MiniMig with AGA

[Darrin]

The projects on aminet are typically about hooking PS2 keyboards to A1200s, not turning A1200 keyboards into PS2 ones. What is needed is something akin to the Keyrah, and IMO it would make perfect sense to put this on the expansion board that Yaqube is making, but I have no idea whether it is feasable or not.

To be honest, I wouldn't add it to the board as some people won't want it and as a stand-alone unit it could also be used with a PC (WinUAE, etc), Minimig v1.x and the C-One.  All of which equals a larger market for sales.

[Hattig]

Nope it's not faster then a 030 50Mhz.

The softcore speeds are:

TG68K @ 7.09 MHz : 4.27 x A500 / 1.85 x A1200
TG68K.C @ 7.09 MHz : 5.81 x A500 / 2.52 x A1200

To be fair, yaqube did say he would try 14.18MHz with a memory buffer (cache?). That would be 5x A1200, which would be akin to a 70MHz '020 / 90MHz 68000.

I don't know if the A1200 speeds were with fast RAM or not, but looking at the numbers I think not.

Any more information? It's not really the most important thing, it's already ~a 45MHz 68000, which beats the old Supra28 A500 accelerator!

[mikej]

It's a bit hard to say how fast it will go. The current TG68K will need to gain a simple cache in front of the DRAM to speed things up otherwise it is locked to the memory cycle time.

I have got about half way through a new 68K implementation which is table based and pipelined. It runs well at the moment, but it is not complete. It currently runs at over 40MHz with a two cycle pipeline and instruction prefetch. I am running it against the real 68K to make sure it is well behaved.

It is a background project, I'm not sure I'll ever get a chance to finish it at the moment. If I do, I will see how fast it runs on a small Virtex6 (high performance part).
/Mike

[kolla]

To be honest, I wouldn't add it to the board as some people won't want it and as a stand-alone unit it could also be used with a PC (WinUAE, etc), Minimig v1.x and the C-One.  All of which equals a larger market for sales.

I don't quite see why anyone would object to an A600/A1200 ribbon adapter being there, but ok.

One thing there problably is a market for, is a slim case for A1200 keyboard + keyrah, like the case that came with Infinitiv towers.

[tasmanian guy]

Okay so it probably wont be as fast as a 68030 at 50mhz, but how much ram can you expand it up to?  I saw the 50 meg chip ram demonstration, which could be very handy, as you can never have too much chip ram :-)
 
It is a pity we can't make an Amiga clone with a 68060 and PowerPC for those that have yet to cross to Amiga OS 4 cheaper than the Amiga X1000 or a Sam.
 
I suppose WINUAE will suffice for cpu power hungry apps.  Off topic but I've just discovered Dark Basic Professional, what a great program!  Reminds me of AMOS in terms of being easy to get quick results.

[mikej]

The expansion board has a higher performance processor with local memory, for those who want a bit more speed...
Exact spec of processor to be determined.
64MByte of RAM on the base board at the moment.

[amigadave]

The expansion board has a higher performance processor with local memory, for those who want a bit more speed...
Exact spec of processor to be determined.
64MByte of RAM on the base board at the moment.

Is the onboard RAM shared Chip/Fast RAM, all Chip RAM (but faster than the Chip RAM in a Classic Amiga), or configured Chip or Fast RAM via jumpers or software?

[yaqube]

Is the onboard RAM shared Chip/Fast RAM, all Chip RAM (but faster than the Chip RAM in a Classic Amiga), or configured Chip or Fast RAM via jumpers or software?

The SDRAM is shared as follows:

0.5 MB for ROM (will be expanded to 2 MB)
2 MB for Chip RAM
1.5 MB for Slow RAM
8 MB for Fast RAM (Zorro II area)
48 MB for EXTRA Chip RAM (may also be configured as Fast RAM)

The memory is configured by the OSD menu.

[freqmax]

I assume the softcore 68000 is using 32-bit adress bus?

[yaqube]

I assume the softcore 68000 is using 32-bit adress bus?

Your assumption is correct. Otherwise there was no support for more than 16 MB of RAM.

[MarkTime]

All classic hardware is slow by today's standards.  I understand the interest in retro computing, but I don't understand going through any worry about the speed of the thing.

If I purposely bought a 386SX-16mhz machine, just for the retro experience, I wouldn't then search out a 386SX-25mhz upgrade.  If I wanted more speed, I'd just buy a 3.33Ghz core i7.

So if I were going to get an AGA based Amiga, I think I'd just go with stock.  In fact, insist on it .  That was the most common experience with the Amiga, and I'd just enjoy that.

But beyond the users talking about speed? of the machine, for whatever reason, somehow even the developers have managed to put themselves into this curve - and more or less, in a shortened time period going through the same machinations - starting with relatively stock, getting 2x improvement on that, working on some more improvements.

What?  Didn't Amithlon solve this already - don't you get 100x performance over a stock Amiga - with AGA as well?

What am I missing here?

[Darrin]

Your assumption is correct. Otherwise there was no support for more than 16 MB of RAM.

OS3.9 needed a 68020 or better to run on a real Amiga, is it capable of running on this softcore CPU?

[bungle]

Whats wrong with a USB to PS2 convertor ?
Then just use Keyrah ?
I mean most USB keyboards you buy nowadays come with a little crappy USB to PS2
Why wouldn't that work ?

Bungle

[mikej]

The USB to PS2 "convertor" is passive, the keyboard does the prototcol switch.
but yet, it should work. I'll try one.
/Mike

[Louis Dias]

Good luck finding USB keyboards and mice that still support the PS/2 protocol.

[freqmax]

Microcontroller with ~30 GPIO pins that interface to the A1200 keyboard matrix and PS/2-Minimig/FPGAarcade in the other. Done!

Btw, anyone seen a non-BGA S-ATA to LVTTL/LVDS bridgechip or similar that can interface to an Xilinx Spartan FPGA ..?
S-ATA = 1500 Mbit/s ; USB2 = 480 Mbit/s