A new open source 'Zorro' Graphics Card?

[CodePoet]

Just spotted this card on Hack-A-Day today, which claims to be an open source Zorro II/III card for A2000/3000/4000: http://hackaday.com/2016/12/10/amiga-zorro-hdmi-graphics-card-hits-the-market/

Here's a link to the authors site (apparently sold out already): http://shop.mntmn.com/product/mnt-va2000-amiga-graphics-card-zorro-ii-iii

I've not heard of this project before. Apparently the card is RTG compatible and fully upgradable/hackable by the user.

...Some of the comments are fantastic:

Amiga has become a sysinfo loader a long time ago. All those addons are used only to satisfy memberies, to load sysinfo and bask in the glory of red bar being longer than blue bars

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Information about that card pops up periodically on the various Amiga Facebook pages and Google+. Seems like a nice card. I meant to share something a few weeks ago but life got in the way.

Sadly a lot of decent "homebrew" Amiga hardware doesn't get shared on this forum, and without support of any major manufacturer or distributor, often languishes in relative obscurity.

[Jeff]

http://shop.mntmn.com/product/mnt-va2000-amiga-graphics-card-zorro-ii-iii-batch-2-preorder

[apsturk]

Thank you for posting I have read everything including the information at GitHub info. This is a very cool project indeed. I am going to have my guys look in to this as well. I seems that anyone can build a card themselves.

[Kernel]

Perhaps he can do a USB card next and make an entire like of cards

[LoadWB]

This is cool:

   a slot for MicroSD cards that can be mounted in AmigaOS.

Would be kick-@$$ is that is bootable.

From the HaD article:

   it’s fair to say this development won’t revive the Amiga platform in the way that the Raspberry Pi has for RiscOS.

No, but it's fair to say the Vampire has had a massive effect (at least in pre-order stage, yeah?)

ALTHOUGH, I do have to ask why are we still lingering in IDE when we could linger in SATA.

[vince_6]

I would love to see a display video of it.

[LuigiThirty]

Looks like a much better deal than digging up a Picasso96 card from Amibay. I'd also love to see a video of it in operation.

[CodePoet]

I'm actually very surprised that they haven't posted a video of it in action - Dropped them an email, hopefully they come through with something.

[CodePoet]

Information about that card pops up periodically on the various Amiga Facebook pages and Google+. Seems like a nice card. I meant to share something a few weeks ago but life got in the way.

Sadly a lot of decent "homebrew" Amiga hardware doesn't get shared on this forum, and without support of any major manufacturer or distributor, often languishes in relative obscurity.

I hear you on both counts man, life has been kicking everyone in the dick this year. I hope for the creators sake that the card takes off. Always good to see new hardware, even better to see Open hardware.

[Iggy]

There is a new batch of these due out next year and pre-orders are being taken now.
This is the RTG card I intend to install in my A2000, whether I get a Vampire not not.
And I may just stick with a conventional cpu for the A2000.
Also, in comparison with the Vampire2, this is a cheaper upgrade.

[LoadWB]

My biggest problem with video cards is the lack of native video pass-through.  It is so much easier to have an all-in-one solution to reduce the number of devices need to work with my systems, or special monitors or switches, etc.  My PIV and Retina both have FF/SD pass-through, which is great.  Even if I had to buy an Indivision to FF/SD the native signal then pass that through an RTG card.

[CodePoet]

My biggest problem with video cards is the lack of native video pass-through.  It is so much easier to have an all-in-one solution to reduce the number of devices need to work with my systems, or special monitors or switches, etc.  My PIV and Retina both have FF/SD pass-through, which is great.  Even if I had to buy an Indivision to FF/SD the native signal then pass that through an RTG card.

I guess the required signals don't appear at the Zorro bus to handle this sort of thing internally. With that said, I wonder if it's feasible to do something exceptionally sh*tty, like grab the RGB/CSYNC signals from Denise using an additional adaptor, feed them to the card, and process/upscale them to output via HDMI using the onboard FPGA when native video is in use?

The signals out of Denise (and prior to VIDIOT on the A2000) are digital, 13 signals in total assuming we'd only need R[0:3], G[0:3], B[0:3], and CSYNC - Conceptually it wouldn't be all that complex of a task for an FPGA

[Robbie]

I guess the required signals don't appear at the Zorro bus to handle this sort of thing internally. With that said, I wonder if it's feasible to do something exceptionally sh*tty, like grab the RGB/CSYNC signals from Denise using an additional adaptor, feed them to the card, and process/upscale them to output via HDMI using the onboard FPGA when native video is in use?

The signals out of Denise (and prior to VIDIOT on the A2000) are digital, 13 signals in total assuming we'd only need R[0:3], G[0:3], B[0:3], and CSYNC - Conceptually it wouldn't be all that complex of a task for an FPGA

The video signals are present on the Zorro III bus, but the guy designing it did so for his 2000.

The Picasso IV had the genius design of having a circuit board you could snap and put into the video slot of the 2000 and connect back up to the board in the Zorro slot but I guess that would have been a lot harder to implement on this project; especially if he really only needed it for productivity software etc.

[guest11527]

I guess the required signals don't appear at the Zorro bus to handle this sort of thing internally.

Right. They appear on the video slot but not on Zorro. But even if they would: The signal is not suitable for HDMI, the frequency is too low, and you would need at least an build-in scandoubler, or frequency upscaler.

I believe this has been tried, but the quality was not very remarkable.

With that said, I wonder if it's feasible to do something exceptionally sh*tty, like grab the RGB/CSYNC signals from Denise using an additional adaptor, feed them to the card, and process/upscale them to output via HDMI using the onboard FPGA when native video is in use?

Such a sh*tty thing already exists, namely in the form of the Indivision. All it would need is an input socket on the graphics card that connects to the Indivsion.

But yes, I agree, the unavailability of a native video pass-through is highly annoying.