A market for new Amiga hardware?

[tokyoracer]

I was thinking,
Is it time to star re-manufacturing now expensive equipment such as flicker fixers, accelerators, CD  interfaces and other interfaces for example? It must come to a point where you could make good money out of this due to the high demand. Flicker fixers for example look super simple stuff yet they easily fetch over £100.
Anyone else thought of this?

[amazing]

i just go the minimig way

[Jeff]

It has been discussed at length, many have thought of it. The problem is cost. Look at what it is taking to get the Mini-Mig off the ground as a not for profit hobby project.

The return on investment for any larger projects just wouldn't be there. Not to mention some of the needed components like 68060 CPU's for accelerators, and the special ram for Flicker Fixers is almost impossible to find these days in any sort of quantity.

People like Jen S are a good example of small run projects and just how much time and money is involved.

That said, if you do come up with a needed add on for a reasonable price I'll probably buy one, and so will others.

Jeff  

[Oli_hd]

Is it time to star re-manufacturing now expensive equipment such as flicker fixers, accelerators, CD interfaces and other interfaces for example?

It all depends on if the parts are available, custom parts like the Amiga connectors are expensive to be made, specially in small batches. This makes cheap A600 memory cards and other things to expensive to make even though the actual parts are cheap.

Flicker fixers for example look super simple stuff yet they easily fetch over £100.

The standard external flicker fixer design has a adc then about 2meg of fifo ram (I think the toasterscan uses four meg if its got a flicker fixer onboard or two otherwise) and then a cpld to control it all, followed by a dac.. its not as easy as it sounds and with each of those chips costing pounds, not pence the card would still end up around the £75 mark once product warrenty, a markup for the maker and a markup for the seller is taken into account.

You will find a lot of modern Amiga cards (past seven years) use one large FPGA/CPLD to do as much in one chip as it can. (The new Z3 USB card, Picasso IV and Prometheus cards are good examples) as they are good for short production runs and reduce the risk of major design problems needing rework. (you just reprogram the chip and send the card back out)

Also dont forget you need the product CE marked for EU sale, FCC marked for American sale and in the EU it must be Pb free and RoHs compatiable.. is your cheap China PCB supplier? Fines await if you just stick CE marks on or use lead coated components.

So lots to think about, an easier way is to do the design, upload it to Aminet for free and see people make them and flog them on eBay as individuals.

[gdanko]

amazing wrote:
i just go the minimig way

Minimig is fine if you want a 7 mhz A500.

[motrucker]

I would think the the speed that FF/SC's vanish when offered for sale, and the price they bring would answer your question right there. There is a market.
I would buy an NTSC version in a heartbeat.
Accelerators really don't seem to be selling all that well, no matter what the masses say. This amazes me, but the $$$ speak.
Some real, up to date stuff, like SATA cards - and FAST USB cards would really be nice to have.

[B00tDisk]

motrucker wrote: like SATA cards - and FAST USB cards would really be nice to have.

Why?  On the best day with the wind at its back, Zorro gets...what, 12mb/sec thruput?  And even if you're writing drivers for the PCI bodges available for the various systems you still hit a bottleneck unless they're the ultra-rare type that hook straight in to the accelerator card.  

Buffered IDE and USB 1.1 are about as powerful as you could ask for, I/O wise, for the Amiga.  More drivers for the (USB) gear thats out there, that's what's needed.

[dammy]

Why? On the best day with the wind at its back, Zorro gets...what, 12mb/sec thruput? And even if you're writing drivers for the PCI bodges available for the various systems you still hit a bottleneck unless they're the ultra-rare type that hook straight in to the accelerator card.

Buffered IDE and USB 1.1 are about as powerful as you could ask for, I/O wise, for the Amiga. More drivers for the (USB) gear thats out there, that's what's needed.

Problem is folks are looking for a silver bullet to solve everything.  There are two camps of users and it has to be realized that one hardware package won't fit both's needs.

Minimig is perfect for the person who wants a A500 with some possible expantions.  Minimig is not for a Amiga follow on, your going to need modern hardware for that with modern OS.

Dammy

[alexh]

Oli_hd wrote:
The standard external flicker fixer design has a adc

Averlogic AL-875A-T-0 Triple 8-bit ADC ~= $5

then about 2meg of fifo ram (I think the toasterscan uses four meg if its got a flicker fixer onboard or two otherwise) and then a cpld to control it all, followed by a dac..

Averlogic AL-250A-T-0 Video Scan Doubler (De-Interlacer) with embedded DRAM & DAC ~= $11

with each of those chips costing pounds, not pence the card would still end up around the £75 mark once product warrenty, a markup for the maker and a markup for the seller is taken into account.

I think it could be done for £30-35. But there is no real market, you'd sell like maybe 150-200 if you were lucky.

[amazing]

gdanko wrote:

amazing wrote:
i just go the minimig way

Minimig is fine if you want a 7 mhz A500.

i expect in the future more is possible with it  ;-)

[freqmax]

I see two primary values:
1) The software that were created for Amiga during approx 10 years.
2) Platform that can be used for actual task that users benefit from, be it DSO, wordprocessing or games.

I think the (2) has already been filled by other players. So that leaves essentially (1). How much effort is it worthwhile to be able to use the already written Amiga software and hardware capabilities that the software exploits.

Ofcourse this platform is useful for using other m68k architectures aswell, but that's another story :-D

[Crom00]

I think it could be done for £30-35. But there is no real market, you'd sell like maybe 150-200 if you were lucky.

Why limit yourself to just Amiga? Is it possible to make it a s-video, (modern console), scart, component, rca, amiga rgb to vga apapter so it has more appeal? This way you're selling to a few 100,000  customers instead of a few hundred.

I bought a smiliar device from a chinese company for my xbox for $50. It took the component signal (480i-1808i) and converted it to a sweet VGA signal.

[tokyoracer]

Thanks for the comments people. Interesting comments but it seems that although the hardware is wanted by many, it just isn't a large enough community which is a shame.