Oli's ColdFire Board

[bloodline]

Hi Oli, I was looking over the A1200 CPU slot and noticed that it Has Left and Right Audio signals on it... A quick hunt around some technical documents shows that any signals piped into these pins will be mixed with the Native Amiga Audio and squerted out of the Audio RCA's at the back of the Amiga.

If you include a sound chip on the board (I seem to remember you saing somthing to that effect), then could you pump the Audio output via those pins and make one really cool Amiga accelerator and soundcard in one!!!! :-)

[Animagic]

Great idea!

[mantisspider]

with the patent for the amiga running out are we gonna see complete amiga clones being built?

Acceleon G30™ looks nice! having one of those embedded to a  V5 333Mhz Coldfire card would be sweet.

The CD32 has a nice small motherboard and CD32 owners have never had the chance to get any decent power out of it.

is there any guessed prices yet? under £200 or £300 for the card?
A CD32 Coldfire card would be cool, especially if it had a PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports along with PCI. No need for the ugly low powered Sx series of addons! put me down for two of them and two A1200s please...ta

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:
If you include a sound chip on the board (I seem to remember you saing somthing to that effect), then could you pump the Audio output via those pins and make one really cool Amiga accelerator and soundcard in one!!!! :-)

Just as long as you keep the sound chips audio isolated on another output for people who want to use it for music apps. Paula isn't exactly noisless when the channels are open - I can hear the effects of system activity through mine quite often when using Sound Studio. Its faint but it finds its way into recordings easily enough...

[Jagabot]

The CD32 has a nice small motherboard and CD32 owners have never had the chance to get any decent power out of it.

It almost did...

The A2200 was a dual board design that combined a Spellbound motherboard with an Agent 88 pseudo-motherboard into an ATX form factor so it could use any clone case (at the time desktop slimline), support a wide variety of accelerator cards, numerous expansion possabilities, etc..

It almost saw the light of day, too bad it didn't. I would have also allowed for CD32 owners to buy "kits" which allowed them to pop their motherboard into a case with an Agent88 already installed, and in 10 minutes have a full blown A2200 (faster than an A1200, included a Kiko chip, CD32 CDROM drive, etc.).

Sure woulda been neat to have one of those hey?

[bloodline]

Karlos wrote:

bloodline wrote:
If you include a sound chip on the board (I seem to remember you saing somthing to that effect), then could you pump the Audio output via those pins and make one really cool Amiga accelerator and soundcard in one!!!! :-)

Just as long as you keep the sound chips audio isolated on another output for people who want to use it for music apps. Paula isn't exactly noisless when the channels are open - I can hear the effects of system activity through mine quite often when using Sound Studio. Its faint but it finds its way into recordings easily enough...

I'm always facinated how "blitter noise" seems to make it's way through the audio output of "integrated audio" solutions... The weird thing is that the noise is present even if the volume is turned down to 0... which leads me to think that if I could get some decent grounding I could reduce the noise too.

[Framiga]

Bloodline wrote:
"'m always facinated how "blitter noise" seems to make it's way through the audio output of "integrated audio" solutions... The weird thing is that the noise is present even if the volume is turned down to 0... which leads me to think that if I could get some decent grounding I could reduce the noise too."

I agree . . . it is the second time . . :-)

Even on standalone solution like my RepulseGold card, i had some little noise related problem, when the card WAS installed in the original A4000D case.

I had fixed the problem, isolating physically the rear RepulseGold bracket from the case. (due probably to a ground loop).

No problem when i've changed to the PowerTower case.

Audio, is very hard to handle, from a hardware planning POV.

Ciao

[CD32Freak]

The A2200 was a dual board design that combined a Spellbound motherboard with...

Yeah, too bad it never saw the light of day :-( There is a webpage dedicated to The Forgotten Amiga  :-) By the way, what's Agent 88? :-?

[mantisspider]

I want one!

coldfire vs amigaOne?
what makes the coldfire solution better than going for AmigaOne? is there going to be a complete amiga clone motherboard using coldfire cpu onboard?

[bloodline]

mantisspider wrote:
I want one!

coldfire vs amigaOne?
what makes the coldfire solution better than going for AmigaOne? is there going to be a complete amiga clone motherboard using coldfire cpu onboard?

Nothing makes the Coldfire better than the A1, but the Coldfire is more fun and will allow aging hardware to get a bit closer to modern specs in terms of CPU performance.

[Karlos]

I think the of the coldfire as the best way forward for all classic amigas unable to take the PPC/OS4 route. If Oli's first product is (hopefully) a success, then maybe we will see faster CF cards in future.

Even as a PPC user, I still want one :-)

Nobody really wants to see their 680x0 only system wither and die after so many years of service - I got a 1200/040 here that is begging for a CF upgrade ;-)

[Quixote]

Karlos kommented:

- I got a 1200/040 here that is begging for a CF upgrade.

;-) And I've got an A500 that would benefit from one.

For me, the question isn't whether I'll get an AmigOne, the question is "Yes, I'll get an A1, but what'll I do with the old A500?"

-And the ColdFire solution is an answer.

[JetRacer]

Actually, ColdFire will be _much_ faster if you're running 68K/AGA stuff. Even 1.4GHz G4 emu will be inferior to actual hardware in combination with  ColdFire.

One doesn't rule out the other though. Peg/A1 will be much faster running their native stuff. Stuff which some day probably won't appear as 68K versions no more.

Personally, I think I'll buy both (ColdFire & A1). But I'm not going to buy an A1 until OS4 is released. If I hadn't already had RHL on my x86 already it would have been a different matter though.

[that_punk_guy]

ColdFire sounds cool to me. If it sees the light of day and I have the money by then, i will probably go for it. At the same time I can't help but think that if the Amiga PPC platform does become truly viable, the ColdFire will be little more than a curiosity... then again, that's kind of cool too :-)

[bloodline]

that_punk_guy wrote:
ColdFire sounds cool to me. If it sees the light of day and I have the money by then, i will probably go for it. At the same time I can't help but think that if the Amiga PPC platform does become truly viable, the ColdFire will be little more than a curiosity... then again, that's kind of cool too :-)

With all due respect (which really goes without saying), do you not think that the Amiga/AmigaONE/AmigaPPC/AmigaAnything is nothing more than a curiosity now anyway... :-/

Thus a coldfire makes a curiosity, an Ubercuriosity :-D