Amiga on a Chip Project

[Amigan123]

This would have been amazing, amiga hardware emulated on a single chip but was cancelled

[ Show youtube player ]

Maybe somebody could resurrect it, with current technology a small box with usb port for mouse, keyboard and xbox controller, external hdd, hdmi video and sound and an sd card reader for loading .adf images it would be awsome.

[hattig]

Luckily Minimig came along, and since then FPGA Arcade and other systems like MIST are being developed.

Not quite a single chip ASIC... but a bit more reconfigurable. I don't think we'll ever see an ASIC reimplementation of the Amiga though, best make use of the FPGA solutions.

[alexh]

It would have been significantly cheaper than MiniMig, MiST or FPGAArcade sort of in the $20 region.

But it wouldn't have been anywhere near as flexible.

Today you can run UAE on a Raspberry Pi for $35 which is not too bad a price.

UAE running at 50Hz on a TV looks much better than UAE on a desktop computer using a 60MHz Monitor.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Amigan123

This would have been amazing, amiga hardware emulated on a single chip but was cancelled

[ Show youtube player ]

Maybe somebody could resurrect it, with current technology a small box with usb port for mouse, keyboard and xbox controller, external hdd, hdmi video and sound and an sd card reader for loading .adf images it would be awsome.

IMHO you should cool down - at first there is few projects with Amiga emulation on a chip - MINIMIG for example (or Jens Clone-A).

I've watched this movie many times some time ago and i must say after this i doubt that she was even close to emulate Amiga chips - look at her development board - around 60 perhaps slightly more lines connected to Amiga board - perhaps enough to emulate Agnus but where is Denise and Paula?, where is Gary and CIA's?
Probably she started some things around Amiga but that's all.

Perhaps im wrong but knowing how frequently she misname circuits/techniques (e.g. DDS vs Wavetable, PWM vs Delta-Sigma) i don't believe in this movie.
Also seem that Commodore lost documentation to Amiga chipset (thus it can be quite strange that someone give her lost plans) but proto Amiga was made on PAL's and TTL's so those plans look like hand draw fusemap's in PAL's so perhaps they are real.
Anyway im with huge reserve to her claims...

[majsta]

@pandy71 I must agree with everything you said.

I followed her work and send message to her with some specific questions and didn't get reply. I know for a fact that she answered number of mails to people giving support for hers projects and asking simple questions. I asked specific questions regarding that project Amiga on Chip so maybe that was too much for her to admit that he didn't do much. Anyway i don't think that there is something special in connecting some DEV board to some bus. After seeing her other projects, for example, C64 in joystick I realized that there were others people involved there. They separated project and each team member get his part to work on. So she didn't start or finish project alone. Another thing, there was such interest for creating that device and money support so it was hard for me to believe that this project was canceled due to lack of interest especially if people from Amiga community was there to provide documentations. In other hand why do you need any "real" documentations those days if you have A500 schematics and logic analyzers. It seems to me that people like mysteries just like she would be able to bring something totally modern and innovative. In my opinion best thing happened to amiga scene for past 10 years is minimig, you have everything there opensourced so if you want you can start creating much, much better Amiga in a Chip that she would ever done. Why she even bother publishing this video, so what if there is no interest in the project, something you start you need to finish or you don't start at all. One more strange thing is that FPGA she used, there is no way that this little FPGA can emulate complete Amiga chipset. There is simply not enough LE, and still need space for MC68K. If i can see well this FPGA can have no more than 8000LE and minimig for DE boards can take up to 22 000LE so here you have something to think how real this project was.

[desiv]

Haters gotta hate...

Oh well, would have been an interesting product, but didn't happen...

desiv

[majsta]

Originally Posted by desiv

Haters gotta hate...
desiv

Are you referring to me ?

I simply stated what I see on the video. It is possible that she placed custom chips on the development board and then rerouted them in FPGA. That should take few lines of the code but for me seeing that custom chips are present in development board makes me wonder are they emulated at all. Don't get me wrong I admire hers work, but lets face it this FPGA can't be used for this. For C64 can but here we are in situation that this FPGA just don't have enough LE for anything. This could be impressive to someone who didn't worked with FPGA but believe me this is nothing special.

[modrobert]

...these wires are broken off here so there is not a chance this is ever gonna work again.

[chaos]

It is possible she used more than one FPGA - like one FPGA for one custom chip replacement. Plus, the whole custom chipset probably isn't much larger than 8kLE, of course if you don't include the 68k CPU.

Minimig has a lot of special features added that weren't present it the original custom chips. Plus, since the minimig design is based on guesses at what the custom chips actually do inside, it is possible it uses (a lot?) more gates than the original design. Obviously, if you take into consideration when the Amiga custom chips were made, and that they were hand-drawn, 8kLEs (which could be as much as two to three times as much ASIC gates - so ~20k gates) starts to sound quite a lot .

So the custom chips design prints could still be useful to see what some of them are actually doing inside, like what kind of pipelining, if any, is used inside, etc.

Do have to admit, I like Jeri and her work

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by chaos

Do have to admit, I like Jeri and her work

No one says something else - i like her - she is nice person, attractive girl, very positive due of being female which is uncommon for electronics - probably her popularity is related highly to this that she is a SHE not HE - but as expressed this majsta - everyone who at least trying to do something with FPGA realize that this is a bit trickier than hookup few tens wires to board. I think that perhaps dev board act as logic analyzer (SignalTap) - this is fine for me, perhaps as basic state machine with some Agnus capabilities (Agnus not present in socket), OK but defintelly this is not eneough to emulate each chip. Ask Jens about estimated FPGA requirements - Clone-A seem to be cycle exact replica for Amiga chips thus this should be very close to schematics and will provide quite correct figures.

MC68000 is different example - MC68k is approx 68000 transistors but why on FPGA this softcore use more than few hundred thousands transistor? FPGA have different architecture - some block are not fully utilized etc. There are even online available patents (
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4325121.pdf http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4296469.pdf http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4307445.pdf
) with quasi detailed fuse maps for PLA used in MC68000 but i doubt that they help reduce size of used LE in FPGA.

And yes - i agree - Minimig is probably large due of reimplementation HW form SW point of view - probably far from being efficient but still it works more or less OK ans can be used as Amiga alternative for all users without real Amiga.

What i expect is FPGA cycle exact replica, with new features added to OCS/ECS/AGA chips, with SDRAM used where classic transfers are use only fraction of a time and CHIP is available fully in almost independent way, with some new features like different data organization, perhaps some multimedia acceleration etc etc etc

[Loedown]

Has anyone thought to ask for photocopies of those hand drawn schematics?

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Loedown

Has anyone thought to ask for photocopies of those hand drawn schematics?

Yes, i've asked her directly under movie (comment) also as this movie return as a kind of ping-pong in Amiga world, some other people asked her and they also report that no reply from her side.

[midway]

I know a few people who know her, she was more into the 64 scene here in portland. Maybe I can get them through a friend ?

She shows up once in a while during Vancouver Commodore retro meetings, but I wont be there for much longer. Too bad the Amiga has not many active people here in the northwest besides hoarders.....

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by alexh

UAE running at 50Hz on a TV looks much better than UAE on a desktop computer using a 60MHz Monitor.

I'm sure it does, but how is the scrolling? Not perfect I'm guessing.

[TCD]

That's what V-Sync is for. Don't know about 'perfect', but you won't see any tearing if it's properly configured.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by pandy71

IMHO you should cool down - at first there is few projects with Amiga emulation on a chip - MINIMIG for example (or Jens Clone-A).

I've watched this movie many times some time ago and i must say after this i doubt that she was even close to emulate Amiga chips - look at her development board - around 60 perhaps slightly more lines connected to Amiga board - perhaps enough to emulate Agnus but where is Denise and Paula?, where is Gary and CIA's?
Probably she started some things around Amiga but that's all.

Perhaps im wrong but knowing how frequently she misname circuits/techniques (e.g. DDS vs Wavetable, PWM vs Delta-Sigma) i don't believe in this movie.
Also seem that Commodore lost documentation to Amiga chipset (thus it can be quite strange that someone give her lost plans) but proto Amiga was made on PAL's and TTL's so those plans look like hand draw fusemap's in PAL's so perhaps they are real.
Anyway im with huge reserve to her claims...

You sir are wrong, and a bit of a wally if you don't think Jeri Ellsworth was either telling the truth or capable of doing this to 100% completion whilst being funded by the C64DTV makers(I think it was their project). You do realise she pretty much invented the C64DTV, the most complex of 20$ system in a joystick emulators ever made. So if my friend Jeri says she was working on it as a follow up project to the C64DTV joystick then you should weep into your tesco value meal for one mate at the loss.

Minimig is OK but WTF would I want an Amiga 500 or 1200 FPGA board that costs almost as much as an Amiga 4000/030 on ebay? Why? If Mike would get venture capital and make 10,000 at once to drop the price to something beyond the minority obscurity type thing that would be great.

Getting the Amiga into an ASIC based system on a chip and inside a $30 joystick would have been amazing for our community. She added CPU burst modes and 256 colour modes to the C64 still keeping the system compatible on those parts of the emulation....just think what she could have done for Amiga....chunky mode/converter? Dual Paula (4 channels is shit sorry, Commodore dropped the ball on that on AGA) or even triple speed 68k burst mode.

She's a true genius and yet has been so unlucky in companies she has ended up working with. A true waste of talent sitting there when stuff like the C64DTV/AmigaDTV should still be on shop shelves NOW.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

You sir are wrong, and a bit of a wally if you don't think Jeri Ellsworth was either telling the truth or capable of doing this to 100% completion whilst being funded by the C64DTV makers(I think it was their project). You do realise she pretty much invented the C64DTV, the most complex of 20$ system in a joystick emulators ever made. So if my friend Jeri says she was working on it as a follow up project to the C64DTV joystick then you should weep into your tesco value meal for one mate at the loss.

I've read all history behind C64DTV - some people complaint on Jeri but this is completely irrelevant in this topic - C64DTV is something else than Amiga.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Minimig is OK but WTF would I want an Amiga 500 or 1200 FPGA board that costs almost as much as an Amiga 4000/030 on ebay? Why? If Mike would get venture capital and make 10,000 at once to drop the price to something beyond the minority obscurity type thing that would be great.

Minimig exist, core was offered freely to comunity by Dennis van Weeren and this end all - you can buy Minimig or you can use Minimig core on your FPGA board - FPGA are always more expensive than ASIC's.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Getting the Amiga into an ASIC based system on a chip and inside a $30 joystick would have been amazing for our community. She added CPU burst modes and 256 colour modes to the C64 still keeping the system compatible on those parts of the emulation....just think what she could have done for Amiga....chunky mode/converter? Dual Paula (4 channels is shit sorry, Commodore dropped the ball on that on AGA) or even triple speed 68k burst mode.

Those things can be added to Minimig too - there is nothing against having those features on FPGA - more important - HW can evolve with FPGA, ASIC are fixed. There is Akiko as chunky to planar but better is simply support chunky and packed pixels structures directly on chip, this can be done, you can add DDR interface, you can have truecolor, you can have DSP, you can have more audio channels (but PC have only 2 audio channels and is fine with this). you can for example do HW channel combining, add panorama register (ie locate freely each audio channel between Left and Right thus no longer fixed channel allocation) - all thoise things are easy to implemented in fashion fully compatible with OCS/ECS/AGA, you can have second video controller (modern one) and combine old graphics on this new (by overlay or by HW blit). You can have much faster 68K (look at Majsta with his project, look at FrenchShark,).

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

She's a true genius and yet has been so unlucky in companies she has ended up working with. A true waste of talent sitting there when stuff like the C64DTV/AmigaDTV should still be on shop shelves NOW.

She is very nice person, pretty women, she is a positive celebrity that promote electronics but definitely there is more true genius in Amiga community - there is Jens Schoenfeld with Clone-A for example - project that can be turn to ASIC, there is Yaqube with his knowledge about Amiga, we Have Toni Wilen - we have more genius guys - but for today we have Minimig and we have other projects not just video on YT.
And we must life with this.

So please understand - Amiga community experienced in the past many promises - Hombre, Caipirinha etc - we are tired and bored with false statements.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by pandy71

She is very nice person, pretty women, she is a positive celebrity that promote electronics but definitely there is more true genius in Amiga community.

Interesting statement..
Maybe it's a communication issue. I'm not sure one can say there is "more" genius without objectively checking genius levels... The word "more" implies a comparison of something.

We can say that Jeri is apparently very talented, and there are some other incredibly talented people in the Amiga community....

I'm not sure what being "a pretty woman" has to do with the conversation tho..
Are you saying something comparatively about the looks of Jens or Toni or Yaqube????

desiv

[SS454]

Originally Posted by pandy71

No one says something else - i like her - she is nice person, attractive girl, very positive due of being female which is uncommon for electronics -

Weird that you mention you fancy her before you mention what she's actually good at.

Next time Jens gets mentioned I'll have to make it clear I think he's probably got a firm arse before I mention his products.

[Scyphe]

I'd love to see someone use David Haynie's released design documents and pdf's for the AAA chipset and create a backwards compatible AAA-daughterboards that you could simply slot on like the new AGA Indivision cards.

Or perhaps even build Haynie's Acutiator design motherboard (Acutiator was basically a revolution that ended with C='s bankruptcy) with support for modern buses (PCI, PCIe) since it was completely modular and different from any Amiga up to A4000T.

Oh well... Dreams will stay dreams. Imagine if Haynie and his team had managed to get the hardware finalized, put together and offered as a 3-level solution (ie. low-end, mid-end and high-end machines all based on the Acutiator design). Things might've looked very different today. C= might have had a share as big as Apple or better. Since the Acutiator design was so modular it was entirely possible to add PCI (to run the same cards that came for the PC).

AmigaFX, low-end solution, with a 3dfx Voodoo connected to the AAA-chipset, proper audio DSP etc.?? AmigaOS 4 in 1996.

Dreams....