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Amiga

A New Motherboard For Amiga, The Platform That Refuses To Die (hackaday.com) 90

Posted by EditorDavid from the very-retro-computing dept.
Hackaday writes: In the early years of personal computing there were a slew of serious contenders. A PC, a Mac, an Atari ST, an Amiga, and several more that all demanded serious consideration on the general purpose desktop computer market. Of all these platforms, the Amiga somehow stubbornly refuses to die. The Amiga 1200+ from [Jeroen Vandezande] is the latest in a long procession of post-Commodore Amigas, and as its name suggests it provides an upgrade for the popular early-1990s all-in-one Amiga model.

It takes the form of a well-executed open-source printed circuit board that's a drop-in replacement for the original A1200 motherboard... The catch: it does require all the custom Amiga chips from a donor board...

It's fair to say that this is the Amiga upgrade we'd all have loved to see in about 1996 rather than waiting until 2019.
Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) shares a recent video showing the latest update of AmigaOS 4 by Hyperion Entertainment, and reminds us of two "also active" Amiga OS clones — AROS and MorphOS.

Further reading: Little Things That Made Amiga Great.
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A New Motherboard For Amiga, The Platform That Refuses To Die More

A New Motherboard For Amiga, The Platform That Refuses To Die

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  • We Amiga fans are keeping the dream alive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Armonk ( 5413686 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @01:39PM (#61130874)
    Those of us that grew up with Amigas will never let the platform die. - Amiga fan for life
    • Wow, you must have grown up fast. I bought the original 1000 very early and even worked on the Blink linker, but it died only a few years later. Didn't think it was long enough time for a generation.

    • I grew up with Amigas and I wish they'd die. They were never really that good.

    • Better question. Why should it die? So windows, apple, or linux can succeed?

    • Re:We Amiga fans are keeping the dream alive (Score:4, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @03:20PM (#61131130) Homepage Journal

      The "Ami" in my username is short for Amiga.

      I have a kind of love-hate relationship with it, because I was one of its biggest fans but also got very frustrated by the efforts to keep it alive and current, which mostly came to nothing. I sold most of my gear and deeply regret it now, because now it's a retro machine and expectations have changed I'm enjoying the Amiga much more again.

      In particular I've started writing code for it once more. The tools available now are fantastic. There are a couple of Visual Studio Code add-ons that let you do assembler or C, and launch the code in an emulator in a few seconds. The emulator is 99% accurate and has advanced debugging tools, like a view of DMA allocation. Managing DMA is the key to getting good performance form the Amiga.

      Back in the day you had to do everything in assembler to get good performance. Now we have GCC 10 and the code it produces is usually pretty close to as good as you could do by hand, to the point where the choice of algorithm and the way you manage the hardware is the dominant factor by far. That means it's much easier to write interesting code now, and you can still throw in assembler where it makes sense to do so.

      • What are you writing for it? Demos? Games? Some music tool? I'm trying to think what else you'd write for retro hardware. Back about 2005 I had a coworker who tried to unload his 'spare' Amiga 500 on me but I declined. I wish I hadn't but I wouldn't have appreciated it back then so maybe it went to a better home.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Mostly demos at the moment. Back in the day I did a few small PD games, some utilities and a few demos. Mostly one-off effects I had seen and wanted to figure out for myself.

    • The rest of us grew up and got a life.

      But hey, don't we feel special, calculating on our abacuses (which we probabl call abacii...aea..ii)... whilenlistening to wax cylinders in our covered wagons... ;)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cito ( 1725214 )

        You young whipper-snappers and your fancy abacus(abacuses?, abacii?).
        The real pros calculate base-2 on fingers, and use notepad for the notation.
        And no it's not that fancy thing from Microsoft, but the notepad you can get
        for a buck at a local dollar store.

        Hehe ;-)

    • Yes, we will. For 1985 the Amiga was good, not great. The main problem with it was the OS. The idiotic design of a multitasking OS with out memory protection. The second greatest weakness was the reliance on custom chip sets for everything. Yes, that was a weakness. Most us didn't know that till we go a real x86 computer with linux on it. Where we could just upgrade the graphics and sound by just replacing a card.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        It was a product of the times... The OS design focused on performance at the expense of stability.
        Memory protection was not possible without memory management hardware, which would have increased the cost and reduced performance.
        Dos and early windows or macos versions also lacked memory protection for the same reason.

        Same with the custom chips. You could add new video or sound cards to the amiga and they would be used by the os and all software running through the os. Games generally ignored the os and drov

      • Yeah, the OS was largely a waste of time. Nobody really wrote apps for the Amiga, it was a demo/games machine.

        Actual coding on an Amiga was painful due to horrible support for hard disks, etc.

        Back when I coded for Amiga I used to edit/assemble on an Atari ST and send it to the Amiga over the parallel port.

    • Indeed! I co-host an Amiga development stream (https://dosamigans.tv) and thereâ(TM)s a good community of programmers and enthusiasts out there still.

  • This is a replacement for the A1200 board and does offer advantages over the original, but as far as I can tell it's still using Kickstart 3.1 with a 680x0 CPU and so it won't run AmigaOS 4.

    • There is no good reason to run an actual Amiga now unless you want to play legacy games, play with legacy trackers, or similar.

      There is no good reason to run AmigaOS now unless you are running an actual Amiga.

      AmigaOS 4 is silly.

      • Re:A new obsolete Amiga. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by damnbunni ( 1215350 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @01:58PM (#61130916) Journal

        All computers and OSes suck. They just suck in different ways.

        I use AmigaOS 4 for things because it's fun to screw around with. And easy to fix when I break something.

        • Plus it makes their software library available.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          does lionux realy suck, I agree that the gui side of thing suck (you know wherever x replacement and desktop mess they come up with this week), but does the os itself suck? but you are right no software, of anyy kind, is perfect.

          • Of course it sucks. It sucks all sorts of ways.

            Here's a suck I personally hit, as an example: I installed it from an iso image, it worked and went 'oh hey there are driver updates' so I let them install, and then my ethernet no longer worked. So that was fun.

            One I'm dealing with currently is grub is absolutely refusing to see my Windows drive on a multi-disk machine, so I can't add 'boot windows' to the menu. I have to hit f12 and pick a drive to boot from.

            Every computer sucks. The trick is to find the one

  • is that it resurrects hardware that has died. You obviously can't buy new chips for the custom graphics on Amiga. This lets hobbyists take dead computers and pull the chips, putting them on a new board and making a working computer.

    The moral of the story, if you've got an old classic PC that won't boot hang on to it or find a collector to give it to :)!

    • Obviously the part most likely to fail and need replacement is the printed circuit board. /sarcasm

      • Re:What makes this so cool (Score:4, Informative)

        by Bad Ad ( 729117 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @02:18PM (#61130972)
        You think you are being funny, but you clearly dont know much about the amiga. The PCB is the most common part to die in many models of amiga, the battery leaks and destroys the board.

        Feel that may have backfired for you a little.
        • The PCB didn't fail. The battery failed.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bad Ad ( 729117 )
            Which leaked on the board, that then damages traces, which doesnt conduct between components, therefore PCB failing to operate.

            Not sure why you are trying to be a pedant, but one thing can cause another to fail. The cause of the PCB failure doesnt really matter, once its dead, it needs replacing - no matter the "cause".
            • PCBs can get corroded traces from humidity, smoky environment, poor quality materials, etc. When a capacitor leaks, it's a capacitor fault, not a PCB fault. When a resistor blows, it's a resistor fault, not a PCB fault. When a battery leaks it's a battery fault, not a PCB fault.

      • Re:What makes this so cool (Score:4, Informative)

        by mkopack73 ( 7651756 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @05:18PM (#61131384)

        Obviously the part most likely to fail and need replacement is the printed circuit board. /sarcasm

        Actually, for a lot of Amigas, that IS the part that has died... The A1200, 500+, 2000, 3000 and 4000 all had NiCd batteries in them to power the real time clock. Many machines were stored away in the mid 90's without this battery being removed, which subsequently leaked battery acid all over the MB destroying traces and ruining the board.

        So yes, the boards ARE the parts that have often died, but the chips are perfectly good...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Actually you can, there are several FPGA implementations of the Amiga chipset. Some which aim for compatibility with old games, others which aim for compatibility plus performance improvements etc.

  • Amigas put to community use (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stwrtpj ( 518864 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @02:12PM (#61130946) Journal
    I still remember a day years and years ago. There was a local cable channel that ran community bulletins, mostly things like local community events and the like, Just simple text messages obviously driven by some off-the-shelf computer hardware. I wondered what type of PC they were using for it until I one day I tuned to it, and it was displaying an Amiga guru mediation message.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @02:18PM (#61130970)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Sure, but it will be time consuming and expensive to reverse engineer these old chips.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by crow ( 16139 )

        I'm sure there are tools for that based on taking an original chip, some fancy x-ray photography, or something like that, and clever software. I would think some companies already do this to study their competitors' products (whether legal or not). For these older chips, the feature size would be much larger, making such a task easier.

        Does anyone know if this is really practical?

        • There's Youtubers who document doing stuff like that. Harder part is finding out how scarce the source chips are.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Who needs to reverse-engineer them? An emulator on a RPi would probably do rhe job just fine. As long as it gets the timing right.

        • actually for the most part I do run most amiga software on a pi these days

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Who needs to reverse-engineer them? An emulator on a RPi would probably do rhe job just fine. As long as it gets the timing right.

          I think they've been long reverse engineered - UAE and such have emulated every official Amiga for years now.

          There are official distributions of UAE for various platforms that include legitimate copies of ROMs too.

          Amiga was great for its time, but later it started becoming the limitation as IBM PCs and Macs started outperforming them. The custom chips are great, but they were als

      • Sure, but it will be time consuming and expensive to reverse engineer these old chips.

        Will be? It's already been done. https://makerhacks.com/mister-... [makerhacks.com]

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        I'm not a hw expert, so please excuse t he possible silliness of the question, but does a chip tralu haveto replicate the original or is it enugh that it produces the same outputs given the same inputs?

    • Re:Regarding those custom chips.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @03:27PM (#61131152)

      They have been replicated years ago, with VGA output and other capabilities. There are the UnAmiga, MIST and the MISTer, for instance.
      Or if you just want a faster CPU, there are the Vampire boards with CPUs in FPGAs running at speeds that Motorola never made chips for.

      But there is still something special about real hardware in an authentic enclosure, with full compatibility with all peripherals.

    • they have been several times. the most notable is the vampire v4 stand-alone amiga

  • Yeah, well, two of those platforms aren't dead, you know.

  • They are all personal computers.

    Anyone using "PC" like the Apple commercial did, is completely unqualified and should never be allowed to write any computer tech article whatsoever.

    Otherwise the luddites will be running the show, thinking they are the experts and anyone else is "backwards". Like it is already the case for much of the web and for pocket PCs.

    • I suspect most people think of a computer compatible with the Compaq Deskpro 386 than the 'IBM PC', IBM had essentially abandoned the PC and PC-AT platforms by the time what most people think of as a modern PC was developed (they wandered off to Microchannel Architecture). Compaq's Deskpro 386 was the machine that almost any PC newer was based on.

  • Far from the only Amiga project... (Score:4, Informative)

    by mkopack73 ( 7651756 ) on Saturday March 06, 2021 @05:05PM (#61131350)

    There are dozens of Amiga related things happening these days...

    Just off the top of my head:

    The A314 project that allows you to hook a Raspberry Pi into the A500's internal memory port to provide both the expanded RAM to the Amiga, but also acts as an accelerated co-processor board to offload high performance code to, and it even allows the Pi access to the shared Chip memory as well as a few other tricks...

    There's the Vampire accelerator boards to speed up the A1200, 500/1000/2000 systems that give it a 68080 (yes 080) processor, a ton more ram than these machines normally can take, IDE interfaces and even options for ethernet add-ons.

    There's the zz9000 RTG graphics board for the 2000/3000/4000 that give retargetable graphics, and ARM processor to offload some processing, Ethernet, and even some USB capabilities.

    There's the new RGB2HDMI project which lets you make use of a Raspberry Pi zero as a video passthrough to output the RGB video out to the PI's HDMI port so it can be easily used on modern LCD monitors (just installed one of these yesterday and it's great!)

    There's a number of projects for replacing the motherboard with new boards (again, requiring donor parts from an original board)...

    There's are at least 3 other new accelerator projects I can think of...

    A new version of the classic 68k OS just came out a year or so ago (3.1.4) and 3.2 is expected sometime this year...

    Of course, there's still a ton of legal hassles going on - Cloanto bought up all the licenses but Hyperion came out with the 3.1.4 OS claiming that they had the license for OS 3.x, so of course there's a lawsuit going on, which has been yet another useless distraction. Hopefully they'll work it out soon.

    So, yeah it's FAR from a dead platform.... No, not a huge commercially successful one anymore, but it still has an active community and following, and is still being developed and expanded.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      When you say "these days"... The "editor" didn't even bother to remove the bit from the summary which says that this "news" is 2 years old. Your post should probably be the summary instead.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      There's also a standalone version of the vampire which includes the 080 cpu, as well as implementations of the custom chipsets in the fpga.

    • Thanks for the list! The party trick of the A314 is that the Amiga can read from it as if it were RAM... so, for example, the Raspberry Pi can do the hard work of decoding video, which the Amiga can display as if the Amiga were doing the decoding natively. Real-time video on your A500!

      You mention FPGA emulation. I've been looking into the MISTer platform, which emulates a range of retro machines including the Amiga. Because it's in FPGA, the timing of the Amiga's weird custom chips can be preserved, while s

  • Being freshly woke, what about fatherboards?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by iamacat ( 583406 )

      Shame on you, everyone knows it should be villageboard! You may atone and get uncancelled by donating 10% of your income to the underprivileged.

    • motherboards and childboards have moved beyond the need for a father

  • Taken to the extreme, even the creator himself had to make yet another sequel

  • Taken to the extreme, even the creator Cameron himself had to make yet another sequel. A million voices asked Why?

  • The author (mytek) made an 8-bit motherboard [weebly.com] ... and then he made another one [weebly.com] that fits into the XL disk drive chassis (so it fits with the rest of the XL/XE time peripherals).

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