in. Best bet is to connect with a Chinese Manufacturer and get Amiga Kit to place orders. OR heck just open up an ebay store. Make a sales website, facebook and twitter page. Send a freebie to Leo Laporte with a Craopload of games, he'll mention it on his podcast, you'l get 100,000 hits on your site and sell 2000 units in a couple of weeks or less.

[Zibri]

Hi guys..
Firt of all my best wishes for any new product.

Then I wish to tip you about this:


It's inside the vodafone UK femtocell which van be found on ebay for 50 punds.

I'm trying to find a way to get inside the box but I know almost nothing about fpga (compared to you)

I think there is at least one serial port somewhere but I can't find it.

If you have any clue you can come to my forum: http://forum.zibri.org
It's in italian but we all speak english there and I can setup an international section.

Sorry to be slightly off-topic but I think this board could also help YOU since it's a monster board with a CPLD and FPGA (the biggest spartan3 available).
It also features 3 gigabit ethernet ports and (maybe) an sdcard mmc slot. (top left of the image)