Portable Amiga anyone??

[mikej]

I have mailed him, but no response yet...

Hi Picman,
I got your email, but I haven't had a chance to reply yet.
If you look on http://www.fpgaarcade.com and scroll down a bit you will see the hi-res touch LCD daughter board for the Replay board, which is a prototype for a portable machine.

Work is progressing on a 68030 core well, this will be released with a new Amiga core for the Replay board as soon as possible.

I design ASICs / boards for a living and have to say doing it on 4 layers is almost impossible to do while keeping good power and ground planes needed for good signal integrity, really important for the high speed video and memory busses. You could do it if you go to 4 thou traces but then the PCB cost goes higher than a cheap 6 layer board. I use Mentor PCB tools for the design.

Designing the PCB is by far the easiest bit of the work. There is a lot of software design in in the embedded controller and design work in the video and memory subsystems. It looks like not much has happened since I got the first board back in the summer, but it's been a long slog to get the rest of the system written.

The other big headache is to get these boards produced at a good price you have to buy in bulk and from the suppliers directly. I am lucky enough to go to China a lot, so I have been talking and buying a lot of components in Shenzhen. I have quite a collection of bits now

So, I think it is great if you want to work on this, but don't underestimate the amount of work it takes to get it up and running.

I'll mail you privately as well.
Best,
Mike

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Port UAE to either the Pandora and/or to the GP2X Wiz, and make some nice whdload menu system (something like AmigaForever or Gamebase Amiga) and you've got your kickass portable Amiga

[kolla]

As for the 020/030 emulation: ask for some help from Tony_Wilen. He is the author of WinUAE and can help with the C code, which then you need to adapt to Verilog (the same as Dennis did for the first Minimig).

Eh, no - the Minimig sports a _real_ 68000 CPU, not a softcore one. And my understanding is that coding an FPGA and C coding are so far apart that using UAE code is not really an option, allthought one can look at UAE code for inspiration and answers for specific issues.

[kolla]

Regarding wifi - to be used how, exactly?

For AmigaOS there's only a third party prism2 driver around, and it only supports WEP and 802.11b - hardly relevant today. Before wasting time on wifi for a portable minimig, one should at least make sure there's proper wifi for AmigaOS at all first.

[mitchd61]

So how about using the PSP case?
It has a large capacity battery, the correct size screen, analog joystick, dpad..
 
Slight mod for an sd card... there are lots of faulty ones on ebay for cheap...

It seems to me that would be the most straight forward approach. The only consideration would the variations in the PSP models. The PSP-1000 has a slightly bigger (thicker) design and would probably be a better choice by virtue of having more room to work with. I've had my PSP-1000 and 3000 both apart for case mods and the 1000 definitely has more room and the construction is sturdier as well.

[Piru]

Is anyone interested in such a device

I'll just run UAE on my PowerBook

[mike-]

Thats the idea of the touchscreen.
The unit is only ment to play games and not write applications etc, so only a minimal keyboard is needed like the iphone...

I was quite interested up until you said that. Why is it so hard to include a tiny little qwerty keyboard and make the screen flipup like a tiny little laptop... Thats the soul reason i dont even look at the iphone, or why im not considering the google phone...

@Piru

Get it done already! im tiered of waiting, even installed linux on it! ^^ Looks good btw, boots faster then pretty much anything i´ve seen.

[mitchd61]

I was quite interested up until you said that. Why is it so hard to include a tiny little qwerty keyboard and make the screen flipup like a tiny little laptop...

Are you thinking of something like this... http://ps3maven.com/psp-laptop-mod-keyboard/ It's a little rough, but uses readily available parts. A little refinement and voila!

[KThunder]

touchscreen or no many amiga games use or can use the keyboard a lot. maybe buttons emulating keyboard presses could be used and a setup prog in the os to setup which keys,  turbo, etc.

[jj]

Port UAE to either the Pandora and/or to the GP2X Wiz, and make some nice whdload menu system (something like AmigaForever or Gamebase Amiga) and you've got your kickass portable Amiga

 
What like this http://pandorawiki.org/UAE4ALL

[mike-]

Are you thinking of something like this... http://ps3maven.com/psp-laptop-mod-keyboard/ It's a little rough, but uses readily available parts. A little refinement and voila!

Something like that yes. Maybe a bit more Nokia N97 (is it?) style. Now the only thing keeping me from buying that is the non opensourcenesss.

Read an interesting comment made by intel regarding the Atom 2... "Promising" not to make it too powerful so it would compete with existing higher end laptop solutions... So no dual core for atom netbooks it seems, unless someone is smart enough to take the desktop version and make a netbook...

Im quite sure companies know what users want.. But hey, milk the cow!...

[Piru]

Something like that yes. Maybe a bit more Nokia N97 (is it?) style. Now the only thing keeping me from buying that is the non opensourcenesss.

N900 is nice. Touchscreen. Physical keyboard. And it's open source (much of it at least), etc.

So no dual core for atom netbooks it seems, unless someone is smart enough to take the desktop version and make a netbook...

Actually intel forbids anyone from using the desktop CPUs in laptops / netboots. Fun, not.

[tone007]

So no dual core for atom netbooks it seems, unless someone is smart enough to take the desktop version and make a netbook...

The Atoms do hyperthreading, though, looks like two processors in your task manager, and only draws the power of one core!

Actually intel forbids anyone from using the desktop CPUs in laptops / netboots. Fun, not.

They probably learned their lesson back when there were still desktop CPUs in laptops (high clock-rate powerhungry P4s in particular.)  Too much heat in a small space causing shutdowns and crashes doesn't make Intel or the laptop vendor look very good.


P.S., all Nokia products are crap.  Sorry Finland.

[picman]

The N97  uses the OMAP3 .. back to pandora......

[Tron2k2]

I used to use Nokia phones all the time because they were super sturdy.  Went Samsung for a few phones, they seemed to last about a year (I'm hard on my phones) then went back to Nokia for the Xpress Music 5310.  Tons of features-also tons of flaws in the software, and the durability has been a disappointment-I'm on my fourth one of them in a year and a half.  The earphone speaker keeps blowing out.

So if this is indicative of current Nokia product durability, then I would be reluctant to throw down for another one.

With regards to the actual subject of this thread-yes please!  A portable Amiga would rock.  It would also be possible to sell them in Fred Meyer with a pre-loaded selection of Amiga games.  You know, it would actually MAKE SOME MONEY for someone.  Needless to say, The Name, Inc. were not hyped on the idea..

[tonyyeb]

Having followed the Pandora project for the last 24 (?) months or so, I have seen how difficult it has been for a team of 4 dedicated people to develop a hand held device, similar to what you are proposing. And the Pandora still hasn't been delivered to the first paying customer yet.

Are you proposing something similar to the http://www.fpgaarcade.com/ but in portable form? If so then that is something I may be interested in, at the right price (i.e. cheaper than the a current complete minimig).