“Minimig [homepage] stands for Mini Amiga. Minimig is an FPGA-based re-implementation of the original Amiga 500 hardware. In it’s current form, Minimig is a single PCB measuring only 12*12cm which makes it the smallest ‘Amiga’ ever made and the first new ‘Amiga’ in almost 14 years! Minimig is available for download as an open-source/open-hardware design under the GNU public license. This page describes the architecture and the inner working of the Minimig. All design files can be downloaded from the download section.”
Well darn. I was starting to salivate, but this just removes it from grasp. It would be nice if someone would reverse engineer the Kickstart ROMs and release a free equivalent.
There is a bounty for a Kickstart Replacement at http://thenostromo.com/teamaros2/
I was of the impression that most games and demos in the happy Kickstart 1.3 days, prior to 2.0 was banging the hardware directly, bypassing the kickstart? Perhaps that could be used as a temporary measure.
Or, you know, just pay $10 or so to get them from Amiga’s current owners.
You know, the idea of an $80 retro-Amiga thin client (one I posited the other day in the last Amiga thread) doesn’t seem too far out of grasp now…
Or you buy Amiga Forever from Cloanto, comes with a whole boatload of different ROMs. I have a copy here myself, actually.
My idea precisely! Besides it wouldn’t add much to the cost of the board… $30 which could then be used on MiniMig, a PC, whatever… as long as it isn’t used at the same time…
Or, you know, just pay $10 or so to get them from Amiga’s current owners.
I sense your sarcastic self-righteousness, but having 1990’s ROM chips in hand does not equate to having a file on disk. Getting from ROM to file is the problem. Although perhaps purchase of (and therefore possession of) old hardware could be used to justify an illegal download.
Illegal why?
Illegal in the sense you are restricted to use in a given machine? Where’s that contract one signs saying it? Right, there’s none…
Copywrite violation == illegal.
This is such a basic fact it really shouldn’t need to be explained on a forum such as this
Copyright violation as where one uses what one had payed for?
It’s digital, I do have the right to backup. MY Original vanilla 1200 got broken, though sh*t, well perhaps not because I can just use the backup rom and revive it in another shell.
I know, it would probably be a lot cooler for the corporation just having me buying another computer from them, but hey Commodore just went bust, news flash! There’s no news A1200s…
Which Copywrite violation would that be btw?
Homebrew computer projects like this are awesome. I’m going to buy one if someone offers it pre assembled. I already have many kickstart roms here.
I have a nice’n-huge collection of those, I guess muhahaha
For the MSX fans, there is also an implementation of MSX 2 using FPGA
http://www.bazix.nl/onechipmsx.html
so how about stuffing this into the classic A500 housing and make a mint from oldies?
i still think that the “all addons are external” concept is the best from a user point of view. and hey, look at laptops or umpc’s and usb&firewire…
Edited 2007-08-05 16:17
I have money here with anyone’s name on it who can provide an assembled one of those! I am sure I am not alone. I tiny little Amiga that I could perhaps hook up to the TV would be heaven!!
Especially one with a flash card slot that connects to VGA monitors. This could be an excellent, low-cost computer that would do a lot of fun things.
Now, here is the awful question I don’t want to ask: does this violate any patents?
There seems to be discussion on selling a pre-built board or kit. See:
http://www.amiga.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=39358&for…
Edited 2007-08-05 19:54
Now, that’s just cool. And he’s talking about selling these for £40, assembled. It can connect to PS/2 mice and keyboards and a VGA monitor, which beats even the A500..at that price, he could make a killing on these.
They should throw in some intel cpus and having the 68000 use the power of a cheap intel cpu and ddr ram.
This could need some developing otherwize cool project
Yeah, but one of the bragging points of the Amiga at the time was the fact that it had Intel Outside (I even had a sticker on mine indicating as such).
A fun read and nice pic and I’m sure if fits someones needs but what I still want is the modern multimedia desktop os implementation! Where is it? Syllable, AROS, Haiku, (SkyOS) how nice it would have been if your code all ended up in the same awesome project =P
It’s hard to make a “modern” OS (70’s unix
for an MMU-less CPU without using a safer programming language (not C/C++), and you would probably have to sacrifice some raw performance for the added protection.
I’m guessing AROS could be made to run the minimig, but I would be surprised to see any one of Haiku, SkyOS or Syllable on it.
Anyway. It would be so cool seeing some multiprocessor hobbyist class hardware using low-power CPUs. MMU-less works for me. I don’t mind. With some kind of NUMA-ish memory, like a poor man’s Cell processor. Give each CPU an FPGA and some IO and we’re off to a flying start!
You missunderstood me, AROS covers the OS side and this the hardware side, but I find very little use in both since sure both the OS and hardware was nice back in the days but time and people (well, most of them atleast) have moved on. What I want is a new modern multimedia OS on new modern hardware, but there doesn’t seem to exist one, Windows is as good as it gets and OS X can’t be called “new” and “modern” with its UNIX heritage.
Oh, I’m sorry.
Yes, it sure would be fun to have a new hardware/software revolution. Perhaps if we rethink everything, from CPU design to programming languages to physical interaction, new forms of storage, networking, … I think the way forward is to go simpler, unlike the giant chip makers.
I wish I had a garage or a basement.
Personally I think the way forward is more dedicated cores and/or chipsets for specific tasks. I think personal computers of the future will be more like cluster-servers than single-core x86’s
Edited 2007-08-06 14:41
Aliquis wrote:
AmigaOS it is enough good to have multimedia software which reads CDs, plays MP3 and also Play DVDs.
But it is the hardware that gives enough horsepower to run it.
On an A500 the processor could run only audio CDs because the databus and the CPU have only the power to run it.
A600 and A1200 could made use of an external DSP card connected to parallel port to play MP3.
A1200 and A4000 have good 12 and 16 bit audioo cards.
A1200 and A4000 could also mount PCI Voodoo graphic cards, and soundblaster cards to play multimedia programs.
PCI slots are available thanks to Bus extender cards which requires tower cases to mount A1200 and A4000 in.
A4000 equipped with PPC processor at 160 or 200 or even 240 MHz and a graphic card can run movie players to show full framerate movies at VHS resolution 320×240 (356×276 overlay).
AmigaOne with PPC processor G3 clocked at 600 MHz or G4 at 800 MHz / and Pegasos II at PPC G3 600 MHz, or PPC G4 at 1GHz equipped with AGP graphic cards could run DVDs (DVD are circa 640×680 resolution)without any problem.
So it is not the multimedia the problem.
AmigaOS and its programs have enough multimedia capabilities.
But you must run AmigaOS on top of a decent hardware configuration…
So does anyone know what the status of minimig is compared to Clone-A? I saw the latter demonstrated on Breakpoint, and it seems it’s fully functional. Also, it is claimed Clone-A can run *any* Amiga software, regardless what tricks are used. Can minimig do this also?
…the owners of the Amiga OS do not make some changes to the way the system works so that it can be installed on more general hardware. I mean, Amiga is no longer owned by a hardware company, so is there really a financial incentive to tie to particular hardware?
Certainly there are clear reasons why an Apple or Sun might do that, as they are both hardware companies, but why in all these years cannot the Amiga OS be made to run on a G5 or Power/Cell processor and general hardware? Why not create a Xeon specific version that can be installed on a Mac Pro? (Yes, I know this is not PPC)
It just seems to me that the amiga community continues to pound on the rock expecting it to produce a diamond. And we all kinda know what repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting different results is a symptom of, don’t we?
I am not bashing the Amiga, I have never really used one, but I would certainly consider it if I did not have to go so out of my way to get it. I am always on the look out for a good OS, modern or not.
There’s a couple of reasons why not to use more general hardware: 1. Device drivers would need to be created for all of the general devices that plug into the aforementioned general hardware or else the hardware would be less general. 2. Intel/AMD hardware uses little-endian byte ordering which is not compatible with the Amiga design unless you use a bunch of BSWAP opcodes to make the nasty Intel processors behave like a more general network-endian processor like the PowerPC, Sparc, and most other non-Intel/AMD processors do. 3. The last time Amiga hired a company to make a more general hardware that would run AmigaOS, we ended up with a dongle in the UBoot firmware to prevent it from being ported to other non-licensed hardware. 4. The ownership of AmigaOS 4 is disputed in court at the moment and nobody who has a non-UBoot enhanced system is likely to see it until the legal system or situation is fixed. 5. Binary software distribution would require all the closed source to be recompiled to work on the new hardware so keeping it on a minimal number of instruction sets is key to its success.
If you want to see software as generalized as possible, support http://llvm.org and make an assembly-level bytecode that will distribute code to different instruction sets with minimal degradation of performance. That way developers can pick from interchangeable operating systems the same way they do with interchangeable device drivers.
Thanks for this reply. I was honestly expecting to be flamed.
I was thinking of buying an Amiga from eBay…
This looks pretty nice.
I hope someone productizes it. I wonder if it would pay to upgrade this to use a faster CPU so that eventually people COULD write software for playing Movies and MP3 music on it?
There perhaps should be at least this version fully debugged and emulating the A500, and with enough profit to perhaps fund an “Pro” version that re-creates an A4000.
I’d also like to see the unit in Micro ATX form so that existing PC Cases/Power Supplies could be used to mount the unit up into, to save the time and money to design a custom case for it.
Mage66 wrote:
Answer:
If you want to buy an Amiga from EBay, check that it is A1200 or A4000.
With these machines you can buy MEDIATOR PCI BUS Extender that allows AMiga to mount upto 6 PCI cards.
If you want to see movies on it, then you need also PPC expansion card for A1200 or A4000, but there are very few remaining, and allow you to run only tiny sized resolution movies (340×240 VHS resolution runs fine).
Programs are mPlayer, DVPlayer, Frogger Player, etc.
[HUM… Seems to me that mPLayer (same version than Linux) it is only for modern PPC Amigas]
If you want to play music, then A1200 + Mediator + el cheapo Soundblaster card, will perform the task flawlessly…
Also there are good players to listen CD and MP3. One of these is AmiAMP (same program as WinAMP as present in Windowze Nerdish World).
See AmiAmp in this image:
http://home.wtal.de/amiga-news/OS3.9_an.jpg
Edited 2007-08-07 10:59