New Universal Agnus 8372, 75 etc

[QuikSanz]

Nice, looks like now is a good time to refurbish the good old A2000!!

Chris

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

But still - my point wasn't about PC market but gaming consoles of which whole gen5 (starting with 3DO and Jaguar in 93)

3DO

The 3DO was awarded Worst Console Launch of 1993 by Electronic Gaming Monthly... Citing a lack of decent exclusives and an "astronomical asking price", in 2009 video game website IGN chose the 3DO as its 22nd greatest video game console of all time, slightly higher than the Atari Jaguar but lower than its four other major competitors...

Gaming retrospectives have also accused the 3DO of having an abundance of poor quality interactive movies. Trip Hawkins' business model for selling the 3DO was widely derided by industry figures...

The 3DO Company designed a next-generation console that was never released due to various business and technological issues...

The 3DO hardware itself was designed by Dave Needle and R. J. Mical (designers of the Amiga...

Good hardware design, too expensive, bad marketing. Sound familiar?

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Promilus

It's easy to verify. There's something called PC Mag - that was pretty damn big magazine and released monthly. There are scans on google books. It takes one look to verify what kind of configurations WERE available BACK IN 1992/93.
You don't believe me? Here you go
https://books.google.pl/books?id=LIy...page&q&f=false
Page 165 and downwards might, just might enlighten some about what PC world actually had to offer back then when it comes to VGA card. And magazine itself is filled with ads of 486 based systems.
Who's the liar now?

lol - you are hilarious - 486 was available but at a price way higher than 386.
you can't ignore two things - something need be designed in advance to be produced and later available on market so 1 year difference is huge amount of time when comparing products (it is more appropriate to check available config for 1991/1992 than one year later).
second thing is also important - most of listed VGA/SVGA chips doesn't support any HW acceleration (except linear addressing), they are more primitive than old uPD7220 - some PGC/IBM 8514 successors (ATI MACH, S3) are equipped with HW acceleration but still they popularity is limited (limited software usage of the HW acceleration) - those chips are used mostly as framebuffer - there is limited number of drivers (mostly Windows and AutoCAD, sometimes other DOS software like editors, spreadsheet etc).
For many PC users those cards are simply not different than plain VGA/SVGA.
So graphic performance is limited by CPU and bus type... this is completely opposite to Amiga where you get HW acceleration supported in each software you can imagine just out of the box (perhaps except poorly migrated multiplatform titles).
In fact PC software doesn't use HW acceleration so widely until Windows 95... where WinG/DirectX begin to be truly popular.

[utri007]

It is nice that they have made this possible, but only important question is "when I can buy one?".

[QuikSanz]

Hell, I'll take the whole set, can't find the pic but "Take My Money"....

Chris

[nonarkitten]

Originally Posted by quiksanz

hell, i'll take the whole set, can't find the pic but "take my money"....

Chris

lol

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by nonarkitten

What could be done with Willoe alone:
- 16MB chip RAM (2MB addressable from 68K); this could allow Workbench, for example, to have it's screen not take any of the critical base 2MB
- 2x and 4x Blitter speed and Copper prefetch (non blocking)
- Note that the 3000 will use real chip RAM for the base 2MB and will need upgrading to 70ns FPM to support 2x and 4x AGA fetch modes

What could be done with Willoe and Xander (A500/A2000):
- up to 8MB of chip RAM addressable from 68K
- non-blocking CPU cycles for up-to double the CPU bandwidth

What could be done with Willoe and Faith (A500/A2000/A3000):
- AGA 2x and 4x display modes, double playfield and HAM8
- possible side-banding up to 50% of bitplane DMA freeing more cycles
- integrated scan doubler for VGA output

What could be done with Willoe and Harmonie (A500/A2000/A3000):
- Paula 2x and 4x audio and disk speeds
- Support for HD floppy speeds (60kbps)
- Support for either 112kHz 8-bit or 56kHz 16-bit audio

So should someone build something like A500++ (or just remove original chips from A500/A500+) and place all Buffee sidekicks on it it would end up being AGA-like machine but with bigger chipram?

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by nonarkitten

AGA was not so bad when you fairly compare it to contemporary hardware.

Doing a bit of game dev on AGA at the moment, and currently I am a bit excited how crazy good AGA games can look, if you put a bit of work into it (which you always have to do when creating games on the Amiga that don't look like shit).

If they only put out the 1200 a year or two earlier and had a few good devs really put its resources to good use...

On topic, I really love what you are doing here. Feels more Amiga to me than putting in a card that does RTG and a fast CPU.

YMMV off course.

No chance of this coming to the A600 I guess?
Would so love to have an AGA capable 600 sitting on my table.

[QuikSanz]

Originally Posted by Promilus

So should someone build something like A500++ (or just remove original chips from A500/A500+) and place all Buffee sidekicks on it it would end up being AGA-like machine but with bigger chipram?

Looks as it would be a bit better than a stock A1200. and you have not even added a good 030/50 accelerator on it yet!


Chris

[nonarkitten]

Originally Posted by Promilus

So should someone build something like A500++ (or just remove original chips from A500/A500+) and place all Buffee sidekicks on it it would end up being AGA-like machine but with bigger chipram?

Mostly, it's not 100% simply because we can't magically give CPUs a 32-bit bus to chip RAM. The 3000 will probably be the MOST compatible because of this. So there are a couple of shortcomings and some bonuses. In a nutshell, CPU access will be a little worse, but chip access will be a lot better and we're hoping that the balance of this provides good compatibility.

[nonarkitten]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

Doing a bit of game dev on AGA at the moment, and currently I am a bit excited how crazy good AGA games can look, if you put a bit of work into it (which you always have to do when creating games on the Amiga that don't look like shit).

So many users judged AGA based on what was released -- often just 2MB ECS games with maybe a slight tweak. We didn't start seeing real AGA games until the CD32 like Guardian AGA which is mind-blowing, and had Commodore given developers some advance knowledge (or even beta AGA hardware) and disclosed how it worked, maybe we'd have been more impressed back then as well.

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

If they only put out the 1200 a year or two earlier and had a few good devs really put its resources to good use...

Commodore hated AGA. Management wanted AAA. The engineers wanted AAA. But it wasn't compatible, it was buggy and they were a long ways off from having their "Amiga on a chip" that would be there for compatibility. AGA was a stop gap and they could not stop insisting this. It wasn't until years later that we got a data dump and finally knew how it worked.

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

On topic, I really love what you are doing here. Feels more Amiga to me than putting in a card that does RTG and a fast CPU.

YMMV off course.

I would agree.

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

No chance of this coming to the A600 I guess?
Would so love to have an AGA capable 600 sitting on my table.

Never say never. We're testing our PLCC process with Willoe first. I don't know if anyone's made a ReAmiga 600 yet and since nothing socketed, you'd have to be comfortable desoldering chips. But it's not impossible.

Our general plan is:
1. get drop-in ECS compatibility working first, this should allow any combination of Agnus, Denise and Paula to work with Willoe, Faith or Harmonie with zero compatibility issues
2. add in the 2x and 4x prefectch modes with compatible chips so get Willoe-to-Faith communication working at 2x and 4x; get Willoe-to-Paula-and-back communication working at 2x and 4x; this will remain at ECS feature level though and should still work as drop-in replacements for any chip combination
3. add in AGA compatiblity; wide-sprites, HAM8, etc

Since I made a sort of "universal" DIP board, this design can be easily adapted to any DIP 48, 40 or 28 chip, so we're also planning on making ROMs with in-system reprogramming, 6502's, CIA chips, etc. Some of this may be in parallel, some may not.

Adapting this to a smaller PLCC-52 footprint is easy. One of the great things about our design is that there are no series-resistors or level shifters eating up board space. Basically, drop in a two-channel regulator, some capacitors and we're good.

[nonarkitten]

Originally Posted by QuikSanz

Looks as it would be a bit better than a stock A1200. and you have not even added a good 030/50 accelerator on it yet!

Chris

On 16-bit machines, the CPU will have less bandwidth than AGA does but the chipset will have more, so be sure to disable FBLIT like extensions.

[QuikSanz]

Does the new memory nudge into Zorro 8 meg space, I only use 4 meg max anyway but curious. I know nothing about the addressing here.

Chris

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by nonarkitten

So many users judged AGA based on what was released -- often just 2MB ECS games with maybe a slight tweak. We didn't start seeing real AGA games until the CD32 like Guardian AGA which is mind-blowing, and had Commodore given developers some advance knowledge (or even beta AGA hardware) and disclosed how it worked, maybe we'd have been more impressed back then as well.


Commodore hated AGA. Management wanted AAA. The engineers wanted AAA. But it wasn't compatible, it was buggy and they were a long ways off from having their "Amiga on a chip" that would be there for compatibility. AGA was a stop gap and they could not stop insisting this. It wasn't until years later that we got a data dump and finally knew how it worked.


I would agree.


Never say never. We're testing our PLCC process with Willoe first. I don't know if anyone's made a ReAmiga 600 yet and since nothing socketed, you'd have to be comfortable desoldering chips. But it's not impossible.

Our general plan is:
1. get drop-in ECS compatibility working first, this should allow any combination of Agnus, Denise and Paula to work with Willoe, Faith or Harmonie with zero compatibility issues
2. add in the 2x and 4x prefectch modes with compatible chips so get Willoe-to-Faith communication working at 2x and 4x; get Willoe-to-Paula-and-back communication working at 2x and 4x; this will remain at ECS feature level though and should still work as drop-in replacements for any chip combination
3. add in AGA compatiblity; wide-sprites, HAM8, etc

Since I made a sort of "universal" DIP board, this design can be easily adapted to any DIP 48, 40 or 28 chip, so we're also planning on making ROMs with in-system reprogramming, 6502's, CIA chips, etc. Some of this may be in parallel, some may not.

Adapting this to a smaller PLCC-52 footprint is easy. One of the great things about our design is that there are no series-resistors or level shifters eating up board space. Basically, drop in a two-channel regulator, some capacitors and we're good.

Sounds amazing. Thanks for your great work...

[nonarkitten]

Originally Posted by QuikSanz

Does the new memory nudge into Zorro 8 meg space, I only use 4 meg max anyway but curious. I know nothing about the addressing here.

Chris

We plan to have Willoe address 16MB regardless and all of this is "DMA-able", that is, it can be read or written by any of the custom chips. It is useable for video, blitter objects, sprites, audio samples, disk buffers, etc., but only the first 2MB or less is directly accessible by the CPU.

If you install Xander, then you can have up to 2MB on all systems. If you then enable 4MB or 8MB of chip, then yes, that would cut into Zorro RAM as chip RAM is always contiguous (e.g., all 8MB would need $000000 to $7FFFFF).

[AJCopland]

Jeroen Vandezande of the Blegian Amiga CLub has done a socketed version of the A1200
https://www.amigaclub.be/projects/amiga1200plus

Would it be practical to do versions of these chips and do 32-bit/AGA chip replacements from them?

Or another idea, would it be possible to do 32-bit versions of these and build a replica A1200 board from them?

Not asking you to do that btw, just curious.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by nonarkitten

Mostly, it's not 100% simply because we can't magically give CPUs a 32-bit bus to chip RAM. The 3000 will probably be the MOST compatible because of this. So there are a couple of shortcomings and some bonuses. In a nutshell, CPU access will be a little worse, but chip access will be a lot better and we're hoping that the balance of this provides good compatibility.

Luckily I have got two A3000s
Really looking forward to putting a full set of replacements in at least one of them!

by the way: How will this play out with Amber?
I guess it will be obsolete and there will be some breakout on Faith itself?
Or could we replace Amber with some better version as well? (thinking of Graffiti, HAM-E, DCTV functionality ...)

[CrashMidnick]

Sorry if I missred something or for my ignorance, but where are we in the development of this project (Willoe) ? Beginning, middle or close to the end ? I cannot find the info.

Congratulations for this project that I will foloow for sure.

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by CrashMidnick

Sorry if I missred something or for my ignorance, but where are we in the development of this project (Willoe) ? Beginning, middle or close to the end ? I cannot find the info.

Congratulations for this project that I will foloow for sure.

Willoe is built, code is being worked on, Nonarkitten is better to give an approximation of completion. The Willow project is intertwined with some other projects.

Here is info on Faith... http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...30#post1565930

Originally Posted by AJCopland

Jeroen Vandezande of the Blegian Amiga CLub has done a socketed version of the A1200
https://www.amigaclub.be/projects/amiga1200plus

Would it be practical to do versions of these chips and do 32-bit/AGA chip replacements from them?

Or another idea, would it be possible to do 32-bit versions of these and build a replica A1200 board from them?

Not asking you to do that btw, just curious.

The big thing is the existance of the code, if the code is available/workable then the possibilities are there. Nonarkitten is the one to give a definitive answer

[Niklas]

Originally Posted by kipper2k

Willoe is built

If the board that has been built is based on this schematic then it is missing a PLL, which is probably needed for the logic to work (I pointed this out to nonarkitten earlier).