More from Finland

[Makotti]

Hello! Terve!

I used to have an A600 with a hard drive and an A1200 with 030 accelerator (can't remember was it Apollo or Blizzard) in the past and traded them away in 1996 or 1997, a stupid thing to do. But years after I kept reading about Amiga news occasionally and almost forgot about it (I remember the last time I read something about the "vacuum cleaner" Walker Amiga) and several years passed by. But now, I've checked what's going on with the Amiga scene and was surprised to hear about the new Amiga OS 4.1 (even 3.5, 3.9 and 4.0 was news to me), AmigaOne and sam440ep.

I hate the way pc's and windows work, wasting resources and generating a lot of heat (although keeps warm in the winter, especially when gaming) and Amiga had always worked better and is _the_ user friendly and intuitive computer for me. Mac is ok, maybe I'd buy one for music production (Cubase), but otherwise it has nothing interesting for me to offer.

So, I decided to buy myself a Christmas present from Amigakit, an A1200 is on it's way home. It will be upgraded to 030/50 and I'm considering a tower case with the Mediator and bells + whistles later on. I hope Elbox will release a new accelerator (Coldfire?), I bet they would sell since there are no new accelerators on the market and have not been produced for a while.

Also, I'm watching with great interest the NatAmi, hoping it will see the light some day.  :-)

Have a boingy day!
 :-)

[KimmoK]

Heips & tervetuloa takaisin Amigamaisuuksiin.

I hope we one day see FPGA+RAM combination that fits in the A1200 trap door slot. The FPGA could be programmed to function as a fast 68k with a better compatibility than Coldfire.
(example: http://www.natami.net/specification.htm
"New enhanced and performance optimized 68K-CPU planned as free upgrade.
Work is in progress on a new fully compatible 68K CPU, AKA N070, providing high performance for todays multi-media applications.
This CPU will become part of the SuperAGA chipset. Our goal is to make this available as free firmware upgrade for the Natami boards. ")

Also PPC440+RadeonM9+RAM would also be very nice in the trapdoor slot and it would enable PPC operating systems. And because PPC440 has a lot of I/O, it could easily be guite a beast (ethernet, usb etc...)

[jj]

That really is a crazy idea in my opinion.  Better way would be a FPGA card with all the custom cchip access that could be added to modern PPC mobos andd give 100% backward compatibility with old softwware on modern hardware.

This is just as unlikely though i feel.

[KimmoK]

@JJ

Ok. Next idea:
200€ PCI-express card that would turn modern 50 € x86 board to a PPC amiga & AA or NATAMI on a FPGA (FPGA should/could be optional -100€)

or

AM2 socket instead of PCI express.

[Makotti]

I think, since there are so many classic Amigas around, maybe a simple and cheap FPGA N070 trapdoor accelerator would do. Sure people want to max out their classic Amigas, before moving on to the next Amiga whatever?

A1200T + N070 + Mediator + graphics card might not equal to say, NatAmi, but sure it would be close?

Just my thoughts.  :-)