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My point was more that there's no part of this project that actually emulates "a number of other peripherals", so it still needs to plug into a board that has w
by derefr 3y ago
My point was more that there's no part of this project that actually emulates "a number of other peripherals", so it still needs to plug into a board that has working instances of all these other (no longer produced! rare! expensive!) chips on it.
Consider a "field-found" repair of an Amiga, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-wNbku3CeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-wNbku3CeI
In the instance above, the board was able to be revived — but only after swapping out a few chips with spares! Spares that need to be sourced!
But there are Amigas discovered in far worse internal condition. In those cases, the board itself is basically shot. Along with most of the chips. Often legs of DIPs are just corroded off, etc.
Having a single-SoC bus-compatible board, that you could use to entirely replace the internals of an Amiga, would mean that in that particular case, you could just shake the scraps of rust that the board has become out of the case, clean up the case and peripherals (which are likely still fine), and then build a "new" Amiga by putting that new SoC board in.
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This is already a very common approach you'll see in e.g. the Gameboy modding scene — as so many gameboys are found as e-waste or in a ditch somewhere. Though the focus there isn't usually on decreasing parts cost with a one-SoC board, but rather getting perfect fidelity, since the target market is collectors who are willing to pay a high price and so a high BOM isn't as much a problem.
Also, amusingly enough, as there are people creating not just new bus-compaible GB/GBC/GBA boards, but also new custom buttons + shells, and even new non-IP-restricted BIOS ROM code, a "repaired gameboy" might actually contain no Nintendo-original components whatsoever. It's more a "generic" gameboy (by analogy to generic pharmaceuticals) at that point.
- rbanffy 3y ago> no part of this project that actually emulates "a number of other peripherals" It does - it's just that none of the emulated things go through the motherboard to be emulated. There is an Apple II HDMI board that can output Apple IIgs graphics from a II+ because it watches the peripheral bus for the signals a 65816 would make to setup a IIgs screen. Lots of Apple II accelerators emulate a number of things on-board and only use the socket to push peripheral IO. > then build a "new" Amiga by putting that new SoC board in. I really like this idea. A lot of the experience of a retro machine is the physical device. I've been toying with the idea of making Atari ST and Amiga keyboards with USB ports just so that the emulators would "feel" more real. I have a PC-122 keyboard and using it in combination with a 3270 emulator feels just right (even when the mainframe is running on an RPi)
- bitwize 3y ago> I really like this idea. A lot of the experience of a retro machine is the physical device. I've been toying with the idea of making Atari ST and Amiga keyboards with USB ports just so that the emulators would "feel" more real. THEC64 got a lot of love and goodwill from the retro community, just by having a breadbox case and a keyboard with real C64 layout and feel. It's still an emulator on an ARM computer, so it's not going to be cycle-accurate or even particularly low latency. But damn it, the feel of the thing is pretty close to booting and playing with a real C64 for 98% of the things you might do with it!
- rbanffy 3y agoI know. I have one. That's what triggred this realization - that the physical interface is much more important than absolute fidelity to the original's internal logic.
- snvzz 3y agoI'd be less unhappy about these if they were shells for FPGA-based boards, instead of ARM-based ones.
- rbanffy 3y agoThere's no real reason for not offering both options. In the case of the TheC64 Maxi, there is no lack of internal space.