MiniMig with AGA

[xyzzy]

We could see all sorts of things emerge, an extended AGA chipset (more planes/resolutions/sprites), AGA but with no DMA contention, a built-in p96/cgfx compatible RTG graphics card and vga switcher or anything else we can squeeze in.

[desantii]

I would preffer VGA or HDMI, that is more than enough as most TVs have those inputs. DVI with audio would be cool!
 
 

If there was a 20-30 Euro extra price for the version with svideo/composite out, how many people would be interested?
Before I get the chips, it would be useful to know if I should make all the boards with svideo option, or say half.
(To get the basic board price down I made the svideo/composite a build option)
Cheers,
Mike

[Amiga_Nut]

If it has RGB analogue output that would be great for me, I'd want to use it with a CRT screen and RGB scart is the best way for us in the EU

Anything else for me personally is just an extra bonus.

[mikej]

It has analogue RGB out (nicely filtered as required). It also has DVI, which depending on the core and video timing, can be cabled directly into a HDMI TV input.

I have set up timing for most popular video standards, 576i, 488i, 576p, 488p (pal / ntsc interlaced/progressive), 1080i, 720p and a few others like 1280x1024 etc. The chip may do 1080P but it's pushing the FPGA IO timing a bit.

I am still waiting for placement dates, everybody here seems to be going on holiday and the first date I've got is mid July at the moment. I may take the parts back to China to get assembled. I'll keep you all posted.
/Mike

[Hattig]

We could see all sorts of things emerge, an extended AGA chipset (more planes/resolutions/sprites), AGA but with no DMA contention, a built-in p96/cgfx compatible RTG graphics card and vga switcher or anything else we can squeeze in.

I think the NatAmi is doing a lot of this.

Personally I think that it is better to do enhancements that enhance existing software, than to add new features that require developer support.

Therefore a contention-less AGA would benefit people, and more resolutions would provide more options for software, but more planes or sprites or chunky bitmap modes would have to wait for software to be enhanced to use it. I guess the chunky modes could have a P96 driver created for them.

[Crumb]

@Hattig

I guess the chunky modes could have a P96 driver created for them.

Although making a P96/CGX driver would be a great idea there are chances no one can do the task (lack of DriverDeveloperKit or simply skills).

Existing chips supported by P96/CGX are well documented (like CirrusGD5446 or Virge) so it could be possible to emulate the behaviour of the gfx chip so existing drivers work without changes. I hope implementing the gfx chip would not require a lot of accuracy, just the minimum to open screenmodes and make blitter work, the important part would be register compatibility, the rest could be reimplemented as developers choose.

Cirrus Logic Linux drivers seem to be more or less well commented so it's not hard to see the addresses of the registers and their functionality. I'm not saying making a complete svga chip with a FPGA is easy, but Amiga drivers probably don't require to have a perfect VGA chip emulation (no need of emulating segmented memory layouts, no need of some VGA registers and screenmodes unused by P96/CGX drivers...)

[alexh]

How simple was the UAEGFX picasso96 "driver"? Totally alien to a real driver?

[NovaCoder]

While a custom p96 driver would be great (eg UAEGFX), to just do the WINUAE trick and boost chipram to 8mb and make it a faster would allow Ratte to develop some nice new drivers/modes.   Even without any new modes you'd be able to run in 1024x768 and 256 colours....just try it in WINUAE if you want to see how it performs

[Louis Dias]

While a custom p96 driver would be great (eg UAEGFX), to just do the WINUAE trick and boost chipram to 8mb and make it a faster would allow Ratte to develop some nice new drivers/modes.   Even without any new modes you'd be able to run in 1024x768 and 256 colours....just try it in WINUAE if you want to see how it performs

I guess no one noticed in the NATAMI demo that they were running 16MB of chip ram...

[mongo]

I guess no one noticed in the NATAMI demo that they were running 16MB of chip ram...

I guess you didn't notice in the MiniMig AGA demo that it was running 50MB of chip ram...

[NovaCoder]

I guess you didn't notice in the MiniMig AGA demo that it was running 50MB of chip ram...

[Louis Dias]

I guess you didn't notice in the MiniMig AGA demo that it was running 50MB of chip ram...

I guess you didn't notice the NatAmi is eventually supposed to have 256 Megs Chip and 256 Megs fast...

[xyzzy]

The Replay board is supposed to be a multi-purpose board, not just amiga specific. 256MB of onboard ram would be overkill for many applications.

If more ram is needed it can be added via the expansion connector, on a cpu board for example.

[xyzzy]

How simple was the UAEGFX picasso96 "driver"? Totally alien to a real driver?

The advantage of replicating the WinUAE hardware RTG card is that we have the source code to hand and know how its supposed to work.

[spans]

I guess you didn't notice in the MiniMig AGA demo that it was running 50MB of chip ram...

Err WOW, erm how much Ram is this beast coming with? :laughing:
Dans gettin that warm fuzzy feeling

[mikej]

64MBytes.
/Mike