FPGA Replay Board

[psxphill]

I don't want to argue about this terminology to be honest, but a hardware implementation in my mind is very different from a software emulation. And in terms of potential user confusion, it's best to keep away from the "emulator" word. "Re-implementation" is a really good term IMO, it says exactly what it is.

That argument reminds me of the "there is no such thing as fish" argument.
 
http://swimmingunderwaterblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/there-is-no-such-thing-as-fish.html

[AmigaClassicRule]

That argument reminds me of the "there is no such thing as fish" argument.
 
http://swimmingunderwaterblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/there-is-no-such-thing-as-fish.html

Why are you so persistent to ruin it for us. We want implementation not emulation. I will not pay money for emulator in a hardware, please don't ruin FPGA for me! I want a reimplemented upgraded new technology to the old technology of the Amiga classic. FPGA Replay is doing that for me so don't enforce "emulation" into this. Let me enjoy it. Please.

[billt]

Why are you so persistent to ruin it for us. We want implementation not emulation. I will not pay money for emulator in a hardware, please don't ruin FPGA for me! I want a reimplemented upgraded new technology to the old technology of the Amiga classic. FPGA Replay is doing that for me so don't enforce "emulation" into this. Let me enjoy it. Please.

One thing to consider, software "emulation" requires parsing, understanding, translating, and execution of the results of that translation. This FPGA stuff is a circuit. The Verilog or VHDL is a circuit design, and then the FPGA IS that circuit. There is no translation  involved of the Amiga application or operating system you are running.

Some FPGA experts wish the FPGA inventors had used the term "configurable" rather than "programmable" for an FCGA instead of an FPGA, but that's all completed history.

Now, I don't understand why it's so important to decide to buy somethign or not based on a single word applies or not. Silly. So is the endurance of argumentation over such a trivial and unimportant word. The people who are adamant will not have their minds changed, let them believe they are right when you know better. (That goes for all of you, on both sides of the fence) Let's get back to productive, interesting discussions that have a point to them.

[mongo]

+1

Biggest reason why I will never own Minimig because it is completely burned in my brain and will not change is nothing more than UAE running on ARM. However, FPGA is completely custom based, real chipset, in my opinion the new and latest Amiga upgrade had Commodore continued in the line of 68k Amiga. Is why I did preorder for FPGA and did not spend a dime buying Minimig even if it is out already for sale.

If I am going to be running "emulator" in a hardware and pay for it, might as will use WinUAE and it is for free and no need for additional keyboard/mouse/monitor/space. But since FPGA is "Re-implementation" I will buy it

Uh...

Are you serious?

[yakumo9275]

+1

Biggest reason why I will never own Minimig because it is completely burned in my brain and will not change is nothing more than UAE running on ARM. However, FPGA is completely custom based, real chipset, in my opinion the new and latest Amiga upgrade had Commodore continued in the line of 68k Amiga. Is why I did preorder for FPGA and did not spend a dime buying Minimig even if it is out already for sale.

If I am going to be running "emulator" in a hardware and pay for it, might as will use WinUAE and it is for free and no need for additional keyboard/mouse/monitor/space. But since FPGA is "Re-implementation" I will buy it

lol WUT? minimig is fpga chipset with REAL 68k cpu.

[AmigaClassicRule]

Uh...

Are you serious?

Beyond serious. More serious than a heart attack even.

lol WUT? minimig is fpga chipset with REAL 68k cpu.

It was already sealed in my head ever since the mention of "emulation" of A500 by minimig that I am more than convinced the whole minimig is nothing more than hardware emulator of an A500 instead of software; more worse, I am convinced it is a software emulator run in a hardware. To that end I would rather use WinUAE since it is a configurable emulator with lots of choices and even emulate 8 MB chip RAM and support AGA and RTG emulation and when I am done I quit back to Windows. For that reason I not only not desire obtaining minimig but really turns me off all together. I would rather have a real A500 (if I am going through that direction) than an emulated A500 in minimig with emulation of floppy disk, HD and don't even get the real feel of a real A500 with the sexy Commodore case, I don't even get the pleasure of power LED turn off/on due mono/steroe or crashing like real Amiga 500.

[Duce]

The "pleasure" of it crashing like a real A500?  Dancing LED lights and clicky floppy drives?  Really?  No.  Really??

I'd recommend you do your homework on the Minimig if you think it's simply a commodity solution running UAE.  It's not.  Think of it as the little brother of the FPGA Arcade solution if you like - there's not a heck of a lot different about the two in approaches.

I'm overjoyed at the thought of having an FPGA Arcade with '060 and daughterboard to use as my main, stable legacy Amiga replacement.  No more cobbled together A1200 with doo-dads sticking out the sides, no flaky, slow PCMCIA ethernet cards - onboard ethernet, USB.  Just great stuff.  That being said, I don't do any Amiga gaming in the least - which is why the Minimig itself held zero appeal to me.

Crapped out floppy drives, noisy, hot, hideously slow SCSI hard disks aren't something I'll miss in the least.

[JimDrew]

Thanks, Mike.  I will check out the site and email you.

[JimDrew]

By the way, any device that is not the original hardware and is able to run original software, is an emulator.... period.  No matter if you like it or not.  

FPGA based devices are emulators by definition (English).  In the case of the Amiga, if you made a tiny double sided circuit board with the original chipset, it would not be an emulator.  But emulating, recreating (or whatever you might try to call it) that chipset makes it an emulation of the original.  There is simply no arguing with the exact definition of "emulator".

[ChaosLord]

By the way, any device that is not the original hardware and is able to run original software, is an emulator.... period.  No matter if you like it or not.  

FPGA based devices are emulators by definition (English).  In the case of the Amiga, if you made a tiny double sided circuit board with the original chipset, it would not be an emulator.  But emulating, recreating (or whatever you might try to call it) that chipset makes it an emulation of the original.  There is simply no arguing with the exact definition of "emulator".

Your point is 100% completely vaild.  AGA is an ECS emulator.

The thing is, for regular ppl on the street, your average Joe Blow thinks of "Emulator = laggy, with wild speed fluctuations like they have experienced over and over and over and over again in WinUAE and other software-based emulators"

An FCGA based "emulation" should never ever ever ever lag.  It may run slow or fast but at least it should not lag.

I think they should consider renaming FPGAreplay to FCGAreplay/arcade.

@AmigaClassicRule
You should be aware that recreating actual hardware circuits like Replay/Natami are doing is a totally and completely different thing than running a slow program under windoze.

[ChaosLord]

I'm overjoyed at the thought of having an FPGA Arcade with '060 and daughterboard

Me too.

 to use as my main, stable legacy Amiga replacement.

I was originally planning the same thing... but then I realized this may not work out because...

  No more cobbled together A1200 with doo-dads sticking out the sides, no flaky, slow PCMCIA ethernet cards - onboard ethernet, USB.

A cobbled together A1200 gets to use 128MB (possibly 256MB) Radeon gfx cards which there is no way to do with the Replay.

noisy, hot, hideously slow SCSI hard disks aren't something I'll miss in the least.

If you don't like your SCSI hard drive you are allowed to buy a new quiet, cool, fast SCSI hard disk for your old Amiga.  Or you could just get a cheap silent slow SD card like a lot of ppl do.  Or you could use a new slow IDE drive.

Your SCSI controller is likely faster and smoother than whatever Replay has to offer. (Which I cannot remember right now.)

Complaining about SCSI is a really silly thing to do.

[Duce]

In a world of cheap, great performing, reliable SATA - SCSI *is* crap, IMHO.
Most people would kill for native SATA on their Amigas.

I just ordered 2 2 TB SATA drives.  $99 each.
Refurb 73 GB SCSI drive is $150.

So yeah, I do prefer SATA where it is an option.

As for drives on the FPGA, my intentions with it are to simply network it to my NAS box via SAMBA/SMBFS and use the onboard card for the OS.  I don't need RTG myself, but I do see your point on that one.

[ChaosLord]

In a world of cheap, great performing, reliable SATA - SCSI *is* crap, IMHO.
Most people would kill for native SATA on their Amigas.

I just ordered 2 2 TB SATA drives.  $99 each.
Refurb 73 GB SCSI drive is $150.

So yeah, I do prefer SATA where it is an option.

Does Replay have a SATA controller that I never heard about???

I have stacks of 2TB and 1.5TB drives too.

As for drives on the FPGA, my intentions with it are to simply network it to my NAS box via SAMBA/SMBFS and use the onboard card for the OS.

I have been doing that since 1999 with my "cobbled together" A1200.
The purpose of my $99.00 bgcpc is to connect cheap drives to it which are then networked to my A1200 via Ethernet.  But my A1200T came with a 10mb/second Ethernet card which surely is a lot slower than my SCSI.
If I popped a 100mb/sec Ethernet card in there then it would be an interesting race to see which was faster, SCSI or Ethernet100.

 I don't need RTG myself, but I do see your point on that one.

I only use it for certain specific things.  For those certain specific things, RTG is awesome.

[Duce]

FPGA Arcade doesn't have onboard SATA, no.  Which is why I was going to go the ethernet route to my NAS box for file storage, but USB to SATA adapters (or just a simple USB based external HD) would always be an option for the thing I guess.

Used the adapters in the past with pretty good luck.

[JimDrew]

The thing is, for regular ppl on the street, your average Joe Blow thinks of "Emulator = laggy, with wild speed fluctuations like they have experienced over and over and over and over again in WinUAE and other software-based emulators"

Wow, maybe using 486 machines this might be the case, but WinUAE runs faster (and consistantly so) on modern PCs than the original A4000 hardware.  Likewise, my emulations on modern PC hardware run circles around the original Mac/Apple II/Atari computers they are emulating.

So, regular people on the street, at least in the U.S., think of emulators as often faster and perhaps less compatible than the original hardware.  This is one big advantage of a FPGA based emulation platform, and the very reason why I am interested in this setup.  FPGA setups allow you to easily make cycle exact chipset emulation, something that is much more difficult to do with software emulation.  So, this FPGA hardware with 060 should be able to emulate an 060 Amiga setup exactly.  Like mentioned previously by another forum user, I would like to get rid of all of my original Amiga development systems (A1000 through A4000) and have a single box capable of emulating them all.

[freqmax]

Biggest reason why I will never own Minimig because it is completely burned in my brain and will not change is nothing more than UAE running on ARM. However, FPGA is completely custom based, real chipset, in my opinion the new and latest Amiga upgrade had Commodore continued in the line of 68k Amiga. Is why I did preorder for FPGA and did not spend a dime buying Minimig even if it is out already for sale.

Minimig is a re-implemention in FPGA just as MikeJ's FPGA Replay. The difference is that the CPU is in ASIC and RAM is less etc.

A cobbled together A1200 gets to use 128MB (possibly 256MB) Radeon gfx cards which there is no way to do with the Replay.

The FPGA can interface directly to PCI 33/32 and other interfaces can be handled by added suitable transceiver chip or upgrading FPGA with onboard ones (Rocketport etc).

If you don't like your SCSI hard drive you are allowed to buy a new quiet, cool, fast SCSI hard disk for your old Amiga.  Or you could just get a cheap silent slow SD card like a lot of ppl do.  Or you could use a new slow IDE drive.

Your SCSI controller is likely faster and smoother than whatever Replay has to offer. (Which I cannot remember right now.)

Complaining about SCSI is a really silly thing to do.

The present drives are almost all either horrible expensive SAS drives which will not interface with Amiga or S-ATA ones that will neither. So you will still need to make do with the SCSI-1 SE narrow stuff that were common with Amiga. Present flashmemory (SD) will beat ordinary Amiga SCSI hardware on Mbyte/s basis.

The reason I bought SCSI is because it has a sound electrical interface, clean hardware API with well defined orthogonal commands, reliable etc. Something P-ATA never managed. Infact S-ATA drives are still second rate when it comes to build quality that's why SAS drives are more expensive. BUT with RAID or ZFS this issue is negated..