A314 - The RPi co-processor Official thread

[Niklas]

Originally Posted by toshi

One short question remains. Will the board act as an 1 MB expansion when used in an A500plus? Or just 512 kB in this case?

Hi Stephan!

As of this commit A314 provides an additional 1 MB chip ram in an A500+.

[toshi]

Thanks Niklas!


May I kindly ask if the bill of materials for Revs Beta-2 is the same as for V1.0? I am asking because I cannot find the dedicated BOM for Beta-2?


Thanks a lot
Stephan

[hgw]

Hello, the idea to use the trapdoor in that way is realy nice and a elegant way to bring two worlds together. It remembers me a little on the Bridgecards but this solution seems to me much more promissing.


As a person that has no knowledge in building this board by my own but very interested to test and play with that (have 3 different A500+ with Vampire, ACA500...) my question is: there are plans to sell this board in future?

[Niklas]

Originally Posted by toshi

May I kindly ask if the bill of materials for Revs Beta-2 is the same as for V1.0? I am asking because I cannot find the dedicated BOM for Beta-2?

Yes, the BOM is the same for Beta-2 and 1.0. The changes from Beta-2 to 1.0 are https://github.com/niklasekstrom/a314/issues/5 and https://github.com/niklasekstrom/a314/issues/9. Both are minor changes that affect the layout of the PCB but not the components on it.

[Niklas]

Originally Posted by hgw

As a person that has no knowledge in building this board by my own but very interested to test and play with that (have 3 different A500+ with Vampire, ACA500...) my question is: there are plans to sell this board in future?

I don't know of any such plans at this time. As the design is completely free and open anyone could make and sell these boards, and personally I think it would be exciting if someone did that, as that could lead to that more fun applications are developed for A314. Perhaps reach out to some company that sells Amiga hardware and see if they would be interested?

[Ledfoot]

Hmm, wondering if it would be possible (using the same mechanism as the video playing) to effectively pump/render the contents of any Pi desktop application (in particular a web browser) over to the Amiga side? If information like content size and window size are passed as well, then it should be possible to make the scrollbars synchronized between the 2 environments.

Just spitballing... Almost like window by window VNC...

[Sim085]

Hello, just checking if anyone is selling empty PCBs of the latest version of the A314. I would really like to try and build one of these.

[IanS]

This project looks amazing. Well done to those involved. I hope it gets picked up by someone who can produce ready made boards, as it seems there's a market for it.

As a co-processor, what are its limitations regarding taking on some of the 'heavy lifting' from the 68K? As the ARM chip is so fast, could it also be used to emulate an x86 bridgeboard or super fast 68K accelerator for the Amiga? I know there was talk of using a Pi as an accelerator for the FPGA Arcade boards.

Ian

[CrowStudio]

Hi guys!

Do you have any YouTube material from Amiga34? ;-)

[Eriond]

Originally Posted by IanS

I hope it gets picked up by someone who can produce ready made boards, as it seems there's a market for it.

So do we In fact, we have already reached out to a number of well-known retro hardware manufacturers, so now it's a matter of "wait and see"

Originally Posted by IanS

As a co-processor, what are its limitations regarding taking on some of the 'heavy lifting' from the 68K? As the ARM chip is so fast, could it also be used to emulate an x86 bridgeboard or super fast 68K accelerator for the Amiga?

The practical, theoretical limitation is that of memory bandwidth. Both towards the Amiga as well as the RPi. Today, with the dynamic arbitration scheme (awsome job, Niklas) in place, there is no delay towards the chipram bus (ie. ~3.5MB/s). Max throughput from the RPi is depending on the SPI bus speed which we have successfully managed at 66 MHz for a RPi v3. Future RPi's may go faster.

We have had a number of questions regarding "super fast 68k accelerators", but even if such an accelerator would be possible, one has to consider what it would accomplish? What would you expect from a super accelerated Amiga? Probably fast GUI response. Maybe the possibility to playback compressed audio and video? Internet access for sure. etc.
All of these are to a large extent already possible today, using the A314 "as is". The software that's already in place, offloads the tedious tasks of decompression, IP stack handling and others to the RPi, and returns pre-processed data directly into the Amigas' RAM. And more software is on it's way, when skilled software developers get access to the A314 hardware. There's already discussions at the A314 IRC channel showing concepts of even more mind-blowing stunts, so to me it seems the RPi-coprocessor has a very bright future on the Amiga scene. Primarily because it doesn't "take over" the Amiga, but instead complements it in a nice, non-intrusive way.

[Eriond]

I'm very pleased to hear that Edu from Arananet has plans for a batch of A314 boards, as mentioned on the Spanish "Retrowiki": https://translate.google.com/transla...6t%3D200035270
If you don't mind having them shipped from Spain, I suggest you head over to that poll, and sign up for a board (or more )

[CrowStudio]

Originally Posted by Eriond

I'm very pleased to hear that Edu from Arananet has plans for a batch of A314 boards, as mentioned on the Spanish "Retrowiki": https://translate.google.com/transla...6t%3D200035270
If you don't mind having them shipped from Spain, I suggest you head over to that poll, and sign up for a board (or more )

Have signed up at Retrowiki, just waiting for my accont to be activated, I will write me up for 2 pcs.


Will you guys only get credit, or will you actually get some of the money?
If not maybe you should add a donate option on you gitHub repository


Keep up the good work!

[Ratteler]

I picked up one of these unpopulated. I have a Rev 5 A500 Board. I was thinking, is there a way to desolder the chip RAM on board, and have all the RAM come from the A314?

I've been thinking about socketing the hell out of it.

[Niklas]

Originally Posted by Ratteler

I picked up one of these unpopulated. I have a Rev 5 A500 Board. I was thinking, is there a way to desolder the chip RAM on board, and have all the RAM come from the A314?

I've been thinking about socketing the hell out of it.

Hi Ratteler! I believe that should be possible. I don't think anyone has tried it but I see no reason why it wouldn't work. a314.device needs to be modified slightly to handle having all memory (0.5 MB chip and 0.5 slow) on A314, but that should be a quick fix. The change has to do with how a314.device maps Amiga addresses to A314 addresses, and a new kind of mapping should be added here.

[ugorampazzo]

Hi all! Tomorrow I will try to assemble an A314 (PCB Beta1 bought from ebay, components from Digikey list found on "issue" section of GitHub project area). I'm pretty decent with soldering, and some years ago I was repairing phones and desoldering/reballing/resoldering also BGA, so I think that - if I don't lost my hand - I'll be able to solder everything. Does anyone has any hints about making the best with less time? Soldering hints of this particular board? USB Blaster upload (already made file w/o installing Intel software? Thanks in advance.. I hope to be back with you with some good news.
I'm also interested - as I also have some rev.5 and rev.3 Amiga's, to install A314 and make it work in chipmem w/o any chance in AGNUS.

[Niklas]

Originally Posted by Ratteler

I picked up one of these unpopulated. I have a Rev 5 A500 Board. I was thinking, is there a way to desolder the chip RAM on board, and have all the RAM come from the A314?

I forgot to mention that it is possible to disable the motherboard's memory without desoldering it. As mentioned here, there's a solder pad JP3 that can be cut in order to disable the DRAM on the motherboard.

[ugorampazzo]

Hi all! Today I finally was able to solder everything, apart connectors (in order to be able to triple-check ASAP and ease things if I need to desolder some ICs, then connect pin 1 to +5V and ping 3 to GND or expansion header to my PSU in order to see if something makes smoke.. and.. if I have some luck, try to connect to USB Blaster.
I'm unsure about PIN1 of IC7: can someone confirm that's ok?
Let me known if you have any suggestions!

[Niklas]

Originally Posted by ugorampazzo

Hi all! Today I finally was able to solder everything, apart connectors (in order to be able to triple-check ASAP and ease things if I need to desolder some ICs, then connect pin 1 to +5V and ping 3 to GND or expansion header to my PSU in order to see if something makes smoke.. and.. if I have some luck, try to connect to USB Blaster.
I'm unsure about PIN1 of IC7: can someone confirm that's ok?
Let me known if you have any suggestions!

Very nice ugorampazzo!

I'm no soldering expert so I can't really comment on the solder on IC7. But if you like you can join the #a314 irc channel on EFnet where there are several persons that I think can comment.

[CrowStudio]

Originally Posted by Niklas

Hi Ratteler! I believe that should be possible. I don't think anyone has tried it but I see no reason why it wouldn't work. a314.device needs to be modified slightly to handle having all memory (0.5 MB chip and 0.5 slow) on A314, but that should be a quick fix. The change has to do with how a314.device maps Amiga addresses to A314 addresses, and a new kind of mapping should be added here.

Did I get it right that it could be possible to share a total of 1MB of chip ram if you disable the chip ram on the A500 6a motherboard by cutting J3 and J7?

Would this benefit the memory access times?

[Niklas]

Originally Posted by ugorampazzo

Let me known if you have any suggestions!

I just noticed something: there should be solder in the hole on the back side of the FPGA. You can compare with this picture.