Hardware Emulation for Efika

Um, have I got the wrong end of the stick, or wouldn't this have been a fantastic hardware project for Efika?

Wouldn't Amiga emulation on a PCI card for the Efika effectively mean you could run *all* your old hardware hitting Classic Amiga demos, games and apps. Making Efika/MOS not only 100% compatible with 68k but also code that uses the Amiga's old custom chips, such as the Copper, Paula, Denis, etc, blah?

I would have thought that at only 400mhz, the Efika could use all the help from hardware it could get? and emulation is pretty heavy going for such a small cpu.

Just wondering why this was rejected? has someone just not noticed the great potential? or am I missing some implementation issues which would make it impractical/unrealistic?

thoughts?

Quote:

It's great idea, but personal issues between Buck and Jens prevented it from happening.

It would be pretty rad if they'd both bury the hatchet (not in each other!) and move on. Jens makes uber-cool hardware, MorphOS rocks hard Yes, a tiny Efika/Amiga on a card deal could be the end-all be-all hardware Amiga-with about twice the MIPS and over four (or a lot more??) times the mem bandwidth as a real Amiga, ntm the interface speed, USB, etc.

I'd spend five hundo for that in a heartbeat!

We've been over this before, why does he need an EFIKA just to create a PCI card CloneA? Hint: he doesn't!

By the way, where are the openPCI drivers for the Catweasel?

Quote:

It doesnt make Efika 100% compatible with 68k. First of all Efika got only one PCI slot and Amiga emulation must be entirely on PCI card where PCI card would be its own mini computer.

Using just custom chips on PCI from MorphOS side doesnt help much. MorphOS runs on PowerUp Amigas and I used MoprhOS on one years ago but old games and demos will not work because of memory protection and other stuff that might come on the way.

Well, I guess the question will be, will MorphOS run on the upcoming Samantha board? It has an FPGA and rumors (no HW available at this time) have it that an Amiga on Chip is coming.

Don't start a flame festival, but the Efika is too limited in user expandable options, like FPGA, SATA, Mini-PCI, Flash, and from a personal side 256 MB of Ram (better to have and not need) and onboard graphics. It looks like a DEV board not a market product. Not saying that you can't market it. But, I always thought the Amiga One SE/XE's were meant to be DEV boards and not mass market boards but thats just me I guess.

Looking forward to the Pegasos III (hurry up) . .

Wasn't their an ITX design for the Efika that had on board graphics and other expansion solutions similar to the Samantha? When's that coming?

Quote:

Nope.

Quote:

Admittely Efika cant and never will replace my Pegasos 2 (I've got both Peg2 and Efika here) and it is not really a desktop computer.

(Tho I dont know how FPGA or Flash could be counted as a user expansion options but this was not the point of course.)

I cant belive you guys. I own an Efika wich runs xubuntu 6.10
Why in gods name would this not be suiteble for using as a desktop?
I have an usb-hub and have connected an extra harddrive, a cdrw and a joystick. uae is working and dosbox is also working, for those retrogames =) Openoffice runs just fine and so does firefox. Ok it cant compete with my 2.8ghz intel with 1gb ram but the Efika costed me only under 400$ (with all the expansions). I use it almost everyday for writing, surfing and games. I really cant see the problem in why this machine would not be a good desktop if you are not a HARDCORE gamer =) And morphos is on its way! =))

It's something like comparing an A500 with an A2000... they are not the same, but you can do lot of things with both of them... They both are ok, and they are not substitutives of each other...

Maybe you recall that Thomas Hirsch had developed an HW-AGA Amiga chipset emulation long time ago.
He did offer to donate this to the EFIKA over a year ago.
At this time the chipset could have been nicely integrated into the EFIKA.

You can of course argue how much benefit, an integrated AGA chipset will bring to MOS.

Some may say that an integreated GFX chip with Paula, AGA, etc is of little value. Other might think different.

Just to keep the record straight, the holdup of this project as not Genesi.
The problem was that some persons of the MOS team did not want to provide any information about MOS/CyberGFX to allow the integration of this.

If the MOS team still denies access to this information then
the Clone-A project can of course too not be done.
Maybe this is the real reason of the deny of the project?

Gunnar

[ Edited by BigGun on 2007/2/18 12:57 ]

Bummer . . .

That would have forced me to purchase one or more Efika's. MOS with super backwards compatibility to an A1200 from a software vantage, in a super small package, WOW. (of course onboard graphic's would be a big plus too.)

Sounds to me like a great example of the "Bone Head" maneuver.

@itix

Quote:

Hint: The term was user expansion, not expansion slot or port. From a user vantage, if I want to add a flash drive there is a place already for it, no cards or other upgrades needed. FPGA, the possibilities are huge with no add on boards / cards etc. needed.

There's also MiniMig, Dennis work that might be closer to Genesi's goals then Clone-A ever would... (Open Source hardware, is that neat or what?)

Maybe the problem is that you can plug a PCI card into a PC, too :)