Zeus68k – Accelerator/IDE/RAM for the A500/2000/CDTV and others

[diskers]

Hi,
Really nice. In previous post you said that there's a possibilty to bake, where is it possible?

[Geraldine]

Originally Posted by mr.vince

We don't deliver banana products that ripen at the customer. We want to make sure we have a perfect, fully working product, which will make everyone happy..

Totally respect that. I will look forward to the new year then

[mr.vince]

Bake? This aint no bag of rolls...

[TroelsDK]

News of this?

Is this board in the making?

[mr.vince]

Well would you mind reading the posts I made? There are three boards being tested and we are in the process of testing all important stuff while implementing the FPGA logic.

This thing replaces the CPU and does all kinds of trickery to create all these different devices in a single chip. You want this to be rock solid, otherwise it's guru time up the ying yang.

[Charlie]

Ahh, I have a warm glow about this thread.

Speaking for myself may I restate my keen interest in getting my hands one one of these boards as soon as possible...

...having said that I'm very happy to see the devs are keen to do as excellent a job as they can and so won't rush the release - an attitude I'm fully along side.

All the best with this project, I hope there will be more to come.

[diskers]

bag of rolls [urghhhhhh] - backe

[mr.vince]

We will let you know soon enough when it's time to pay the production company that will assemble the boards. Before that it's just development costs we can cover ourselves at the moment.

I would be interested in buying one or two of these boards - one to expand my A500 and possibly another for an A2000.

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug

[mr.vince]

For the record... AR3 support is now working as on a real Amiga, too.

Stay tuned for more news, soon.

[amigoun]

Originally Posted by mr.vince

For the record... AR3 support is now working as on a real Amiga, too.

Excelent, this is one of the features, that I would prefer Zeus68k to other (current & future) products.

Nice, another added feature.

Originally Posted by me

I would be interested in buying one or two of these boards - one to expand my A500...

I should elaborate. I need it to finish Project Bodega Bay. See

http://retro-link.com/smf/index.php?topic=252.0

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug

[prowler]

@RobertB: Please read this forum rule regarding signatures. It could save you some typing.

[mr.vince]

So, gentlemen... Here's some more stuff.

Herzi has done the impossible and even enhanced chip mem write speed which is troublesome, because chip mem is in your Amiga and not on the Zeus board.

If you look at the first picture, you'll notice that a standard A500 with the Zeus is faster than an A3000 with 68030 at 25 MHz.





7MB/s:




Now for line draw and write pixel. Green is standard, red is Zeus. More is better.

[lukassid]

Impressive performance

[1time]

I think we have a winner!

[johnim]

great work

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by mr.vince

Herzi has done the impossible and even enhanced chip mem write speed which is troublesome, because chip mem is in your Amiga and not on the Zeus board.

Careful with these "enhancements" - not all Agnus types like a late start of the access. I've tried that as well, but found that it's better to make it a user-option rather than a standard setting. Especially the NTSC 8370 Agnus (the "first ever" fat Agnus) is piccy. Also, an early end of the access will most probably only work on newer boards with faster memory chips. I've had the exact same idea when working on a Rev.8 A500 board, but quickly found that it's best to continue testing with a Rev.5 board that has 150ns RAMs (worst-case). The combination of "late start" and "early end" for read access will only work on later boards, and "early end" for writes doesn't work at all, as you probably violate data-hold times.

Commodore has used all kinds of memory chips in the A500 (always the cheapest on the market!), so going fancy on chipmem access bears quite some dangers. You won't be able to increase the average of 3.5MBytes/s to chipmem, but you may gain a cycle or two of execution between chip(ram/register) accesses.

Originally Posted by mr.vince

7MB/s:

Attachment 33459

You should use Bustest instead of AIBB - it's way more accurate and will show a higher number. That's way better for your promotion ;-) I believe that the actual performance of your Fastram is way higher then 7MB/s. You should get something close to 25MBytes/second for 0-waitstate or 16.6MBytes/second for 1-waitstate.

Jens

[Slayer]

Sorry I can't check the entire thread at the moment but does this project have a web page or a blog etc?

Cheers!

I haven't brought anything off you chaps since first batch Kyroflux, I'm looking forward to supporting you again. Since the X1000s, Amigakit has been getting all my business =)

[Exit]

do you have a a1200 fpga accelerator in the pipline? or just the a500 version? great to see these developments on amiga platform, keep up the great work!