
FPGA expansion board for the Amiga 500: SDRAM, microSD mass storage and Ethernet - doener
https://github.com/endofexclusive/greta
======
erickhill
Appears to be a technical design document from 2 years ago, although I can't
tell if anyone ever used it to create his/her own board (let alone use it for
mass production). Shame, if I'm right.

~~~
doener
"GRETA is supposed to expand an Amiga 500 by 8 MB SDRAM, an ethernet
controller as well as a port for MicroSD cards and a freely usable I/O-port.
It seems that the development of the board has been finished but since 2013
obviously the programming of the FPGA was not continued: Currently GRETA only
offers additional memory. All other features still have to be programmed. The
documentation of the projects are available on Github under the GNU General
Public License."

[http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2016-04-00050-EN.html](http://www.amiga-
news.de/en/news/AN-2016-04-00050-EN.html)

------
tacos
I'm not loving GPL for "dumb" blocks of hardware designs. SRAM glue and SD
card boilerplate would benefit from a more liberal license. Commercial fees
charged by the big boys for some of this crap is truly absurd. And it barely
works.

Want to craft a tool to generate it and release under GPL? Right on. But the
output? Please consider other options. I know so many people wrestling with
this stuff.

Emulator code, cpu cores, etc. may benefit from GPL depending on your
leanings. I just don't see it for some of the basic blinky-blink stuff.

~~~
bitJericho
Are you suggesting this wasn't completed because of the GPL?

------
Zardoz84
Could be adapted to an Amiga 1200 ?

~~~
kingmanaz
Or an Amiga 2000.

~~~
tyingq
This appears to connect to the left side expansion port on the Amiga 500. See
[https://github.com/endofexclusive/greta/raw/master/greta.pdf](https://github.com/endofexclusive/greta/raw/master/greta.pdf)

For the 1000, it has almost the same connector, but inverted in gender.

Not sure about the 1200.

For the 2000, there's the Zorro slots, which serves the same purpose, but is
an entirely different type of connector.

I don't think there's a ready made adapter available for either. There was an
adapter to use Zorro cards on an A500, but not the reverse case.

~~~
rodgerd
> For the 2000, there's the Zorro slots, which serves the same purpose, but is
> an entirely different type of connector.

The connector is different, but the Zorro II bus in the A2000 is logically the
same across all the 16 bit models.

------
rbanffy
Why not use the internal connector under the keyboard? Is it that different?

~~~
vardump
You mean slow RAM expansion slot? Isn't it connected to chipset side, right.
So limited in capacity and slow.

On some Amiga models I actually saw this expansion "slow RAM" as true chip
RAM, could play samples, set up copper lists, set Denise to display bitplanes
from it, etc.

------
s800
Any chance of this loading the Vampire II stuff?

~~~
ZenoArrow
That's the Apollo 68k accelerator right? If so, that could be great, though I
wonder if it'd result in too much data travelling through the A500 expansion
port.

~~~
cmsj
The Vampire 500 is in the final stage of design and does not use the expansion
port, it replaces the 68000 CPU in its socket.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Sure, that makes sense, but I was replying to the suggestion that the Vampire
could be part of the A500 accelerator linked to at the top of this thread.

