New Amiga motherboards from Jens

[Retrofan]

You are true about somekind of improvement for sound like a mas player, and the same about graphics or RTG.

I don't know if they could make a complete improvement in all of the specs taking much more time - a year or maybe more- instead of wasting the few chips they have.

Edit: What I talk about is ... money. Do you prefer/want to spend 300€ instead?

[HanSolo]

Originally Posted by Predseda

Do you understand the purpose of this board properly?

Yes but I am disapointed.

Originally Posted by 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.

I have big box amiga but it is so slow...

Originally Posted by Retrofan

You are true about somekind of improvement for sound like a mas player, and the same about graphics or RTG.

I don't know if they could make a complete improvement in all of the specs taking much more time - a year or maybe more- instead of wasting the few chips they have.

Yes it is only wasting precious chipsets.We getting castrated amiga with very limited possibility of expansion.Even if CF card slot will work at 14mb/sec on standard configuration what is for ? For old games in whdload which most of them weight less than 3,5MB ?

[fitzsteve]

I'm extremely excited about this project. I for one don't think we need and all in one super Amiga with RTG, etc. We have WinUAE for that and other various options.

In my time tinkering I've become a huge fan of a basic A1200 setup with an 030 this does pretty much everything that I want from an Amiga and with mod cons like USB and HDMI options all brand new is certainly a big plus for me.

I was a huge fan of the ACA500 and I'm really keen to see these features on the include list for the Amiga Reloaded.

[Mrs Beanbag]

we have a saying, "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut". i'm sorry to say it but it sounds like for what you want an Amiga to do we need the opposite expression.

what would that be?

"using a nut to crack a sledgehammer"?

The new boards are for whatever old boards are for. For doing Amiga things. If you want to do PC things why not just use a PC. There. I said it.

[Retrofan]

I didn't want to tell, but what all those improvements mean -faster mobo, fpga accelerators, better and faster music, better graphics- is that although they will play just the same old games, just the same way, you will like to play them in a nice, fast, good looking OS. (...)

There is where I want to go, although you already can try it, it's called AKReal .

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

it sounds like for what you want an Amiga to do we need the opposite expression.

what would that be?

"using a nut to crack a sledgehammer"?

Or perhaps "cracking yourself on the nut with a sledgehammer"?

[Amiga1992]

This sounds very cool but has some strange decisions, like the floppy port (meaning that if I have an Amiga floppy drive I want to use I have to get ANOTHER one) and the video issue. Also 3.5" audio jack is shitty in my opinion. I also understand there's no PCMCIA port? So we rely on the externally accessible CF which is IDE right? So I can't use a FAT95 easy transfer solution like I do with a PCMCIA adapter. That's a bit annoying as well.

In everything else, interesting enough and looking forward to the final, developed boards!

[fitzsteve]

I think he will use the same solution as the aca500 so the second CF will probably support fat32 and natively. I agree at least there should be some rgb output as standard.

[CMTX]

Wow, this board looks really interesting, i will be looking forward to it with excitement

But what about clockports? I really hope it has at least one clockport, there are a lot of 1200 hardware that uses it. And then it will be my perfect amiga.

For me the best is:

-Zorro 3 speed ethernet and usb in desktop case
-fastest chipram access

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by CMTX

For me the best is:

-Zorro 3 speed ethernet and usb in desktop case
-fastest chipram access

What you are asking is already planned, in fact they are the main things I commented of all of the info:

Originally Posted by 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.

I don't think he will add any USB option and no idea of how the clockport will be improved.

[CMTX]

Yes I know, you missunderstood my message. :P

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

[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.

[Retrofan]

Yes, there are a lot of chips/functions that he could improve: Audio/graphics/USB/Internet/Clockport speed/HD speed/Chipram...

I guess he will only update the cheapest solutions and/or the ones that need something he's actually selling or he is planning to make.

BTW Mallorca is funky indeed

Edit: BTW if you want to play some funky music on your miggy, you just have to run AKReal with a 030 and a MAS player to listen some of the radio streams. That's like being in Plaza Gomila, saturday night .

...LOL... The 8.5 update will be the funkiest of all.

[CMTX]

Hahaha, lanzarote is funky too

I tried AKreal and it's just fantastic, but i don't want to go offtopic. I'm going to bed camarada amiguero. Buenas noches!

[NovaCoder]

There's obviously a lot of things that could be improved with a new Classic Amiga motherboard but the tricky part is to maintain compatibility with Classic software.

For this reason I'm not surprised that Jens is being conservative.

It's basically a platform for selling IC products and it could get very expensive to build a working computer.

The only funky thing I can see is the faster CHIPRAM although it's hard to say at this point how much difference that will make...especially if the accelerator card is still being crippled by a slow bus.

[alenppc]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

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.

Good point.

I hope the board sells well enough to warrant development of faster accelarators in the future.

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

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

I think he will use the same solution as the aca500 so the second CF will probably support fat32 and natively.

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

[Sandro]

1 : no cpu in the motherboard: > this is marketing to saving components and to sell aca cards

2 : 3.5mm jack instead 2 rca > the mobo supposedly fits on the A1200 case? I do not understand

3 : no pcmia ?

4 : no scandoubler built in: marketing to sell the indivision

5 : no external floppy conector ?? again to save components

6: no USB built in, marketing to sell the rapid road


*** sincerely I don't know in which level this mobo will be better than my original A1200 motherboard: is fact I see this totally inferior

[Amiga1992]

The point is to have a new, more reliable, fixed modern version of the A1200 motherboard with some upgrades. And this will come to you with a warranty!

[Predseda]

And drops now obsolete and so redunant floppies

re 2: my understanding is this will be solved the same way as with C64reloaded: jack 3,5mm will just look out through the hole in the case where cinch output (left or right) normally is.

re 3: thats correct. I regret this a bit as I use PCMCIA for Squirrel as well. PCMCIA-> CF will be solved by its own card slot, Ethernet will be solved through expansion slot, but my SCSI CD-ROM is useless for this board, imo.

re 1, 4 and 6: I understand this, this is the way how standart PCs are sold normally, just built it together with equipment you really need to cut the price of the basic components.