AmigaPCI

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RetroNinja

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The AmigaPCI is an OCS/ECS Amiga computer in the ATX form factor. It provides a flexible CPU Local Bus port, five AUTOCONFIG PCI slots for expansion purposes such as video and sound, an on-board dual port ATA controller, and offers performance improvements over legacy Amiga designs.


It looks like JB is finishing up the A2000EATX and moving on to his his next project.
 
The Amiga community is full of a lot of personalities. Heck some would say the platform failed due to Amiga owners pirating everything instead of actually purchasing their games/software …… taking versus providing. People want immediate gratification nowadays with little of fort on their own part. It’s strange.
 

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The AmigaPCI is an OCS/ECS Amiga computer in the ATX form factor. It provides a flexible CPU Local Bus port, five AUTOCONFIG PCI slots for expansion purposes such as video and sound, an on-board dual port ATA controller, and offers performance improvements over legacy Amiga designs.


It looks like JB is finishing up the A2000EATX and moving on to his his next project.
This is a freaking awesome project.
 
Re drivers - Thomas Richter (of P96 fame) has been working on a new implementation of the openpci library for all PCI bussboards - he's just released the first test version (https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=1699071&postcount=27) - and I believe has been in contact with Jason to discuss how the AmigaPCI will be supported later. He will start releasing a range of P96 GFX card drivers next I expect! This is great news for the Amiga PCI ecosystem and hopefully will remove the fragmentation and the reliance on elbox commercial s/w...
 
It looks like this project is slowly but steadily improving. There's a shout out for STM Microcontroller architecture help. If you've got the skills, help build the project.

Some people ask why PCI vs PCIe, here are some notes on that (stolen from the Discord)...

cdh12/26/24, 3:37 AM​

I have a few ideas why. A single lane of PCIe Gen1 is 2.5 Gbps. That requires a much more expensive FPGA than one which can support 66 MHz PCI bus. Probably the FPGA while require a hard block on top of that. PCIe is point-to-point, where PCI is a bus. This means that to implement multiple slots, either the FPGA needs to implement multiple root ports in hardware (expensive), or a single root port in hardware, and an additional switch chip (like PEX8505 would give you four PCIe slots). Either way, that makes it more expensive and more complex to implement.
Don't get me wrong; I'd love to have an Amiga with PCIe bus, as there are many advantages to that. I think a first step, though, would be getting a full PCI implementation working. Once that is functional, there are relatively cheap bridge chips (around $15) which will take you from PCI bus to a single PCIe lane. There are even plug-in PCI cards that will provide a PCIe slot, so that's something you could use right away.


NotTHEMatze12/26/24, 5:35 PM​

There’s also bandwidth: the CPUs in question would not ever be able to utilize the bandwidth of PCIe. Then there’s software: while we do have rather good coverage for various PCI cards, there’s hardly anything available for PCIe cards. Writing a driver for “modern” PCIe cards is also near impossible for the lack of information and the amount of required complexity. I think PCI pairs well with an 060 - it’s a very good match
 
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