Quote:
Originally Posted by gulliver
Are you planning on doing a Zorro II version?
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We haven't discussed a Zorro version, but it sounds like a reasonable thing to do. The changes needed for a Zorro version should be straight-forward, I think.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bwldrbst
@Niklas & @Elrond, that looks really cool, can't wait to see it in action. Have you got a driver interface on the Amiga for communicating between the two machines?
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It's nice to hear that more than the two of us are finding this idea interesting.
Currently, the interface works roughly as follows. At first the trapdoor expansion card looks like a regular 512 kB memory expansion, which shows up at the regular place in the Amiga memory map (at $C00000 if the A500 has an 8371 Agnus, or at $80000 if it has an 8372/8375 Agnus). A program running on the Amiga that is aware that the memory is in fact implemented by this Raspberry Pi trapdoor card will allocate a block of memory in that range, and then there is a mechanism (a "magic handshake") such that the address of that block can be sent to the Raspberry via the FPGA. After that the Amiga and the Raspberry can communicate asynchronously by reading and writing to that block of shared memory. We will (at the very least) provide examples of how to do this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kolla
An idea for your software, when you get so far... let the "pi side" act as a proxy for the Amiga, so that Amiga software can continue to use legacy code and protocols, and then let the Pi side translate those to new fancy and cpu heavy protocols.
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I think of the Raspberry Pi on our expansion card as a co-processor to the Amiga, connected through an interface with a decent bandwidth (theoretically ~7 MB/s on the Amiga side, ~3 MB/s on the Raspberry side). Hopefully there should be many applications that can take advantage of this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kolla
I am currently very busy with conference and being away on vacation out July, but I will try to find time to look at your project too.
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You definitively sound like a power-user for an expansion like this, so I'm looking forward to you getting your hands on it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TroyWilkins
Anyway, the Janus library, as used with emulation systems such as the PC emulators, could this be useful for this?
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Not sure how useful Janus.library would be for this project, but I will look into it. Thanks for the suggestion!