4 ms·

Still got mine, freshly recapped. Long live right to repair, teaching kids about retro glory and how stuff actually works at the hardware layer will make sure

Still got mine, freshly recapped. Long live right to repair, teaching kids about retro glory and how stuff actually works at the hardware layer will make sure such iconic pieces of computing will never reach the landfill. …now if only there could be actual selling 8520 CIA replacement chips/fpga replacement being manufactured AND sold instead of destroying old motherboards…

bogantech 5y ago
8520's can still be gotten NOS from Analogic and probably a few other places but there are also a couple of projects in progress at the moment to replace the CIA's https://github.com/niklasekstrom/cia-verilog https://github.com/niklasekstrom/cia-verilog https://github.com/bwack/VHDL6526 https://github.com/bwack/VHDL6526 (6526 and 8520 differ only in their TOD clocks so it should be simple for this to support both kinds)
- boboche 5y ago
  Lots of CIAs out there are resold broken. The FPGAs are the best option since they wouldn’t break all over again… saw those 2 projects but one is incomplete and the other is not really “fully” tested. There’s that page since a while too but no updates. https://1nt3r.net/j-cia/ https://1nt3r.net/j-cia/ Since these were made probably with 100nm+ process, Cost of making them shouldn’t be an issue vs. potential sales, (maybe after the chip shortage ease) since whoever owns the amiga patents are not doing anything better than the last multiple owners since commodore… my money would be on fpgas even if denatures the machine a bit.
mrweasel 5y ago
I don't know anything about chip design and manufacturing, so I might be way off, but could you just send working Commodore chips to China, and have someone make a clone. It seems like replicating 25+ year old chip technology should be easy enough, or are there simply no plants left that can create compatible chips?
- philistine 5y ago
  At this point, I’d presume it’s much cheaper to get an FPGA to emulate at the hardware level the chips than it is to order 10,000 new chips in an old fab from wherever.

bogantech 5y ago

8520's can still be gotten NOS from Analogic and probably a few other places but there are also a couple of projects in progress at the moment to replace the CIA's https://github.com/niklasekstrom/cia-verilog https://github.com/niklasekstrom/cia-verilog https://github.com/bwack/VHDL6526 https://github.com/bwack/VHDL6526 (6526 and 8520 differ only in their TOD clocks so it should be simple for this to support both kinds)

boboche 5y ago
Lots of CIAs out there are resold broken. The FPGAs are the best option since they wouldn’t break all over again… saw those 2 projects but one is incomplete and the other is not really “fully” tested. There’s that page since a while too but no updates. https://1nt3r.net/j-cia/ https://1nt3r.net/j-cia/ Since these were made probably with 100nm+ process, Cost of making them shouldn’t be an issue vs. potential sales, (maybe after the chip shortage ease) since whoever owns the amiga patents are not doing anything better than the last multiple owners since commodore… my money would be on fpgas even if denatures the machine a bit.

mrweasel 5y ago

I don't know anything about chip design and manufacturing, so I might be way off, but could you just send working Commodore chips to China, and have someone make a clone. It seems like replicating 25+ year old chip technology should be easy enough, or are there simply no plants left that can create compatible chips?

philistine 5y ago
At this point, I’d presume it’s much cheaper to get an FPGA to emulate at the hardware level the chips than it is to order 10,000 new chips in an old fab from wherever.