Amiga 500 is the 'real' Amiga?

[daxb]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Anything that runs from the original hardware (motherboard and custom chips) is a 'real Amiga', as soon as you bung in a FPGA card then its basically emulation albeit hardware emulation, its no longer using the Amiga's motherboard (or Amiga soul as we know it!)

You may missed it. FPGA is not emulation nor hardware emulation. This seems to be a common misunderstanding.

[daxb]

Originally Posted by ajk

I guess I can comment here that yes, it does have an end, the mission "Cydonia or Bust" where you attack the alien base at Mars You just need to advance far enough in the research to be able to do that.

Seems that I didn`t advance enough in the research or miss something. Alas the manual didn`t say what is needed or similar. Is there at least a list or something what can research?

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

(or Amiga soul as we know it!)

This took a turn for the philosophical!
I would like to know what, to people, IS the "soul" of an Amiga.
Is it the CPU?
Is it the custom chips?
Is it the case?
Is it the OS?
What is it?

I am sure every person has a different definition from what I see here.

Personally replacing the CPU with an FPGA doesn't bother me. It's like if you got transplanted an artificial heart and you would consider yourself not to be human anymore. Would you? At least, I'd say you're some kinda cyborg

Basically to me an Amiga ceases to be one when people start turning it into what a PC was/is. Stuff like graphic cards, USB expansions, ugly PC-like tower cases, PowerPC processors, etc. For others, stuff like AmigaOS4.x and PPC are a must and to them AmigaOS IS the miga, which I strongly disagree with. They have a hardware-agnostic view.

As long as the Amiga remains in an original case, run by a 680x0 processor of any kind (FPGA implementation or not), driving graphics through its custom chipset, it's an Amiga to me. It's silly to say A500 is the "true Amiga" because we have many different models of true Amigas with this definition. And you can also turn any true Amiga into something else, for example, putting a PPC card in an A1200 (yuck).

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by daxb

You may missed it. FPGA is not emulation nor hardware emulation. This seems to be a common misunderstanding.

Please explain in layman's terms for me please, to me a new piece of kit 'replicating' an older piece of kit is 'emulating' it, is it not?

@Akira, bloody hell i just joking...you took it down a Tom Cruise kinda route now!

[dlfrsilver]

To me, it's the overall machine.

You can't go and define a machine's soul just because it has a great sound chip or a scrolling ability.

If i dared comparing with a woman, it's like saying :

"Oh my god, she has a slick pussy, a terrific ass, awesome bobs, i must marry her."

We are all adults and we all know that you can't marry a woman just because of these 3 things. She must have other things to offer than JUST that.

What defines a woman it's her overall, her spirit, her body, and all the bodylove advantages she has to offer

For a computer, it's the very same

[Phantasm]

For me it is WinUAE just as much as the real machine. I am less interested in the games than in the coding, cracking, reverse engineering etc - so having WinUAE and being able to quickly switch between an A4000 emulated to the max with a HD and RTG and stacks of ram and an A500 with action replay (or even run both at the same time) without needing to have all the machines setup for real is fantastic. I still love to play with these 'machines' all these years later.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

@Akira, bloody hell i just joking...you took it down a Tom Cruise kinda route now!

but I truly am gobsmacked by how many definitions of "what is an Amiga" there are out there! For something that, to me, is very much obvious and set in stone. It's an interesting topic.

[Lord Aga]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Please explain in layman's terms for me please, to me a new piece of kit 'replicating' an older piece of kit is 'emulating' it, is it not?

Sorry to barge in, but I don't understand this. I have a brand new TFT monitor, 'replicating' my old C 1084. Is my new monitor an emulator ?

Let's try with a well established and recognized emulator - the UAE.
It is a piece of X86 software, runs on an X86 machine, and uses X86 instructions. It uses them to emulate 68K instructions and then run 68K software.

'Our' FPGA CPUs use 68K instructions and run 68K software. There is no emulation in between. Actually they cannot run anything else. You buy a Vampire card and you have an Amiga CPU.

[alpine9000]

Originally Posted by Cobe

Yup, out of nostalgia I really like using floppies but for the single or two disk games. Surly I'm not gonna torture myself again like back in the days and play Monkey Island from floppies

And I really dont get that gotek thing. It is slow as floppy(obviously) but in return it doesn't give you the audio satisfaction nor u can hold a disk, insert it in drive, nothing thats actually worth that waiting... so if the game is bigger I'm choosing hard disk.

For me the gotek thing is for people that don't have any floppies, or any way to easily write floppies.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Lord Aga

Sorry to barge in, but I don't understand this. I have a brand new TFT monitor, 'replicating' my old C 1084. Is my new monitor an emulator ?

Let's try with a well established and recognized emulator - the UAE.
It is a piece of X86 software, runs on an X86 machine, and uses X86 instructions. It uses them to emulate 68K instructions and then run 68K software.

'Our' FPGA CPUs use 68K instructions and run 68K software. There is no emulation in between. Actually they cannot run anything else. You buy a Vampire card and you have an Amiga CPU.

Ok the CPU runs direct instructions, how are the custom chips done?

[Lord Aga]

They are not. It is only the CPU for the time being. And glue logic, but you have that on every piece of hardware. It's a genuine turbo card like the ones from 20+ years ago.

SAGA/HDMI should be next, if you are thinking of those. It is in beta/testing phase now.
But the principle will remain the same. FPGA will run the graphic chip's instructions and that's it. It is not a Radeon graphics chip emulating Amiga chip's instructions or anything.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Lord Aga

They are not. It is only the CPU for the time being. And glue logic, but you have that on every piece of hardware. It's a genuine turbo card like the ones from 20+ years ago.

SAGA/HDMI should be next, if you are thinking of those. It is in beta/testing phase now.
But the principle will remain the same. FPGA will run the graphic chip's instructions and that's it. It is not a Radeon graphics chip emulating Amiga chip's instructions or anything.

Ok thanks for clearing that up! Makes me more interested in one now!

[Lord Aga]

Glad to be of service

[turrican9]

So from all this we can conclude that the Amiga 500 is the real Amiga, but only when loading real floppy diskettes and playing ABBA in the background.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Please explain in layman's terms for me please, to me a new piece of kit 'replicating' an older piece of kit is 'emulating' it, is it not?

Think of an FPGA as reconfigurable hardware. It is basically a bunch of logic elements which can be programmatically connected to form a circuit. A real 68000 CPU also consists of logic elements, however here they are hard-wired to a specific configuration. In theory, it could be possible to create a 1:1 replica of a real 68000 CPU in an FPGA if you desired (with some differences in level transition times and propagation delays etc. due to a different process and design of the logic elements). After programming it with the FPGA configuration on startup, it is running just like the real thing with no emulation involved.

Thus, the Vampire 2 is an accelerator just like the Blizzard/Apollo etc. cards from 20 years ago just with a massively faster software-upgradable CPU and SD controller instead of SCSI.

[Amigajay]

Fair enough, i understand it a bit more, the CPU side, though i read you can play AGA games through it (on a A600) how is that possible without emulating the AGA custom chips?

[Samurai_Crow]

By implementing a SuperAGA core on the FPGA of course!

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

how is that possible without emulating the AGA cYustom chips?

You confuse emulation with software implementation on FPGA core. They aren't the same.

[turrican9]

Even though a FPGA core is programmed to work like a Motorola 68000 it's still not the real thing. It's just an advanced core that can be programmed to function (replicate) like a real 68000.

[Retro-Nerd]

I would call that hardware simulation, not emulation.