Amiga Custom Chips

[whitebird]

Hi all,

Where can find information about amiga custom chips internals??

Where are all those commodore plans and schematics? Are they available to public or still copyrighted and kept in a secret place?

Thanx

[Ultron]

AFAIR the AGA chipset was never even fully documented\released. The others were (still had some undocumented 'features' though), devs had them back then, these days i don't know. Hopefully someone will help.

[Toni Wilen]

There is no internal custom chip documentation. (it was lost or hidden somewhere..)

[whitebird]

OK, thanks

And what about asking the guys developing and maintaining winuae.

The answer is in knowing how the emulation is done. Is it a custom chip level emulation or only a behavioral emulation??...

[alexh]

Originally Posted by whitebird

what about asking the guys developing and maintaining winuae.

Tony (see above) IS that person

The answer is in knowing how the emulation is done.

Out of curiosity, why would YOU want to know?

Is it a custom chip level emulation or only a behavioral emulation??...

Your sentance makes no real sense. What is "custom chip level"?

WinUAE is a "behavioral" emulation, not all busses, clocks, enables etc. that exist in the real Amiga are emulated. But it does have some sections which are both bit wise and cycle accurate.

[whitebird]

Oh I am sorry, I wrote you an email Toni asking you the same question but I have not realised you gave me an answer through this thread.

I don't really want to know the way winuae works. It was simply a personnal idea that the coders may have a very good knowledge of the Custom chips to emulate a real amiga so accurately..

Your sentance makes no real sense. What is "custom chip level"?

Yes the sentence is not very clever but your comprehension is good alexh and you gave me a satisfying answer.

By custom chip level emulation I mean an implementation of the amiga close to the hardware structure...

Is there some documentation describing the custom chips in terms of interface (it doesn't matter if it doesn't describe the internal architecture)


PS: many thanks for your job on winuae Toni. I am using it since 6 years and I am very impressed how accurately the feeling of a real amiga is reproduced. I mainly use it on my TV, I get very smooth scrollings.
I don't want to start a discussion on winuae here but most of the games work fine. I have some problems with jim power. I don't know why but this game works only fine on an amiga 500. When I try it on my 500+ the title music plays slower compared to the 500.

Whitebird

[alexh]

Is there some documentation describing the custom chips in terms of interface (it doesn't matter if it doesn't describe the internal architecture)

The Pinouts of the Amiga chips are available from the Aminet.

If you think that you are going to take on the likes of Dennis "MiniMig" van Weerden or Jens "clone A" Schoenfeld I would think again if I were you unless you have a lot of spare time.

[Ultron]

Hopefully their reverse engeneering progresses will make it back as emulation knowledge.

It'd be a great breakthrough if the Amiga500\1200 custom chip architecture came out of the woodworks though.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Ultron

It'd be a great breakthrough if the Amiga500\1200 custom chip architecture came out of the woodworks though.

I dont think you are giving the UAE guys enough credit. They've done 95% of the work in discovering the chip architecture and behaviour. Years of experimentation and intelligent guessing.

[whitebird]

Is Dennis project still only A500 or did he start to implment AGA??

[kriz]

He`s not going to do Aga, but its going to be open source.. So maybe some other brave soul does some Aga support

[alexh]

Originally Posted by kriz

its going to be open source..

I will believe it when I see it. Minimig represents a large amount of Dennis time and so has a relatively large market value. If I were him I wouldnt be releasing it so soon. Only after I had decided not to work on it any longer.

So maybe some other brave soul does some Aga support

I would happily donate some of my time if there were other participants. Once I've converted the source to VHDL that is

[kriz]

He said so on a Amiga show just recently, was BB4..

This is his word btw And good for sharing, sharing is caring.

[whitebird]

I would happily donate some of my time

Me too, but at this time I have not enough knowledge of the amiga architecture because of lack of documents.