amiga-news.de - Minimig: Amiga 500 as FPGA reimplementation

10.Dec.2005
(ANF) Minimig: Amiga 500 as FPGA reimplementation
Under the title link says an amiga.org member that during the last twelve months he has newly implemented the complete chipset of an Amiga 500 into a FPGA (field programmable gate array). He used a Spartan-3 FPGA development board programmed in Verilog. Please consider that there is no further confirmation of the existance of this project apart from the developer's statement and some images (see below).

According to the designer is in the current version of the project codenamed "Minimig" support for sound and keyboard still missing, and the emulation of the flopppy controller is not very accurate (as "floppy discs" are MMC flash cards used with ADF images stored on them). The Workbench as well as some games (New Year Lemmings is named) are allegedly already running on the prototype.

The FPGA contains the complete Amiga chipset (Agnus, Paula, Denise and both CIAs) including ChipRAM but not CPU and FastRAM. The two inmdependent bus systems of a real Amiga were put together to a combined synchronous bus with a 7.09379 Mhz clock and existing only within the FPGA. RAM and CPU are linked via two bridge chips (synchronous-asynchronous conversion) with this internal bus. A real ROM does not exist, instead there's a bootloader loading the Kickstart from a memory card.

Images:

Plasma effect on Minimig, demonstration of a Copper bug
New Year Lemmings on Minimig
The Minimig prototype
The used processor (3,3V version of the MC 68000) (cg) (Translation: wk)

[News message: 10. Dec. 2005, 16:24] [Comments: 4 - 02. Jan. 2006, 01:03]
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