NatAmi
From Amiga Coding
NatAmi is a project by Thomas Hirsch which aims to create a successor to the AGA Amiga's. It will be compatible, but it's aim will be to update (faster, more features) instead of 100% compatibility like Minimig. A prototype was shown at MeKa 2008.
In 'BigGun's' words:
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The Natami is in my humble opinion the so far best approach to create an "original AMIGA" which is HW and Software compatible to the original ones but as fast as you can get it without having the industrial manufacturing resources of INTEL and NVIDIA combined.
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Features
This is all non-official info, collected mostly from forumposts made by a programmer who's helping with/writing for NatAmi:
- SuperAGA
- has all the features of the original Amiga AGA chipset, but it is about 100 times faster
- Resolution of 1280x1024 in 32bit
- Automatic scandoubler for all PAL/NTSC modes (for VGA out, not used for TV out)
- PLANAR modes and new color modes 8Bit Chunky, 16Bit Hicolor, 32 Bit Truecolor
- 32-bit (copper/blitter)
- Video in / Audio in
- Blitter
- Much faster Blitter (100 times faster)
- Cookie-Cut Blitter support for CHUNKY, HI-Color und TRUECOLOR pixel modes (meaning a transparent color, like sprites??)
- 3D acceleration with Texture mapper with ALPHA, Mipmapping and Antialiasing
- Paula (audio)
- (like OCS) 4 channel 8bit sample x 6 bit volume
- (AGA++ mode) 4 channel 16bit sample x 8 bit volume
- Paula (audio)
- Very Fast Chip Ram
- Onboard Amiga compatible IDE and DISK controller (Can read Old Amiga disks!)
- IDE controller (faster than in original Amiga's)
- can use USB keyboard/mouse
- CPU-Expansion with Fast Ram
The now build Dev-CPU Carts will be 68060 CPU with 512 MB Fast Mem PPC CPU expansion cards is possible
- PCI Expansion bus
NatAmi's Blitter
Quote from 'BigGun':
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Blitting Bobs using cookie-cut needs less CHIP memory and is twice as fast as Planar Amiga mode at the same clock.
Blitter is twice as wide and 30 times higher clocked than Amiga original blitter.
Using cookie cut the Natami has about 120 times higher bob copy performance than orig Blitter.
(If I'm calculating this coprrectly?)
Screenmode up to SuperHires non interlaced (1280x1024) with Overscan supported (1440x ???)
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Quote from 'BigGun' (23-jan-2008): [1]
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The Natami does not use 10ns SRAM but faster .
The aimed goal was to drive the bus access with 10ns.
Goal of the blitter is to do 100% random texture fetch in the SRAM in 10ns - in a much huger amount of memory than your AMD CPU has.
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quote from the NatAmi website:
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The first requirement is that NatAmi will be a stable running system according
to the features documented and described in the HRM. After that, certain
extensions will be made for an up-to-date multimedia-system. Great care will be
taken to implement them in true amiga-style.
With the NatAmi I am building a COMPATIBLE machine. Compatible is ment
regarding to the amiga philosopy, not to restrains of old implementations.
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Sources
- NatAmi website
- AmigaHistory.co.uk - NatAmi
- 12-jan-2008 - a prototype of NatAmi was presented at german Amiga Meeting MeKa 2008
- 13-jan-2008 - some features of NatAmi
- 16-jan-2008 - amigaworld post listing some features
- 17-jan-2008 - Post regarding possible inclusion of 3d acceleration features
- 6-mar-2008 - discussion in which features of NatAmi's superAGA are listed
- 19-jan-2008 - about why direct mem access instead of PCIe gfx card
- 19-jan-2008 - more info on the blitter and some other stuff
