Real Amiga portable? Humour me.

[Adrian Browne]

Have there been any projects that sufficiently redesigned and shrank say an A1200 board to the point that it might fit a portable- I know someone was musing on the idea of a MisTer handheld. Thats FPGA so technically a recreation of an amiga but...

I think I heard the FPGA Arcade board may be small enough?

Well, I guess my question is: is it technically possible to redesign and shrink real AGA hardware to make it suitable for a portable Amiga system? What options would there be? How on earth might it be accomplished or is it just plain impossible? I imagine such a thing might be quite expensive?

I suppose Individual Computers A1200 Re-loaded is such a thing but will probably not be small enough I imagine.

Re-amiga seems the closest i think but is it possible for it to be smaller?

I'm just musing but the idea of an A1200 handheld in commodore beige with an LCD screen, HDMI, USB, SD card slots, bluetooth, keyboard and mouse connectors, with six gaming buttons, dual analogue sticks + D-pad would be awesome. .

[DisasterIncarna]

FPGA's seem the best way to me tbh, i mean FPGA's simulate hardware as best they can, due to the nature of FPGA's ive never understood why someone hasnt decided, even for science to make a "boosted/improved new gen" amiga rather than just copy the original hardware, see if its possible to boost OG hardware using "new" faked FPGA hardware, even better if "new" stuff doesnt break old stuff but just improves or adds new features, the most obvious being a 1:1 copy of planar screens giving them all a chunky equivalent (i think vampires do that?), my second wish would be for it to handle file i/o faster so who known we might be able to use and abuse something like EXT4/BTRFS or similar.

I have often seen people comment that "sprites" are the amigas weakness, so an FPGA could theoretically take the old and improve to new/better. find old/original bottlenecks and use new hardware to improve pretty much everything.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

FPGA's seem the best way to me tbh, i mean FPGA's simulate hardware as best they can, due to the nature of FPGA's ive never understood why someone hasnt decided, even for science to make a "boosted/improved new gen" amiga rather than just copy the original hardware, see if its possible to boost OG hardware using "new" faked FPGA hardware, even better if "new" stuff doesnt break old stuff but just improves or adds new features, the most obvious being a 1:1 copy of planar screens giving them all a chunky equivalent (i think vampires do that?)

I think that's indeed what the Vampire's 68080 and AMMX is trying to do.

[derSammler]

even for science to make a "boosted/improved new gen" amiga rather than just copy the original hardware, see if its possible to boost OG hardware using "new" faked FPGA hardware

This all has been done. There were new-gen Amigas even before FPGA - they all failed on the market. There is the Vampire V2 that boosts OG hardware, and the V4 which is a kind-of new-gen stand-alone Amiga.

But here's the thing: anything not done for OG hardware or being completely incompatible is just a waste of time. No one wants that. If you create something new with no existing software from the outset, it will simply fail. It it's underpowered compared to a PC, it will fail. And if neither of that applies, you can still simply use a PC.

IMO, PiStorm is what becomes the next-gen Amiga. Because it's cheap, very powerful, open-source, easy to upgrade and much more. Yeah, FPGA-lovers will hate that, but biggest issue with FPGA is that the number of logic cells is limited and whatever FPGA you choose, it may not longer being made a year after. FPGA is only good for something you want to do right now, but it is not future-proof.

[dreadnought]

Vampire, PiStorm...huh. Wasn't the actual topic Amiga Portable?

Speaking of FPGAs there's Analogue Pocket which has Amiga 500 alpha core. Then there's bazillion RPi based handhelds which can run PUAE via Retroarch. And another heap of handhelds with Android. And you could probably do it on the likes of Vita and Switch too. Phones, too.

They're all limited by a) state of the emulators and b) lack of keyboard/mouse. The latter can be worked around I suppose but will always be cumbersome.

And making a Amiga-dedicated one from scratch is a pipe dream, at least for now. The costs vs the interest are just too high. maybe in the future, when a small, cheap and reasonably powerful FPGA board appears it might happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

[Dunny]

I worked for a company that made laptop Amiga 1200s back in '93. They were big, and very very expensive

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I worked for a company that made laptop Amiga 1200s back in '93. They were big, and very very expensive

Interesting.
How much battery could last?

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Interesting.
How much battery could last?

About an hour, maybe a touch less. It couldn't do low res screen modes but it did have a nice 640x512 high colour backlit LCD display which pushed the price up - I recall them being around £3,000 and that was back in '93.

Two were in Black Ash cases (we had an internal slogan - "I can't believe it's not an MFI cabinet") and one in Rosewood. Despite being the size of a bus, they were very nice.

We sold one to a travelling carpet salesman in Yorkshire, I don't know what happened to the other two.

[Adrian Browne]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Vampire, PiStorm...huh. Wasn't the actual topic Amiga Portable?

Speaking of FPGAs there's Analogue Pocket which has Amiga 500 alpha core. Then there's bazillion RPi based handhelds which can run PUAE via Retroarch. And another heap of handhelds with Android. And you could probably do it on the likes of Vita and Switch too. Phones, too.

They're all limited by a) state of the emulators and b) lack of keyboard/mouse. The latter can be worked around I suppose but will always be cumbersome.

And making a Amiga-dedicated one from scratch is a pipe dream, at least for now. The costs vs the interest are just too high. maybe in the future, when a small, cheap and reasonably powerful FPGA board appears it might happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

So probably FPGA is theoretically a possibility for an Amiga handheld? I imagine shrinking and redesigning an actual A1200 or A500 board would be costly. An amiga handheld with a docking station with keyboard and mouse ports- that would be cool.

Its probably easy enough for some chinese manufacturer to build an Amiga themed handheld with off the shelf parts, running emulated software. But that would not be all that exciting.

[SkulleateR]

Why not just use an existing FPGA Design like the Minimig ?

It´s 170x170mm ... should be small enough for a portable AND (if you wish) it can also be equipped with a PiStorm

https://www.minimig.ca

Or an UnAmiga but this is for building into a real A500 case, so probably too big ...

[ant512]

Analogue Pocket has an AGA Amiga core for its OpenFPGA system. If you have a dock you can connect a USB keyboard, mouse and HDMI display.

https://github.com/Mazamars312/Analogue-Amiga

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by Dunny

About an hour, maybe a touch less. It couldn't do low res screen modes but it did have a nice 640x512 high colour backlit LCD display which pushed the price up - I recall them being around £3,000 and that was back in '93.

Two were in Black Ash cases (we had an internal slogan - "I can't believe it's not an MFI cabinet") and one in Rosewood. Despite being the size of a bus, they were very nice.

We sold one to a travelling carpet salesman in Yorkshire, I don't know what happened to the other two.

Very good. You had me for a minute there.

[Minuous]

As we have gone from several hundred nm to about 2 nm process in that time, die shrink of the AGA chips (or other chips from the same period) to modern standards would shrink them about 99% on each axis, therefore they would be about 1/10,000th the original size.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Dunny

About an hour, maybe a touch less. It couldn't do low res screen modes but it did have a nice 640x512 high colour backlit LCD display which pushed the price up - I recall them being around £3,000 and that was back in '93.

Two were in Black Ash cases (we had an internal slogan - "I can't believe it's not an MFI cabinet") and one in Rosewood. Despite being the size of a bus, they were very nice.

We sold one to a travelling carpet salesman in Yorkshire, I don't know what happened to the other two.

Thanks...

Ahh.. too bad you didn't purchased one yourself... imagine today's prices on such rare retro comp...

[BigD]

The Suzanne A600 project seemed the best portable Amiga and even had a CD-Rom drive!

[Adrian Browne]

Originally Posted by SkulleateR

Why not just use an existing FPGA Design like the Minimig ?

It´s 170x170mm ... should be small enough for a portable AND (if you wish) it can also be equipped with a PiStorm

https://www.minimig.ca

Or an UnAmiga but this is for building into a real A500 case, so probably too big ...

That might be a viable option then. Not that I would have a clue how to do such a thing but it might be a cool product

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by rare_j

Very good. You had me for a minute there.

Dunno about that, it's 100% true - Applied Systems & Peripherals, from Elsham Wold industrial estate in North Lincolnshire. They also made a few other products - saw at least two genlocks come out of that company while I was there.

I made demo production disks that we sent out to potential customers - kinda like scene demos but which featured the products. I'd love to get my hands on some of those disks but I'm afraid they're gone now.

[StevenJGore]

Why not just use a Windows laptop that boots straight into WinUAE? No less or more of an Amiga than replicating one with FPGA. And at least it would be much more future proof and you could do other (non-Amiga) things with it.

[alexh]

The only real Amiga portable I've ever seen IRL was the Suzanne by Simon Archer (Rigo)

http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/suzanne.html

Which was an Amiga 600 + 020 with a custom built laptop case.

https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-...e/n31/mode/2up

[Locutus]

I'd imagine that if you really want to, it's probably doable by making a custom board design that fits the MNT Reform case (from the same developer as the Z9000 RTG cards!).