Contaced a Factory in China about producing a run of fully populated Mini-migs

[amigadave]

Tomas wrote:
@terminator4
Maybe you should also look at the faults of your own country?
USA still tortures people, USA still have death penality, USA still has a huge deal of homeless people, USA invades countries for oil.
USA is also losing more and more freedom in the name of so called terrorism.
I am sure 99% of all x86 pcs has at least some components made in China.

The AmigaONE was a failure simple because of bad choice of chipset. Take for example the via 686b chipset... It had already proven to have alot of bugs on the x86 platforms, but still they choose it? It surely had nothing to do with those who assembled the board.

And who the heck could afford a minimig if it was produced here in the west? It just simply is not possible, unless you do a production run of tens of thousand boards, which is not possible in the amiga world.

I had to look back a page to see what prompted this attack on the USA by Thomas.  I am glad I did not complete my first attempt at a rebuttal to his post above before reading terminator4's messages (which I don't agree with, except for a few points, but I don't think that political crap belongs in this thread).  People in the USA are not all like terminator4, or George Bush.  It saddens me to see that so many other people from other countries dislike US citizens now, and think we are all like George Bush, or that we approve of the way in which the war in Iraq was started.

I could write much more in defense of the majority of US citizens, but this is not the time or place for such a long rebuttal.

[amigadave]

freqmax wrote:
There is no write function in the PIC18 firmware whatsoever. I read it..

Does this include writing to a RAM_Disk?  I know that won't help with saving games, unless the Minimig is left ON and the user just wants to shut down a game to do something else on the Minimig, and then return to the game without rebooting.

[freqmax]

@amigadave:
Writing to ram disc is likely to work. It's writing to external storage that is a dead end.
And this is because the amiga implementation will run kickstart (or whatever) that will itself take care and execute  any write operation to ram (wich is r/w).

@Crom00:
"Looks better on 4:3 VGA than 16:9 widescreen 22" monitor due to the stretched   pixels."
Maybe there should be a video mode where side borders are added such that the aspect ratio become correct. Infact the extra space could be used for an permanent OSD.

[whiteb]

Darrin wrote:

Do you have "Menace"?  I loved that sidesways scroller and the music was great.  Please test it if you have it and let me know if it works.  Would "Xenon 2 - Megablast" work on OCS?

Dennis is adding Multiple ADF support, I know that for DEFINITE.

[acidrain]

Is anyone sure that minimig assembled in USA will no consist of china made parts? I'm not sure, f.ex. 68k is made there...
Just not that right way to boycott chinees made goods.
And materials for bag (www.billingham.co.uk) are not made in the same place?
Ok, But I believe that minimig for 100-150 USD is acceptible for me...
Cheers

[tonyyeb]

whiteb wrote:
Dennis is adding Multiple ADF support, I know that for DEFINITE.

I hope he is adding hard file support.... that has to be high on the list of what can be done with minimig v1.1 without any hardware changes.

[acidrain]

Writing to an mmc card is not so hard, but there are problem with kickstart - it doesn't know abou mmc nothing. maybe there  is a way to code an driver for that purpose? But how to access mmc from amiga?

[Darrin]

whiteb wrote:

Dennis is adding Multiple ADF support, I know that for DEFINITE.

Thank you for letting me know that.  Great news.   :-D

[Darrin]

acidrain wrote:
Writing to an mmc card is not so hard, but there are problem with kickstart - it doesn't know abou mmc nothing. maybe there  is a way to code an driver for that purpose? But how to access mmc from amiga?

I didn't think that would be a problem.  I assumed that there was something in place to make the Amiga think that the ADF selected was a real floppy (df0), so it's not the "Amiga" side of the logic that's the problem, but rather the software that "emulates" a "floppy" on the MMC which needs to be expanded to support a write function.  Correct?   :-?

[alexh]

If minimig hardware was available, it would be relatively easy to modify the FPGA and PIC code to emulate an IDE hard drive, (probably through a HDF file at first), just as it does now with a ADF image.

With lack of MiniMig hardware, there is no real incentive to develop for it.

[Darrin]

alexh wrote:
If minimig hardware was available, it would be relatively easy to modify the FPGA and PIC code to emulate an IDE hard drive, (probably through a HDF file at first), just as it does now with a ADF image.

With lack of MiniMig hardware, there is no real incentive to develop for it.

Let's just keep our fingers crossed that Crom comes up trumps.

[whiteb]

Darrin wrote:
I didn't think that would be a problem.  I assumed that there was something in place to make the Amiga think that the ADF selected was a real floppy (df0), so it's not the "Amiga" side of the logic that's the problem, but rather the software that "emulates" a "floppy" on the MMC which needs to be expanded to support a write function.  Correct?   :-?

Well, i am not an authority in this field, but the kickstart rom's already recognize an ADF being inserted, and will auto boot from the ADF, if the boot block on the ADF allows it, so it definitely sounds like code on the pic job.  What needs to be investigated, is that the current code, is around 37KB already, is there enough room left on the PIC ?

[amigadave]

whiteb wrote:

Darrin wrote:
I didn't think that would be a problem.  I assumed that there was something in place to make the Amiga think that the ADF selected was a real floppy (df0), so it's not the "Amiga" side of the logic that's the problem, but rather the software that "emulates" a "floppy" on the MMC which needs to be expanded to support a write function.  Correct?   :-?

Well, i am not an authority in this field, but the kickstart rom's already recognize an ADF being inserted, and will auto boot from the ADF, if the boot block on the ADF allows it, so it definitely sounds like code on the pic job.  What needs to be investigated, is that the current code, is around 37KB already, is there enough room left on the PIC ?

Not having a working MiniMig yet to test, what happens when the adf of a Workbench disk is selected?  Can writes to RAM then be performed?  Does a disk icon for the Workbench adf disk show up and when opened does it show remaining space up to the Amiga floppy capacity of 880kb?  Maybe these are stupid and uninformed questions, but please educate me.

[tonyyeb]

Any update Crom? Will we see prototypes/beta machines before xmas?

Cheers

[Crom00]

Not before Christmas unfortunately.

[tonyyeb]

Crom00 wrote:
Not before Christmas unfortunately.

Any other news to keep us going?