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[Simon82]

Hello,

I'm really interested in Minimig future and I'd like to know what do you think about the development that people are going to make on it regarding differents cores for example. Are we going to see lot of differents system emulated on it or it would made the end of the C-One?

What could suggest me to buy it compared to a classic A600?

Bye

[countzero]

Minimig is Amiga specific. I don't think any other system could be emulated on it (with the exception of Atari, maybe) and I honestly think it's not necessary anyway, because it's already a successful product. Comparison with A600,

1 - Onboard scandoubler on Minimig
2 - No moving parts, no floppy hassle, breeze to download adfs from internet and play them.
3 - PC keyboard/mice compatibility
4 - small and consumes low power

and most important of all, when you're buying an A600, you're buying a 15 year old product which is near the end of her life. A simple cap leak can waste your money. MiniMig is new hardware and will serve you much longer than an A600.

[alexh]

As soon as my MiniMig arrives (end of April) I've agreed (in return for getting my board) to try to port the open source Spectrum, C64, Atari ST and Amstrad CPC cores to MiniMig.

The bummer is that you'll all have to reprogram / replace your PIC.

Simon82 wrote:
What could suggest me to buy it compared to a classic A600?

Nothing. With a CF flash as an internal hard drive and a CF flash as a PCMCIA removable disk the A600 beats it (as an Amiga) pants down.

[AJCopland]

Actually the only Amiga specific thing on the MiniMig appears to be the crystals for PAL display timing! You can flash whatever you like into the FPGA. Ok it'll only have 16bit wide access to 2MB of sram but that should be fine for emulating other 68k based 16bit-era consoles.

An Atari should be fairly easy, but Neo-Geo and Megadrive should also be possible because they both used 68000 cpus and long as room can be found in the fpga for their other custom processors then there's no reason for them not to work.

I started to have a look into what else would be required but my knowledge of Verilog/VHDL is totally insufficient for working out the *how* to do it at the moment.

Andy

[AJCopland]

alexh wrote:
As soon as my MiniMig arrives (end of April) I've agreed (in return for getting my board) to try to port the open source Spectrum, C64, Atari ST and Amstrad CPC cores to MiniMig.

The bummer is that you'll all have to reprogram / replace your PIC.

Alex that's awesome news!

[alexh]

The other Amiga specific bit is the PIC.

I wouldnt hold your breath, I dont have my MiniMig yet.

The current list of open source cores are:

Atari ST
C64
Amstrad CPC
Zx Spectrum
MSX
Vic20
Numerous Arcade Machines

Each will need the MiniMig PCB wrapper porting to it (Sound and VGA output, joystick inputs etc.) and almost certainly some PIC changes (hopefully not too much that you have to swap PIC's between platforms) to get the data in off the MMC card.

[Fransexy_]

An Atari should be fairly easy, but Neo-Geo and Megadrive should also be possible because they both used 68000 cpus and long as room can be found in the fpga for their other custom processors then there's no reason for them not to work

Megadrive and neogeo also have a Z80 processor

[AJCopland]

Fransexy_ wrote:
Megadrive and neogeo also have a Z80 processor

I know, but the Z80 has fpga implementations already :-D like I said I did look into it and the Z80 was primarily used for audio and peripherals in both of them thus whatever other logic would be required for emulating other platforms would be subsumed by the Z80 for those two.

Andy

EDIT for clarity.

[downix]

alexh wrote:
The other Amiga specific bit is the PIC.

I wouldnt hold your breath, I dont have my MiniMig yet.

The current list of open source cores are:

Atari ST
C64
Amstrad CPC
Zx Spectrum
MSX
Vic20
Numerous Arcade Machines

Each will need the MiniMig PCB wrapper porting to it (Sound and VGA output, joystick inputs etc.) and almost certainly some PIC changes (hopefully not too much that you have to swap PIC's between platforms) to get the data in off the MMC card.

Forgot the Atari jaguar there Alex.

[freqmax]

It's been mentioned before:

"It's likely possible without any hardware modifications to run Atari ST, Macintosh 68k, Sega, Early x86, Proberbly most 8-bits. With some fpga tricks even early Sun, SGI, NexT aswell.
Then there's the possibility to do demos coded directly in HDL (like vhdl) and really exploit the fpga power. Or even use the fpga capability to interface with other electronics as logic analyzer etc.."

So there IS candidates besides Amiga. And it should be possible. And any 8-bit should be definitly be doable.

Any Z80 as a auxillary cpu is no big deal either. Unless it have a complexity on par of m68k..

[countzero]

I was talking about the Acube production run. Now if any of you are dreaming to interface a Z80 to that I say you're just dreaming. I say get a Spartan3 kit and start from scratch, it will be less painful. That of course has nothing to do with minimig, but a different project.

[whiteb]

alexh wrote:
As soon as my MiniMig arrives (end of April) I've agreed (in return for getting my board) to try to port the open source Spectrum, C64, Atari ST and Amstrad CPC cores to MiniMig.

The bummer is that you'll all have to reprogram / replace your PIC.

Which is why you put a copy of Tinybootloader on the pic first so you can flash pic firmware at will.

[freqmax]

I meant a HDL-Z80 ofcourse. No reason to buy a physical one in this case.

[alexh]

downix wrote:
Forgot the Atari jaguar there Alex.

There is an open source FPGA Atari Jaguar? What's the link?

[alexh]

countzero wrote:
I was talking about the Acube production run. Now if any of you are dreaming to interface a Z80 to that I say you're just dreaming.

I think you'll find the Z80 will fit inside the FPGA on the production run ACube and leave enough space for an 8-bit computer or console too.

freqmax wrote:
I meant a HDL-Z80 ofcourse. No reason to buy a physical one in this case.

Deffo.