The most ambitious hardware proposal ever... UAU (wow)

[Dr_Righteous]

Here's an idea that'll never be built, but I thought I'd share it anyway... The Ultimate Amiga Upgrade or UAU (pronounced wow).

Designed with the A4000D in mind, a single "fatherboard" overlayed on top of the motherboard... Plugging into the CPU slot, the daughtercard slot, perhaps even the ROM sockets.

The idea is to create a whole new high-speed local bus for the CPU to directly access PCI expansion, ZorroII/III, USB, dual channel ATAPI interface, scan doubler/flicker fixer, 16550 UARTs and whatever else one can think of to modernize an A4000D.

All this connected directly to the processors (68060 AND 604e) and memory. OR perhaps a G4/G5 processor to run OS4.

Obviously, this would require a new tower case to house it all, but it'd be one HELL of an upgrade!

[kedawa]

I agree...

...it'll never be built.

It would make more sense to just make a completely new motherboard.

[Karlos]

Wasn't the original amiga one concept something like this? I remember the idea of it attaching to the A1200 trapdoor (in a tower config obviously) in order to get access to the legacy hardware.

[adonay]

Karlos wrote:
Wasn't the original amiga one concept something like this? I remember the idea of it attaching to the A1200 trapdoor (in a tower config obviously) in order to get access to the legacy hardware.

yes it was i am so glad they hanged that idea and build`t something new instead. You can modify old hardware all you like but you will always have performance loss somewere along the way due to the design. If not if you were to have everything on a card like ide sound ppc DRAM etc were is the point in the orginal hardware for keyboard support???"

@Dr_Righteous: this would most likely be to exspensive to produce but its a nice idea tho and you would also need some one to make it design it etc i dont see that manny in the amiga market able to do so and for what proffit.

[Sparky]

It'd be easier to just put the custom chips onto a PCI and board and access them from there ... can't remember the name of the company who were doing such a thing, it fizzled anyway ... just like most other things Amiga.

[adonay]

that would be the inside out from "Index Information"  was all custom chips on a pci card compatible with a whole a1200

adonay :-D here

[MarkAshley]

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 :-D

And more importantly, could we get it working on an A1?! Just think - OS4.0 with a FULL A1200 custom chipset. Total backwards compatability.

I think I've just p1ssed myself.  :lol:

[hppacito]

Something does not look right in that board...

Take a close look to that board.... Where the decoupling caps for the CIAs went ?

Where is the power supply for the 060, I mean the regulator 5->3.3 ?, may be they get 3.3 from the PCI bus... A crystal is missing to clock the 060...

Look at the Blizzard 060 or so, you will see tons of logic... where is the logic in this board

(Unless there are loads of ics on the other side of the board... (btw, were do they got the original chips ?)  :-?  :-?

[Sparky]

The reason it looks empty is probabl because its not finished ... project never got completed.

[DamageX]

If it's ambitious hardware proposals you want... I say buy up some modern manufacturing equipment and crank out some low-voltage, high-speed 68K CPUs with large on-chip cache, integrated FPU, and maximum backwards-compatibility. Make some accelerators. Then make an AGA-compatible chip with scan doubler, SVGA, and 16-bit sound built in and make some new motherboards.

[KThunder]

3.5ghz 68090 with 512k on chip cache
500mhz aga emulator chip with rtg and 3d acceleration
16bit 44khz wave table dolby5.1 paula
1gb ram
500 gb hd
free beer
all for about $150

[Doppie1200]

KThunder wrote:
3.5ghz 68090 with 512k on chip cache
500mhz aga emulator chip with rtg and 3d acceleration
16bit 44khz wave table dolby5.1 paula
1gb ram
500 gb hd
free beer
all for about $150

The free beer makes up for the lack of modern software. Who needs an internet browser when drunk! Hell, create anything that produces free beer and you have a winner.

But somehow I think the moment you call it an Amiga you will get into financial difficulty. It is a curse.

[coldfish]

Something has always bugged me about creating a new computer architecture, then attaching it to old hardware.

It sounds a bit like to 32X add-on for the old sega Genesis/megadrive.

Kinda good as a concept, but the reality is you end up with a not-quite-new machine that cant-quite-do modern computing tasks and is held back by all the legacy dependencies.

And how many A4000's are out there anyway?

[MskoDestny]

coldfish wrote:
It sounds a bit like to 32X add-on for the old sega Genesis/megadrive.

Kinda good as a concept, but the reality is you end up with a not-quite-new machine that cant-quite-do modern computing tasks and is held back by all the legacy dependencies.

The 32X didn't really have this problem. The SH-2s operated more or less indepedentantly from the 68K. It's limitations in performance were mostly tied to efforts to control costs rather than compromises due to it's connection to the Genesis/Megadrive.

That said, things are getting kind of out of hand with these upgrades to classic Amigas. Some of the proposed upgrades (Dragon, ACK, etc.) are pretty much a whole new computer plugged into a classic Amiga. Someone needs to implement the basic Amiga chipset in FPGA and build a new system around that.

What seems to make the most sense to me, would be to make a PCI card with an FPGA implementation of the basic chipset (perhaps beefed up a bit for more modern stuff). This could be sold alone for AmigaOne users and the like (or even x86 AROS boxes once 68K emulation is integrated) or sold with a ColdFire or PowerPC board maybe in a passive PCI backplane setup with the processor on it's own PCI card. This would allow you to leverage the economies of scale of the Sonnet Crescendo 7200 if you want PowerPC. You could probably even rig it up in a classic Amiga with a PCI busboard and use the MMU to redirect chip memory and direct chipset access to the souped-up PCI version.

[Dr_Righteous]

Actually, I realized I was calling for a complete computer on top of the A4000 board right after I wrote that... Really I was just trying to come up with a way to get around the PCI/Zorro bottleneck. And then of course throw in all the other modernizations to help out the old gal.

Of course I'd really love to see a board built from the ground up... Custom chips updated and placed on PLDs. Of course that would require some serious reverse engineering of the chips... Or someone creative enough to turn UAE into hardware.

Oh well, a guy can dream...