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Commodore's Amiga Is Being Revived In Newly Updated Hardware (hothardware.com)
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.
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.
and in flying cars. When Windows 10 is a long distant memory, we will still be using our Amigas.
Amigo?
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).
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Now thirty years later, have they added essential things to make these units compliant? There are much more stringent regulations that have to be met now.
UL (kind of)
ETL
CE
FCC
It isn't cheap to sell consumer electronics anymore. Everyone wants a piece of the pie, and you'll be sued out of existence in some countries and not allowed to enter the market in others if you manage to survive the first round of development.
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 (including MiST) have used the CPU for loading cores onto the FPGA and not much more. The FPGA would need to provide an interface from the CPU to the machine's "Chip RAM" and that might be a bit too unusual?
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
You know, I'm as nostalgic as the next guy. Maybe more so.
I can already run an Amiga emulator on the Raspberry Pi and reminisce like its 1987 all over again.
This is just a ridiculous waste of time. I can do much more with the $40 Raspberry Pi than I can with any Commodore anything. And for a few dollars more I can ramp up, by orders of magnitude, past the Raspberry Pi.
Crommulent!
right now you guys...
Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 due to mismanagement. They had the Amiga 4000 with advanced video editing capabilities back then which was still used professionally many years later. I had a dude in '96 in my CS classes at university running windows emulators on his Amiga just fine.
That SID chip music will be back :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If the source code is available anywhere to the os
That SID chip music will be back :)
SID music never went away. Go to the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) and put 2018 in their search box. SID wasn't part of the Amiga chipset though.
> Anybody remember the Nickelodeon Saturday Morning show "Total Panic" with Steve Gibson warning about the failures of Amiga systems and other computers of the 80s in 1990?
Google seems not to remember, so did it ever really happen?
I’d love to see a reference for this.
Unless you happened to see a commercial for SpinRite.
As TurboStar said above, there was no SID in the Amiga.
The SID chip was inside the Commodore 64.
#DeleteFacebook
And post "Amiga is being brought back" as the preferred Slashdot shitpost?
It also found its way into your crappy radio music through the SidStation
You can clearly hear the filtered saw-tooth waveform in the beginning of Britney Spears - Gimme More
I worked extensively with a company that shipped Amiga 4000 based products long after Amiga Technologies went kapoof. That work included re-layout of motherboards to reduce EMI/EMC emissions. Given that those products represented the tail end of single-ended, open collector parallel bus technologies I can tell you than anyone who claims to know jack about those boards and is merely keeping them alive by replacing caps and batteries is nothing but a hack. Unless you have studied the capacitance of those boards trace by trace, updating the terminating pull-up resistor values to meet timing requirements, you haven't even begun to understand the challenges involved in keeping them operational as they age. It seems the last of the true Amiga community died along with Software Hut in 2005. RIP.
... as my Atari 800 w/ ATR-8000 and a pair of 8-inch floppies.
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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 to relive their youth. And it would be senseless to try to use AmigaOS as if it were a modern OS, because it lacks important features like memory protection — Amigas generally didn't come with a MMU, and even most accelerators don't have one. It was awesome in its day, but today there's no actual point outside of enjoyment of the experience.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You had to be there to understand it.
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Yeah. My mates didn't even consider PCs until there were decent graphics cards. PCs were "business computers". As soon as command and conquer came out though, the tech was there for PCs to kick the arse of everything else.
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/
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 hardware.
It seems every few years there is another announcement that Amiga is returning from the dead.
For balance of powers, there is the Amiga computer, and there is the Atari computer.
The FireBee is a New Atari compatible computer.
http://firebee.org/fb-bin/index?&lng=EN
This is not an Amiga revival, it's not new life, it's not a Renaissance.
This is a couple of hobbyists fooling around with some old hardware, replacing some damaged components to get the machine working again. I never used an Amiga but I thought it was a fine idea and I give props to the people who loved them. And that's all this is; some Amiga owners working on a weekend project.
Know what an Amiga revival would really look like? New Amiga models with new CPUs, development work on the OS, software appearing for the system that never existed before.
Time and circumstance have passed the Amiga by. It was good in it's day and it's day is done. Same goes for the Commodore 64, same for the DEC Rainbow, same for the TRS-80, same for all old computers. Reminiscing about the Good Old Days is fine as long as you know that's all it is.