Pre-assembled Minimigs - Cmonnnnn!

[mingle]

There's a huge amount of interest in pre-assembled Minimigs, so I wonder why it seems to be so hard to get hold of one?

For those (like me!) who have neither the time, nor the surface-mount soldering skills required, the only way we'll ever be able to get one of these darned machines is when they're sold "ready to go"!

If a shiny new PCB is only 9 quid, surely a fully assembled board couldn't cost more than 50 quid?

This is a prime opportunity for someone to make a buck and also to help out the Amiga community by getting a 'new' machine out there for people to buy!

So C'MONNNNNN someone! (please  :-D)

[Steril707]

SMD soldering is not all that easy, and let's estimate you need 3 (probably 4 or 5) hours for one board, take the material costs into the equation, as well as having to give a guarantee for the minimig being working for a amount of time. And probably a hundred of other issues as well.

Considering all of that your 50 bucks is no-go.

I can't see many people wanting to go through the hassle of smd soldering with a hourly wage of $3.50.

Why not order the pcb plus all of the required parts, and ask someone professional in your local area to do the job for you. Thats the most realistic approach i currently see for people like you (and me) getting a decently working minimig.

[skurk]

Yeah.  With Xennep's cancellation on the pre-assembled boards (no hard feelings), I'm also interested.

[Hattig]

You seem to have mistaken 'quids' for 'bucks'. £50 is $100.

However the component costs have to be taken into consideration - the FPGA, the 68k, the RAM, the ports, the resistors and capacitors, ...

The boards could be assembled in China however in proper ovens - and if you're doing that, then why not switch to a PGA FPGA? However I'm willing to wait for such a "version 2", and just want a version 1.1, fully assembled, for around £75. After that it is just time to get the woodworking skills developed and make a nice pretty case.

And the system would make a damn neat FPGA programming platform, besides being a MiniMig. Who's going to write the first demo in Verilog + 68k?

[nBit7]

There are a few blocks to getting a commercial production run of minimigs.

1. Capital. Up front costs
2. Legal: (A inc)
3. Legal: World EMC and Saftey testing (FCC etc) (very costly)
4. Unknown demand.

You would probably need to make and sell at least 1000 to make it worth while.

[mingle]

I guess what it needs is someone (an Amiga-oriented company?) to (excuse the buzzwords!) pick it up and run with it.

Surely the manufacturing costs in China would be low enough to make a profit? There are places that specialise in smaller production runs. Anyway, I'm sure that they could sell a thousand - how many of the C64DTVs are out there?

I don't fancy getting someone local to do the donkey-work - can you imagine the hassles of fault-finding and rework?!?

I'm sure they'd be quite a few people who would be willing to put up deposits to get the ball rolling...

I'm quite capable of fitting the assembled PCB into a case and adding connector and other bits and pieces, but unless I can get one of these I'm going to have to stick to WinUAE for my Amiga-thrills!

Cheers,

Mike.

[nBit7]

Would anyone care to guess how many minimigs you could sell in 3months without paying for any advertising?  Assume US$120

[little]

2. Legal: (A inc)

Let's review history please.

1. Back in the day PC clones had a phoenix bios to avoid paying IBM royalties for their IVM PC bios ang guess what, there was never a demand from big blue against those doing clones even though they took the market from them. The bios shipped with the minimig is the PIC controller program released under the GPL.

2. When apple clones arrived, companies were lazy and never created an MacOS compatible bios, the result? Steve Jobs returned to apple and prohibited these companies from bundling the bios or their operative system with the machines. Guess what, the miniming will not be bundled neither with the bios nor the operative system property of A inc.

IMO it would be the last nail on this legal issue if someone writes some verylog code so the miniming runs another 68k era computer, the Atari ST for example, so the minimig would be a generic 16 bit emulation solution.

[downix]

little wrote:

2. Legal: (A inc)

Let's review history please.

1. Back in the day PC clones had a phoenix bios to avoid paying IBM royalties for their IVM PC bios ang guess what, there was never a demand from big blue against those doing clones even though they took the market from them. The bios shipped with the minimig is the PIC controller program released under the GPL.

2. When apple clones arrived, companies were lazy and never created an MacOS compatible bios, the result? Steve Jobs returned to apple and prohibited these companies from bundling the bios or their operative system with the machines. Guess what, the miniming will not be bundled neither with the bios nor the operative system property of A inc.

IMO it would be the last nail on this legal issue if someone writes some verylog code so the miniming runs another 68k era computer, the Atari ST for example, so the minimig would be a generic 16 bit emulation solution.

Um.. wrong on both points.

1) The "BIOS" in the Amiga is the AmigaOS itself!  The PIC loader is there to load this BIOS as well as the FPGA programming.

2) Incorrect here as well.  Mac's used (until they switched to Intel) OpenFirmware, same thing the Pegasos used.  OF, mind you, is an industry standard, IEEE-1275.  Anyone can impliment it.  Apple locked out the clones by killing access with custom chips, also by refusing to sell Mac OS seperately.  Some of the clone makers held on, but with no OS, they too fell.

[Kronos]

@Downix

Ever heard the terms "new world Mac" and "old world Mac" ? ;-)

[TheMagicM]

skurk wrote:
Yeah.  With Xennep's cancellation on the pre-assembled boards (no hard feelings), I'm also interested.

what??? when did this happen?  does that mean the original 10 or so that were going to be developed has been cancelled?

[little]

The "BIOS" in the Amiga is the AmigaOS itself!

Are you serious? The amigaOS is not and has never been the BIOS, the kickstart is. Before you argue that the kickstart is the same as the amiga operative system remember that you can since the old days you also load unix/linux into the amiga. Also as I have stated before, it is a matter of time befor somebody develops verilog code that you can load into the minimig to run another machine (a c64? an atari st? a classic macintosh? only time will tell) so I stand by my words, the PIC code is the bios of this machine, everything on top of it won't run unless the PIC code is run first.

2) Incorrect here as well. Mac's used (until they switched to Intel) OpenFirmware

Next time please double check you facts. The whole mac clones drama was before the days of openfirmware, before the days of PowerPC and when system 7 was the cool kid on the block. The mac had no custom chips like the amiga, you could use chips with a similar functionality and voila, you had a functional mac clone. Steve Job didn't refused to sell the OS, he locked out the clones from bundling the next version (system locking them into obsolecence, but that trick won't work on a 100% retro system.

So I stand by my words, A inc has no legal grounds against the minimig and with amiga forever there is the posibility of 100% legal clones.

[alexh]

The main problem is the initial investment. To do a production run large enough for savings to come in (200) the guy doing it will have to put up several thousand pounds (perhaps £2-3k, perhaps $6000) for at least 2-3 months.

That is a lot of money to find, and risk, on an as yet (v1.1) untried design.

It's going to take:

a) someone for whom £3k is not a large amount of money
b) prepayment ordering where the risk is giving your money over and never seeing it again.

[alexh]

little wrote:
So I stand by my words, A inc has no legal grounds against the minimig and with amiga forever there is the posibility of 100% legal clones.

Not true. Whoever owns the copyright for the book "Amiga Hardware Reference Manual Third Edition 1991" could sue for infringement of copyright. Minimig is effectively an unofficial translation of this book from English to Verilog.

You could of course sell the boards unprogrammed.

[amigakid]

I for one plan on ordering one and assembling it myself.  I dont have a lot of time and it'll take a while due to that, but I am a very experienced solderer on both through hole and surface mount, but it is still a tedious task and time consuming.  I think it will be a fun project but to think someone could make money doing it, time and cost would not be worth it unlee\ss they sold them for a high cost