Excitement about NatAmi

[Louis Dias]

I think they're waiting for the Minimig AGA to be released to copy their code.  

I thought that this would be possible but the Minimig license renders it unusable by the team.  Yes, I've asked this on the forum.

The reality is that the board went from 4-layer to 6-layer to add onboard add Gbit-ethernet and USB.  Hence, going from LX to MX has taken longer than originally planned.  A PCI slot was removed and 2 more memory chips were also added...

...but I suppose someone looking for actual answers would have gone to the official forum and discovered this for themselves...
[listens for the wolves to cry 'feature creep']

No one wants to buy a computer today that can't get online out of the box...the Natami team included.

[Piru]

The reality is that the board went from 4-layer to 6-layer to add onboard add Gbit-ethernet and USB.  Hence, going from LX to MX has taken longer than originally planned.  A PCI slot was removed and 2 more memory chips were also added...

Why does this remind me of BoXeR?

[Karlos]

Why does this remind me of BoXeR?

Back in the day when it was first announced I had such high hopes for the BoXer

[Hattig]

No one wants to buy a computer today that can't get online out of the box...the Natami team included.

Well, it would be useful if there was an Amiga App Store style thing (e.g., to download games from the various Amiga freeware/abandonware game sites; access aminet; etc). If GigE is pennies more than 100mbit then it sounds like there's a purpose to it.

In the end it depends on the cost of the final board. I think there's room for both an FPGAArcade and a Natami (later on, when it's complete) in my life though.

[Tension]

Back in the day when it was first announced I had such high hopes for the BoXer

Those were the glory years for Vapourware.

[Karlos]

Those were the glory years for Vapourware.

Who remembers the A-Box and it's famed Caipirinha custom chip?
Who remembers the phase5 BlizzardG4 ? I was so up for that :lol:
When that never materialised, there was the met@box AmiJoe G3. OK, a step down from G4, but still, got all hot and sweaty again for nothing
Elbox SharkPPC?
Elbox Dragon?

(at least there were prototypes of the last few)

It gets depressing after a while.

[Crom00]

Come on guys stop being so negative... you sound like my parents before they got a divorce...

Well whadya want...these projects are hard enough to get off the ground to begin with. I'm amazed we have MiniMIG and new Turbocards from Jens. Be thankfull for what we have.

That being said I was totally drooling for the G4 phase 5, AmiJoe, etc. I feel your pain. I'm happy with UAE and a 42" lcd for now. (no flicker fixer or $50 or coverter cables required)

[persia]

Feature creep is the grim reaper of the IT world....

Come on guys stop being so negative... you sound like my parents before they got a divorce...

Well whadya want...these projects are hard enough to get off the ground to begin with. I'm amazed we have MiniMIG and new Turbocards from Jens. Be thankfull for what we have.

That being said I was totally drooling for the G4 phase 5, AmiJoe, etc. I feel your pain. I'm happy with UAE and a 42" lcd for now. (no flicker fixer or $50 or coverter cables required)

[Hattig]

Feature creep is the grim reaper of the IT world....

At least using FPGAs these days lets you get something out of the door before the feature creep takes over a project...

[Louis Dias]

Well, it would be useful if there was an Amiga App Store style thing (e.g., to download games from the various Amiga freeware/abandonware game sites; access aminet; etc). If GigE is pennies more than 100mbit then it sounds like there's a purpose to it.

In the end it depends on the cost of the final board. I think there's room for both an FPGAArcade and a Natami (later on, when it's complete) in my life though.

They are for different markets for sure.

The Replay (fpgaarcade) board will have a connector for standard arcade controllers (JAMMA or is it JAMBA) and is not specifically for the Amiga market.  It can be a slightly souped up Amiga for sure but it's performance is below the goals of NATAMI.

Natami is designed to be an Amiga PC.  It will have a PCI slot(s) and a cpu slot, ethernet and USB and 256MB or ram or more.   I can't recall if it will have SATA or PATA IDE.

here is a quote from Thomas the designer:
http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=6¬e=28597&z=Xyqlpy

The boards are not in production right now. But they are close to. Designing the MX board took much longer than I expected. There are only "small" changes to the LX board. But they increased the complexity very much. There are now four memory chips on board instead of two. And I removed one PCI connector to make room for two on-board PCI components (USB and LAN). For that the board has now six layers instead of four.

I'd much rather have ethernet and USB onboard rather than have to waste 2 PCI slots for them.
This is a positive delay.


@Piru
I don't see similarities to the Boxer at all.  The BoXeR looks like a PC board with an fpga to emulate AGA and a connector for a 68k or PPC cpu.  Natami is a re-implimentation of an actual Amiga design with bottlenecks removed and enhancements made where they can be.


In truth I wish all Amiga projects could work together and share assets for even faster delivery of products.  Licensing models do work against this though.

[Darrin]

I thought that this would be possible but the Minimig license renders it unusable by the team.  Yes, I've asked this on the forum.

Why is that?  The Minimig is Open Source isn't it?  Does that prevent the NatAmi team using the code for a retail product?

The reality is that the board went from 4-layer to 6-layer to add onboard add Gbit-ethernet and USB.  Hence, going from LX to MX has taken longer than originally planned.  A PCI slot was removed and 2 more memory chips were also added...

...but I suppose someone looking for actual answers would have gone to the official forum and discovered this for themselves...
[listens for the wolves to cry 'feature creep']

No one wants to buy a computer today that can't get online out of the box...the Natami team included.

The problem is that we keep hearing "NatAmi will have this", "NatAmi will have that" on these forums, but we never see pictures or hard specs.  With regards to the FPGA Arcade/Minimig AGA, we have pictures posted, we see Workbench running, we have production updates and we have SysInfo screen grabs.

I've visited the NatAmi set several times and the only real updates I see are to the site graphics.  Quite honestly, I have no idea what the current specs are, how far along the board is, who is working on it or what the plan forward is.

[zipper]

Who remembers the A-Box and it's famed Caipirinha custom chip?
Who remembers the phase5 BlizzardG4

I'll probably maintain my preorder receipt forever

[Louis Dias]

Why is that?  The Minimig is Open Source isn't it?  Does that prevent the NatAmi team using the code for a retail product?

Natami is closed source.  Using Minimig code would require them to post their changes.  Open source can tie someone's hands when they want to bring unique features to a market.

The problem is that we keep hearing "NatAmi will have this", "NatAmi will have that" on these forums, but we never see pictures or hard specs.  With regards to the FPGA Arcade/Minimig AGA, we have pictures posted, we see Workbench running, we have production updates and we have SysInfo screen grabs.

I've visited the NatAmi set several times and the only real updates I see are to the site graphics.  Quite honestly, I have no idea what the current specs are, how far along the board is, who is working on it or what the plan forward is.

No!  The problem is you don't look for answers.  Post your questions on the actual Natami forum where someone who actually can answer you will.
You also conveniently forget that their is a video of the LX board running OS3.1 in AGA and running A500 games back in april or may.
The MX board is the final board.
Go back and look at when the "Minimig with AGA" thread started and where it's at.
Too many people have selective memory around here it seems.

[Darrin]

No!  The problem is you don't look for answers.  Post your questions on the actual Natami forum where someone who actually can answer you will.
You also conveniently forget that their is a video of the LX board running OS3.1 and running A500 games back in april or may.
The MX board is the final board.
Go back and look at when the "Minimig with AGA" thread started and where it's at.
Too many people have selective memory around here it seems.

I look for answers, but I don't expect to have to dig for them.  If this is a commercial product then they must be using ex-Commodore PR staff.

Too many people don't know what "passage of information" means.

[Louis Dias]

I look for answers, but I don't expect to have to dig for them.  If this is a commercial product then they must be using ex-Commodore PR staff.

Too many people don't know what "passage of information" means.

No.  Too many people think passage of information is a requirement every 5 minutes.
You don't hear about a new iPhone being released until it's already in production.
Natami MX is not in production.  That seems to be all you really want to hear.

[SamuraiCrow]

@Darrin

The reasons the LX board never went to market are as follows:

• The Altera Cyclone III FPGA was too small to hold all of the cores.
• The dual-bus architecture wasn't saturating more than half of the bandwidth of the DDR2 memories.
• The I/O pins could be put to better use with a single memory bus, making the whole thing smaller and cheaper.

The main deal-breaker for the LX board was that the 68050 is a larger core than the LX could hold with all of the rest of the features added to the SuperAGA core.

The MX board design has all of these things corrected and more.  The Cyclone IV chip has nearly twice the capacity of the earlier Cyclone III.