And production has started…

As the last entry was in May last year, I think some update is in order.

Simply, work went crazy and I moved flat in the summer last year – all of which conspired to push out the Replay board development sadly. I have got the production process in place now, and 100 boards are being assembled this week. Assuming all goes well, more will follow immediately. we have also developed a USB interface adapter for the Replay board. This replaces the PS2 connector and adds low latency keyboard / mouse USB support directly into the FPGA. This can be back-fitted to existing boards, and will be available as an option on new ones.

More news to follow ….

Well, I said I would not update this “old” version of the site any more, but as I haven’t had time to bring up the nice new one yet completely, one more update is necessary. The Replay boards have now obtained FCC and CE approval and are starting to ship, however in small quantities.

I have received a complete barrage of email about a chap advertising the board. We have been in contact for a while and I have been using him as pre-production non-developer beta tester. I agreed that he could put boards in cases and resell them if he wished, but that other distributors may come on line, and the boards would always be available directly from the www.fpgaarcade.com website.

The price for the current boards is 199Euro + VAT for the non-composite/svhs version and 229Euro +VAT with. VAT in Sweden is 25%. I can ship without VAT to companies only in the EU. Everybody who has mailed me and requested a board is still in the queue and will be prioritized over the disti channels! Producing boards is not a problem, but I do not want to sign off the PO for assembly of the next batch until I am 100% happy. I have about 30 boards which are not stable because the DRAM timing is fixed in the current core – and every chip will have slightly different timing. So, the full validation is being held up until I am totally happy, then we press the button. The new core looks pretty much the same as before, but a whole lot of infrastructure has changed to support multiple cores and dynamic configuration etc. A number of people are working converting different games or platforms to the board.

It has been a long journey, but we really are reaching the good bit now.
Thank you for your patience
MikeJ

Well, I still haven’t got the new website up and running, but testing and shipping of the boards continues.
I’m working through the list of people who have mailed me. I have a new Amiga core up and running based on Jakub’s latest work, but it’s not quite ready yet – I’m so busy testing boards.

I also got the IO shields back, they look rather nice :