Replicated motherboards, any interest?

[Britelite]

moving bigger textures around in FPS's on the Amiga

Can you name one FPS that actually stores the textures in Chip RAM?

[matthey]

What if there was a plug in option for Agnus, has an FPGA to "Replace" the motherboard one (as long as it is SOCKETED), and associated RAM on the add on board to bring CHIP ram up to 8MB ?

Plug it in to an A500, and have it use the extra Ram, and an A500 will have 8MB of ram.. Food for thought.

How about unplugging the 500 keyboard, plug into the Natami motherboard and toss the 500 motherboard. 68000 and ECS suck! N68070 and Super AGA for the win!

[vidarh]

I think this is a good idea for replacing dying, or dead Classic A500, A600 & A1200 motherboards with new FPGA designs that are better than the originals.  Something like the FPGA Arcade Replay Board with or without the proposed 68060 daughter-card, extra memory, Ethernet & USB ports, but in a form factor to better fit into the original cases and also able to use the original keyboards.

Someone already fit the Replay board into an A590 case combined with a harddisk, so it'd surely fit in an A500, A600 or A1200.

Mikej was asked about original keyboards and started looking into what it'd take to get an original keyboard attached to it. IO lines shouldn't be a problem, so no board redesign as there are free lines available on the board - it's likely only a matter of FPGA updates. The only additional thing needed for the Replay really would be a couple of brackets with ports to line up nicely with the backplate.

Personally I'm going to get a Replay board and want to fit it in an A600 or A1200 (don't worry, I'll look around for an already dead one or sell off the motherboard to a worthy home if I have to gut a working one).

[freqmax]

@matthey, Natami hasn't sold any card nor does it fit physically as all external connectors require an PCB that uses the same size and fasteners to work.

@vidarh, No need use up the free I/O pads for keyboard. Just put an microcontroller that talks PS2/USB in one end and "amiga keyboard" in the other.

[Duce]

The idea of jamming these new FPGA boards into the older legacy Miggy cases is very appealing, and likely the better solution in the long run.  Chasing down custom chips isn't terribly difficult if you went the "recreation board" route, but there is still a limited supply of them, even if they won't become scarce anytime soon.

I'm looking very forward to an FPGA solution with Ethernet.  I'm not an Amiga gamer in the least, so the stuff like the minimig never appealed to me at all.  I'd LOVE to have a more modern daily driver FPGA Amiaga with networking onboard to run my BBS off of.

[bloodline]

The obvious idea is to have a single FPGA board with RAM, large enough to hold the full AGA/OCS/ECS/RTG/CPU cores, and have a I/O connector. This could be produced in large numbers and would be quite small.

Then do smaller production runs of a separate "Connector boards" that match up to the various cases, and these "Connector boards" would hook up to the FPGA board's I/O connector! simple.

This would allow users to replace broken motherboards easily.

[orb85750]

Anyone with these resources and capabilities should make new Amiga-compatible systems, not "just" motherboards (or *in addition* to the motherboards).

[matthey]

@matthey, Natami hasn't sold any card nor does it fit physically as all external connectors require an PCB that uses the same size and fasteners to work.

Natami has sold some cards but only to Natami developers . Sure the ports don't match up. It would be possible to get connectors and cables and make cables to run to the ports. Personally, I think it's rather pointless. I'd rather have the expandability and standard power supply of a mini tower. If I was going to stuff the Natami in a small case, I would make a laptop. A fpga decoder/translator/output for LCD laptop screens would be sweet.

[psxphill]

What if there was a plug in option for Agnus, has an FPGA to "Replace" the motherboard one (as long as it is SOCKETED), and associated RAM on the add on board to bring CHIP ram up to 8MB ?

That would be kickass, but you'd have to add a ham texture mapping engine to the blitter to really make it worthwhile.
 
It would be interesting to see if you could write to the denise colour palette fast enough to do something there as well.

[voyager]

I don’t think sourcing the old chips is really a option you can do a small production run maybe.. But if the chips are gone, your left with a new pcb design you spent a lot of hours on doing nothing.

Doing something with power pc cpu’s maybe if you have a design team behind you. It will take many many hours before it will see the light of day. Then you want to do a production run and discovery the board will be priced like the X1000 so only a small group can buy the damm thing. No.

FPGA. There is a wonderful design by yaqube and it’s here NOW. With small modifications this can be  your replacement board. Print it on a larger PCB, add some ports a keyboard interface. It is possible that a second FPGA is needed to have enough IO ports and to replicate the legacy ports. But developing this is doable.

Then again why replicating the serial port, the parallel port, this can be a nice space for a USB ports. I think the PCMCIA port is a different story it’s used by many. But it’s a lot of IO stuff.

Ok.. FPGA it’s not the speed of a power pc I know but they are getting faster every year. Speeding up the custom chipset will give it a powerful boost. Even the minimig1 got a super blitter mode. Yaqube board got RTG. In the end the Amiga will be useful again do some browsing play some music, read your mail, watch a movie.

About the super agnus or replacing custom chips with FPGA’s . I think this can be a new thread, it’s a completely different story but a good one. The thing that gave us the giant leap forwards back in the days is now holding us back. We see that new games for example the port of scumm will use the chunky mode of the indivision ECS. Or the new doom that already uses this. Maybe it is possible to create a super Paula giving us 16 Bit multichannel audio. A super fast Agnus, even a RTG Lisa. But like my humble a600 your board will be taken over by al the add-ons and it will be harder and harder to get things stable. Bad chip connections for the clip-over chips etc. We already see unstable A600 accelerators  in some cases, now think of making clip-on chips on every chip in you A1200.
 
Again A new system board, with RTG a large FPGA with enough room for future expansion is the best way to go.

[amigadave]

I seem to be the only one that wants exact replacement.

I have a ton of hardware and software I want to continue using.
(ie toaster, flyer, etc)

Also, we need new accelerators (060)!!!

I don't think you are the only one, I also have several "Big Box" Classic Amigas that I would like to keep using for a long time.  A natural progression from using FPGA designs to replace existing 68k mobos in A500, A600 & A1200 cases might be to later make FPGA mobos with slots that can accept A3000/A4000 daughter cards w/Zorro slots for those people that still want to use their old Zorro cards.

IIRC, Zorro slots are impossible to find new these days, so the only way to get them would be to use old Amiga hardware to steal them from.

[desiv]

The obvious idea is to have a single FPGA board with RAM, large enough to hold the full AGA/OCS/ECS/RTG/CPU cores, and have a I/O connector.

Exactly.  And it's not just a great idea because I mentioned something similar in another thread...  

The more I think about it, if you could design such a board with different daughterboards for the various systems (1000/500/2000/3000/4000/standard PC case?), not only would it be the same main board for all of them, but it makes future upgrades easier..

With FPGAs, the minimig is maxed and you can't just upgrade the FPGA, you need to design a new board.
Same thing with the FPGA Arcade.  It's just about maxed, so any "major" speed increases will need a new board with a newer FPGA.
(Not counting expensive daughterboards with actual 060 chips on them.. ;-)

Fine, if you have the same basic connector, when a larger FPGA is affordable, a new run of main boards for those who want them...

Next year, I buy the model with AGA and 50Mhz 68020 version and a 1200 daughterboard for my 1200.  
But in a few years, there's a new model, AGA++ with 68060 at 200Mhz, so I upgrade the main board for my 1200.
But I also get a 1000 daughterboard so I can put my older one in the 1000...  etc...

And, like the FPGA Arcade, there's no reason to limit it to the Amiga.

Hmmm.....

That might be worth paying more for....

desiv

[amigadave]

Exactly.  And it's not just a great idea because I mentioned something similar in another thread...  

The more I think about it, if you could design such a board with different daughterboards for the various systems (1000/500/2000/3000/4000/standard PC case?), not only would it be the same main board for all of them, but it makes future upgrades easier..

With FPGAs, the minimig is maxed and you can't just upgrade the FPGA, you need to design a new board.
Same thing with the FPGA Arcade.  It's just about maxed, so any "major" speed increases will need a new board with a newer FPGA.
(Not counting expensive daughterboards with actual 060 chips on them.. ;-)

Fine, if you have the same basic connector, when a larger FPGA is affordable, a new run of main boards for those who want them...

Next year, I buy the model with AGA and 50Mhz 68020 version and a 1200 daughterboard for my 1200.  
But in a few years, there's a new model, AGA++ with 68060 at 200Mhz, so I upgrade the main board for my 1200.
But I also get a 1000 daughterboard so I can put my older one in the 1000...  etc...

And, like the FPGA Arcade, there's no reason to limit it to the Amiga.

Hmmm.....

That might be worth paying more for....

desiv

If anyone has already thought of this idea that Bloodline, desiv, myself and others are in support of and you are working on making it a reality, please let me know via PMail, or email.  I would be interested in working on such a project and even investing what I could afford into making it a reality if I could be reimbursed through sales of the project boards.  Although I disagree with desiv about the FPGA Arcade Replay Board and think it is more capable than he might think.  This would be a great follow up project for MikeJ to look into doing.

[desiv]

Although I disagree with desiv about the FPGA Arcade Replay Board and think it is more capable than he might think..

I must have misstated then..
I think it's very capable, and a great project!!!

It's just that, it will hit a point of no return (as all FPGAs do) and you can't upgrade the FPGA to a faster/larger model, you need a board redesign that uses a newer model...

That's all I was trying to say (badly)..

desiv

[Cosmos Amiga]

Anybody here, please, upload the A1200/A4000D/CD32 gerber files on my email !

(http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=26609)

[SamuraiCrow]

Why not 16 MB RAM?, the 68000 can handle that.

Because the I/O chips have to map into memory somewhere.  The 68000 can handle 16 total megs of addressing maximum.  If you have 8 megs Fast RAM, 2 megs ChipRAM, that leaves a grand total of 6 megs of ROM and chipset control registers.