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Amiga Hardware Technology

Commodore's Amiga Is Being Revived In Newly Updated Hardware (hothardware.com) 94

Posted by BeauHD from the blast-from-the-past dept.
MojoKid writes from a report via Hot Hardware: Although it has been over three decades since the first Commodore Amigas were originally released, a fan base for the beloved systems is still going strong. In fact, today's Amiga community seems to be more active now that it has been in years, and a number of exciting new hardware projects have cropped up in recent weeks. Two relatively new projects, led by popular members of the Amiga community Paul Rezendes and John "Chucky" Hertell, are designed to breathe new life into the Amiga 4000 and Amiga 1200.

Both men set out to reverse engineer the motherboards for these systems, not only to continue the possibility of repairing existing machines that are prone to serious damage from leaky batteries and electrolytic capacitors, but to potentially spur additional customizations for the platform in the future. Though Paul and John have only made minor modifications to the Amiga 4000 and Amiga 1200 motherboard PCBs to this point, the possibility now also exists for all new variants to arrive at some point in the future for these machines as well. The first actual working motherboards populated with components based on the Amiga 4000 Replica project or Re-Amiga 1200 haven't been shown off just yet, and they may require additional revisions to work out any kinks. However, both projects are good examples of the passion that still remains for the beloved Amiga from computing glory days gone by.
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Commodore's Amiga Is Being Revived In Newly Updated Hardware More

Commodore's Amiga Is Being Revived In Newly Updated Hardware

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  • What, again? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @06:50PM (#57045226)
    Ah, never mind. I see this is about the same stuff as last time (Apollo etc). Sure, you could spend a bunch of money on a "new" Amiga, but at the end of the day it seems simpler to just run an emulator or FPGA system (I went with the later).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Excelcia ( 906188 )

      at the end of the day it seems simpler to just run an emulator or FPGA system

      There is some truth to this. But I would not mind having a physical system. Not sure how much I'm willing to pay for this, but there is something to be had to have an actual Amiga. But then I'm the type who has kept a pair of actual Amiga Corp joysticks back from before their purchase by Commodore.

      The Amiga was one of those crazy amazing things where things just lined up in the universe to produce something that was an engineer

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kenja ( 541830 )
        Thus the FPGA systems like MiST etc. Physical joystick ports, dedicated hardware, can be used for other things and much cheaper than a used Amiga much less a new one.

        • Joystick ports were replaced by USB... it's easy to get a throwback joystick these days.

          • Joystick ports were replaced by USB... it's easy to get a throwback joystick these days.

            Or if you must hack hardware, you can always use an Arduino Mega to get physical ports. There's really no good reason to use a classic joystick, though. They all sucked compared to a good gamepad. Literally all of them.

            With that said, actual Amiga users who want a mediocre gamepad which plugs into their Amiga can trivially hack a six-button mega drive pad to work. All six buttons are supported in all of four or five games; more games support three buttons, and vastly more support two. It involves swapping t

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              8/16 bit era joysticks were vastly superior to gamepads because they were right handed. For some reason we ended up with the directional controls operated with the left hand on gamepads and modern joysticks, when most people favour their right hand for precision control.

              You can get right handed arcade sticks nowadays, but the last time I saw a right handed gamepad was the Playstation era and it didn't look great.

              • Unfortunately, it's really hard to even find information on these because those little gaming keyboards are now called gamepads for some reason. Stupidity, I guess. Anyhow, there is the goofy foot mod kit [totalradnes.com]. The NES controller is an ergonomics train wreck, but they are still readily available and they are one of the most precise game controllers ever made...

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                  I might give that a try. A right handed Saturn pad would be amazing... But I'll probably end up with a right handed arcade stick.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Even cheaper and easier is a Raspberry Pi. Also supports physical joystick ports and even real Amiga keyboards.

          Emulation is pretty good these days. I still like to have a real Amiga with a proper CRT monitor around though.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        'Rein of terror' is not really what you'd think of as being an easily marketable product, but you'd be surprised at just how wealthy the four horsemen are and how much they'd be willing to spend on horse tack.

      • You touch on the importance of the Amiga (yes, I do miss my beautiful 2000/68030), but by and large emulators do run better today than than the originals. The point that's being missed is that it was a philosophy of design that made it so special. Take the things that suck up the most CPU cycles and offload them to hardware, then seemlessly (more or less) integrate them back into the os. Today gpus, soundcards, etc perform the same functions. In order for any "new" Amiga to be anything more than than just s
        • Unfortunately, there aren't many people today who can recognize a good design, let alone build one themselves. "Good" these days tends to mean "we managed to deploy it." Elegance isn't a thing anymore. (I should say, it's rare. Bitcoin was elegant.)

      • Microsoft ("who would ever want to run more than one program at a time?")

        They later changed their mind on that.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        Ah, the decade that taste forgot...

    • I understand that it's much easier (and cheaper) to emulate than to run on original hardware, but emulation doesn't bring the nostalgic factor like original hardware does and to be perfectly honest, it just isn't as cool. Also, half the fun in running old gear is keeping it clean, making repairs as needed and providing all the love necessary to keep things running clean and quiet.

      I've been collecting Commodore hardware over the last decade and have quite the Commodore museum for an office. There's nothing

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kenja ( 541830 )
        Sure, if you want a project rebuilding an old Amiga is fun. But then you start looking at spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on upgrades and it just gets silly. If your goal is to run Amiga OS and games, the best middle ground seems to be a dedicated FPGA system. Lets you use old accessories etc, only thing they tend to be missing is a floppy drive, which frankly I can do without... most "new" Amiga systems end up replacing the floppy with a flash drive anyhow.

        • But then you start looking at spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on upgrades and it just gets silly.

          These days there are hundred-dollar accelerators for Amigas, with enough RAM for gaming, so it's not that bad. On the other hand, having to re-cap them is a bit of a drag, and probably not worth it to most potential users. Emulation is better in its own way, because you can emulate multiple different models of Amiga, and some games (or other software) doesn't run well or at all on some models of Amiga, even with whdload.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Instead of a 100 MHz CPU in FPGA running against vintage graphics and sound chips, I would much rather like to see the vintage graphics and sound chips in FPGA but the CPU being emulated, with JIT-compilation running on a fast modern ARM multi-core chip.

    That would be a really powerful Amiga, and you would be able to run other things (such as OS:es and emulation cores) on it as well.

    However, I have not found any FPGA board that has had any good interlink with any powerful ARM chip. The ones I have seen (incl

  • ... as my Atari 800 w/ ATR-8000 and a pair of 8-inch floppies.

    • You could have saved this comment for the thread about "they're reviving the Atari 800"...

      ...oh? They aren't? Huh. Imagine that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      From your username and your like of Atari... you are from Poland, right?

      I found recently that the Atari 8-bit is very popular there for some reason.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Why does the hardware for Amiga matter so much, people are willing to redesign and reserve engineer to get it to work?

      Nostalgia. The Amiga (as a package) was so vastly much better than anything else available at the time that a lot of people have very strong feelings about it. It was outpaced by PCs at about the time that PCs started to get decent video acceleration, and I don't mean the 3d kind, but until then it was by far the best value in computing since its inception. It had a good CPU, a fast bus with autoconfiguration, and by far the best graphics and sound for ages.

      Am I blind in thinking that AmigaOS is better off being modernized to run on bare metal modern off the shelf hardware?

      It wouldn't give the same feeling to people trying

  • What gets me excited about the Amiga hardware scene are the neat FPGA kits that drive them. It's particularly interesting when this leads to things superior to any officially produced Amiga hardware out there, like a 68080 processor core: http://www.apollo-core.com/ [apollo-core.com]

    It's nice to simulate an ECS or AGA chipset for old times' sake, but it's also nice that the hardware doing that is also easily used for other creative things. I'd love to see RISC-V and FPGAs become a new creative playground for programmable

  • It seems every few years there is another announcement that Amiga is returning from the dead.

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