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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.
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
Your post must have been delayed on a 20-lightyear link....
No typo... Amiga was a popular graphics computer of the 80s.
Raspberry Pi represents to our children what we were growing up with in the 90s... small processor and storage sizes, and dirt cheap hardware. There's many kid efforts in teaching computers that are just not discussed on Slashdot.
Spotted the millennial. Shouldn't you be driving up the price of avocados or something?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm largely in agreement.
However, I will note that an Amiga, or even a C64, was a much larger percentage of the household budget in the 1980's than today's Raspberry Pi which costs no more than a night at the (absurdly overpriced) movies.
The Raspberry Pi and its copycats, like Odroid, are amazing computers for the price and vastly more versatile than Commodore was/is.
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.
No, I mean 1980s.
That SID chip music will be back :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
As TurboStar said above, there was no SID in the Amiga.
The SID chip was inside the Commodore 64.
#DeleteFacebook
Amigas were not cheap. About the price of a midrange gaming PC in today's money. C64 were cheaper later on but that's still closer to entry level PCs than a Raspberry Pi.
Also, the Raspberry Pi is a powerhouse compared to these old-school computers. It changes the way it is approached. You can fully understand an Amiga or C64, know every instruction, their timing and addresses. A RPi is always used through an OS, with many abstraction layers and things happening behind your back. Basically, old-school computers forced you to understand the hardware if you wanted to go further, but it was easy, now you don't really need to, and doing so would be much harder.
... as my Atari 800 w/ ATR-8000 and a pair of 8-inch floppies.
More likely the OP is a troll, or someone from whatever we're calling the generation younger than millennials (Gen Z?).
Amigas were not cheap. About the price of a midrange gaming PC in today's money.
yes, in todays money you'd get a very decent PC, but back then the Amiga was cheap compared to PC's and offered way more (colours, sound, multitasking OS).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
There was only one 2008.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
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I and my brother bought a second-hand Amiga 500+ by saving up our pocket money. 50 GBP second-hand, and it came with dozens of games and other programs (some original, others copies). Even adjusting for inflation, that's only about 4 times the cost of a Raspberry Pi.
It also wasn't really necessary to understand the hardware to do cool things. You could make a shoot-em-up with Blitz Basic which looked just as good as most of the stuff you got on magazine cover disks.
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.'"
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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.