Yes. If you haven’t yet read it Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification is well worth a read. I am still reading it but it certainly explains some of the bad practices by these major advertising/spying giants and the resulting market distortion. We need to up our game as technologists and hold our employers to account.
It was a strange decision to limit the drives. I can see they might want to accredit drives which would give a 'Synology Approved Experience', though outright only support their own was bizarre. I'm very pleased they are reversing this. Aside: Now we just need Apple to do the same and resume support for industry standard expandable memory and storage.
From my perspective it lined up exactly with when I was looking to upgrade. I decided to bite the bullet and go with Duplicati, storing to a European based S3 service. I decided against US cloud providers since the US is looking too politically unstable to put anything important there. It was easy to set up and so far is running well.
If you are interested in FPGA PCIe or PCI cards there are also a lot of Gidel boards available second hand. ProcSpark/ProcStar etc. The official software is proprietary and they often contain multiple FPGA devices so there is again an exercise working out the pinouts etc if you want to simply use them with Quartus. I got one with a massive Stratix IV on.
A Kintel UltraScale+ is quite a prize though, really nice write up.
The top-level Verilog module and Vivado .xdc file (contains pin mappings, timing constraints, etc) from Gidel for the HawkEye 20G-48. [0] No SDK from Gidel though.
My back burner project for them is to create a PCIe TLP sniffer/MiTM/device emulator by hooking up two together via 10 GbE for relaying TLPs with one of the remaining 10 GbE connection going to a host PC for the sniffed/injected TLPs. The Aria 10 FPGA PCIe hard IP allows for either root or endpoint mode so I “just” need to draw the rest of the owl, avoiding any Quartus IP modules that would make the setup non-transparent.
I’m not sure what using a 10 Gbit link for PCIe will be like with faster devices but fail0verflow got away with TLP proxying with 115200 baud UART. [1]
As a big openscad fan I love the idea of designing circuits with code.
I do wonder though about designing circuits vs designing schematics. I see you have ‘wire down 100’ making it a more visual language than defining the nets. Be interesting to separate the schematic layout from the nets, so rule base schematic layout can then be applied.
You can actually skip all the wire commands and still generate a valid netlist, however the schematic might be a bit hard to decipher if there are many components!
I did explore automated layout algorithms for components in the schematics, however the readability and flow of the schematics might not be ideal, depending on what the algorithm prioritizes.
In the end, I realized that the actual layout and arrangement of the schematic itself was critical in the overall understanding. That was when I decided to add the "wire" command and give more control back to the schematic designer.
In the future, I do plan to add some automated way to generate these "wire" commands for automated layout. If the designer ever chooses to edit this automated schematic layout, he would be able to edit the wire commands for finer control.
In the end, I do believe that the visual part of the schematic plays an important role in understanding it. I, too, have spent hours puzzling/being misled by poorly drawn/disorganized schematics. Especially during troubleshooting or creating an updated revision, having a good understanding of the schematic saves time.
One of the aims of Circuitscript is to make the visual part easier, so at least more time can be spent thinking and organizing the schematic itself.
I've had great results with Codex, though I found ChatGPT 5 was giving much better results than the existing model. So ended up using that directly instead. So very excited to have the model upgraded in Codex itself.
The main issues with Codex now seem to be the very poor stability (it seems to be down almost 50% of the time) and lack of custom containers. Hoping those get solved soon, particularly the stability.
I also wonder where the price will end up, it currently seems unsustainably cheap.
In Switzerland pretty much all sites have a setting for French, German, Italian and often English. It is very much a multi-language country.
It is great to be able to select individually per site. I often like to use the native French and just drop back to English if its technical language.
I do find that every site has the setting in a different place which is annoying, it would be great to be able to select it in a standard place on the browser.
The worst offenders are the single language per country sites. For example Ebay insists on only using German in Switzerland, which is rather frustrating since I only know English and French so far.
If anyone was interested in the Amiga but has not kept up with recent developments, I suggest looking up the Vampire V4. It is mentioned in the article but I thought I'd add a few more details.
It has a reimplementation of the ECS and AGA chipset. It includes custom extensions to the chipset to 'SAGA' which is an attempt at extending the registers to more modern standards.
It also has a reimplementation of the 680x0 CPU, which is using more modern design techniques. The developer used to work on Power.
Anyway putting it all together its a great system in the vein of the Amiga. Of course it is not as fast as a modern ASIC, being consumer low end FPGA based. Still it is great fun.
Relevant to the Amiga 600? Well there is a standalone version but there is also a version called 'Manticore' that fits into the Amiga 600.
Many people will say you can get similar performance with emulation. This is of course true though, as someone who studied microelectronics, I see the value in real hardware. Both in future potential for making an ASIC and for more precise sub-microsecond level timing.
There is an alternative semi-emulation approach. i.e. emulating the CPU with a raspberry pi and using the rest of the original hardware. This is known as PiStorm and connects the GPIOs from PI onto the 68K to replace the original CPU.
Vampire is real hardware alright, but is basically just emulation in that layer instead. The hardware has nothing to do with an Amiga. So I don’t see much being won over traditional emulation in this case, other than perhaps improved input latency and performance.
If I were to go there, I’d go MiSTer or a clone instead, and save a load of cash in the process. You’ll get an A1200 level + AGA performance, and this ought to cover by far most of the content from the Amiga scene.
And for anyone who doesn't mind going down a massive rabbithole there are many variants of Minimig, the original FPGA-based recreation of the Amiga - most of which are on more affordable hardware than the Vampire - and open-source to boot.
The versions which have a soft-CPU are significantly slower than the Vampire - but for my money feel more authentic as a result. The versions which use a real 68000 CPU are slower still - but I think the version which combines an FPGA for chipset and an actual PiStorm for CPU is currently the fastest nearly-an-Amiga...
The Vampire is way overpriced and the extensions it adds are useless because they only work on other Vamprire machines. The PiStorm is much, much cheaper, and emulates a standard 68k while continuing to use the Amiga chipset.
As someone that was the only PC guy among a group of friends all Amiga owners, I don't think these systems do justice to the original systems.
What made Amiga great was the 1980- mid 1990's landscape of computers, 30 years later it is hardly any different from running an emulator, even if modern OSes still lack features present on AmigaOS.
I mean, sure, but, as the Vampire makes clear in its name... it's not an Amiga, it's its own thing, wearing the Amiga's skin as a hat. You can also stick a Raspberry Pi running E-UAE inside an Amiga case for pretty much the same thing (a thing that's definitely not an Amiga, emulating being an Amiga, in the shell of an Amiga)
older accelerators still work and are great compatibility-wise of course, there's also terrible fire which is great. I'd put Vampire the last actually, in-part due to compatibility and as you've said it.. you can pretty much do the thing with RPI and heck, you can even have rpi as an accelerator within an amiga - PiStorm.
I have three A1200s, two A600s, and an A500+. In each A1200 I have in order of least to most powerful: Blizzard 1230 with 030+FPU, Blizzard 1260 with 060, and TF1260 with 060. If I'm after most compatibility and games, it's 1230 that gets out. B1230 is just plug and play, you put it into Amiga and it's faster. That's it. With 1260 both Blizzard and TF you have to install stuff, play with it etc. It's good for demos and demo coding where target always is anyways Blizzard 1260. In A600 I have one stock and one with Furia with 030. A500+ is stock (actually A500 reworked to be A500+). Technically that's the full circle of it. There's no new stuff made for it or advantage of more power than this. Demos are made for 060 anyways. I also have PCMCIA cards with WiFi on them so that I can move stuff to amigas over the air, or even remote execute code.
Aside from ALL OF THAT (including a bunch of 1084s monitors), I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. I boot it up, it's an amiga, has all the crap on it and most of it works immediately. What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amiga was. That's what I'd recommend anyone wanting to get a bit into it outside of WinUAE on their own comp.
> ...I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. ... What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amiga was.
Worth noting that the RPi 500 is also out now, with much improved performance. It's the most "home computer"-like thingy on the market, so it goes quite well with that kind of usage.
The Vampire people really turned me, and likely many others, off when they tried to argue that FPU emulation isn't important and that hardly anything uses the FPU, rather than simply saying they weren't going to work on it then.
When you try to use bullshit to make excuses, people notice.
After that, they said the MMU isn't important, and that being fully m680x0 compatible isn't really as important as other things.
The issue, I guess, is that the Vampire sits in this weird space where they've picked a pretty arbitrary cutoff in which classic hardware they care about - most users who stuck with the Amiga for a long time would have had an accelerator with an M68k with an FPU, and MMU.
At the same time the Vampire extends the 68k instruction set and chipset in various ways. So it reflects this very opinionated "alternate history" version of what the Amiga could've been that involves ignoring a lot of what was.
I find the Vampire fascinating, and would quite like one (but maybe not enough to fork out what they're asking for it) but I realise I probably wouldn't use it much - it's mostly interesting because it's a fun oddity.
I'd have loved a Vampire-like machine that actually tried to take things forward across the board. I'm happy to see them experiment with 68k extensions, but I'd have loved to see them match the "full" classic experience with FPU and MMU first.
But it's their project - they're of course free to do what they want.
I think this the best analysis of the Vampire. To my mind it is more of an Amiga-compatible computer (with some odd graphics and CPU incompatibilities) than it is an actual extension of any Amiga platform ideas or plans.
Their odd instance on sticking with the "chipset architecture" also ensures it'll never be anything other than a niche device within a retro-computing niche.
I agree that it would indeed be more interesting if their 68080 actually extended the 68060 rather than branching off from the 68000. And their sAGA/Maggie architecture is a real deadend for programmers if, as they claim, they want to reignite Amiga's popularity. Commodore themselves understood that OCS/AGA was a deadend and designed their Hombre specification to replace it. If they implemented a 64bit version of Hombre than would be an intriguing thing I think.
Though frankly why you wouldn't just design for PCI based GPUs is anyone's guess but then you kind of have to admit your whole platform would just be better off being a PC
Ouch, if that is the case this is only going to boost the non US suppliers. Has anyone tried lcsc.com? Digikey and mouser are great but if all semiconductors go up 50% that is a problem.
Yes it does seem a bit strange - I guess the goal here is to encourage them to source and sell me a quality American SMD diode at less than $(0.006 + 10%) per unit.
That said I'm struggling to fully understand it all, the site kind of implies that the 50% Semiconductor tariff _is_ drawbackable - and if we look some of those were in effect since 2024. It does say that the 10% 'China tax' is not.
My reading here then is that the 10% extra is for everyone, and the rest of that table in addition is for goods consumed in the US. (And, some of those tariffs don't look very different from some of them in my non-US locale, which I would have to pay anyway)
Still a daft situation, will for sure be looking around for other suppliers.
I've used lcsc.com, and aside from their website being a little janky, it was fine. I would normally have used Digikey/Mouser, but I needed a few parts they didn't stock, but LCSC did. Then I found that a bunch of the other parts I was ordering were significantly cheaper from LCSC, and ultimately ordering everything I could from them cut the bottom line price of my BOM in half.
That said, shipping was $40-50 for one small box with around 50 components (varying quantities), so if you do order from LCSC it's best to order as much as possible within the same order, since the shipping is gonna be a significant chunk of the cost for any order <$1K. It took a few weeks to arrive using DHL, where Digikey/Mouser both generally deliver within a week (domestic shipping, I'm in N. Carolina).
TLDR; I would recommend LCSC if you are buying enough such that the per-part savings offsets the significantly higher shipping costs, and you don't mind waiting a ~10-14 days for your parts to arrive. I personally still use domestic suppliers for most parts, but when I have a larger BOM and I'm not under a deadline, I'll go with LCSC.
If you're ordering from the US, you should also be aware that Trump's tariffs still apply, so be prepared to pay at least 10% more for everything (some items--things like medical equipment, batteries, and semiconductors--are significantly higher, up to 100%). There may also be a processing fee levied by the shipping carrier if they collect the tariffs on your behalf. As I understand it, LCSC includes a customs declaration form with the shipment, and it's your responsibility to pay any duties or tariffs as the importer.
