Terrible Fire Amiga accelerator project
UPDATE: More info and Group Buy discussion
Just to be clear, I have not committed to doing a group buy yet. However, I have committed to doing the legwork on pricing and seeing if there is enough interest and cost savings to make a group buy worth doing. If so, then I'll look at whether I will handle the group buy, hand off the information and contact list to someone else to handle, or maybe arrange with one or several others in different regions to handle group buys for our area. Basically whatever makes sense. I also will not commit unless we can all agree on a method everyone is ok with and that doesn't put me at financial risk.
I hope none of that sounds too negative. I very much want to help out anyone in the Amiga (or Atari) community that is interested in this project and will do what I can to facilitate that.
Meanwhile, we'll have to be patient. This isn't something that's going to happen in a week. I've already ordered most of the parts to build one or two boards myself and once I've received that parts, I'll do the math on the costs involved and the total and post the information in this section. I also want to test the board and make sure the parts I find are correct and functional. Finally, the board has only just gone to beta status this past week with TerribleFire just achieving the first fully functional version at that time.
What that means is that he's now verified that the hardware design is correct and functional. Any future revisions and updates should be strictly firmware related. This means that anyone getting in now is an early adopter and beta tester and that there may be bugs. However, it also means those bugs can be fixed with an update to the CPLDs.
If we don't rush in to things, TerribleFire and his few current Alpha testers may find any remaining bugs and fix them before we build our boards so it's in our interest to wait a few weeks anyway.
The current recommended speed for the board is 24MHz and that's what I'm gong to build and test. The board has however been tested up to 32MHz though that's pushing stability with the current firmware. One future update planned by TerribleFire is to go through the firmware and find optimizations necessary to run the board at higher clock rates reliably, possibly up to 50MHz. Some people may want to wait until that is achieved, some may not.
If you are just looking for a nice, inexpensive little boost to your A500 then gong with a 24MHz build and processor now should be fine. For those looking for more performance and possibly more RAM, it might be worth waiting so you only have to buy one set of parts and processors.
Anyway, I'll do my best to keep everyone up to date however there won't be much news to report until I've received everything I've ordered and gotten final invoices on it all. Once I do I'll put a spreadsheet together with the parts and costs pus shipping, etc. for everyone to look at to get a feel for what the final costs might be and whether we're all still interested in a group buy or just a parts resource list or what.
#TF530CCC
Thanks Christopher Gaul for this clear summary. :)
ReplyDeleteI'll pass this summary to the Commodore Amiga fb group.
OK, so I think all of the parts I ordered are shipped or in process.
ReplyDeleteI got a notice that the PCB's are in production so I expect they'll ship soon too.
No idea when I'll finally have everything in hand, but I'll keep posting updates here.
As I said, once everything arrives and I have final invoices etc. I'll put together a spreadsheet that takes those numbers and calculates a per unit final cost based on what I paid. This will give us a baseline cost for a complete kit that we can shop the group purchase idea against. We can also use it to comparison shop for better prices on each component.
Once I've built and tested one complete unit, I'll weigh the amount of effort and decide if I'm interested in building and selling a few completed units at a reasonable price.
Any idea Christopher where to acquire the CPU & FPU and how much these things cost now?
ReplyDeleteRegarding the building of the Boards: Paul Rezendes is willing to assemble them for the US and Christer Sigfrids for us here in Europe.
ReplyDeleteMo Ahaddour So far I'm not finding any good sources of CPU/FPU so we'll have to work on that.
ReplyDeleteAs for assembly, I think there may be enough demand that Paul and I will need to both work on fulfilling the North America demand.
Meanwhile see if you can encourage Christer to join this community so we can all communicate.
And anyone else interested actually. Communication is key to success.
I just did and Christer accepted :)
ReplyDeleteAlso made a post for help on the CPU/FPU purchase.
I've also posted the main post here in the Commodore Amiga Group.
Christer just noticed me that his Google+ account is Rodeo. So please let Rodeo in :)
ReplyDeleteMo Ahaddour I just saw it and approved him.
ReplyDeleteWelcome aboard Rodeo / Christer
Great ;)
ReplyDeleteAnd here i am. thanx. :)
ReplyDeleteWelcome, let's take the bull by the horns :-)
ReplyDelete