Excitement about NatAmi

[orb85750]

Sure I read somewhere that it would probably cost about the same as a SAM

Where was that stated, and by whom?

[orb85750]

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.

Agreed.

[Darrin]

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.

Whereas "every 6 months" is acceptable?  You are aware that it is now November so "a video in April" is somewhat old news?

[Piru]

How much effort is adding a PCI USB controller to a board when you've already designed the PCI bus interface? The same goes for ethernet.

Lets see: Total relayout, adding two layers to the board. Quite an effort if you ask me.

And Natami without USB would be a strange beast given that it's meant to be a more up to date classic Amiga, and USB stacks exist for the Amiga already, and most peripherals are USB connected?

Surely it would make more sense to use a PCI USB card.

And bugs? It's an FPGA

Not everything is FPGA on these boards. It's more than easy to add bugs to the board that are not fixable via FPGA patches.

[Darrin]

@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.

See, that's the sort of interesting stuff I like to read about.  The AROS Team manage an update thread at least twice a day (or does it just seem that way).  There's so many people interested in the NatAmi that you would think there would be regular updates as goals were met or features agreed upon.

[Franko]

Seems like I didn't miss the "holy wars" after all, some points of view expressed on this site are very strange indeed, I could jump in here and start dissing the MiniMig but where's the point in that just cos it's not my personal choice, so why do you diss  the Natami...

Dunno what age half of you are but you obviously weren't around when the Amiga was at it's peak and folk held user groups where you met up with real Amiga users, we didn't diss each other because one person liked one bit of Amiga hardware and the others didn't...

Seem's to me like there's a hell of a lot of Windoze and PC users here who'd be better buggering off back to their PC's and let real Amiga enthusiasts enjoy themselves in peace...

[Darrin]

Not much effort, but the designer said he removed 1 PCI and added USB/Ethernet option onboard.

I believe Piru's point is that instead of f'ing about with the mobo and delaying the project, stick with what you have and use a cheap USB PCI card in order to get the hardware out of the door and into the hands of the consumer.  USB on the motherboard could wait until the "NatAmi-II".

[Darrin]

Seems like I didn't miss the "holy wars" after all, some points of view expressed on this site are very strange indeed, I could jump in here and start dissing the MiniMig but where's the point in that just cos it's not my personal choice, so why do you diss  the Natami...

Dunno what age half of you are but you obviously weren't around when the Amiga was at it's peak and folk held user groups where you met up with real Amiga users, we didn't diss each other because one person liked one bit of Amiga hardware and the others didn't...

Seem's to me like there's a hell of a lot of Windoze and PC users here who'd be better buggering off back to their PC's and let real Amiga enthusiasts enjoy themselves in peace...

Well back then we had plenty of Atari ST owners to dis.

[Franko]

Well back then we had plenty of Atari ST owners to dis.

We only had one in these parts and he spent most of his time at our group meetings, but we never dissed him, reckon we just felt sorry for the poor little chap...

[jj]

Exactly.
 
@ Franko
 
I think you will find that most people on this site are more than old enough to not only remeber the Amigas Hay day, but  to have been using the machines at this time.

[Darrin]

We only had one in these parts and he spent most of his time at our group meetings, but we never dissed him, reckon we just felt sorry for the poor little chap...

Every village has one.  

[orb85750]

Exactly.
 
@ Franko
 
I think you will find that most people on this site are more than old enough to not only remeber the Amigas Hay day, but  to have been using the machines at this time.

You're probably right, but Franko makes a good point.  This place seems to be closer to a Fight Club than a users group half the time.

[Franko]

My brother in law in the states was one of those who constantly nipped my head about how you can't live life today without the internet and it was time to give up my Amiga's. Well I've tried the first part (ie:the net) and it's nothing more than I had always imagined it to be. You don't need to be on the net to enjoy using a computer...

As for the second part of his advice, no chance. I even told him about this site (he's not an Amiga user) and he's looked in on here on a number of occasions, the one thing I can't argue with him about is when he commented that from what he read here was "you all seem to spend more time arguing with each other that mines is better than yours" and  "if that's what you Amiga users are like then I'll stick to my PCs anyday".

If that's how someone on the outside views us what chance do we have...

[Louis Dias]

I don't see much feature creep dragging his project.

My point is even when there isn't much feature creep, it's still taken over 2 years to produce a Replay(fpgaarcade) board that is still not for sale.

Especially when your goal posts keep moving constantly.

the only things moving is what's in the fpga but that's ok because that can be changed anytime, I just quoted the developer of the board stating they are close to production...

Lack of resources. For instance USB support adds insane amount of extra work. Why? Just because you don't want to use PS/2 like the other projects?

because the other projects are indeed not trying to be as versatile....
Again, I quoted the developer stating that the work is already done...

What makes more sense:
-ethernet and USB onboard supported from day 1 with one less PCI slot
or
- now you have to buy an ethernet card and a USB card consuming 2 slots ... oh and by the way which model did you buy because I don't think we support that chipset ... perhaps you should start a bounty for that card on NATAMI

Perhaps you are a masochist and prefer the 2nd option, but I'll take the 1st - thanks! ;-)

[Piru]

the only things moving is what's in the fpga

So what was this change where USB and ethernet was added on the board?

Perhaps you are a masochist and prefer the 2nd option, but I'll take the 1st - thanks! ;-)

Ah, so who's writing the driver for this USB chip? And ethernet SANA2 driver? Or are these yet another items that will happily get ignored on the software side of the project?

[Louis Dias]

So what was this change where USB and ethernet was added on the board?

The LX board was made not to be sold but to prove that the MX board could be built.  In that time it was decided having ethernet and USB on the production board would be a big positive.  Why is this so hard to comprehend?

Ah, so who's writing the driver for this USB chip? And ethernet SANA2 driver? Or are these yet another items that will happily get ignored on the software side of the project?

I am not on the team, perhaps you should direct your questions to a team member on the project's forum instead of speculating none shall exist - if you are indeed truley curious.  The plan is to release a fully functional PC.  To think less is to spread FUD.

So let's be clear, just because the board is developed and produced doesn't mean it will be for sale until a working Amiga OS(and/or AROS 68k) installation is running on it.  It also helps to have hardware in hand when writing drivers, no?