Does Natami satisfy Classic Amiga enthusiasts?

[matthey]

yes sounds good alright but x1000 good too just different markets for running old amiga software hope it would be good, but then when the original amiga 1200 come out alot old games didnt run well 1.3 stuff because the cache and aga etc cfo slot always going have some people un happy .

The N680x0 CPU should handle the cache problem. I believe it will sniff the memory for self modifying code and auto-magically "handle" it. The problem of poorly written early OCS/ECS games can't really be fixed. Also some games will likely run way too fast. Most of the later games programmers learned though. The Natami CAN do certain things with the fpga chipset and CPU to increase compatibility.

[Retro_71]

It does satisfy me (when released), since they say you can bag the hardware it will be interesting to program for it, be nice to get back into programing. FPGA Arcade and Natami are the 2 system i want to buy the most and when i buy a FPGA Arcade machine i will still want to buy a Natami and for that matter a CloneA as well.

[DonnyEMU]

If I were going strictly by the word "Classic", I would suggest that means Commodore-Amiga and that PowerPC had nothing to do with Commodore's Amiga at all nor was it planned. In fact Commodore were looking at HP as their next gen chips. So do I think PowerPC had anything to do with "classic" Amiga, that's a BIG NO..

Some AGA/AA Amigas had problems with OCS/ECS games too, so I'd suggest that we live now in a time where adjustments for this kind of things is possible.

[haywirepc]

I think it will if its ever for sale. At this point, I'm less than optimistic about when or if they will ever sell the boards. Maybe its just that I've had high hopes and been burnt by many others promising something similar and never delivering.
 
I hope they start selling boards someday,  But how many times are they going to change the design and then start backpedaling on release dates?
I stopped watching the site.

Steven

[Methuselas]

Seems and interesting an fun project, though I wonder if suffers from runaway feature creep.

I concur.

[Methuselas]

It also seems that Jens hasn't given up on CloneA yet which would be yet more 'competition' for team Natami.  How come in the tiny Amiga market, everyone has to compete with each other and nobody works together (classic and NG!)  

Long time, Nova. Did you hear anything from Jens about the CloneA? He's been quiet about it for about a year now and last I heard, he was having issues with the ROMS, due to licensing. :confused:

[Duce]

I'll buy a Natami board the moment they are released if they have an ethernet port and an easy means to getting it networked and on the internet.  Would be a stellar BBS host if it runs all the old SW just fine.  The PPC OS 4 solutions just don't run such BBS SW well enough to use unless you use emulation, and if I have to do that I might as well continue running a BBS on a UAE'd PC.

Without onboard networking, it's a doorstop to me at any price.  Hope they also offer these as just motherboards so I would not be forced into buying some overpriced fully built PC full of cheap 2 year old asian components like the x1000.

[scuzzb494]

Never heard of it... But then I'm not that much of an Amiga nutter.

[SamuraiCrow]

I used to want to make games for the Natami, but I have never cared about making games for a non-Amiga system so the Natami was something I was really looking forward to for a while.

I'm sorry things didn't work out for you being a member of the NatAmi team.  I think that the whole team may rupture if they don't come out with some useful hardware soon.

Feel free to contact me by PM or email if you want some more help learning to write code.  It doesn't matter to me whether you want to write code for Amiga or otherwise.  I'll help you either way.  Thanks to Chris Handley, PortablE may work reasonably on Windows as well as AROS and MorphOS and the rest.

@Thread

I'm a lot more likely to get a NatAmi than I am to get another OS 4 box.  OS 4 is nice but their hardware is always overpriced.  If I want performance, I'll write a compiler to program the FPGA directly as an alternate core.

[NovaCoder]

Long time, Nova. Did you hear anything from Jens about the CloneA? He's been quiet about it for about a year now and last I heard, he was having issues with the ROMS, due to licensing. :confused:

Yep he refered to CloneA recently over on EAB as still being 'alive' in one form or another.

[Tripitaka]

I'll buy one if they come out, or a clone A if Jens beats 'em to it. Maybe I'll even buy them both but until it's on the slab it's all just theory.

[Gulliver]

The Natami is like a pipe dream. It looks good, but its protoype development is crawling. It is also the fault of goals that are being added as the project makes some progress.

I really wish they could deliver something to the average Amiga user, but with moving targets, I know they never will. It is not about being against the Natami, it is about being realistic. No one will ever witness mass production of the Natami in the next following years. It is just that it takes a lot of time and dedicated/professional effort for a completely working prototype to reach mass market, and the Natami prototype is not even complete.

For me, a better choice and much more reasonable is the FPGArcade/Minimig AGA/Retro Replay board.

My ideal Classic 68k specimen, would be something like a seriously redesigned and greatly enhanced motherboard of an AGA Amiga, following the concept behind the superb design Georg Brown did with his GB A1000 project.

[SamuraiCrow]

Yep he refered to CloneA recently over on EAB as still being 'alive' in one form or another.

For anyone searching, heres a linky.

[ElPolloDiabl]

It sounded good when they were doing an 060 based AGA Amiga with 3D enhancements. It would have been like the next step in classic Amiga and nice to program on.
  Now I haven't got a clue what they are doing... it sounds like a fun project for the team, but they shouldn't claim that it will be a mass produced Amiga ready within a year and a bit and be faster with every new FPGA tech.
  If they ever finish it no one will care but them.

[NovaCoder]

What makes me laugh, is that a single guy create the MiniMig and then open sourced the project.   How hard would it have been for someone with some money to have updated it (eg ACube, AmigaKit) and sold it as a classic replacement in a branded MiniITX case.

[B00tDisk]

It's what, two years out of when they said they'd have dev machines released?

Ah well it's not like they're doing pre-sales or anything, can't pick on 'em TOO much.