If anyone is interested, I thought I'd share the progress of my latest ongoing pet project for MorphOS.
While UAE works fairly well on my Mac mini I bought a Minimig with the intent of controlling it from MorphOS (as if it were a daughterboard).

It is still very early days. So far all pieces can communicate and I have a simple MorphOS application which controls the system and feeds it with mouse/keyboard/joystick data.
(Thanks BSzili and Kelly Samel for help with Xbox360 controller code on MorphOS!)

Here is a movie of the work in progress:
http://youtu.be/PABMGhbiElY


The goal is of course to eventually have the MorphOS host also do the file serving to remove the need of putting disk images on the Minimig SD card.
The long term goal is to be able to simply double-click an ADF to have it launch on the minimig as a seamless experience just like if it had launched in UAE :)


Cheers,
--Anders

Hey that's really nice!
How's Minimig connected to MorphOS though? Via USB? Do you have any ETA of your project?

Yes, via USB.

I've made a prototype board which slots into the PIC microcontroller socket on the Minimig.
This board contains an ATMega microcontroller which talks to the host PC over USB. The ATMega is also wired to the original PIC microcontroller (which has a modified firmware to allow it to talk to the ATMega).


I don't really have an ETA. This is a learning experience for me, and will likely take some time to get everything right.




[ Edited by agranlund 26.11.2013 - 10:46 ]

This is real cool !! WIsh you the best with this project, will follow it :)

This is great.

This looks like a cool hacking project.

Very neat. The only down side I see is the price of these Minimeg boards. I still find it a lot easier to just run UAE over spending all the money needed for one.

Dont get me wrong, I would love nothing more than to see a return of the hardware hacks to our systems. My old A1000 had more hardware grafted to it just before I sold it off for an A3000 then I think it had original hardware on it. Good luck and please keep us posted on your progress!

Acill,
Quote:

Absolutely! The cost of the board, and other extra hardware, is perfectly ok with me since I view it more as paying for the entertainment value in hacking the board and less so for actually using it.
The Minimig board do have some benefits (and drawbacks) compared to UAE but considering the cost I'd say UAE is likely the better choice for most people.

My Intel Macbook Pro runs UAE very well for playing classic games, but it doesn't quite have the coolness factor of running on 68K+FPGA hardware controlled from a PPC MorphOS computer :)

I love this project !!!

Thanks a lot agranlund

I think this is a very cool project and I can't wait to see it into fruition when I can start use it myself. Then, I will have to get me a Minimig

I have been eying the Minimig for a while now, and a venture like this really strikes my interest!
For one thing, the Minimig supports MIDI adapters and runs OctaMED fine! Something I can not do under UAE currently.

The project has escalated somewhat to building a computer out of this.
I figured I have so many different pieces of hardware on my desk anyways so I might as well stuff it all in a box :)
(mac mini, minimig, kvm switch, usb hub, amiga-to-usb joystick adapters and so on...)

Currently the Mac is just a bare motherboard sitting on my desk and I am already starting to feel MorphOS withdrawal syndrome.. I am estimating it'll be at least a week or so until I can boot up MorphOS :/
Mounting holes needs to be drilled in the chassis, cooling needs to be taken care of, and I am waiting for delivery on a 44pin cable for the HDD.

Nothing much has happened on the minimig and software side as I have been working on the Audio + video output card that will go into the single PCI slot of the chassis. It's pretty much done. It's not pretty, but it does the job :)

The blog documenting the build progress can be found here:
http://amiga.happydaze.se/

nice project but i don't feel interested in the hardware part. At first i thought it would be a project that would be useful for everyone, something everyone owning a minimig and a morphOS machine could do, but now the pre-requisite will be too much.

yeah, how about a box for the interface only and making it for morphos running machines with a usb ?

" I can talk to it from MorphOS over USB, and it in turn can control the Minimig and the VGA switcher hardware."

X

Cool, glad to hear your re-casing everything now. This should be interesting!
It would be great if someone took your lead and tried once again to find a solution such as this for the masses. A means for MorphOS (and other) users to interface with some sort of actual Amiga hardware rather than relying upon emulation.

Seems that there's been some progress, looks really nice :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7fHtTq0tKo

[ Edited by jPV 29.08.2016 - 22:03 ]

This is really great! I wish I could do something similar with my Mac Mini and my Mist

Impressive stuff.

Didn't know you could run Lightwave on MOS!

Hi! Thanks :)

Yes, life got in the way of working on the computer for the longest of times but I finally got some hours every now and again to work on it.
It's at a point where it is almost finished and I'm really quite pleased with the result - but even more so with the learning experience.
I think any somewhat sane person would be much better off just using UAE instead :)

There are a couple of pictures and some information on my website:
http://amiga.happydaze.se/

Now that my MorphOS machine is actually usable and doesn't have cables sticking out of it everywhere I think it's time to upgrade to 3.9 and catch up with what has happened since last time :)

Cheers,
--Anders

> Didn't know you could run Lightwave on MOS!

Details: http://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7241&forum=9