A project I'd like to see from Jens...

[wawrzon]

The Amiga commity seems a lot smaller to me.

judging by the activity on forums one could come to such a conclusion, yes. while the lack of motivation and the ageing process will surely affect all parties, the genuine amiga fraction is likely to sustain this best, since it has least at risky stack but their since twenty years verified values, and therefore is probably least affected by disappointments. im not even talking about the forum crowd. however will be difficult to estimate the target audience nevertheless.

[Ancalimon]

I'd like to see a turbo card for A1200 owners. Around the speed of a 060-50 and with a rtg on board so that we can use 1080p resolutions, +hardware decoders for picture, video and audio formats and 16bit audio. If such a thing was created and was priced between €400 and €600, I'm sure every single active Amiga1200 user would buy it. There can also be a bounty in which people could pay some of the price (cost?) and if the product were to be canceled, the money people gave could be taken back from the pool.

(Oh. Don't forget to add the sata controller which doesn't choke the cpu when reading and writing)

[SamuraiCrow]

This is not the NatAmi MX board.  Thomas made that as stand-alone.   This is an off-the-shelf FPGA dev-board called the Sockit board (based on past discussion with Gunnar) or a derivative and an accelerator harness.  Getting SuperAGA added would require distribution rights from Thomas but it is possible.   There are other cores under development that may surpass SuperAGA.  Since an accelerator has access to the chipset, functions required by a stand-alone unit can wait.

[freqmax]

Motorola 68060 is the last Amiga hardware beast to conquer ..

There is a die shot (1851 x 1757) but translating that to HDL code is another matter.

As for quantity. 1000 is the magic number when there's enough units to order directly from manufacturers.

[Bif]

Would be good to know how big the market really is today.
Producing 100 or 2000 boards would make a difference in the price.

I'm not one to really buy any expansions, but I probably would buy what you are describing. I love the thought of pimping out an A1000 with the modern conveniences. For me the hard drive/CF support and network are most important as floppies make things too unbearable to use these days. The accelerator, memory and RTG should really rev it up and make all sorts of other things practical for daily use that otherwise wouldn't be. Good luck with the project!

[Madshib]

Well, I've been looking for a reasonably priced 040 accel for my 1200 and this maybe why I've been waiting so long

+1 for my 1200
and, if it is as awesome as it is made out to be
+1 for my future 3000 that I've yet to get

[KimmoK]

Its hard to estimate how many people are still around.
Would be good to know how big the market really is today.
Producing 100 or 2000 boards would make a difference in the price.

How about crowd funding?
Kickstarter as an example would be interesting for organizing order of some 2000 boards?

[biggun]

OK lets be very honest, ok?

We do this thing not to make a lot of money. ;-D
We do this because _WE_ want it ourselves.

We work on our CPU Core for about 5 years now.
Frankly, I regard the Motorola 68060 Core as very good core,
but I strongly believe that our Core is better.
And our Core is faster, its even faster than all overclocked 68060.

We do this project because we want to use our Core together with in a nice OS.
I personally regards Amiga OS as much nicer and friendlier than Linux.

I think that our CPU Core has enough power to do quite a lot of interesting stuff.
I believe its strong enough to play games like Wing Commander 4, or Northland or Diablo 2.
And for me also playing 640x480 AVIs is an important goal.

I speak here a lot about "me".
Because I want you to understand what my and my friends motivation is.
We want to surf internet a little bit, to be able to download some ADF or buy something on EBAY,  
And we want a low cost, silent harddrive,
also I want a nice screen resolution when working with my computer.
720p minimum screensize with 16bit colors is what we want.
In this resolution you can play games in nice quality, and have a nice looking Workbench ...
And we want to attach a big LCD TV's without loosing quality over scart.

These are the features that we personally want from our "toy" computers.
And this is why our card is like it it.

There are certainly many wishes other people might have.
But if we start adding the stuff that others like - then this will be a project which will never end.
Frankly, we did put all the stuff and the card which WE need and WE want.
And we added nothing else because we want to start using our cards next month - and not next year.

This is the honest story behind this.
If you like our card then you are welcome to join our boat and sail along. :-D

Lets also be honest what we want to do in the future.
This card is our toy system to continue to develop the CPU core.
We believe that we have by far not reached all that is technically possible.
And we also have our own "work in progress" version of a next Gen AMIGA chipset.
I call it Super-AGA, and the card will also also us to tinker around with it.
Please get me right: This does not mean that we will ship the card with this.
I just tell you what we want ourselves to use the card for next year...

[KimmoK]

OK lets be very honest, ok? .... we want ourselves ....

Be aware, if the crowd likes it, and you (for some reason) deside to keep it (only) to/for yourselves, Amiga-Gaida will get you. ;-)

[vxm]

I have a design question.
If I understand correctly, the new card will go into the cpu socket.
Is there any impact to not use the CPU slot (when it's avaible)?

[biggun]

I have a design question.
If I understand correctly, the new card will go into the cpu socket.
Is there any impact to not use the CPU slot (when it's avaible)?

The card goes into socket in A500/A1000
This means the card is internal for these AMIGAs.
While a card using the A500 slot would be external

For the A1200 the card will be adapted to use the CPU expansion connector.
This means the card is internal here.

For the A4000/A3000 the card would use the CPU slot.
This means the card is internal here.

Does this answer your question?

[ElPolloDiabl]

Low cost and compatibility with Classic PPC 603e PUP/WOS software.

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC5200B
http://www.freescale.com/files/microcontrollers/doc/user_guide/MPC5200UM.pdf

That is nice. It's fast enough for using the internet.

What would be nice is to get all Amiga platforms to remain compatible. 68k is there by default. PowerPC has the 2nd most software.
The only time it isn't an Amiga is when you have to use another OS to set something up.

[vxm]

Does this answer your question?

Partially because I have a A500 and A2000.
This is fully justified for the first.
But the second, as A3000 and A4000, was designed with a CPU slot.
So, I just wonder if the solution chosen for the 2000 is optimal.

[wawrzon]

Partially because I have a A500 and A2000.
This is fully justified for the first.
But the second, as A3000 and A4000, was designed with a CPU slot.
So, I just wonder if the solution chosen for the 2000 is optimal.

from design point of view the best solution is the most universal one, and how close you can integrate a new cpu into the system if not in place of the old one?

[vxm]

"from design point of view the best solution is the most universal one"
I know, I shortened my original question.
"how close you can integrate a new cpu into the system if not in place of the old one?"
So why a CPU slot ?

[Gulliver]

Going back to the original topic:

I would like to see from Jens an A1200 68030 accelerator that had a socket for an optional FPU and that didnt require any mysterious motherboard fix to work, nor custom software to switch it on.

It would also be nice if it could have a real time clock built-in, and not available separately (which now costs more than 10% of the value of the accelerator itself).

21 years ago a company did that (Phase 5), but somehow, today (2014), it seems it cant be done for some odd reason that eludes me.

And hey, I am not even talking about a SCSI interface!

I just dont get it why we get inferior products despite all the technical progress that has been done in these past decades.