Still a place for Amiga custom chips

[Nlandas]

Ok, ok, I know I'm going to hear just give it up, modern hardware is so much beyond the Amiga custom chips it's not worth it but hear me out. I am not talking about making a modern desktop PC. I'm talking about specific devices for things like TV attached kids edutainment.

Follow me here, as I lead into my real question, Commodore used to be the King of cost reducing existing tech in order to continue selling them at a much lower cost for a longer period of time. Is there no way, if someone had permission to use the old AGA chipset, to cost reduce it enough to make it viable for something like a VTECH handheld edutainment system?

My kids love their VTech VSmile but the graphics don't even live up to AGA. Their Grandma just got them some kind of Fisher Price pad that you hook to the TV and run on it. They love it too but again, the graphics are horrible. If someone owned the rights to the custom chips, I really think that there are markets left if the cost to manufacture the chipset could be brought low enough.

Doesn't anyone own them anymore and if not, how could they just enter limbo without anyone being able to offer to buy them.

[save2600]

This has been talked about to death... the purchasing and utilization of Amiga custom chips. The politics behind it all seem to be too much trouble than its worth. But I do agree that the technology is great and still has its uses. Especially for these kiddie plug and play things. 15khz native video and done extremely well no less. It's just a "luxury" that will forever remain mired by poor decisions, greed and God knows what else is behind their agenda with the Amiga.

[Hattig]

Sadly for $15 - $20 you can buy fast ARM chips with integrated graphics that far outperforms anything that AGA could offer.

Or for $25 - $30 you can get GHz class ARM designs with fast PowerVR based graphics, video acceleration, etc. An NVIDIA Tegra 2 probably won't set you back too much more than this either.

Maybe you could take the Minimig AGA VHDL and compile it into a hard core, and then attach a TG68k or N68050 style CPU into the same ASIC (or fix it to an ARM), and all the other stuff, but it would still cost a lot in terms of up-front design and engineering effort, and if you can afford that, you can afford to get a deal on buying 100k+ ARM SoCs.

Maybe five years ago, maybe even certainly ten years ago (if a single-chip AGA++ had been produced, which would have required Amiga/Commodore to be alive, and all this pie in the sky stuff that's not even worth considering). Not today.

[recidivist]

Sometimes kids have more fun with the box than the toy!

  A whole lot of people are prevented from enjoying many things because of greedy lawyers and ridiculous patent/copyrights on things decades old..
  But then I've met flea market sellers who were adamant that they would destroy the items on the table before lowering the price.Now how rationalk is that?

[Tension]

Not economically viable.

[tone007]

Not economically viable.

[save2600]

+1 Tone!   :lol:

[KThunder]

Not economically viable.

actually they are. part of the first post was about that. no not resurrecting a long dead chipset but if someone had kept it going there are numerous dexices over the last 15 years or so that could have used aga. from set top devices, satellite dish boxes, pdas, cell phones, childrens learning computers, etc.etc.etc.
vtech saw that, they used to build full computers but got squeezed out. instead of going under like so many others they found a market that could be theirs, and vtech pretty much owns the eduputer market. probably not much profit in it, but here they are many years later still doing pretty well.

that vsmile thingie would have been cooler with aga video

[Tension]

[persia]

You do realise the calendar reads 2010 not 1990 right?  The graphics in  most small devices today blow AGA away.  There's really no place to go with old tech unless you want your phone to look retro....

actually they are. part of the first post was about that. no not resurrecting a long dead chipset but if someone had kept it going there are numerous dexices over the last 15 years or so that could have used aga. from set top devices, satellite dish boxes, pdas, cell phones, childrens learning computers, etc.etc.etc.
vtech saw that, they used to build full computers but got squeezed out. instead of going under like so many others they found a market that could be theirs, and vtech pretty much owns the eduputer market. probably not much profit in it, but here they are many years later still doing pretty well.

that vsmile thingie would have been cooler with aga video

[tokyoracer]

Only time I can see this viable is if they made an Amiga in a joystick like they did for the Atari 2600, C64, etc. Even then, the farce it would create to get the hardware to start re-producing these chips would be a pointless effort as emulating AGA at full speed and accuracy would be alot cheaper and easier.

[ElPolloDiabl]

Nobody (in my opinion) has outdone elegant approach of the original custom chips plus OS on rom. But then you could be paying 4 times higher than a PC for such a solution.

[gertsy]

"I want a burger like the one in the PICTURE !"

LOL, Reminds me of Donald Duck with tourettes.

Gertsy

[ElPolloDiabl]

Sounds like computer games. You think you're getting a great game and the thing crashes every ten minutes.