I'm just back from this year on the Amiga User convention in Karlsruhe Germany.

For me, the highlight of the show was that Thomas H. was showing
his development board of a new Native Amiga with from scratch reimplemented ECS and AGA chipset.

The development system was a based on a FPGA development board together with a CPU-daughter card (on the show we saw a daughter card with an 68030 CPU).
The developer said that daughter cards can have any 68k CPU or Coldfire CPUs.
He said that he will solder some 68060 cards next.
In addition to the CPU card the Amiga board had PCI slots for expansion.

Thomas dais he started was an 030 CPU card because he had this CPU laying around.
The 060 CPU will be used in the next devlopment board design which he is working on now.
He said he will use the 060 for testign the new board design.
This makes sense to me a new CPU like the coldfire will need a lot of testing and you don't don't want ot have this as the same time when you are testing new AMIGA chipset enhancements as
16bit PAULA or new 16 bit and 24 bit AGA+ modes.

The whole development system was very interesting looking.
The FPGA development board was highly adapted using hundreds of wires to convert it into an AMIGA compatible system.

While the development board was limited by very old (10 years!) versions of the soldered FPGA
it was truely amazing what it could show us.

The board was booting the AMIGA OS 3 workbench in literally a blink of the eye.
All Amiga custom chips were reimplementedm providing all the real Amiga HW features.

Paula = SOUND
CIAs = true AMIGA disk DMA!
BLITTER (32 bit !!!)
COPPER ...

The current development system was partly plagued with the age of the used FPGAs.
Thomas said that the used old FPGA (ALTERA 1k-3) was too slow to run AGA at full speed.
Because of this he could only show us in the meeting 8 planes in lores resultion.
Thomas said that he overclocked the old chip already and this sometimes caused errors.
(This overclocking reminded me on my old Amiga

Thomas said he needs to builds new development system together with a more recent version of the ALTERA chip. Thomas said when he copies the FPGA code into a FPGA chip from 2007/2008 then the AGA+ chipset will run much faster then the old AGA chipset was running and even in the new TRUE COLOR mode the blitter will be many times faster then the A4000 was.



I found the Meka Amiga Meeting very interesting.

Besides the new AMIGA HW by Thomas,
I was working on writing a Demo on the fly at the meeting.
In true Amiga fashion we did a Demo hacking party.
Gerd was painting a some great GFX on the spot (Cool background image and a beautifull golden FONT)
And I was quickly hacking together the DEMO code, with amiga mod-sound and sine-scroller.
I coded this Demo on my EFIKA which I have brought to the show.
Unfortunately we needed to leave the show early because of personal reasons .....

Here a screen shot

The AMIGA dream never dies!


(Added:)
I have not taken any photos of the New Amiga HW board. (stupid me)
But many people were taking photos of it together with screenshots of OS3 and starting of some Amiga games ...
Can someone please post a picture here?

Last edited by BigGun on 13-Jan-2008 at 09:36 AM.
Last edited by BigGun on 13-Jan-2008 at 09:36 AM.

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@BigGun

interesting explanations and bad that you haven't taken some photos.

Please post some link when review, explanations or photos are available.

Honestly I don't know thomas H is and the Meka Amiga Meeting, sorry for this point but the world is big (even if I have made my french military service in 1990 at spier-germany).

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

-A1200+Mediator+VooDoo3+060/50+96mo+SCSI-KIT
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@BigGun

Cough, yeah right.

@Mrodfr

Here is a link to a picture of the board of Thomas Hirsch.
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/natami.html

Btw, The MeKa Amiga meeting is every year in Karlsruhe,
Meka was always announced, often with pictures on www.amiga-news.de

Peter has recorded some movies on the meeting yesterday.
I'm sure someone will post some live pictures later.

Cheers

Last edited by BigGun on 13-Jan-2008 at 10:40 AM.

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@BigGun

Here is a link to screenshot of an older Meka Meeting
http://www.amiga-news.de/archiv/0029.shtml

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APOLLO the new 68K : www.apollo-core.com

@BigGun

Do you have tried some scene demos on it? Does he use the uae sources to build the aga chipset (like the mini mig has done with the ecs chipset - i hope not!)?

_________________
Ei gude wie!
I love my AMIGA Collection...
2x A500 (1x 1MB) OS1.3
1x A600 (40MB HDD) OS2.05 (broken joyport)
1x A1200 (68030/50, 32 MB Fast RAM) OS3.1
1x A4000D 040/40 (48 MB Fast), OS3.9, Fastlane Z3, CV64, Deneb, Indi AGA
1x CD³²
1x µAOn

Sounds great, is there any hope that some/all of this will be turned into a real/buyable product?

I mean:
"Amiga" Mainboard
68060 Accelerator
Coldfire Accelerator

Edit:
Ah NatAmi at least i now know it's not dead.

Last edited by Donar on 13-Jan-2008 at 11:32 AM.
Last edited by Donar on 13-Jan-2008 at 10:44 AM.

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<- Amiga 1260 / CD ->
Looking for:
A1200/CF CFV4/@200,256MB,eAGA,SATA,120GB,AROS

That looks like the C-1 motherboard, which makes sense as you can reprogram the cpu to become another cpu.

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@Donar

PowerPC Accelerator

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@BigGun

thanks for the link of the picture of the board of Thomas Hirsch (natami).

Verry interesting. Off course, all dream to have a new modern amiga motherboard like this one in development.

Hope all here will see pictures from the last mekka and more informations about the natami ddevelopment..

_________________
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

@cHaOs667

Quote:

cHaOs667 wrote: @BigGun Do you have tried some scene demos on it? Does he use the uae sources to build the aga chipset (like the mini mig has done with the ecs chipset - i hope not!)?

Yes, we tried some games and some demos.
(I recall that we loaded Boulder Dash, a Voxeldemo, A copperdemo,
and some all star titles like BattleChess and Defender of the Crown)

We loaded Workbench tools like Dopus and Sysinfo,
And we played some mods with the original tracker.
Amiga features like Screen dragging and copper lists were working fine. (Copperbar demos!)

While the system looked nearly finished to me, its of course not 100% finished.
For example there were a issue with blitting.
Thomas explained to us that the demo board has a few limitations at the moment.
I think he said that the blitter working in backwords mode has a off by one error.
And the SCAN-DOUBLER that Thomas created the night before the party had a small bug as well.
(There was a black bar in the screen).
I think that still very cool for deverloped in the night before!

Thomas explained us that the development board gives him problems is that the FPGAs are small and very slow compared to todays standards.
He said that while the AGA chipset will fit in 10% of a new FPGA its over 100% in the old FPGA he has ojn the board. Because of this he could not fits 100% of AGA features at the same time in the current FPGA.

On the Party, Thomas was loading the FPGA several times and showed to us, different configuration one with scandoubler then another without and other features enabled.
I think on some version that he runs the main time halve of the sprite channels were deactived to save FPGA resource.

I understood that AGA is nearly complete, only this blitter bug.
If the C64 development board would not be so limiting the demo would have been much cooler as the AMIGA chipset could have been shown in much faster than AMIGA speed.


Cheers
Gunnar

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@cHaOs667

Quote:

cHaOs667 wrote: @BigGun Does he use the uae sources to build the aga chipset (like the mini mig has done with the ecs chipset - i hope not!)?

I don't know on what sources he has build it.
I think he worked with the COMO documentation and has measued signals on the old Amigas too.
He mentioned that ge got some info on some (undocumented) registers of GAYLE the A1200 IDE controller out of the BSD sources.

Did I mention that the board had IDE controller included and ran Workbench and the games from an HD?
Thomas said that he has tuned the IDE controller in speed compared to orig Amiga .

It felt wierd to see how fast the Workbench was booting on this board .
(It booted much faster than Linux on Gigaherz clocked computer...)

Last edited by BigGun on 13-Jan-2008 at 01:05 PM.

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APOLLO the new 68K : www.apollo-core.com

@BigGun

Quote:

16bit PAULA or new 16 bit and 24 bit AGA+ modes.

Very interesting. Maybe basis of 25th anniversary Amiga?

@BigGun

Damn, i wish i could be there - Karlsruhe is just 1 1/2h away from me.
If this board gonna to be released i will surely buy on of these.

_________________
Ei gude wie!
I love my AMIGA Collection...
2x A500 (1x 1MB) OS1.3
1x A600 (40MB HDD) OS2.05 (broken joyport)
1x A1200 (68030/50, 32 MB Fast RAM) OS3.1
1x A4000D 040/40 (48 MB Fast), OS3.9, Fastlane Z3, CV64, Deneb, Indi AGA
1x CD³²
1x µAOn

@cHaOs667

Quote:

cHaOs667 wrote: @BigGun Damn, i wish i could be there - Karlsruhe is just 1 1/2h away from me. If this board gonna to be released i will surely buy on of these.

Chaos, where do you live?
Thomas lives in Stuttgart - maybe he could give you a presentation another time,
if Stuttgart s not to far away from you?


I think Thomas could need some help.

What he needs now is to build a new development system taht can hold all the code at the same time.
I fully believe that he will be able to finish the new board relative short time.

I think he could need a hand for two things:

a) a good website
Thomas has build a website for the project but it would be better if you someone experienced in webdesign could do this - so that the HW designer can focus on HW design.

b) As soon as the new board is ready some SW developers would be needed to help writing a few drivers to create a fully finish product out of this.

Cheers
Gunnar

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@BigGun



Lets hope it comes to market. My A1200 is getting older by the minute . .

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@BigGun

Intresting news! Thanks for the report!

@NutsAboutAmiga

Although I appreciate the hard work of more modern versions of Classic Amiga boards, I really do not understand why do we need such a limited future systems. I mean instead of sticking old 68K or its modern versions like Cold Fire, why people does not work for future capable designs or hacks to run current OS4,0 .

In our current situation, I think we need one of these :
- A modern PPC mainboard. Or A1 Clone which works like A1 ( may be emulated against legal situations)
- A new PPC turbo board compatible with our Cyberstorms or Blizzards.
- Better supported Aros which has real Emulator inside for classic applications.
- Amithlon type a emulator for SAM which may work nearly native for AmigaOS4 until real version for SAM will out.

... And ofcourse Better company than Amiga Inc.

well its good to know that the project is still alive :)

_________________

@aracnet

I don't agree completely. Most of Amiga games/programs we like so much are 68k-based, and computers capable to run them ain't getting younger. So it is just natural that users/developers want to bring out new solutions for 21st century to get the Amiga feeling back and maybe some intresting addons for old machines. Software emulation doesn't cut it always.

If we are looking for totally new OS/computer, that could somehow compete with current products, I agree with your points. There is already community based "sequel" for Amiga and that is the ever-growing AROS. To get "official" OS4/5/6/7 we need owners of Amiga/AOS whatever to do the job for us.

Last edited by quenthal on 13-Jan-2008 at 03:47 PM.