Scanning the original chips

[Digiman]

@Digiman

I think the point is, if you were to make an "Amiga Classic" compatible machine now, due to the complexity of the Amiga (when compared with machines of a similar age), to fully take advantage of technical advances and keep costs down... You would go the MiniMIG/Replay route rather than try and clone the original machine "chip for chip" (so to speak).

I agree, and chip reproduction is financially  only worth it for spares/repairs industry like the company in USA reproducing DeLoreans. They could build a new one from scratch but financially that's a dead end for same reasons.

I was interested in 2 things for comparison ie min technically possible cost for Minimig vs minimum possible cost for a 100% compatible non FPGA method. I know how much an x86 C-USA style x86 emulation based Amiga 600/1200 would cost.....very cheap.

[Hattig]

What I meant was how much a single A600 (or A1200) compatible drop-in compatible motherboard with Agnus/Denise/Paula would each cost to manufacture today from scratch inc tooling up for mass production and all R&D. Assume you commit to producing one million units and exclude CPU costs. Go to China, give them the specs for everything and add R&D cost to invoice they charge for producing a million units. £100? £200? less?

It's far from easy to do, the first Amiga Technologies A1200 motherboard that rolled off the production line run at the factory in France was defective in the mid 90s!

I expect an entire A1200 could be implemented in a single ASIC on a cheap, but still reasonably modern process (e.g., 180nm). You could probably add on digital video and audio outputs, SATA, USB, etc as well whilst you are at it (so implement a typical expanded A1200 of 2011).

But with mask costs in the hundreds of thousands, you would truly want to be making tens to hundreds of thousands of the chips to make it worthwhile. But after that you would just need a sneaky "amiga in a joystick" product that accidentally left exposed pads on the PCB for all expansions, and you could get Amigas into many many homes again.

[huronking]

This is probably a dumb question- but if one had the capital to reverse-engineer, wouldnt it be much cheaper to legitimately buy the original engineering data for an abandoned and obsolete technology?

I don't follow very much anymore, so forgive me if it seems I should know the answer.

(I mean for the MOS ICs, not the 68k, which is obviously still valuable)

[danwood]

This is probably a dumb question- but if one had the capital to reverse-engineer, wouldnt it be much cheaper to legitimately buy the original engineering data for an abandoned and obsolete technology?

I don't follow very much anymore, so forgive me if it seems I should know the answer.

(I mean for the MOS ICs, not the 68k, which is obviously still valuable)

I'm sure I've read several times the original chipset designs have been long-lost.  Even Commodore had to reverse engineer them to make ECS/AGA if rumours are to be believed.

[bloodline]

I expect an entire A1200 could be implemented in a single ASIC on a cheap, but still reasonably modern process (e.g., 180nm). You could probably add on digital video and audio outputs, SATA, USB, etc as well whilst you are at it (so implement a typical expanded A1200 of 2011).

But with mask costs in the hundreds of thousands, you would truly want to be making tens to hundreds of thousands of the chips to make it worthwhile. But after that you would just need a sneaky "amiga in a joystick" product that accidentally left exposed pads on the PCB for all expansions, and you could get Amigas into many many homes again.

And there is the issue of software... The floppy disk isn't a sensible distribution medium any more... And the whole thing just isn't practical

[minator]

This is probably a dumb question- but if one had the capital to reverse-engineer, wouldnt it be much cheaper to legitimately buy the original engineering data for an abandoned and obsolete technology?

Chips were designed in a completely different way back then so even if you could find them they'd be completely useless.