New Amiga motherboards from Jens

[jPV]

There will only be one monitor output as standard: A black&white composite output for monitors that are compatible with PAL and/or NTSC video timing. This is mainly meant for debugging purposes and has been chosen because of it's low cost. You can install one out of two choices for colour output:

Black&white and no option to upgrade to color... why, oh why? I have to fall back to color composite quite often at the events with mixed selection of video projectors... and sometimes at home too. Even with full blown A1200 with Indivision AGA mk2... not to talk ones without it...

Another nice option would be S-video. Instead of that color composite, or with it. It isn't expensive or hard at all to mod to real a1200 at least. Just two resistors and two caps at the simplest from from the legs of CXA1145M, and that's it.

BTW. could I use my existing Indivision AGA mk2 (the original version) and not have to buy that "special version"?

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by CMTX

And btw from the Icomp wiki:

USB functionality can be added with the X-Surf-100 version of RapidRoad. This is the lowest-cost version of the product, yet the one with the highest-performing interface.

I'm guessing he will put a couple of USB ports on the Motherboard somewhere like the X-Surf100 and the Rapid Road will activate them. The RapidRoad, however even the XS100 version has a USB header that can be used instead.

Originally Posted by Akira

Didn't know that, that's cool and smart! Best of both worlds.

Yeah the CF functionality on the ACA500 is excellent, you have your Amiga CF card in the boot slot and a FAT32 CF in the AUX Slot, both automatically mount and you get nice speeds, with an ACA12xx around 3.5mb/sec. I guess we should get similar results on the Amiga Reloaded.

Originally Posted by jPV

BTW. could I use my existing Indivision AGA mk2 (the original version) and not have to buy that "special version"?

I'm pretty sure he is using Lisa Chips so probably...

[spudje]

Originally Posted by CMTX

Personally i want the clockport for a delfina or the upcoming prisma megamix. Not that i will use 16bit software but i listen to music (16 bit) allways, and i'd prefer to do it without powering up any other computer

Yes, I think this is the most missed opportunity. Add in some cheap 16bit additional audio chip for mp3 decoding. Now hopefully there is a clockport to add the Prisma or you require at least a 040 processor (will they even be available at all).

And what about mouse/joystick ports??

[grond]

Where did he get the stock of old chips? Did they vanish somewhere in Petro T's times and now have reappeared?

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by grond

Where did he get the stock of old chips? Did they vanish somewhere in Petro T's times and now have reappeared?

After Commodore (and later Amiga Technologies) went bust there were still a lot of chips floating around, mainly in the various Commodore repair centres around the world (licensed or not), which were still viable for some time after that as there were still a lot of machines around.

When the masses abandoned the Amigas and switched to other platforms, the repair centres took the plunge as well and liquidated those assets and the only still interested in those were the local Amiga resellers, with their loyal customer bases.

During the late 00s, most Amiga resellers left the market and sold their remaining stock to the few big boys remaining around - Jens has probably managed to secure a respectable amount of the chips from them.

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by alenppc

Another nice to have feature would be paged chip ram to overcome the 2 mb limit.

Now that's a nice idea. I can think of a fairly easy method to add two banking bits to each of the eight Bitplane-DMA channels. The problem will be to tell the blitter which bank it's supposed to work in. Here's where a good bunch of software development would have to be done.

I have already called for a true software blitter emulation mainly for speed reasons, but should I follow this banking thought, a full blitter emulation will become mandatory. Further, simple banking will require each bitplane to reside in a single 2MByte-bank. There would be no way to have a bitplane cross a 2MByte-boundary.

The same would apply to audio and sprites, which would all have to stay within one 2MByte-bank of chipram.

Jens

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

Yeah the CF functionality on the ACA500 is excellent, you have your Amiga CF card in the boot slot and a FAT32 CF in the AUX Slot, both automatically mount and you get nice speeds, with an ACA12xx around 3.5mb/sec. I guess we should get similar results on the Amiga Reloaded.

Similar results would be disappointing. Note that the CF cards are part of the 32-bit IO subsystem. Although CF-cards (and IDE) are only 16-bit wide, this subsystem will make the data ports available in a transparent 32-bit register. This will double the raw performance. In real life, this will mean something between 7 and 10 MB/s.

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

I'm pretty sure he is using Lisa Chips so probably...

All custom chips are in sockets for easy service. No "pluggin things on top of chips".

Originally Posted by grond

Where did he get the stock of old chips? Did they vanish somewhere in Petro T's times and now have reappeared?

It's pretty close to what jbenam wrote: I located the actual stock of chips in multiple locations. One had Lisa chips, another had Alice, and a third had Paula. During the late 90s, these people believed that they had "gold", and they could not agree on a project because everyone was demanding a too-high share of whatever money they could make. With everyone in the boat being able to block each other, new Amigas never happened.

Almost 20 years after, I managed to convince each and everyone of them to sell me their remaining stock.

Jens

[Predseda]

I think it is not necessary as all the old software is written for up to 2MB chip mem and there is not any new software that would benefit from bigger chip memory. Also possible backward compatibility issues.

BTW Jens, if it is not secret, how many boards could you produce with that chips stock? Tens? Hundreds?

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by jPV

Another nice option would be S-video. Instead of that color composite, or with it. It isn't expensive or hard at all to mod to real a1200 at least. Just two resistors and two caps at the simplest from from the legs of CXA1145M, and that's it.

Yeah, this is probably the weirdest decision. The c64reloaded comes with svideo and i was hoping these motherboards would too. Why not svideo, Jens?

Also as much as more Chip RAM sounds great, we don't even get enough software production for standard Amigas, who is going to make programs that support this? Who will make this new best Blitter emulator?

Protracker with 4MB of RAM available to it for samples sounds dreamy!

[alexh]

Originally Posted by jPV

Black&white and no option to upgrade to color... why, oh why?

Because black and white is effectively "free". Colour requires a video encoder.

Originally Posted by jPV

Another nice option would be S-video.

Needs a video encoder.

Originally Posted by jPV

It isn't expensive or hard at all to mod to real a1200 at least. Just two resistors and two caps at the simplest from from the legs of CXA1145M, and that's it.

The CXA1145M is an old skool video encoder and I imagine they are replacing it with an uber cheap triple DAC (or maybe even an R2R ladder) which is all you need for SCART.

[Sandro]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld;

It's pretty close to what jbenam wrote: I located the actual stock of chips in multiple locations. One had Lisa chips, another had Alice, and a third had Paula. During the late 90s, these people believed that they had "gold", and they could not agree on a project because everyone was demanding a too-high share of whatever money they could make. With everyone in the boat being able to block each other, new Amigas never happened.

Almost 20 years after, I managed to convince each and everyone of them to sell me their remaining stock.

Jens

20 years
that's because you need to make a superior motherboard, otherwise few ppl will buy it

add for free USB if not pcmcia is included,
add for free a sacandoubler
add for free a wireless lan
add a socket for the 040 and 060 and simm to add fast memory
add a basic p96 gfx card

then you can sell it in 300 or 350 instead 200 then amiga fans will buy it

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by Sandro

add for free USB if not pcmcia is included,
add for free a sacandoubler
add for free a wireless lan
add a socket for the 040 and 060 and simm to add fast memory
add a basic p96 gfx card

then you can sell it in 300 or 350 instead 200 then amiga fans will buy it

What you're asking for is unlikely to be possible for a three-digit figure. The funny part is that there's another person on the German a1k forum who believes that 350,- EUR is a good price, and he also wants lots of additional stuff for that price. Putting the two of you together gives the term "dream team" a whole new meaning ;-)

Jens

[kamelito]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

Now that's a nice idea. I can think of a fairly easy method to add two banking bits to each of the eight Bitplane-DMA channels. The problem will be to tell the blitter which bank it's supposed to work in. Here's where a good bunch of software development would have to be done.

I have already called for a true software blitter emulation mainly for speed reasons, but should I follow this banking thought, a full blitter emulation will become mandatory. Further, simple banking will require each bitplane to reside in a single 2MByte-bank. There would be no way to have a bitplane cross a 2MByte-boundary.

The same would apply to audio and sprites, which would all have to stay within one 2MByte-bank of chipram.

Jens

Emulation?
What is needed is to patch every library calls who use the Blitter and replace them by 68020 code same patches as in the Draco. Extra memory for program banging the HW will have to be written specifically.
Any plan for a chunky mode?

As FBlit as been recently open sourced this is a good starting place.
https://github.com/SamuraiCrow/fblit


Kamelito

[Photon]

I think floppy emulators are a great first enabler, both for existing motherboards and perhaps the reloaded ones? I would not assume PC drives are easier to buy the next few years... a compatibility jumper would make the board a plug-in replacements for A1200, where it seems motherboard damage is relatively frequent, while floppy drives are available from Amigakit.

I think built in CF support is a good idea, and removes the need for Zorro support for the most part. Usually that's what it was for on A500, HDD interfaces. Just don't make us put the CF card inside a screwed shut case. (like the Lvd/Kipper board)

So for the "A500 aspect" of the design (running Good Old Games, and OCS demos), well... accelerated A500s were not common, a big reason for having one is the excellent (un-upgraded) compatibility, i.e. you want the base specs and need only that. So I see Zorro as "can definitely be eliminated".

For the "A1200 aspect" of the design, missing expansion slot will make the die-hard angry perhaps, but they already have the knowledge to build their rigs

And from the specs it looks like this will be a speed demon, a real step in the modern direction with really good value for money! So if it becomes this fast, compatible replacement, a *lot* of people will be super happy with it and not even look at a 68060 with measly normal DMA and Blitter and Chipmem speed...

I would assume that zero software will be changed to accommodate Amiga Reloaded, with the exception of any software you happen to already have and already have a programmer ready for I think it will work out...

I have no opinion about video output options except that black&white, well just remove it and save a few cents Make it a test pin, nobody but you will use it Jens, you know that

Also not really bothered if the serial port goes out the window. Parallel port - well you'd need something to sample sounds with.

Speaking of that, I think would be a golden opportunity to pre-mix the Paula channels for the excellent 3.5mm output (like WinUAE default) - everything will sound better and it would be a true problem-solver for musicians, and there are lots of them. It's an absolute drag to get the equipment to do it outside the Amiga, but inside only a couple op-amps are necessary. Even if it's just 3 pins to connect a separate jack to, it certainly would be wonderful to have this original design decision enhanced, and to have it all inside.

[duga]

My 2 cents for Jens:

Prio 1: Make USB standard. If not, make at least one PS/2-port standard for external PC keyboard for those with broken A500/A1200 keyboards or those who wants to stove away the computer.

Prio 2: Remove parallell and serial ports as they are replaced by USB (see #1). For those who really needs par/ser they can always buy a clock port expansion for that (and you get back some of the money you lose on making USB standard).

[utri007]

FBlit open sourced Thats ood news, though Amiga reloaded wount get that much benefit with it than ordinary A1200, as chip ram access is so much faster. Hopefully samuraicrow will update it. I remember that original author had a plan to make some kind of fblit screen mode availlable?

Thanks to Jens. Big new, keeping mobo simple will keep costs lower. What I want to do is connect my Blizzard 060 and my PCMCIA wlan card to it. No wired Network for me, but maybe usb makes wlan possible?

By the way, is Buddhas clockport enough noise free to use with x-surf version of usb? I could buy one for AMiga reloaded, but untill it arriwes would be nice to have some use to it.

[gulliver]

Originally Posted by duga

My 2 cents for Jens:

Prio 1: Make USB standard. If not, make at least one PS/2-port standard for external PC keyboard for those with broken A500/A1200 keyboards or those who wants to stove away the computer.

Prio 2: Remove parallell and serial ports as they are replaced by USB (see #1). For those who really needs par/ser they can always buy a clock port expansion for that (and you get back some of the money you lose on making USB standard).

I couldnt agree more. USB should replace nearly all vintage peripherals and I/O interfaces. It would mean a manufacturing cost saving measure and a really cool built-in feature for users.

BTW, I understand the need for some form of video output, even if it is black & white. Jens needs to provide users with some form of basic visual diagnostics, because if not techincal support might become a nightmare. I can certainly imagine a scenario where users report that the board doesnt work and cannot give any bit of extra detail about this because they cant see sh*t if they have no video display.

And another thing that bothers me a bit, is that I understand that the board form factor will be something that fits an A500/A1200 case. But wouldnt it be better for us all, if Jens could choose a simple PC case form factor? There is a huge variety and availability of PC cases out there, and not the same can be said about Amigas.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Photon

Speaking of that, I think would be a golden opportunity to pre-mix the Paula channels for the excellent 3.5mm output (like WinUAE default) - everything will sound better and it would be a true problem-solver for musicians

Not really, mixing it means I can't individually process the audio channels if I want to on an external mixer. It's not a good idea.

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by Akira

Not really, mixing it means I can't individually process the audio channels if I want to on an external mixer. It's not a good idea.

Interesting point actually since I use my A1200 with a Sony PVM these days that has Mono sound, I unplug one of the Audio leads and the Amiga mixes the Audio, I guess with a 3.5in jack we miss this feature?

[gulliver]

Oh, and another thing: Why two CF slots?

Instead it should be cheaper to manufacture a single standard IDE header. Why IDE? it is more flexible, you are not tyed to CF and its adapters. You can inexpensively connect any sort of drives and even buy cheap bidirectional sata converters, even CF adapters if you wish to. With two CF slots, you can only use memory cards, no optical media, no SSD´s, no SCSI adapters, and more importantly, it is not standard enough to become future proof.