natami

[commodorejohn]

Who said anything about efficiency?

I guess I had inferred that from your statement that Natami is a "waste of time" because it seemed like the obvious course of argument for why something that's a hobby project to scratch the itch of a handful of individuals in a hobbyist community is totally stupid and unjustified in existing, but if I was mistaken, please feel free to enlighten me on what your actual reasoning was.

[Kronos]

Offcourse they are just emulators, as they only mimik (emulate) the chips behaviour as seen from the outside. They might get closer to the orginal then UAE, but thats only due to the efford involved not to the method used.

A real reimplementation would be opening the chips and transfering them to the FPGA gate by gate.

A Minimig might have more emotinal value for you, but the underlying principle is still the same as with UAE.

[Lurch]

If this could drop straight into an A500 case and use the keyboard/mouse/joysticks I'm sold. :-)

[vidarh]

Offcourse they are just emulators, as they only mimik (emulate) the chips behaviour as seen from the outside.

By that argument every modern PC is an emulator. Pretty much nothing in a modern PC uses the same implementation method as the original version of the chips that first defined the "outside behaviour".

Defining emulator that way makes the term absolutely pointless.

[jj]

not really modern x86 chips do emulate old behaviours

[Fats]

Natami is a monumental waste of time.

But wasting time can be so joyful...

greets,
Staf.

[Lord Aga]

If this could drop straight into an A500 case and use the keyboard/mouse/joysticks I'm sold. :-)

It can (could, should, will, might?). It has an A500 keyboard connector on board.

[AmigaClassicRule]

No one told me Natami is an emulator. I thought it was real. Good thing I have an A1200 then. Paying a fortune for an emulator my seem a put off for me.

[desiv]

No one told me Natami is an emulator.

Of course it's an emulator.  It doesn't have an Agnus or Paula or Denise...
It uses an FPGA (The P is a clue..).

I thought it was real..

It is real.. They have videos you can see on youtube.  :-)

It's not a "real Amiga", but nothing since the last 1200 rolled off the line (or was a CD32 the last Amiga? Anyway, you get what I mean..) has been.

It's emulated in hardware.  Of course, LOTS of stuff is emulated nowadays.
The line is very blurry...
Lots of REAL chips have parts that emulate other things by design...

Now, you could say the Natami is more "real" than the FPGA Arcade, because it has more new features that the original Amiga never had.

Then again, the FPGA Arcade lets you have more than 2M CHIP, which the REAL Amigas didn't do, so that's not an "emulated" feature, but a new one.

The fact is, emulation isn't what it used to be...

We need a "Turing Test" for these emulators.
If it can do X (whatever X is) and people can't tell the difference, then it's real, because it's no longer distinguishable from real...

desiv

[SamuraiCrow]

Re:The NatAmi team

I was reluctant to join the team because I knew I couldn't afford to buy a prototype NatAmi with the 68060 board included.  Now just as I've gotten a source of income and can buy one, Thomas has gone underground.  I don't blame him at all for doing so.  Gunnar was really hard on Thomas for not accepting help with the chipset design and not doing so in VHDL instead of AHDL.

What resulted in the "too many chiefs, not enough indians" situation was that there were mostly software guys on the team.  When it came time to implement the hardware, Thomas wanted to do the chipset himself as the icing on the cake.  This is what lead to the current situation.  An Amiga without an OCS compatible chipset is no Amiga at all, IMHO.  There are still missing features on the NatAmi chipset cores to this day.

While I have a 2-year degree in electronic engineering technology, it's not enough to be able to figure out all of the intricacies of a hardware descriptor language.  I had hoped to write drivers for the chipset but started running into insufficiencies of the AmigaOS Graphics.library and not much of a solution in AROS 68k.

While it has been observed that a FPGA is an emulator, it is not a software emulator.  It is much more massively parallel than a multicore CPU and can run things much more efficiently.  More importantly, it is a step toward a baked chip and even an ASIC if the market will bear the design costs.  What the market wouldn't bear, I'm convinced, is both the NatAmi and FPGAArcade boards at the same time.

[desiv]

What the market wouldn't bear, I'm convinced, is both the NatAmi and FPGAArcade boards at the same time.

Now that I don't agree with.
The FPGA Arcade is a different market than the Natami.

I really liked what the Natami team was working on.  I think it was very interesting, but based on the price and the fact that I am really more retro, I knew I was never really in the "target audience."

It's like the X1000 or SAM stuff to me..  Looks great, but not something I would be interested in..

Now, the FPGA Arcade is very tempting to me.  It doesn't have all the bells/whistles, but it is MUCH more in the price range.
I think FPGA Arcade competes more with actual Amiga hardware.
Would you want a decked out 1200, or an FPGA Arcade?

There will be some overlap in the middle, but it's like saying a Kia Rio is stealing market share from a Ford Mustang, because some people won't pay more for the Mustang.

As I see it, feature and cost wise, the two products are VERY different with VERY different markets.  (With overlap in the middle, and a lot of the overlap people would probably buy both..)

desiv

[JimS]

Of course it's an emulator.  It doesn't have an Agnus or Paula or Denise...
It uses an FPGA (The P is a clue..).

It's emulated in hardware.  Of course, LOTS of stuff is emulated nowadays.
The line is very blurry...
Lots of REAL chips have parts that emulate other things by design...



We need a "Turing Test" for these emulators.

desiv

Oh Mighty Zarquon! We're not going to start this "what's the difference between emulation and reimplementation" flame war again, are we? ;-)

[desiv]

Oh Mighty Zarquon! We're not going to start this "what's the difference between emulation and reimplementation" flame war again, are we? ;-)

Technology changes rapidly.
Word definitions don't...
Semantics can't keep up..

And if you can't discern the difference, is there really one?
:-)

desiv

[JimS]

Re:The NatAmi team
While it has been observed that a FPGA is an emulator, it is not a software emulator.  It is much more massively parallel than a multicore CPU and can run things much more efficiently.  More importantly, it is a step toward a baked chip and even an ASIC if the market will bear the design costs.  What the market wouldn't bear, I'm convinced, is both the NatAmi and FPGAArcade boards at the same time.

If I had the cash, I might have got both. But I think you're right. The folk here it seems see the FPGAArcade as the "AGA minimig", but it's more than that, with cores for many classic machines on the way. So it has a market much wider than the NatAmi. I'm sure down the road, many of those advanced chipset features of the NatAmi could be implemented in the minimig core for the Replay.

[desiv]

I'm sure down the road, many of those advanced chipset features of the NatAmi could be implemented in the minimig core for the Replay.

It was my understanding (could be wrong) that the FPGA on the FPGA Arcade wasn't as big as the one on the Natami.
I didn't think there would be enough gates to fit what Natami was trying to do???

desiv

[takemehomegrandma]

Amiga is dead, Long Live Amiga!