Great news!

Quote:

which will demonstrate the compatibility of Clone-A to a real Amiga

i like that.. they seem rather sure that this product is very compatible with an A500.

Quote:

Clone-A will ultimately be put into a single low-cost chip, which can be used in a laptop or desktop computer, but also in smaller mobile units and toys

This also sounds Very interesting. beeing able to put Amiga compatibility into almost Anything. how about a small handheld gaming console with all your favorite Amiga500 compatible games in a neat flash card with floppy emulation

_________________

How many of the chips demonstrated will be clones?
How many will be original CBM chips?

Minimig has no PAR: and is therefore incapable of playing the wide selection of 4-player Amiga games. Has this deficiency been rectified in Clone-A?

_________________
Wanna try a wonderfull magical Amiga strategy game?
Total Chaos AGA

Minimig has nothing to do with Clone-A...
Why do you assume the latter would have the same problem?

Is AGA also in development for say "Clone-AGA" ?

All Commodore chips of the demonstrated machine will be clones: CIAs, Paula, Gary, Agnus, Denise. The CPU will be an original Motorola. The final chip will also include AGA, but that's the step after next. The current plan includes a major demonstration every quarter with prize money/goods for any incompatible software that someone discovers. We might be able to sell the first FPGA-based units late summer 2007. If you're good at beta-besting and finding/writing software that discovers incompatibilities, the prize money could pay your Clone-A board!

The parallel port of Clone-A works, so 4-player games can be played.

Jens Schönfeld

How good is Clone-A at running demos?

_________________
A.miga D.emoscene A.rchive

Clone-A is currently being tested with Scene-demos, as that's the more complicated software. Games are boring, we can't find any that don't work

Sanity's Arte and Hardwired work fine, just to mention two of my favourites. Just in case you wonder: It's already much better than UAE. There are many flaws in UAE that you won't find in Clone-A. Come to Aachen and see for yourself! If you have a program, demo or game that you think is critical to the Amiga chipset, it'll be fun to see it work (or not work?) on Clone-A.

Jens Schönfeld

Quote:

The parallel port of Clone-A works, so 4-player games can be played.

Yahoooo!!!!

_________________
Wanna try a wonderfull magical Amiga strategy game?
Total Chaos AGA

@Jens

Can I ask a potentially stupid question?

Does the user need to provide a kickstart ROM image to use the Clone A, or does it include one? (Or does it not need one?)

If it includes one, doesn't it need to be licensed from AInc?

Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere.

EDIT: Forgot to say that the Clone A sounds like a fantastic project!

Last edited by Gleng on 09-Mar-2007 at 04:09 PM.

_________________

Bump

This is a very good question that deserves an answer!

Last edited by ferrels on 09-Mar-2007 at 04:58 PM.
Last edited by ferrels on 09-Mar-2007 at 04:50 PM.

The kickstart needs licensing, of course. AInc is already informed, and they are very cooperative. However, while no deal has been signed, I cannot give you any details. The FPGA-based versions will most probably come with a special rom that aims at developers and is 100% our intellectual property: A rom that has a 68K assembler and machine language monitor included, and has the possibility to load kickstart images from a mass-storage device. Most games can be loaded with this rom, but the workbench won't work with it.

I'm already giving way more information than I should... just wait for the first thing that you can buy

Jens

Sounds great! I look forward to it.

_________________

Hello!

First, congratulations!

I didn't think this would see the light before minimig but here we are!

Second, do I read this right that you will license chip sets out to hardware developers, hackers and nutters!

I'm still puzzled about the impact/idea/future this product has.

For example, let's say that i really would love an A500 compatible "thing" which supports modern standard mass storage device (hd's, usb keys, cd's) and which i can hook up to a modern flatscreen monitor. Let's say that i want to store tons of demoscene material on it and be able to play music modules, view pictures, run demos,... on that device.

Would that be possible?

Any estimate on when the first device would be on-sale?

_________________
A.miga D.emoscene A.rchive

I can't give any release dates yet, but we're facing a 12-month period of semiconductor development. The contractor that I'm currently talking to has a new 0.35um process in the making that will be up and running in 2008 - since semiconductor development cannot begin before the design has been finalized, we're way more than one year away from the so-called "tape rollout" (semiconductors in our hands).

As I mentioned earlier, we'll make FPGA-based boards that will be sold to customers just like normal mainboards. These FPGA-based boards can be updated easily, so whenever we're fixing a bug or whenever we're adding an AGA feature, you will be able to check that immediately after downloading and installing the update.

And yes, I'm planning to sell chips to whoever wants to make his own appliance with it. Plan for a single-supply 3.3V device in 144-pin TQFP package and reserve some space on it's side for a 54-pin SD-Ram chip and a serial flash. Quantities above 250.000 units can be shipped as KGD (known-good-die) to lower the cost even more. The chip has RGB- S-Video and FBAS output (software-selectabe, including scandoubler) and needs two crystals if you're planning a multi-norm device (PAL and NTSC). For one norm, you will only need one crystal.

ciao,
Jens

Jens, if you don't mind me asking - have you guys thought of ethernet/WLAN connectivity?

_________________
That'll Put Marzipan In Your Pie Plate, Bingo
💻 Pro-Amiga, 🌍 Pro-Globalism, 🍅 Pro-Vegan, 🛦 Pro-NATO & 🇪🇺 Pro-Joint EU Defense Intervention Initiative

hello,

all are verry promising (I'm limited to english to said much better reaction).

could we have some example explanations of cloneA hardware examples application on actual or futur hardware ???

- Add on a A500 to have AGA ???
- Add on a AONE or EFIKA or SAM to have also AGA ???
- Add on A PC for better/complete UAE emulation ???

I hope I will soon see new amiga hardware selling and add cloneA after for backward compatibility on a FPGA chip or PCI expansion.

An amiga classics clone motherboard but uptodate (STA, USB,...) seeme to be possible with cloneA ???

Last edited by Mrodfr on 09-Mar-2007 at 06:41 PM.

_________________
BTW, what you have done for the amiga today ????

-A1200+Mediator+VooDoo3+060/50+96mo+SCSI-KIT
-SAM440EP-667mhz-on MapowerKC3000+AOS4.1

Amiga Docs Disks Preservation Project

All ECS Amigas can flip between PAL or NTSC anytime they like. I wasn't aware that my A500 had 2 crystals in it.

_________________
Wanna try a wonderfull magical Amiga strategy game?
Total Chaos AGA

@ChaosLord

WTF ????

ECS-Agnus can switch between 50 and 60Hz video-sync, but a PAL-Amiga running in NTSC-mode is still clocked at only 7.09MHz not 7.14 (unless you hook an external crystal to the videoport that is).

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

Chaoslord: You're right, your Amiga (and Clone-A) can switch between PAL, NTSC and more screenmodes while running. However, using a PAL TV-modulator on an NTSC-machine only produces a B/W picture because of the wrong frequency. You don't notice that on RGB monitors.

Clone-A gives you a possibility that you'd have to "hack" into a real Amiga: Both crystals for 100% compatibility.

ciao,
Jens