Well after hating anything FPGA based for ages I started playing around with FPGAs and have to say just how impressed I am by them.
I had a look at the minimig which is excellent but lacking in features compared to the far newer FPGA Arcade which is a great looking board but I can't build the board which is half the fun!
My aim is to eventually combine a regular 68k processor with an FPGA holding the custom chips, hopefully we'll see the AGA core for the FPGA Arcade eventually released.
However I still needed to learn more about FPGAs so I discovered the MIST board. It was created by a gentleman called Till Harbaum. Based around a Altea Cyclone III development kit he create this neat little board and ported the Minimig core to it. However he is an Atari man at heart and is attempting to get TOS running on the board which is/was the original intention it just so happened the DE Minimig cores ported pretty much straight across.
The board as I said is Cyclone III based and has an Arm controller which appears to be allowing USB keyboards and mice to be used on the AMIGA side!
I now have one of only a handful of boards. I ordered the major components tonight from digikey and will order the rest from RS or Farnell. Till is currently redesigning the board to be even smaller and its that one will which will probably see wider distribution I would imagine.
Details of his development of this first version of the board are available here:
http://www.harbaum.org/till/mist/index.shtml
That's a complete v1 board above.
I'll detail the build for anyone that is interested here. If the Minimig AGA core is ever released Till believes it should fit comfortably into the Cyclone III.
I had a look at the minimig which is excellent but lacking in features compared to the far newer FPGA Arcade which is a great looking board but I can't build the board which is half the fun!
My aim is to eventually combine a regular 68k processor with an FPGA holding the custom chips, hopefully we'll see the AGA core for the FPGA Arcade eventually released.
However I still needed to learn more about FPGAs so I discovered the MIST board. It was created by a gentleman called Till Harbaum. Based around a Altea Cyclone III development kit he create this neat little board and ported the Minimig core to it. However he is an Atari man at heart and is attempting to get TOS running on the board which is/was the original intention it just so happened the DE Minimig cores ported pretty much straight across.
The board as I said is Cyclone III based and has an Arm controller which appears to be allowing USB keyboards and mice to be used on the AMIGA side!
I now have one of only a handful of boards. I ordered the major components tonight from digikey and will order the rest from RS or Farnell. Till is currently redesigning the board to be even smaller and its that one will which will probably see wider distribution I would imagine.
Details of his development of this first version of the board are available here:
http://www.harbaum.org/till/mist/index.shtml
That's a complete v1 board above.
I'll detail the build for anyone that is interested here. If the Minimig AGA core is ever released Till believes it should fit comfortably into the Cyclone III.
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