FPGA Replay Board

[mikej]

Hi Mike,

are these the FPGA Arcade boards in China ready to ship or do I have you confused with someone else?  


(Sorry, I couldn't resist)

One day ....

[ChaosLord]

Could you give some concrete examples of what you would realistically want to do on a 68k Amiga that requires more than 128 Mb RAM?

Gfx. Games.

[JimS]

Absolutely perfect description, mind it I use it?

Be my guest.... I probably borrowed it from somewhere myself.

[freqmax]

As I understand it there's 32 MB on the baseboard and those 4x SDRAM (128 MB) are on the future add-on 68060/ethernet etc.. expansion board. In that case it's still in development and replacing them with better options for DRAM would be easy. In particular different type of DRAM-stick could pack more memory in the same space. Provided the I/O interface isn't a pain to interface.

A caveat with DRAM in general is to watch out for obsolence. That can make sourcing the components a pain.

In case of crisis, just spin a daughterboard full of DRAM sockets. And have 20 GB ram if you need..

Something that could be useful is an expansion connector on the backside of the board such that one can stack several of them ontop of each other just like PC/104:

[guest7146]

The FPGA Replay Board gets a mention on the Amp Hour Radio Show!

The Amp Hour is an electronics engineering radio show that I listen to.  They don't usually discuss this sort of thing on there, it's more electronics design biased than anything else, but this week their conversation went off on a tangent and Jeff Keyzer (aka mightyohm.com) mentioned that he always used an Amiga when he was younger as opposed to a PC.  So they start talking about that, and then Jeff moves on to the FPGA Replay board and discusses it.

Check it out here:

http://www.theamphour.com/2011/06/14/theamphour47-the-mothership-manifesto/

The Amiga/FPGA Replay Board discussion comes in at 8 minutes for those that want to skip right to it.

AH

[mikej]

I've just stuck all the connectors on the board, and I'm happy to say the widest DVI cable I have fits nicely now between the audio and SD card (just). Happy days.
/MikeJ

[digiflip]

so new batch all ready begun to be built wow

[Duce]

Just curious, and apologies if it's already been stated:

How long after the mainboard release until the daughtercard is due?  I need ethernet available.

[digiflip]

cant find on thread its in here somewhere but this is the quote " 06-06-2011, 03:01 PM
Replies: 785
 FPGA Replay Board
Views: 58,529
Posted By yaqube
  Re: FPGA Replay Board

There is no chance to have them available at the same time. Maybe they will be ready for purchase by the end of the year."

[Linde]

Gfx. Games.

You'll have to look hard for a game with even half those requirements without resorting to boring PC ports. I'm sure that there's a huge market who wants play sub-par ports of old PC games and use OWB in slow motion on these boards...

What kind of graphic work would you do? Raytracing spheres over checkerboards in 5000 x 5000 AGA? Spinning chrome logotype animations over grid pattern in 1080p?

Please be more specific, and as I said, more realistic! 68k in the high end memory range is a niche market, and I frankly don't see why anyone would go that route just to be able to do in 1/100th of the quality and speed what any sane person would do with a modern computer. I don't think that a 68k Amiga has anything to catch up to when it comes to modern computers... they're different fruit!

[Belial6]

On the one hand, you have to keep in mind that Amiga 68k isn't the only machine that the FPGAArcade can be.

On the other hand, the question should really be, what task would need 128M, where 512M wouldn't be too little.

[freqmax]

Implementing some 3D and texture acceleration is possible with the FPGA. Infact the CPU doesn't need much involvment at all perhaps.

Anyone has an estimation on the diffeculty level?, and what other functionality could be needed?

Any CPU specificly targeted towards FPGAs should emply parallism and pipelining as much as possible.

[digiflip]

just looked at Mike J's new pics on his fpga arcade website. The pcbs looking good.

[digiflip]

does anyone know if fpga arcade could fit in a pico itx case?

well found travla TE-D288 case dimensions 178 mm x 55.2 mm x 162.5 mm, 7" x 2.1" x 6.4" hope it fits in I might have to move the power supply (ie reposition) for it to fit in.

fpga arcade is i think by what can see on pdf 17cm by 8 cm in inches is 6.69 inches by 3.149 inches.

http://www.fpgaarcade.com/common/fpgaarcade_replay_b01_dimensions.pdf

how deep is fpga arcade with daughter board?

[kedawa]

The more RAM the better, I say.  It would be useful for caching data for multimedia work, or making a big RAM Disk to speed up the system as a whole.
Once it's there, someone will find a way of making it useful.

[Belial6]

Sure, that is why there is so much now.  At some point you have to say, this is enough for this model.  It would be great if we could have 128 petabyte, but 32 on the basic board and 128 with the daughter card is fine.  Delaying the boards to squeeze in a little more that still won't be "enough" would have been a mistake.