Minimig Discussion Forum

Hello there. I'm Jason McMullan, one of the lead developers on the AROS m68k Kickstart Replacement project, and I am interested in supporting the Minimig Core in AROS.

From what I have read in the Verilog, it looks like Minimig is a 512K ROM machine. How easy would it be to add another ROM area at 0xE00000-0xE80000 for AROS?

Is anyone interested in testing AROS on such a modified Minimig, and reporting the results? I am particularly interested in whether the Amiga Graphics support works with the Minimig core.

By the way, the current status of AROS m68k is that it can run most shell and GUI commands of Workbench 1.3 and 3.x, and several applications. We're currently missing a lightweight 'Workbench', so you have to use the very bulky 'Wanderer' or some other workbench replacement.

These development versions of AROS require:

* M68000 or better
* 2M Chip RAM
* 4M Fast RAM
* Serial port (for logging debug messages)
* AGA (I think. Might work on ECS, but I only have an A1200 for real hardware testing)

Optional:
* Gary IDE (Have not tested with Gayle or A4000 IDE)

If you are interested in testing, pre-build binaries are available at:

http://aros.sourceforge.net/download.php#nightly-builds

You only need the following ROMs:

distfiles/aros-amiga-m68k-ext.bin 512K@0xE00000
distfiles/aros-amiga-m68k-rom.bin 512K@0xF80000

They are designed to work on the entire M68K family, from 68000-68060, and on all Amiga hardware (we hope).

Sorry for the large size of the ROMs, but they are jam-packed with debugging code. We plan to shrink them quite a bit once we have full functionality.

I am not a developer but rather I am a Minimig user with a 4MB Minimig that would be interested in testing AROS-m68k on my Minimig if it could be adapted to run on it.

Sadly at the moment I dont think the current available Minimigs meet the hardware requirements you list about as the 4MB Minimig with ARM addon board(the top spec currently available) has to use some of that 4MB to load the kickstart image, so even after the minimig core is adapted to load a 1MB kickstart it will only have 2MB of chipmen and 1MB of slow RAM available to run AROS-m68k. The ECS chipset emulation may also be an issue but if AROS-m68k can be adapted to run on the curent hardware I would love to help with the testing.

Greetings and welcome Ezrec!
Nice to see an interest in supporting Minimig even to modern OS like AROS

Actually its not very hard to use another 512kb s-ram bank as a ROM at any other address.
I made this in some test core to get extended ROM of CDTV to work. Sure this only was a joke but it only took a few minute to allign Gary modul addressing and core compiling.

A more difficult matter would be ROM uploading into this area.
ARM and PIC right now can detect 256kb and 512kb ROM image size. 68k Bootloader in FPGA (blue background + text) must be changed too.
For a standard 2MB raw memory Minimig board, this would left free only 1.0MB of user/OS memory. Its a bit low for AROS.
An expanded Minimig board would still have 3.0MB of free memory left. As the list says: no, its still not enough.

Im interested in testing AROS for 68k. Maybe its impossible for Minimig but I also own many real Amiga model of differnet kind and expansion.

That sounds very good.
Most importand is to have a "free" available Kickstart replacement without copyright issue and requirement of an original ROM chip etc.

As mentioned above, Minimig V1.1 board seems to have too less available memory.
The Replay board by MikeJ. would be a better test env.

PS: Gary IDE module already is present in Minimig.

I will test this binary file as soon as possible
Thanks for your hard work!

Thanks for your interest!

A number of people have been interested in 512K ROM images of AROS m68k, so I'll spend some time to see if I can make a stripped-down AROS that can run it that space.

It'll probably need to move graphics.library and friends to a boot disk, but I'll see what can be done.

Does anyone have a Terasic DE0/DE1/DE2 that has more memory that could use the 1M image?

I have an Altera Terasic DE1, and I've used it as an Amiga in the past but it has a pretty incompatible 68000 implementation in the Minimig (FAMPIGA) core, so a lot of software gurus on this one. It's like a broken Amiga, I use it as a MSX
Anyway, if you want me to test something, I'll set up the Amiga core and see what I can do.
Or even better, I can send you my board so you can test everything you want

I'd really appreciate that. I have PMed you my contact details.

Aros 68k works in WinUAE with at least this settings:

- 68000 cpu
- 512KB of chipmem
- 512KB of slowmem
- OCS chipset

On Minimig with remapped 512KB ram area to $E00000 - $E7FFFF (manual image upload with later-on write protection) it dont work.
I only get a dark or white screen or even a "wild crash" (cpu randomly poke into chipset register).

I could maybe use my Replay board to test AROS 68K aswell. If my memory serves me well, the Replay board has some more memory to use.
Just have to wait until I move into the new place and my ITX cabinet arrives from China and I can test And when Yaqube ships the daughterboard, a 060 cpu will spice up the Replay even more. Man, this is gonna be so c00l

Do you get any serial output? (115200N81)

If so, that could help indicate what's going wrong.

Unfortunately there is no serial FPGA output from Aros ROM.
The system always go wild (random effects, sometimes Drive-LED stay on) or just show a black/white screen.

I guess Aros is not yet able to work on real Amiga hardware since I only saw it work in WinUAE.