Quote:
Originally Posted by NovaCoder
Same here.
It seems pretty simple though, most of the complexity is going to be in developing the software side of things. I can see a long road ahead to properly develop the software for this (CPU, LAN, RTG) but at least it's a start  |
Yes of course developing the network driver will take time.
But the good thing is no one has to wait for it.
The card as it is "plug and play".
You take the old 68000 out, you plug the new card in.
And "VOILA" you have a ultra fast CPU and big amount of memory.
From a software point of view there are three development items.
a) IDE driver testing
b) Picasso96 driver testing
c) Network stack
One can go two ways with this.
A) You wait until all software stacks are done and tested.
B) For impatient users you give the card out as "Turbo-Card" now.
And they an download the drivers to enable the other feature when they are done.
The card is good value for the money even alone as memory upgrade.
The card is great value for the money as CPU upgrade.
So for people like you who primarely look for a 200 MIPS AMIGA.
The card is great even without RTG driver.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NovaCoder
I wouldn't worry about support for other Amiga's, I believe the 'card' is basically an off-the-shelf FPGA computer with a custom interface.....can someone confirm or deny that?
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Yes the card is a sandwhich.
Its two PCB connected piggypack to each other.
It design similar to the well known X-Surf.
One piece is the AMIGA bus bridge, with HDMI out, and Network out.
The other part as a high quality, well tested Cyclone 5 card with 128 MB DDR 3 memory, and SDCard interface.
This CPU-Module is already well tested and working fine.
The 2 piece solution offer two major advantages:
a) We can produce cards for ALL Amigas from A500 to A4000.
And only need different adaptors for them.
This means the CPU-module is the same for all of them.
This keeps production costs down and results in
a much higher value for the money for AMIGA users.
b) The CPU-Module is "a module".
This means users buying this solution could even upgrade their CPU module.
The AMIGA bridge can be used with new Modules later on.
The current module has more CPU power than a 68060 and 128 MB memory.
But CPU Modules with more main memory or even much faster CPUs are possible too.
Nova you could basically take the card now without wating for the RTG driver and change one of your games to directly bang the hardware on the RTG truecolor out to have Quake 2 running in truecolor.