Question about USB on the minimig

[dammy]

Coldfire isn't code compatible asfair.

Last I heard, they had libs out for a work around.

Dammy

[dammy]

I still don't get what the huge focus is for using USB for classic gaming.

IMO, it's more of an "amiga lego" then a retro game machine. One could just use EUAE for OCS/ECS games, or one could use a Minimig and expand it beyond what the creator's initial intentions were for it.  I think it's the latter that have the eye for USB capability.  Like what the C64 folks do, take their machine far beyond what it was doing in 1980s.  

Sure do have fond memories of my upgrade ECS A500 with baseboard RAM, Supra 28MHz Accelerator, Dataflyier SCSI with RAM.

Dammy

[koaftder]

USB on minimig 1, it's not going to happen. ps2 devices are cheap and easy to obtain. Who cares?

If you want USB on minimig 1, talking about it is useless, you will have to do it your self or perhaps hold out for minimig 2.

[little]

The whole point is that (OS transparent USB) is really difficult, requires a lot of extra hardware and why not just use PS2 keyboards, mice and 9-pin joysticks?

As I have said before, I think an USB to DE-9 adapter for joystick and mice would suffice, but there is another reason for an OS transparent USB interface. It would enable transparent emulation of the CDTV/A570 and later on it would be posible to create verilog code to run other CD-ROM/68000 based hardware. This will be beyond the capacities of minimig 1, but I think we all agree USB 1.1 is all about minimig 2.0 :-)

[techie]

koaftder wrote:
USB on minimig 1, it's not going to happen. ps2 devices are cheap and easy to obtain. Who cares?

If you want USB on minimig 1, talking about it is useless, you will have to do it your self or perhaps hold out for minimig 2.

Which is pretty much what I said in my first post:

techie wrote:
Edit:
Please Note: I do understand that the current design of the MiniMig was not built with USB in mind but I am curious about the possibility in future versions.  

little wrote:
As I have said before, I think an USB to DE-9 adapter for joystick and mice would suffice, but there is another reason for an OS transparent USB interface. It would enable transparent emulation of the CDTV/A570 and later on it would be posible to create verilog code to run other CD-ROM/68000 based hardware. This will be beyond the capacities of minimig 1, but I think we all agree USB 1.1 is all about minimig 2.0 :-)

I think we're on the same page here I agree that such an adapter would suffice for now (provided it can work with both Joysticks and Mice). But like you say it would still be nice to have transparent onboard USB in the future as it would open up more possibilities.

[Belial6]

While I still believe that a USB port would be valuable (and feasible) for use from the Workbench, let me throw out another solution that could solve the problem without USB.

What do you think about some kind of USB over Ethernet?  Given that Ethernet is a given on some future revision of the MiniMig, this would make the 'USB' a completely software solution.

Again, my concern is getting access to modern devices on the Workbench.  While having a stand alone solution would be best, I think it would be safe to say that 99.5% of all MiniMig users will also have a network at home, and a full PC with USB already implemented.

I would think that this would allow the MiniMig side of things to be very light weight.  It could be a two driver system.  One driver on the PC side to export the interface, and one on the MiniMig side to access the interface.  This would put 100% of the USB stack on the PC side.  It actually wouldn't even need to be a USB device on the PC side.  I guess it would just be a 'Virtual Device' driver.

One question on behalf of the 'Classic Gaming USB' (as opposed to the  'Workbench USB') crowd would be do you think the over head of sending commands across the network would introduce more latency than would be acceptable for things like keyboards and joysticks.  I ask this because wireless keyboards and mice are pretty common these days, so the CG-USB crowd could get benefit from this kind of solution as well.  They could even use an old laptop with WiFI as a wireless USB adapter.  It seems that it would also be possible to implement a version of the Ethernet to keyboard/mouse/joystick driver directly in the FPGA, so that it would default to those devices if you were loading directly to a classic game, instead of to the workbench.

While this solution is not perfect, it seems like it would be simpler to implement in the short run with the limited resources that the MiniMig has at it's disposal.  It would also address the problems posed by both the CG-USB and WB-USB crowds.  We are after all looking for a solution to a problem.  Not a problem for our solution.

So, to those that can plan these things out in there head with little to no effort, does this sound like a feasible solution to the USB problem?

[pixie]

@Piru

You had a point there somewhere?

No point made by me, they're all yours...

[Plaz]

Coldfire isn't code compatible asfair.

Coldfire has a 68K at it's core and is about 99.8% instruction set compatible with say a 68020 when also using the free developer 68Klib library. Carefully written source would compile and run on either. However, the remaining incompatible instuctions would be a chore to trap and redirect. Also trying to tie a Coldfire into a classic chip set (or emulated chip set) will have it's challenges when  working out the differences in the I/O's and timing issues between a Coldfire and 68K. If I recall the V2 coldfire is the most I/O compatible and has a top speed of 33mhz.

Tough, but not impossible. Who want's to help me work it out? :-)

Plaz

[Piru]

@dammy

Last I heard, they had libs out for a work around.

Last I heard the compatibility was for user level code only. Supervisor side is totally different beast.

Plus even the user level side isn't 100% compatible.

[Piru]

@pixie

No point made by me, they're all yours...

Good, because I'd hate to have any inconsistency in my comments. ;-)

[little]

an USB to de-9 adapter would suffice (provided it can also work with Mice)

I think that since mice are quite simple (2-5 buttons/0-1 rudder wheel) would make more sense to make a ps/2 to de-9 adapter just for mice? I am quite surprised that no one has made such an adapter already, since most amiga mice must be quite worn out by now and such adapter would be quite cheap to produce.

[whiteb]

techie wrote:


Sorry I'm probably just being Thick here but if this is the case then I have to ask; How does the Anaiis USB stack work then???  :-?
Because it claims to be working on a pretty much stock Amiga 2000 with ZorroII Highway USB and 68000 processor (7.14 Mhz).

Anaiis is only the USB stack itself, (Think Windows Driver).

You still need the USB HARDWARE itself, for the stack/Driver to control.

Now, In THEORY, you could have a ZorroII bus USB card, but we are back to the CPU USAGE of USB.  One way around, is to have the CARD ITSELF handle all the MIPS required to handle the transfer's.  But to do this, you still need DMA, Otherwise, the CPU cops all the work.  Back to square 1.

Modern PC's have several advantages, CPU Speed (Raw grunt), as well as DMA Channels, which means CPU doesn't get bogged down.  

[little]

Modern PC's have several advantages, CPU Speed (Raw grunt), as well as DMA Channels, which means CPU doesn't get bogged down.

But the amiga has a bus architecture and utilizes direct memory access (DMA) technique. If I undestand correctly it should be feasible to do a USB interface that used DMA to fetch the data.

As I side note that no one has mentioned, another advantage of USB is that you can add a WiFi interface to the amiga thru a USB port (it would require an amiga driver, but anything network related is done thru the workbench anyway).

[Belial6]

I am very pro WB-USB, but if I were going to try to get WiFi on a MiniMig, I would be looking a Ethernet Port, and a bridge.  Wired networking is cheap, available, simple, and well understood.  WiFi on the other hand has a bunch of chips with closely guarded secrets.

On the other hand, this is a perfect example of why USB would be good.  It would only take one guy that knows how to port device drivers from Linux to add WiFi support.  He wouldn't need to know how to build the WiFi into the MiniMig directly.

[little]

this is a perfect example of why USB would be good.

As a side note, doing some web-surfing I found out that the PIC18F2550, PIC18F2553 and PIC18F2580 have built in USB 2.0 ports, so there is no need of a complete redesing of the minimig to add USB, just replace the PIC18LF252-I/SP with one of his three "big brothers" and write the required code.

[Doobrey]

@little,
 That won't work,those PIC's aren't USB host controllers.