@_Steve_

the photos on natami.net are of 030 c-one prototype. these were obviously shot at some amiga meeting in karlsruhe some weeks ago and published on the site ever since. in the meantime they claim to have working 060 prototype. well, i will believe it when i can see it too.

s**t. again..

Last edited by wawa on 10-Mar-2008 at 11:38 PM.
Last edited by wawa on 10-Mar-2008 at 11:38 PM.

This is looking better and better every day

One thing that occurred to me while we're talking about expansion - will the NatAmi board have A1200 style clock ports? it's a pretty simple thing to implement and there are a lot of cheap and useful peripherals for it - USB, ethernet, high speed serial...

@CodeSmith

Who needs clockport? We would have an unlimited supply of almost free USB and Ethernet cards with the PCI. No Zorro III to PCI problems with 12 Mb/s max transfers and lots of CPU usage. As soon as an OpenPCI driver could be written these would all be available and more.

@all

I hope Natami includes a SD card for the kickstart and other AmigaOS files kind of like the MiniMIG. The whole OS could fit on there for super fast bootup times and trouble free operation. It would be great for transferring and backing up files also. What the Natami would lack in raw computing power could be made up for in quickness and flexibility.

@matthey

Not to be snarky, but who's going to write the drivers for those PCI cards? A lot of chipsets are undocumented or under NDA, and we can't use any of the OS4 drivers - they're all closed source PPC binaries. That's why the clock port makes sense, most clock port devices already come with 68K amiga drivers and all clockport devices made by Jens come with full documentation, so even the C64 specific ones can get 68K drivers. I'm sure that eventually, if the NatAmi is commercially successful, there will be a lot of PCI drivers written for it. In the meantime a clockport is a simple way of getting USB, ethernet, etc on the NatAmi. Think of it as being on the same level as the amiga floppy controller.

Hmm, I just had a thought - is the NatAmi's PCI bus register compatible with the Mediator? That should provide a good source of drivers for PCI cards if so.

@CodeSmith

OpenPCI drivers for specific cards/chipsets already are created and working. One driver for Natami's PCI hardware and all the OpenPCI drivers already created work. See this site...

http://bvernoux.free.fr/DevPCI.php

@CodeSmith

I cant speak for the second proto-board, but thie first, the C1 Has 2 Clockports.

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@matthey

Well then great!

Edit: still, it looks like only a handful of devices are supported and the last driver was added over a year ago. Are there any other projects like that?

Last edited by CodeSmith on 11-Mar-2008 at 06:49 AM.

@Barana

Yes I know, I own a C-One myself. As I understand it though, the "final" design is going to be based on the second protoboard; the C-One was designed to be an 8 bit computer and so it probably bottlenecks the NatAmi.

@Kicko

Quote:

Comeon people why go back when you can buy an amigaone :)

:O when did they go back on sale :p

@CodeSmith

Quote:

CodeSmith wrote: @Barana Yes I know, I own a C-One myself. As I understand it though, the "final" design is going to be based on the second protoboard; the C-One was designed to be an 8 bit computer and so it probably bottlenecks the NatAmi.

It would appear the biggest problem with the C-1 board was just the size of the FPGA used on it being too small for the NatAmi project (from the previous thread on it, the AGA chipset took up the whole FPGA, leaving no room for anything else). It will be interesting to see what the new prototype NatAmi looks like.

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@_Steve_

Can't wait!

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@CodeSmith

Quote:

CodeSmith wrote: @matthey Not to be snarky, but who's going to write the drivers for those PCI cards? A lot of chipsets are undocumented or under NDA, and we can't use any of the OS4 drivers - they're all closed source PPC binaries. That's why the clock port makes sense, most clock port devices already come with 68K amiga drivers and all clockport devices made by Jens come with full documentation, so even the C64 specific ones can get 68K drivers. I'm sure that eventually, if the NatAmi is commercially successful, there will be a lot of PCI drivers written for it. In the meantime a clockport is a simple way of getting USB, ethernet, etc on the NatAmi. Think of it as being on the same level as the amiga floppy controller. Hmm, I just had a thought - is the NatAmi's PCI bus register compatible with the Mediator? That should provide a good source of drivers for PCI cards if so.

Well put. Clock port implementation should be a breeze compared to everything else involved, and there is a ton of reasonably priced Amiga specific hardware with drivers out there already.

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Having looked at the updated NatAmi web site, it is looking better & better - as long as he can pull it off!

While I'd happily run OS3.9 on such a machine, AROS (68k port) is probably the only way to make it a viable self-contained system for "new" users. I can't see OS4 running on it, unless Hyperion wins the law-suit - but that wouldn't matter so much if we had a "new Amiga" (in all but name) that Amiga Inc can't touch.

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@ChrisH
Quote:

that wouldn't matter so much if we had a "new Amiga" (in all but name) that Amiga Inc can't touch.

Don't we already have that (i.e. MorphOS and associated hardware)?

@BigGun
Was your flight sim running on the 030 prototype or the 060 prototype when you took the screenshots?

@HenryCase

True enough, but to be quite honest I'm not as keen on PPC as I once was. It doesn't have the retro factor that 68K+AGA has, and it's not competitive with x86+PCIe in terms of raw power either. So to me at least the A-One, Pegasos, etc sit in the uncomfortable zone between "vintage tech" and "useless old crap"

Last edited by CodeSmith on 12-Mar-2008 at 12:25 AM.

@HenryCase Quote:

Don't we already have that (i.e. MorphOS and associated hardware)?

I wasn't aware that they still made hardware that ran MorphOS. And I find the future development of MorphOS to be rather murky (= unclear).

Still, if MorphOS ran on NatAmi, that could be cool...

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@Gleng

Quote:

On the hardware specs page, it claims to have an Amiga compatible floppy and IDE controller

And apparently it won;t require a specific Amiga compatible floppy drive:


(from the 'Amiga-Compatible' page)
Quote:

AMIGA DD/HD floppy support using standard PC Floppy drives

edited, obsolete

Last edited by Wishmaster on 16-Mar-2008 at 11:49 AM.

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@BigGun

Quote:

BigGun wrote: @AmiKit The texture mapper of SuperAGA (Natami) is a requirement. Without it the game will be very slow on UAE.

What machine did you run UAE on? WinUAE has QuarkTex.
http://quarktex.kontechs.de/

There's a Warp3D (named Wazp3D library) software render for 68K(runs on real 68K and virtual 68K-JIT) and AROS X86 port..
Version: beta 36 (March 2008)
http://thellier.free.fr/Wazp3D.htm

Last edited by Hammer on 16-Mar-2008 at 10:46 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 16-Mar-2008 at 10:38 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 16-Mar-2008 at 10:35 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 16-Mar-2008 at 10:30 AM.

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