Quote:

Samurai_Crow wrote: An FPGA for chipset emulation only and ARM JIT would outperform a Vampire. If it's just UAE then no thanks.

Be careful or you will end up on Gunnar's black list too. I am such a threat that it appears I am number 1 and ThoR number 2 on his current black list.

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kolla wrote: Make up your mind, do you want chipset in fpga or do you want emulation? :)

A SoC ASIC with CPU and chipset please but a small FPGA for chipsets would be fun and versatile.

@number6

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I'm more amused by amiga mini threads on eab, amiganews, atariage, here....etc...... all based solely on a facebook hint.

But is it intended that the product is to be named "THEA500" ?

https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00003509554

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@mobileconnect2

Sorry, I meant to say pre-sold more iPhone 12's.

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@amigakit

Google the business and also google for the relatives of Paul Andrews and tell me what you think. The only thing that does compute here imo, are the "classes" of this filing.

#6

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@number6

You mean west wing studios colab working space
Facebook

And articles such as
https://boingboing.net/2019/11/18/horace-goes-copyright-striking.html

Last edited by wakido on 23-Oct-2020 at 04:22 AM.

@Samurai_Crow Quote:

Samurai_Crow wrote: @mobileconnect2 Quote: mobileconnect2 wrote: If it isn't Vampire level of specs and ports then what's the point. An FPGA for chipset emulation only and ARM JIT would outperform a Vampire. If it's just UAE then no thanks.

Why not? WinUAE has the best compatibility AND the best performances.

The o.s./applications performances are currently crippled by the chipset emulation, which is not a strict requirement when you just want to use the o.s. and the application. A solution like Amithon, or the project which Michal Schultz is working on would be much better, because it's possible to fully exploit the host CPU performances. I prefer a "virtualizer", like I suggested already from some years, because I'd like to run Amiga o.s. applications transparently like all other host applications.

@cdimauro

Quote:

Why not? WinUAE has the best compatibility AND the best performances.

There is room for improvements, for example the bitter is supposed to be running parallel with the CPU, but as I understand the code, that’s not how it actually works, in current software emulation.

The blitter can be given its own CPU thread, at least on multicore system might have some impact.

Anyway most hard thing to emulate in UAE is the interlace mode it seems to, getting internal buffer to sync correctly with monitor sync, or capture software. We need something like flitter fixed in software, I think.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 23-Oct-2020 at 10:43 AM.

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@amigang


I'll definitely get an Amiga Mini (or full size) if and when available.

These products appeal to me because I love the Amiga but was always a USER, without a huge amount of time and interest in diving into the details of configuration.

Back in the day, I bought my machines from Commodore and expected them to run with minimal care and feeding -- which they did, while delivering a great computing experience.


Everyone is quick to dismiss the Amiga Mini idea, suggesting in multiple ways that "we already have that." I'm sorry to say, we DO NOT already have what an Amiga Mini would deliver.

Do we have an Amiga of ANY kind that can be readily bought at retail? Or on Amazon? No.
Do we have an Amiga of ANY kind that can be bought for $100 or less (TheC64Mini price) or even $200 or less (TheC64 full size price)? No.

Yes I hope to one day buy a Vampire Standalone. But it definitely won't be $200, and I fear that it won't be readily available to purchase whenever I want one.

Yes I have played with UAE in various forms over the years, and own Cloanto's disk to ensure I have ROMs to emulate with. Frankly, it's a pain to use an emulator, and it's nowhere near as fun as simply turning on an Amiga.

I have a TheC64 Mini, which is fun. For the price, it's a great way to quickly relive my childhood C64 days. I have ordered a fullsize TheC64 because of course having an actual keyboard and more USB ports is better. I know the experience will be good, because the Mini before it was a solid product, with reasonable support from both the maker and a spontaneous community.

So an Amiga Mini might not be for everyone -- but I plan on having a lot of fun with it.

@Dave73

If it’s halfway decent I too would buy the Amiga Mini. I’ve been waiting for something like this for many years.

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@amigang

No thanks. To each his own, but I find replica computers with non-functional keyboards to be kind of silly.

If someone made a full-size A600-like case for the RPi4 with a functional keyboard, then I might be interested.

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@NutsAboutAmiga Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: @cdimauro Quote: Why not? WinUAE has the best compatibility AND the best performances. There is room for improvements, for example the bitter is supposed to be running parallel with the CPU, but as I understand the code, that’s not how it actually works, in current software emulation. The blitter can be given its own CPU thread, at least on multicore system might have some impact.

You have to define your goal first.

What you ask is not useful for videogames, because you must carefully emulate the (slow) Blitter behavior if you want to have the best compatibility. Many games don't strictly require it, and many can also greatly benefit of the Immediate Blitter option that WinUAE already provides. If more speed is needed, then some assembly-level optimization can be made to further improve it.
Anyway, in this context / scenario a parallelized Blitter emulation is not useful, even because usually games have small blits, of little areas, and the offload overhead will kill the gain of the parallelization in most of the cases, so producing worse results instead of better benefits.

A parallelization of the Blitter MIGHT make sense in the second scenario: running the Amiga o.s. and os-friendly applications. In this case the o.s. already provides the queuing of jobs to be processed by the Blitter, so it's easy to both parallelize the task and make it fast.
In this case it can also make sense to use modern SIMD CPU extensions which accelerate computer planar data processing. AVX-512 has it since the foundation (AVX-512F): Bitwise ternary logic.
And even if it works with 512-bit data at the time (128-bit and 256-bit versions were added after, but fortunately they are available on more consumer products, already starting with Cannon Lake), it will give a big boost on this scenario, because the o.s. has to move windows (which can have >512 width even on an Amiga) and graphic applications can have big brushes floating around the screen.
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Anyway most hard thing to emulate in UAE is the interlace mode it seems to, getting internal buffer to sync correctly with monitor sync, or capture software. We need something like flitter fixed in software, I think.

OK, but this is, again, only related to videogames. Interlace on o.s. & applications can be easily avoided with the emulation.

@Dave73 Quote:

Dave73 wrote: @amigang Yes I hope to one day buy a Vampire Standalone. But it definitely won't be $200, and I fear that it won't be readily available to purchase whenever I want one.

Forget it: the Vampire standalone is in the $/€500-600 ballpark.
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Yes I have played with UAE in various forms over the years, and own Cloanto's disk to ensure I have ROMs to emulate with. Frankly, it's a pain to use an emulator, and it's nowhere near as fun as simply turning on an Amiga.

Sorry, but we have completely different experiences. Maybe you've to correctly configure UAE, and then with a few clicks you can run whatever configuration that you like, with a great user experience.

@bison

If the Amiga Mini includes USB ports which of course it will then a keyboard is a none issue. Pick one from the billions of different options. Back when I had my A500 the built in keyboard seemed kind of cramped to me. I was wishing for a separate keyboard. Many people liked the wedge shaped Commodore machines though. It cost them much less to build them that way.

Last edited by DiscreetFX on 23-Oct-2020 at 07:33 PM.

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@matthey

Your list is wrong - I was banned from joining the Vampire discord long before ThoR, he was still able to log in and see what they wrote about him, I never had that chance! :)

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@cdimauro

Quote:

cdimauro wrote: @Samurai_Crow Quote: Samurai_Crow wrote: An FPGA for chipset emulation only and ARM JIT would outperform a Vampire. If it's just UAE then no thanks. Why not? WinUAE has the best compatibility AND the best performances. The o.s./applications performances are currently crippled by the chipset emulation, which is not a strict requirement when you just want to use the o.s. and the application. A solution like Amithon, or the project which Michal Schultz is working on would be much better, because it's possible to fully exploit the host CPU performances. I prefer a "virtualizer", like I suggested already from some years, because I'd like to run Amiga o.s. applications transparently like all other host applications.

WinUAE is a heavy application to be running on a lightweight ARM chip. The chipset emulation is what kills the perfomance indeed. If the chipset runs on an FPGA, then it's much faster and more accurate. Dr. Michal Schulz is indeed making the Emu68 emulator for the processor and it seems it will run faster than a 68080, primarily because it does NOT emulate the chipset.

Since ARM SoC chips come with their own RTG support built-in, we just need to feed that into an HDMI capable SERDES input on the FPGA and output a hybrid signal on another SERDES and hopefully come up with full HDMI. That will give us sprite and playfield support along with RTG support.

Last edited by Samurai_Crow on 23-Oct-2020 at 08:40 PM.

@bison

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If someone made a full-size A600-like case for the RPi4 with a functional keyboard, then I might be interested.

Just find yourself an A600 with a dead motherboard and get a a Keyrah.

Why not WinUAE/FS-UAE on inexpensive x86 hardware?
Why do people insist on going through the trouble (apparently) of Raspberry Pi?

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@Samurai_Crow Quote:

Samurai_Crow wrote: @cdimauro Quote: cdimauro wrote: Why not? WinUAE has the best compatibility AND the best performances. The o.s./applications performances are currently crippled by the chipset emulation, which is not a strict requirement when you just want to use the o.s. and the application. A solution like Amithon, or the project which Michal Schultz is working on would be much better, because it's possible to fully exploit the host CPU performances. I prefer a "virtualizer", like I suggested already from some years, because I'd like to run Amiga o.s. applications transparently like all other host applications. WinUAE is a heavy application to be running on a lightweight ARM chip. The chipset emulation is what kills the perfomance indeed.

Excuse me, but WinUAE runs very good even on my (cheap: years ago I've spent around €150 for it, included a Windows 10 home licence) MiniPC with the PREVIOUS Atom generation: why on Earth you want to force yourself to run it on an ARM, and even on lightweight one?
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If the chipset runs on an FPGA, then it's much faster and more accurate.

Currently all FPGA solutions are less accurate, and will never be as accurate as WinUAE.
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Dr. Michal Schulz is indeed making the Emu68 emulator for the processor and it seems it will run faster than a 68080, primarily because it does NOT emulate the chipset.

Yes, and I've already said it. It's a very good solution for running Amiga applications (not games).
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Since ARM SoC chips come with their own RTG support built-in, we just need to feed that into an HDMI capable SERDES input on the FPGA and output a hybrid signal on another SERDES and hopefully come up with full HDMI. That will give us sprite and playfield support along with RTG support.

See above. Do you understand that you want to greatly complicate your life for getting a much worse product?

@kolla Quote:

kolla wrote: Why not WinUAE/FS-UAE on inexpensive x86 hardware? Why do people insist on going through the trouble (apparently) of Raspberry Pi?

Indeed.

@cdimauro

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Currently all FPGA solutions are less accurate, and will never be as accurate as WinUAE.

The Minimig and SAGA cores are less accurate but not every FPGA solution. FrenchShark is working on an excact dump of the entire ECS. As far as never being as accurate as WinUAE, if that were true, all I can say is God help us. I remember using a UAE version on my Turion dual core AMD laptop and it took a good half-second for the JIT to catch up with Total Chaos AGA every time I started a new turn. The only way to get better CPU emulation is to dump the JIT and use an interpreter and that severely hobbles performance.

@Samurai_Crow Quote:

Samurai_Crow wrote: @cdimauro Quote: Currently all FPGA solutions are less accurate, and will never be as accurate as WinUAE. The Minimig and SAGA cores are less accurate but not every FPGA solution. FrenchShark is working on an excact dump of the entire ECS. As far as never being as accurate as WinUAE,

WinUAE will take advantage of it as well, in case that he succeeds.

AGA remains after that, but it's unlikely that we'll see a dump for it: too many transistors.
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if that were true, all I can say is God help us.

We need the help of good engineers...
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I remember using a UAE version on my Turion dual core AMD laptop and it took a good half-second for the JIT to catch up with Total Chaos AGA every time I started a new turn.

Do you understand that you're talking about a 10-14 years old CPU? Have you tried with any recent CPU? Even my cheap and very low-power Atom has much better CPU performances.
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The only way to get better CPU emulation is to dump the JIT and use an interpreter and that severely hobbles performance.

The JIT was greatly enhanced in the last years, and Toni Wilen has just replaced it with the one from Aranym in the last WinUAE beta.

So, and as you can see, JITs (as well as emulation, in general) can be improved.

Last edited by cdimauro on 24-Oct-2020 at 06:06 AM.

@cdimauro

I think some of you are getting the wrong idea of what this is likely to be and what many of these Mini system are, they are basic, they are usually only set up to run about a dozen or so games, easy front end menu system that design to just plug into your TV and play some games.

Raspberry Pi 2 and onwards had enough power to run 90% of Amiga A500 library, not to sure but I think you can even run Amiga emulation on pi Zero, a $5 board.

A system like this is not going to need a powerful Arm chip or a custom FPGA board. its not most likely even worried about getting 1 to 1 performance or accuracy with the system it trying to be, many of these mini system are usually out just a bit but only the die hard care, and they are coved by other options (minimig, vampire, winuae, armiga, pi etc) or having the original hardware.

this is for the masses, the C64mini has helped grow the C64 market and made kids and parents recapture there retro gaming, there where and are many better option to buy before this entered the market but guess what the market bought these because they where in the local shops.

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