New Amiga motherboards from Jens
 

New Amiga mainboards
Announcement from Jens.

he announced yesterday that he has bought all of the remaining stocks of csg and mos Amiga chipsets from chip suppliers.

he will build new Amiga motherboards for the Amiga 500 & 1200.
he hopes to have something to show in 6 months. I have videoed his announcement and I'll upload it when I get home.

also a new aca500 with 8mb ram which I think he said runs at 40+ MHz asynchronously

and a budget a1200 accelerator in two versions with speed upgrades available to purchase after sale.

mike


My Amiga 30 film , quickly done ...hey I'm tired but here are the bits i caught, jens is on here

its still uploading so it could be a while....

http://youtu.be/SoXxzgfPv4E

http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Amiga_reloaded

Great. Did he say something about the DC-DC converter?

Whoa that's some good stuff !

This is new too https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/shop/...er-supply.html

Amiga Reloaded sounds great, the c64 one is pretty awesome.

It might be awesome, but very expensive in my opinion.

Is the A1200 one just a 'drop in' replacement or will there be enhancements like faster IDE support or onboard SCSI :)

SCSI? Why would you use SCSI in 2015? ;)

The C64 reloaded has a bunch of upgrades, it's not just a 1:1 copy of an old motherboard, so I would expect these motherboards to be the same way (probably S-video output in built and CF slots already on the motherboard? Dunno)

this is amazing news!

will they be in the original form factor?

If the 64 reloaded motherboards are any indication, then yes, they will fit any standard cases.

Choice! Plus SCSI uses much less CPU time. Until Jens reveals what his plans are for the board then we can only guess at what will be added!

This is popular opinion but it is not really true (in Amiga world). Only SCSI with DMA controller uses less CPU time than PIO IDE. There is at least over 30 different SCSI controller models for the Amiga and very few are true DMA, especially pre-Z3 models. Most are PIO = they are as CPU power hungry as Amiga IDE controllers. (I was also surprised, I expected more true DMA models. I noticed it when I started adding 3rd party SCSI and IDE controller emulations)

IDE + DMA controller would be more or less equal to SCSI + DMA controller in CPU time usage.

AFAIK problem with DMA controllers is that it is really difficult to make it work (and work fast) with all kinds of expansion devices and different main board versions. Should be more possible now that all chips and whole board is guaranteed to same.

Sounds interesting. I just hope the price isn't silly.

Thanks for that Toni, you should be on 'Mythbusters' :D Hope Jens has factored this into the design, IDE is more common.

Well, SCSI is the more professional solution, and supports harddrives, optical and magnet-optical devices, as far as that goes, and you can have lots of them. And SCSI is still professionally supported by companies who deal with older servers. But, the devices supported are unattractive today.

DMA isn't really that big an advantage. It caps out at 2.3MB/s and there's no way to go beyond that. And even on 68000 it doesn't really help it boot much faster, you get fast stuttering loads instead that semi-freezes the startup-sequence, since it chokes the DMA to leave little time for the CPU. Today I would say modern IDE is the better solution. I would not have said that for slow MFM/ATA back in the day, it was crap on a stick. :)

If I wasn't so happy with my CF speeds on (switchable) accelerators, i.e. if I were unhappy using my CF card as main harddisk for all my Amigas, I'd love to try some SSDs on updated IDE drivers. But that would add an extra step, i.e. a card to transfer stuff and then an SSD locked inside each Amiga's case to copy it to. Hurgh. Expensive and stupid. :)

As for motherboards fitting original cases, yes, they will. I mean, if he makes them tower-only, he will sell basically none of them :) and I think the A500 mobo specifically will be much smaller than the original. The other products will very likely be "base model, buy upgrades with it or later" and very attractive, I think. He might carry that approach to the Amiga Reloaded to make them very different from the C64 Reloaded prices, and offer bundles, like complete, tested, new, working, accelerated systems to just plug in. My crystal ball is hazy, but that's my prediction. Cos that would be awesome :great

The only component left really would be the floppy drive. And now there are USB-enabled, new, floppy drives. :)

the last computer i built has a SSD in the PCIe slot

@Toni
Do you know which few Amiga HD controllers are DMA? I believe the CSMK3/CSPPC is. Perhaps the 3000 and 4000T SCSI as well?

Buffered IDE like the 4000T IDE and/or enabling better IDE transfer modes like Cosmo's hardware modification should be possible while compatible and would be a big improvement. There are more and cheaper IDE->CF and IDE->SATA adapters than SCSI->CF or SCSI->SATA adapters. Too many motherboard changes (while tempting) could affect compatibility like increasing CPU clock speed. I expect Jens will choose compatibility over upgrades.

Again I'm putting my hazy crystal ball to the test :p but I think he will make the motherboards absolutely as correct and compatible as he can, it's hard to see anything but flashable ROM (and available *new* CPUs and RAM) as modification. I think he will use the same approach as for C64 Reloaded.

Finally got around to making a clear space for my A500+ re-build. Now this has me wondering should I leave it and wait for an A500 reloaded board instead :)

Kickstarter candidate?

Might be fun...