New Amiga motherboards from Jens

[hooverphonique]

Originally Posted by mjnurney

he announced yesterday that he has bought all of the remaining stocks of csg and mos Amiga chipsets from chip suppliers.

does this mean, it will be impossible to get spare parts at reasonable prices in the future?

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by jbenam

Well, the good thing about newer technologies is that we could pretty much make the motherboards a LOT smaller than they were, thanks to smaller SMD components and newer, more integrated ICs

CD32 is A1200 on small mobo, too.

[Schoenfeld]

http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Amiga_reloaded

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

The Amiga Reloaded will therefore have a floppy drive connector that's compatible with PC disk drives

Can you please talk to the HxC floppy emulator guys and make sure than a low-cost Gotek + HxC firmware will work?

Maybe talk to Kipper2k who is making his own low-cost floppy emulator based on Gotek for a better fit in the A500/A1200 form factor?

[Schoenfeld]

I probably won't have to talk to anyone, as the floppy connector ony has a slightly different pinout than the Amiga floppy connector. Tiny change in the software of the floppy emulator, and it'll work.

Jens

[Arnie]

I personally think it would be better to leave the floppy connector as it is. There are, as AlexH pointed out, floppy emu's that work well in the Amiga. There are also PC to Amiga floppy drive conectors. What about Amiga 1760 HD drives, Where do they fit in the design?

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

Tiny change in the software of the floppy emulator, and it'll work.

The Cortex Amiga firmware is closed source and the project is effectively dead. Changes won't be possible in the short term.

[Retrofan]

This is very interesting from the Wiki:

"Chipram is one of the special things where the Amiga Reloaded scores: Although it's "only" 2MByte Chipram like all other AGA machines before, the memory is much faster and can be accessed by the processor at full speed even when eight bitplanes are switched on. This is accomplished by making use of modern memory technology, which is a lot faster than the D-RAMs that the AGA chipset was designed for. The higher speed allows inserting extra timeslots between the original DMA slots of the Alice chip. As a result, the CPU will have high-speed access to chip memory even when 8 bitplanes are used, or the blitter is in "nasty mode", where it will not slow down if the processor signals that it wants to access chip ram. However, this may cause undesired effects with software that can't handle this kind of speed, so this feature can be switched off at the user's choice. It may also be a good idea to patch system functions to not use the blitter, but the CPU to do blitter functions, because the CPU will outperform the blitter in many, if not all aspects, given that it will have at least 14MByte/second performance on chipram. We currently have no plans to provide such a software patch, but encourage authors to continue the work that can be found on Aminet: None of the existing "CPU blit" programs really patch all system functions that use the blitter."

So... Maybe a reason to update FBlit?

This too:


"The Amiga Reloaded will use the same expansion port as the ACA500 and ACA500plus for a networking card. This will give you 100MBit Ethernet at a considerably lower price than the X-Surf-100, yet with the same kind of performance of the product."

And 200€ is a fair price, the right one for it.

What I don't have clear is if I will be able to use my ACA 1230/56 and ACA 1231/42.

[Mrs Beanbag]

will my 2.5" IDE hard drive work in it, or will i have to transfer everything to a CF card? It seems to imply that i will.

[spudje]

Wow, this sounds like a very cool product!! I'll definitely buy one (or two) However, Jens, you do know how to play the vendor lock-in game :/ It's not as expandable as the original Amiga's (Except for the optional USB ports)

I still hope someone will design and build us a new case for this too....

[jiffy]

This sounds extremely cool! :-D

[alenppc]

Wow Jens, one hell of an announcement. Well done. I for one can't wait to get my hands on one of those babies.

So far I like all the design choices & specs. The only thing I don't like is the video output board that requires a separate purchase. Why not include at least a colour composite (jumper selectable PAL/NTSC, if possible)?

Any chances of adding a memory socket module on the motherboard (SODIMM or something)?

Also, for those of you who went to Amsterdam, I am curious how Dave Haynie reacted to the idea that there will be a new amiga motherboard after all this time.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by alenppc

So far I like all the design choices & specs. The only thing I don't like is the video output board that requires a separate purchase. Why not include at least a colour composite (jumper selectable PAL/NTSC, if possible)?

Yes i also thought this was a strange decision.

Any chances of adding a memory socket module on the motherboard (SODIMM or something)?

i don't know what would be the point of that, given there is no CPU on the motherboard and accelerators come with their own Fast RAM arrangements.

[Predseda]

Jens, which version of Kickstart do you plan to include?

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by Predseda

Jens, which version of Kickstart do you plan to include?

They are on holidays, you know?

What concerns me now is this:

Power supply

The Amiga Reloaded will use a modern laptop power supply as it's only power source. Input voltage may range from 14V to 19V DC. Modern DC-DC voltage regulators will provide proper regulation of all local voltages with enough power reserves for top-notch expansions. At the same time, the choice of local DC-DC conversion eliminates cross-regulation trouble that most PC power supplies are exhibiting these days.
Even with today's standards, the Amiga can be considered a low-power system. The Amiga Reloaded will add to this property with it's very high-efficiency switching regulators.




I want that DC-DC converter now !!!!!

Edit: It won't be expensive. They will sell the C64 PSU for around 13€, and this adapter will have something that doesn't exist: it will detect the amount of volts in the psu cable plug connnected to the amiga and it will change that to deliver exactly the right amount of necessary volts.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Retrofan

Edit: It won't be expensive. They will sell the C64 PSU for around 13€, and this adapter will have something that doesn't exist: it will detect the amount of volts in the psu cable plug connnected to the amiga and it will change that to deliver exactly the right amount of necessary volts.

what do you mean, doesn't exist? This is perfectly normal.

[Retrofan]

Yes, you are very true. But it doesn't exist for an Amiga PSU.

Edit: To the point: If you've got a extremely demanding amiga (like I've got), what do you prefer? To use an internal pico-psu or this simple solution?

Edit: To the point 2: I'm planning to sell my very high-end amiga, but I want it to be working perfectly well, and for that I need a neat PSU solution.

[HanSolo]

It's sucks for me for now. First of all the graphics. Workbench in 256 colors doesnt look good.We need graphic card it is obvious. I know that there will be new indivisionAGA for this mobo with hdmi connector but it will display only amiga native modes.Are gfx card needs to be connected to secondary hdmi stot in tv and switched manually.I dont like that.

Second - horse power.ACA cards offer very poor performance.Even working blizzard cards will not provide enough speed to watching youtube on NetSurf brower.Listening MP3 still takes a lot of cpu power - this is crazy.

Maybe Jens should cooperate with guys from vampire accelerators.

[Predseda]

Do you understand the purpose of this board properly?

[TheBilgeRat]

Ummm... specs are "A500/A1200". this isn't an A4000/rtg/mediator replacement.

If you want "horsepower" then buy a big box amiga. This thing hits the absolute sweet spot for most everyone that isn't running alladin or toaster.