MiniMig with AGA

[smerf]

There are lots of ways AGA can be improved. The most obvious one is eliminating the "SuperHiRes 8-bitplane" DMA slowdown, others include speeding up blitter operations. Hopefully 1280x512 would become totally useable.

Hi,

Ever try a modern day graphics card with Amiga Forever.

Talk about improvement with no slowdown and you don't even have to eliminate the superhires 8 bitplane.

Oh wow: 1280 by 512 usable, good grief what will they think of next for the next new hardware for the Amiga.

Amiga Forever runs at 1280 x 1020 with no problems. Oh no I am really going to make you all angry at me I should be thinking slow expensive buggy new hardware for our favorite machine when Cloanto's new 2010 package runs everything great when you have a newer PC machine. Not a 386 or 486 you know something modern. We are up to 6 cores, and single cores that run 200 times faster than a 68060 miggy. I know lets step it up to a 1.86 ghz ppc chip. (10 year old tech) wow super frog will really fly then.

smerf

[Hattig]

Hi,

@cammy,

Yes that is impressive, and with a few more instructions maybe we can have the new expensive minimig board roll over and play dead. Yes I think that the minimig board that duplicates the A500 was a good school project but I saw something the other day walking through a flea market, an Amiga 500 game console that came with 50 Amiga games all embedded in a joystick. It ran off of a couple of double A batts and you could carry it around take it over your friends house and play the 50 Amiga games on it, you could even order a flash card with another 50 games for $49.95.

Now that was impressive.

smerf

And you didn't buy it? You didn't take photos to post here?

Most likely some Chinese company took the Minimig VHDL and made an ASIC with it. Or it's emulated on a fast ARM SoC.

[Hattig]

Hi, Ever try a modern day graphics card with Amiga Forever.

Talk about improvement with no slowdown and you don't even have to eliminate the superhires 8 bitplane. Oh wow: 1280 by 512 usable, good grief what will they think of next for the next new hardware for the Amiga.

Amiga Forever runs at 1280 x 1020 with no problems. Oh no I am really going to make you all angry at me I should be thinking slow expensive buggy new hardware for our favorite machine when Cloanto's new 2010 package runs everything great when you have a newer PC machine. Not a 386 or 486 you know something modern. We are up to 6 cores, and single cores that run 200 times faster than a 68060 miggy. I know lets step it up to a 1.86 ghz ppc chip. (10 year old tech) wow super frog will really fly then.

smerf

I don't think you even understand why people would want Minimig or FPGAArcade, yet wouldn't mind a few issues with the chipsets fixed (mostly sped up).

Amiga Forever is just emulation. It is neat, and useful with the RTG graphics. I have absolutely no interest in it however, I've tried it in the past, but it's just not interesting to me. Having a full reimplementation of the hardware, at a hardware level (FPGA), is far more interesting. I can't explain why, it just is!

Hopefully the video output on FPGAArcade can (or will eventually) clock higher than AGA, allowing higher resolutions than what AGA could drive. In addition adding a chunky mode and a RTG driver would be useful for 3D and desktop uses.

[mikej]

Just to clarify the specs.
The Replay board hardware supports 24 bit and 16 bit video modes. It has a output filter / cable driver to get decent analogue output.

The FPGA is a Spartan3e1600 which is fully supported by the free toolset and around 3x larger than the original Minimig board.

Best,
Mike

[the_leander]

@chaoslord

OK, so I was mistaken about the Minimig, but I'm 100% correct about the Natami and other FPGA based solutions.  Adding new screenmodes and other capabilities is a matter of updating the softcore, no hardware mods necessary.

That is because the D/A on the Natami is already 24bit capable. There is nothing to stop you from adding the registers to the original minimig in principle, the problems start when you attempt to use/display them.  If those "other FPGA based solutions" share the same or similar limitations to their D/A, they will suffer the same issues as the original minimig.

That is all.

[yaqube]

I'm sorry if this has been answered already, but what is missing from m68k/32 for it to be 68020 compatible?

The main source of incompatibility is the lack of support for bitfield instructions and word/long word access at odd addresses.

[skurk]

(...)
but I saw something the other day walking through a flea market, an Amiga 500 game console that came with 50 Amiga games all embedded in a joystick. It ran off of a couple of double A batts and you could carry it around take it over your friends house and play the 50 Amiga games on it, you could even order a flash card with another 50 games for $49.95.

Are you sure about those specs, and that you're not confusing it with the C64DTV?

I've seen similar devices (like the Speedlink) which is a USB joystick and an emulator for Windows, along with some games on a CD.

[freqmax]

.

[jj]

Hopefully we'll see an Amstrad CPC (+) core too

 
+ 1

[yaqube]

Just a small update. The CPU core is still clocked at 28 MHz but this time with two separate 256-byte instruction and data caches.

[little]

Just a small update. The CPU core is still clocked at 28 MHz but this time with two separate 256-byte instruction and data caches.

That looks awesome and begs the ambitious question, how big a cache can be added?  Would it have about the same performance as the coldfire if you add the same size caches (let's say 16kb instruction and 8kb data cache like the 5207)?

[kolla]

:banana: :banana: :banana:

[Darrin]

Just a small update. The CPU core is still clocked at 28 MHz but this time with two separate 256-byte instruction and data caches.

We're going to have to wrap you in cotton wool and assign 10 armned guards to watch your every move just to make sure you never have an accidient!  

Great work!

[wizard66]

Great work Yacube !

Looks like you beat the blizzard 1230@50 with this atempt.
Your speed:    18,65 times A600
Blizzard 1230:  16.69 times A600

Bring out the beer for this man ;-)

Can you please say something about the HDF read/write speeds you get :-)
Is there a gain in speed for hdf read/write ?

[freqmax]

Is there any performance optimimum like for the instruction cache where 16-bytes gives a significant boost, but 256-bytes only gives 7% more performance increase. The idea with data cache seems a full success.

Maybe prefetch could be useful ? , because every RAM-fetch from memory require a significant setup time. So reading a few extra bytes in advance might be benefitial?

How is compatability? any software that screws up on this m68k/32 + AGA combination? There's both instruction compatibility and cycle compatibility for tight software loops?

[yaqube]

Is there any performance optimimum like for the instruction cache where 16-bytes gives a significant boost, but 256-bytes only gives 7% more performance increase.

It heavily depends on application. The 16-byte cache gives significant boost because it's one line of 16 bytes and actually acts as a prefetch buffer. Data from memory are always transferred as a burst of 4 32-bit words (which gives 16 bytes). After initial transfer latency the successive words can be accessed at no delay.

Maybe prefetch could be useful ? , because every RAM-fetch from memory require a significant setup time. So reading a few extra bytes in advance might be benefitial?

It's been already done. When I added the data cache I also implemented an extra instruction cache prefetch. The speed gain is 18%.

How is compatability?

The work is far from complete but there exist some programs which work.