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> The chips can't be consider that advanced anymore, so I wonder if you can get some Chinese manufacturer to duplicate them, if you had working chips for them t

> The chips can't be consider that advanced anymore, so I wonder if you can get some Chinese manufacturer to duplicate them, if you had working chips for them to copy? I believe reverse engineering the silicon still takes serious amount of money. But is it really required? Reimplementing the chips from scratch with FPGAs is a much more practical option, since everything is already pretty much documented by the simulator community. And it appears that someone has already done something on it. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimig > Minimig started around January 2005 as a proof of concept by Dutch electrical engineer Dennis van Weeren. He intended Minimig as the answer to the ongoing discussions within the Amiga community on implementing the Amiga custom chipset using an FPGA. The project's source code and schematics were released under version 3 of the GNU General Public Licence on 25 July 2007.

rbanffy 7y ago
Why even go that far? Software emulation is good enough for the vast majority of the users. What would be very interesting would be a way to compile software emulators that have very consistent sets of rules for how hardware is expressed (such as MAME) into an FPGA.
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  > Why even go that far? Software emulation is good enough for the vast majority of the users. To replace a failed ASIC on a physical Amiga (or a Amiga replica), which will be unavailable in the future. Don't forget the original topic of the article is a recreation of the physical Amiga.
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    It gets trickier when you need to replace one of the ASICs, but if all you want is the physical object and the user experience, without much regard for the internals, software emulation combined with support for the user-facing aspects (keyboard, mouse, screen perhaps), the approach taken by the c64 mini people with their larger breadbox model seems interesting. Having a drop in replacement for aging Amiga motherboards that can run the software and replicate the user experience without necessarily replicating the underlying hardware seems to be a good 80/20 approach. There will be people interested in the accurate replication of the hardware. For those there is no replacement for the real thing or something very close to it.

rbanffy 7y ago

Why even go that far? Software emulation is good enough for the vast majority of the users. What would be very interesting would be a way to compile software emulators that have very consistent sets of rules for how hardware is expressed (such as MAME) into an FPGA.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago
> Why even go that far? Software emulation is good enough for the vast majority of the users. To replace a failed ASIC on a physical Amiga (or a Amiga replica), which will be unavailable in the future. Don't forget the original topic of the article is a recreation of the physical Amiga.
- rbanffy 7y ago
  It gets trickier when you need to replace one of the ASICs, but if all you want is the physical object and the user experience, without much regard for the internals, software emulation combined with support for the user-facing aspects (keyboard, mouse, screen perhaps), the approach taken by the c64 mini people with their larger breadbox model seems interesting. Having a drop in replacement for aging Amiga motherboards that can run the software and replicate the user experience without necessarily replicating the underlying hardware seems to be a good 80/20 approach. There will be people interested in the accurate replication of the hardware. For those there is no replacement for the real thing or something very close to it.