Minimig anyone?


Prometheus said:
An SoC in the vein of what we have in the Pandora, plus FPGA stuff for switching to reimplemented original hardware and other interesting stuff on-the-fly, you mean?
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Exactly. It might be possible to share work across the two - perhaps emulate the CPU and re-implement the GPU (or vice-versa)?
 
I can't say I know - I'm not technically-inclined enough to even know where to begin with finding that out. :lol:


I also can't help but wonder if it's even feasible, affordable, or practical enough, though...
 
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Probably depends on how powerful a chip can be implemented in a FPGA. If its always less that what can be emulated with contemporary CPUs, then there's not much point...
 
Didn't Craig show a photo of his new project on Twitter a while ago and it had contacts for buttons in the shape of a D-pad.
 
^ I think that was for "Product 3", if you're meaning the one that I'm thinking of.
 
Possibly, what is Product 3? Has anything else been revealed?
 
Ian J said:
Didn't Craig show a photo of his new project on Twitter a while ago and it had contacts for buttons in the shape of a D-pad.
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498861542.png



How do you know that's a dpad?
 
I thought there was more image than that, could be wrong and it could have been my over-active mind.
 
Binky said:
Prometheus said:
^ I've had a look around and found what I saw. It was the Mini-ITX Minimig Version 2.0. It has a separate ARM controller that apparently allows for running from a hardfile, and overclocking.
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Llooks like that ARM chip is really just interfacing and control. I was envisioning something more capable than the current Pandora and then an FPGA, which would allow conventional emulation for things that don't have suitable HDL files.


Also, its not really portable :)
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If evildragon made a handeld amiga with fpga and emulation.I wonder if savestates could be implemented.The mini-itx minimig version 2.0 board that prom linked could make a nice amiga handheld if it's the right size.Hell even an oversized handheld amiga would be awesome.Did i mention i love amigas.
 
Prometheus said:
Wrath of Khan said:
Hell even an oversized handheld amiga would be awesome.Did i mention i love amigas.
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Perhaps the Mini Minimig, sized at 11cm x 6.5cm, would be better-suited to a handheld than the Mini-ITX sized one? :p
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Looks nice.didn't know there was so many different minimig variations.Wonder if that project was finished.edit looks like the guys last entries are dated 2009.i guess that project is no longer happening.Right Now who can i bribe/pay/force to build me an a500/a1200 amiga handheld.It is my dream.Gotta have dreams right? :D
 
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FWIW, I have a device already which is similar to the above, but for Atari ST; its a Coldfire (nearly a 68k) cpu with a big fat FPGA which takes care of simulating other chips (floppy access, display shifter, that sort of thing.) Works quite well. But in this case we're doing the 68k on the Coldfire with some emulation in CF to handle 68k opcodes that have been removed.


An Amiga could be done similarly, but I've no experience with doing the 68k itself on the FPGA, though of course the minimig and C-one guys have done it.


Still, we've toyed around with the idea of dynamic reflashing .. run some linux like OS on the coldfire, and reflash the FPGA to perform emulation on the fly, and thus 'natively' emulate SNES or Amiga or whatever all in FPGA for nice full speed accurate emulation.. pretty fun idea, and actually quite doable.


But a _tonne_ of work, and you don't get to re-use any code, since no one has really done much work on FPGA for emulators before.. theres no MAME-for-FPGA sort of thing going on, so you're doing it all from scfratch.


But yeah, I've toyed a little bit .. in my case, its Atari-sT like board, runing Atari ST emulation on FPGA :eek:


--


But for Amiga stuff, definately go check out the C-One I linked above..


jeff
 
Binky said:
Probably depends on how powerful a chip can be implemented in a FPGA. If its always less that what can be emulated with contemporary CPUs, then there's not much point...
Click to expand...
I think the main problem is that there really aren't a lot of FPGA programmers in the emulation scene. When you look into a lot of the projects out there, it's just one guy writing the core in his spare time... meanwhile, you have huge, mature, open-source projects like VICE and UAE competing against them. While it may seem that FPGA's are closer to being the real hardware, the fact is that they still have bugs and compatibility problems like any software emulator.


If you really want the best Amiga compatibility, WinUAE is lightyears ahead of Minimig.


--Zero
 
^ From experience running WinUAE under WINE due to it allegedly being better than other apps, it still doesn't even play certain music samples in Lemmings... :(
 
skeezix said:
FWIW, I have a device already which is similar to the above, but for Atari ST; its a Coldfire (nearly a 68k) cpu with a big fat FPGA which takes care of simulating other chips (floppy access, display shifter, that sort of thing.) Works quite well. But in this case we're doing the 68k on the Coldfire with some emulation in CF to handle 68k opcodes that have been removed.
Click to expand...

Wow, that is looking pretty awesome... I remember looking at this years back when it was still a pie-in-the-sky kind of project like Natami, and didn't think anything would come of it! That price tag is awfully high though... at half the price, I'd consider it, but €650? Ouch.

But for Amiga stuff, definately go check out the C-One I linked above..
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Keep in mind that the Amiga core for the C-One is nothing more than a port of the Minimig core... so you're not really going to get anything extra out of the C-One. The board has some nifty extra features like floppy drive and IDE ports, but the thing was plagued with design problems that prevented actually using most of them. I was on the mailing list for the C-One, trying to keep track of when the software got to the point where things became usable, but they basically gave up on most of those capabilities, and the ones that did work usually required hardware modifications. I was rather disappointed with that.


--Zero
 
skeezix said:
Still, we've toyed around with the idea of dynamic reflashing .. run some linux like OS on the coldfire, and reflash the FPGA to perform emulation on the fly, and thus 'natively' emulate SNES or Amiga or whatever all in FPGA for nice full speed accurate emulation.. pretty fun idea, and actually quite doable.
Click to expand...
So this is possible if you design the system around this idea.Native fullspeed accurate amiga or st emulation would be possible.In theory could one implement save states in game considering that you would be using actual hardware? I know this isn't possible on the natami cos i asked over there on the forums.Im getting a natami though for sure.The firebee looks nice too.Perfect for atari fans.It's expensive cos ther is a small production run of course. A handheld a500/a1200 fpga based/emulated gaming system with save states would be nice.One can dream.
 
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