Tag Archives: Amiga

Amiga, Retromod

The new A1222+, thoughts and reflections

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For those of you following the Amiga retro scene, you are probably familiar with the A1222 next generation Amiga, or at least the name of it.

Without diving too far into the past and get entangled in the Amiga drama once again (which I somehow seem to have a knack for doing, causing all kinds of problems), the CPU that everybody was talking about back in the late 80s and early 90s, was PowerPC (short: PPC). This was the cpu that finally gave Intel a good run for it’s money, at least for a decade or so. PPC was the buzzword on every technology experts mouth, and the hype was only rivaled by the spindoctors of Java. PPC could walk on water -the CPU that would solve everything.

Apple “Candy” Mac’s put Apple on the map again. They sold exceptionally well and is for many synonymous with the mid to late 90s.

Apple was an early adopter of the PPC cpu, having previously been dependent on 68k just like the Amiga. This was the time when Steve Jobs returned to “make Apple great again”, knocking out those fancy candy-mac’s, the mac G4 cube and well, the Mac machines that were exciting to be honest. Steve Jobs somehow found a way to make technology cool and attractive for people not generally into computing. The candy Mac’s and later G4 cube, was just as much a piece of designer furniture as it was a computing platform.

Even my mother that otherwise hated computers liked the candy Mac’s. That really says something about the power of advertizing and aesthetics.

Next generation Amiga

Around the same time the Amiga community was more than eager to abandon the 68k chipset. The old 68k was a beautiful piece of engineering, but it was ultimately technology developed in the 1970s. It was a CISC processor with a wast array of instructions, many of them complex and costly [in cpu terms]- which made it difficult for Motorola to ramp up the clock cycle speed. The 68k was a sturdy, faithful work-horse, but just like a horse cannot keep up with a car – it’s time in the sun had come to an end. The Amiga chipset being so dependent on how the cpu behaved, like gears in a finely tuned mechanism, would never make the transition. The entire 68k Amiga architecture was set to be phased out with the cpu.

A1222 NG Amiga motherboard (and fully setup systems) are available now!

In the Amiga community at the time there were some “hybrid” PPC solutions. Companies like Haage & Partner started knocking out PPC accelerator boards for the Amiga. You could then use replacement libraries (system libraries) which ran on the PPC cpu instead of the old 68k, boosting performance. Graphics performance was probably the aspect that benefited the most from this, although it would affect anything from database handling to sound processing for that matter – if someone had written the software to do so. But for a long time the PPC was regarded as “the next step”. There was no debate about this at all, since the PPC cpu was the only alternative that could give x86 a good run for it’s money.

Without getting into the nitty gritty of things, the culmination of the PPC / RISC development by various companies – competing or not, would eventually result in Hyperion implementing OS4. The legal battles over OS4 has been so insane, and so convoluted and complex, that I wont even bother to venture into it again. Needless to say, if the Amiga IP had been run by reasonable parties back then, we would all be sitting on next-generation Amigas running OS4 from the mid 90s well into the early 2k’s. But the Amiga IP was fragmented left and right, and people have been fighting over it for over 30 years. They are still in court over some of this stuff, which just boggles the mind.

The winner of all this will eventually be the proud owner of something that is worthless, because the technology will be so outdated that it would be equivalent to grabbing the rights to the model T-Ford in 2024. The only possible future I see for Amiga, is first of all my own Quartex Desktop system which is meant for clustering, Amiga OS 4 and finally, Morphos. Aros x86 actually holds the most promise, but without leadership and people paying bounties, it’s dead in the water. It is heartbreaking to watch.

The 3.x branches are dead unless someone magically invents a 68k CPU that delivers i7 performance. Which I very much doubt we will ever see.

30 years later

Whomever you might side with in the legal battles of yesteryear up until the present – Amiga OS4 has been fully developed by Hyperion Software, and is their product. What has happened however, as a consequence of all the legal delays over the years – is that the PPC launch that should have happened in the 90s, ended up being pushed forward into the 2k’s. Almost a decade was lost in the mayhem Commodore left behind. By then, the Amiga market was barely a shadow of what it once was.

Amiga OS 4.1, the chapter of Amiga that most people missed out on. It arrived late but it really is an amazing system well worth owning

Interestingly, in the past decade we have seen a sort of revival of the Amiga brand, as old time Amiga users are returning. Our kids are grown, we are in our 50s, and many of us are thinking about what we wanted to do as young men – versus what we had to do (e.g Job, family, careers). For most of us, the Amiga is associated with a time when the world was wide open; before we carved out a path and did our duty to nature and society.

As the kids grew into young adults, many of us found ourselves thinking about who we used to be, and what we loved doing before university, serious relationships and our careers became dominant. Just where did my Amiga go?

I think a lot of those that have returned to the scene in the past decade have experienced similar epiphanies in one way or another. Of good memories with the Amiga and a desire to re-live those memories. Or perhaps even picking up where we left off.

The way Commodore squandered the Amiga still doesn’t feel right. Like a book with missing chapters that deserves to be written.

PowerPC did arrive

With the mid 90s now over three decades behind us, you would imagine that the Amiga was just a distant memory, and that the next-generation never happened. But this is where people are wrong. Companies like Hyperion, which makes the OS4 software, and A-EON which makes the PPC Amiga motherboards – have not just released one such Amiga in our absence, but several models.

So the PPC / OS4 next-gen platform did go through, albeit a decade later than expected, but Hyperion etc. did deliver. Despite some parties best effort to prevent it i might add. There has been both the x1000 and (more recently) x5000, the Sam PPC boards – which all run Amiga OS 4.

Modern, yet distinctly Amiga. Same file organization, same menus, same dock. If you know you way around 68k Workbench, this will feel exactly the same. Except there is a lot more cool stuff to do here 🙂

The challenge has ultimately been that most Amiga users only remember the 68k line of machines, and completely missed out on the PPC platform. We grew up in the 80s, went to college and university in the 90s, and was firmly lodged in starting a family from the late 90s well into the 2k’s. My point here being, that most Amiga users dont feel an affinity to the PPC line of Amiga machines., they only remember the 68k classics. Which really is a great shame, because if Commodore had survived, we would all have done our college homework on PPC based Amiga machines, not x86 Wintel machines.

The A1222 was set for launch just before the Covid pandemic tragically hit us. Sadly the boards had some parts that were difficult to source, so A-Eon had to redesign the specs and write new drivers for the replacement parts. That the world went to a grinding halt with the Covid pandemic did not make things any easier. Two years out the window, followed by severe chip shortages, delayed production and crippled supply lines. Everything became more expensive (and still is), from bread at the bakery to the cost of a Raspberry Pi.

But lo and behold, the A1222+ has finally arrived!

Strange reception

One of the things I always find baffling about the Amiga community, is how blatantly tribal it is. And for no real reason. You would imagine that a community with roots all the way back in 1985 (older even if you include the PET and C64), would be thrilled to receive new hardware in 2024. It is honestly nothing short of a miracle that companies still exist that is investing in Amiga after all this time. But like I mentioned above, most Amiga fans only remembers the 68k machines, and thus regard the OS4 machines with some strange, tribal hostility.

It makes no sense, really. And the arguments are always the same: “It’s not a real Amiga!”. But what exactly constitutes a “real” Amiga? Is it the blitter chip? The sound chip perhaps? The CPU? If we start taking away chips from a classic 68k motherboard, at which point does it stop being an Amiga? And likewise, if we add new hardware to it – when exactly is it not an Amiga any more?

The original Amiga was first intended to be a console games machine, thankfully they turned it into a real-life computer instead. Just imagine what a loss it would be if the A1000, A500, A1200 etc never had existed..

I find it so strange that the people who have no problem stuffing 2-3 Raspberry PI’s into their Amiga machines, to the point where these ARM computers are doing all the work, still have the balls to say that a PPC Amiga is not a real Amiga.

Keep in mind that, had Commodore by some miracle given Dave Haynie and the engineers the resources they needed, the next generation Amiga would have been PPC based, with a PA-RISC based graphics chipset (where the PA-Risc would be equivalent to cuda runnjng shader code on a modern GPU). We would all have spent our college days using a PPC machine. There would be nothing about those Amiga’s that you could point to and say “there, that makes it an Amiga“.

Except for one thing. Workbench.

What we are left with is the OS. The methodology of how we interact and work with an Amiga system. As a developer I spent 90% of my Amiga days on Workbench. Either in Hi-Soft HiSpeed Pascal, BlitzBasic, Asm One or Storm-C. Sure, I loved to bang the hardware directly, but towards the late 80s the hardware was so out of date that you literally had to count clock-cycle cost per instruction to get good results. Even a cheap 486 dx2 was lightyears ahead of Amiga back then.

So what constitutes a real Amiga? Well, it’s subjective. I can understand that non-developers would put all the onus on the hardware, the physical machine — but as brilliant as that hardware was in the mid 80s, it was ultimately the OS that made the Amiga such a hit. If the Amiga had come out as a console in 1985 (which it was originally designed for), with no means to write software for it yourself, it would be understandable that people would cling to the chipset and architecture. But what made the Amiga such a kick-ass system, was that it delivered a better desktop experience than Windows and MacOS, at a fraction of the cost. It gave all of us the means to become programmers, graphics artists and music makers. And what binds it all together, is Amiga OS.

Amiga OS 4 is compatible with the 3.x kernel (has the same functions and behavior, obviously with new and more modern aspects), so it is by definition an Amiga.

The sort of strange, tribal, soccer hooligan affinity for the 68k is laughable. It really is. There is no next-gen 68k except Vampire, and no amount of CPU emulation or using ARM to run it will help. Not unless you start plugging in hardcore SoC’s like the Rock PI 5 or SnapDragon CPU’s which would deliver i5 performance. But is it then an Amiga? Or a frankenstein machine?

i love frankenstein machines, but to stuff a classic full of ARM computers to do the heavy lifting, and then have an attitude about PPC is hypocrisy of the worst kind. Especially when people become toxic over it.

Get me some PPC

Since the A1222+ has finally arrived I have put in an order for it. Yes, I will be getting the A1222+. And yes it did end up costing almost twice as much as it was said to cost. It was initially meant as a low-cost entry, kinda like the A600 was supposed to be for the A1200 back in the day — but due to chip shortages, the endless legal idiocy of Cloanto and so fourth – price increases globally in every market, it ended up costing more.

But keep in mind, this machine is more or less hand sculpted. It is not made in it’s hundred’s of thousands, but rather in batches of hundreds. If those sell well, there will no doubt be more made. I for one am thrilled to get one, despite the extra cost.

Is it perfect? Probably not. There are bound to be bugs, inconsistencies, flaws – all the common elements of products made by a small but dedicated team of developers.

The only thing that could change that, was if people stopped being so fucking narrow minded and actually invest in OS4. You want an ARM version? Well maybe if the A1222+ sells well they might consider that for the future, but there has to be support for what exists today first. The endless drama in Amiga circles about never getting enough innovation has become the cries of a pampered, spoiled brat.

Just when exactly will there be enough? When will the general Amiga fan, returning or not, be satisfied enough to put more than $400 into actual new hardware? Why should Amiga be dirt cheap when we are fine with a moderate i7 gaming PC starting at $1200? Buying a second hand A1200 today, gettjng it recapped, add a piStorm, put it inside Stephen Jones wonderful desktop case, add shipping and taxes -and you have already surpassed what the A1222 costs (pre-assembled and ready to use).

  • We have the best damn emulation on the planet, rivaled only by massive companies like VMWare. No other retro system on the planet has such an evolved emulation scene as the Amiga. WinUAE got the Amiga down to the last cpu cyce for pete sake.
  • We have FPGA’s that make other legacy platform owners blush in jelousy, from Vampire V4SA to MiSTer clones galore. But bu-hu they cost more than a Raspberry PI, so people bitch about it non-stop.
  • We have Aros for x86, which for some reason people barely bothers to use, let alone donate money for — despite it being a damn near replica of the original OS. If more people paid bounties for it, we would have enough drivers to run Aros on modern computers today, UEFI including which means buying a fucking certificate and signing the frikken bootloader. This isnt rocket science, it’s modern software development.
  • We have cloud based Amiga systems, like the Quartex Desktop and development tools which is set to be launched this year. This allows you to daisy chain together computers to share the payload (clustering). And it comes with modern development tools akin to Visual Studio or Delphi to enable you to write modern, object oriented software. It compiles to JS (WASM is planned), which is means your apps can run ANYWHERE regardless of platform.
  • We have the mini remake computers, like Amiga mini and soon, the Amiga Maxi. This will no doubt set you back $500-$600, but somehow that seems OK for most people. Despite the fact that you could just put a raspberry PI 4 inside an A1200 case and wire it up with Keyrah and achieve the exact same result.
  • We have Morphos that, just like OS4, is a re-implementation of Amiga OS. Except Morphos runs on obsolete, cheap PPC Mac’s which you can pick up for less than $100 in most cases. A spectacular Amiga experience that is seeing a ton of development, with new applications coming out all the time.
  • We have PiStorm that allows you to fit a Raspberry PI and use that as a cheap accelerator, blowing everything out of the water in terms of performance (compared to the old, and costly, 040 and 060 accelerators).

What do these things have in common? They are all rejected by various factions in the Amiga community. It really is the dumbest thing you can possibly imagine, especially when you realize how little other retro communities have to play with. So, the people that love FPGA usually hates emulation. The people that love classic hardware tends to hate both FPGA and emulation. The people that love the PiStorm usually thrash talk the vampire … it is like an insane asylum.

You wanted the 68k branch to be evolved, voila – you got the Vampire. Not only did it evolve the instruction set, it also introduced new display modes, better sound, more sprites, faster blitter, new libraries — all while remaining largely compatible with legacy software (!) I mean, talk about a monumental achivement in engineering! As I type Apollo is re-engineering Aros to make full use of their new CPU instructions (read: run like hell), so we are finally getting away from the Cloanto choke-hold on the ROM kernel.

Then people wanted a better, more updated operating system (read: OS4), but hated the fact that you needed full priced PPC hardware. Well you can pick up a used PPC mac for under $100 and install Morphos. It is just as evolved as OS4, more or less — but then the arguments circle back to “Mac is not an Amiga“. No shit sherlock! Neither is stuffing 2-3 Raspberry PI’s inside your Amiga. The only thing Amiga about some of the souped up classics out there, is that it draws power via the original powersupply (!). The rest is ARM.

It’s too expensive!

Is it though? Is it really? It costs twice as much as a MiSTer ultimate box, which limits you to a 68020 @ 50Mhz + RTG experience. Sure, the MiSTer can also do SNES, Megadrive and the old consoles — but what does that have to do with Workbench and enjoying a modern Amiga?

Have you seen what a tricked out A3k sells for on eBay? Aparently people have no problem forking out $2000 – $3000 for a 30 year old computer with crusty trace-lines, failing parts, vintage capacitors that belong in a museum, and maybe 4-5 repair guys between california and stockholm combined. A computer that you cannot do anything modern with, so you would be better off getting that Raspberry PI after all.

A good condition A3000 costs a small fortune on EBay. For some reason people have no problem forking out $2000-$3000 for a tricked out A3000, but the same people will raize hell over the A1222 costing $1400 fitted as a ready-to-rock system (case, psu, ram, graphics card – all assembled and ready to use).

The A1222+ can run 68k RTG software side by side with PPC software, it can run legacy games and hardware bound software via built-in emulation, and you get access to the plethora of PPC titles and ports of modern software in the process.

Ask yourself this: if the OS4 machines are so bad, why are they never on sale? Why is not ebay, finn and other second hand websites chock full of old x1000’s and Sam460 machines? Why do the few that turn up on rare occasions get sold within 24 hours? In the past 15 years I have only seen one locally on finn (Norwegian ebay like site) and it sold literally over night.

The A1200+ is produced in small numbers to mitigate loss. They are hand sculpted if you will, custom made, and are thus a work of art. So if you want to experience the last chapter in the Amiga saga — why not go for it? That car downpayment is not going anywhere, put it on pause for a month or two and join the OS4 community. You already know the classics, you know it was a dead end, so why not jump straight to the final chapter and experience a machine and software that is much, much closer to modern. A machine that has swapfile support (virtual memory), that has modern compilers, that has games you never got to try, and that also let’s you enjoy the older, 68k titles whenever you like?

I own both the V4SA, The MiSTer ultimate, classic amiga machines, Raspberry PI emulation, RPI laptop that boots into workbench, Aros x86 boces and several Mac’s running Morphos. There is a limit to how many times you can play Defender of the Crown and Superfrog before you wish to try something a bit newer — and the A1222+ allows you to unify all if it into a single box.

When Quartex Media Desktop comes out, you can recycle those Raspberry PI’s you have floating around the place and build a nice cluster with them instead 🙂

Amiga, Emulation

Build your own killer Amiga Mini for the same price

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If your idea of a good time is to be forced to sit one meter from your TV, using what is possibly the worst game controller ever designed for any console – enjoying a fixed number of games on a device that is bricked, then you definitively should go out and buy the Amiga mini.

If however you know how to use a screwdriver and can be bothered to assemble a simple Raspberry PI case, which took me less than 45 minutes, then you can build a gaming system that far surpasses everything the Amiga mini has to offer.

And as a bonus, you get to enjoy Sega Megadrive, Sega 32x, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo Famicom, Super-Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Nintendo Wii, Mame (arcade), Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, NeoGeo SNK, Gameboy, Capcom, Playstation 1 and Playstation 2 (and a few others I didn’t bother listing).

You wont believe how easy it is to build a killer, couch friendly gaming system that makes the Amiga mini look like a joke. For the same price I might add.

Depending on where you live the price for an Amiga Mini can vary. Where I live it’s sold for roughly 1700 NKR ($160). Prices might have dropped slightly since I last checked in october 2023, but I doubt very much that it’s gone below the 1499 NKR ($140-ish).

Whenever I talk about how insane I think the price is for the mini, people constantly remind me that the device is not for people like me. It’s not designed for power users. But that argument makes little sense, because why would I not enjoy some quality Amiga gaming? I would love a dedicated Amiga gaming device, but like I have explained before – there are a few things I expect from such a device in 2024.

In short, I expect the following:

  • Bluetooth game controller and wireless mouse. Such a device belongs under a TV, and nobody sits within a meter from a television, which is the length of the gamepad cable. The target audience here are in their late 40s to 50s, established, and used to modern devices. The mini is not just a step backwards, but two decades backwards. Gaming is best done relaxing on the couch or in a comfy recliner. Not glued to a 55″ television barely a meter away.
  • Emulator access. The fact that Cloanto actually went out of their way to kill the Amiberry emulation menu is absolutely astounding. Amiberry is capable of mounting harddisk files, using a folder on a USB stick as a disk – not to mention fine tuning the emulation. I would have understood it if they wanted to avoid putting in extra work. But they actually put in extra work to limit already working software features. The shortsightedness is just breathtaking.
  • Network share. Having to physically copy WHDLOAD games onto a USB stick and move it back & fourth between your PC and the device, is absurd in 2024. Sure, the USB stick can stay in the device, but at the prices involved the device should have wi-fi networking, and the usb disk should show up as a network share. That way you can copy games directly to the device, run software updates, and basically have ordinary freedom.

Let me show you how to build the best damn Amiga mini money can buy. And unlike Cloanto and it’s partners, every part of my device can be re-purposed for something else. That last bit is important, we live in 2024 after all.

Raspberry PI 4b

The first thing on our list is a Raspberry PI 4b. You can ofcourse get the newer and significantly faster 5B (edit: make sure you find a case for it first), but for our purposes the 4b will be more than enough. Preferably the 8Gb ram version, but the 4Gb will do just fine.

Next we need a good case for our pi, a proper console-ish case. We need a case that provides active cooling since we will be overclocking the CPU and GPU to get maximum performance out of it. Do not overclock unless you have active cooling (at least not in the ranges we will be doing). Besides cooling we also want a case that provides SSD support. SD cards are fun but they hold the PI back. You also want an SSD to store all the fancy games you will be enjoying, and having a 500Gb or 1Tb SSD drive will save you so much time,

The DeskPi Pro case

The case I have opted for i the DeskPi Pro case. This is a metal case that adds the features I have outlined – and then some. You also get two large HDMI out ports, plenty of USB ports, and safe shutdown.

The full DeskPi Pro kit contains everything you need. I cannot recommend this enough.

Right now you can pick up a DeskPi Pro metal case with active cooling and harddisk interface, complete with a 4gb Raspberry PI 4b, for $140. If you dont need the harddisk interface (I strongly urge you to get that, you will regret it if you dont), you can get the lite version which is less expensive ($99 with a PI 4gb). If you already own a Raspberry PI 4B, you can order just the case and assemble it yourself like I did. This version costs just $60.

You can buy that directly from the manufacturer: DeskPi Pro

BT controller and less clutter

To make this system a truly TV friendly setup, you want a good quality BT controller, same quality that XBox and PS5 enjoys. But you also want it to have a USB dongle so you can use it on other devices as well, including your PC.

I got the Steelseries Stratus Duo at $78, which is perhaps one of the best game controllers I have ever owned. It is actually better than the one that ships with XBox X (IMHO). Solid, good grip, perfect balance and a lot of attention to detail.

Steelseries Stratus Duo, an amazing game controller

The reason you should not cheep out when it comes to controller, is because retro gaming systems recognizes the expensive ones (read: popular and established) without any need for configuration. It literally just works once you plug the USB dongle into the usb port. Secondly, you get what you pay for. If you want a controller that will give you years of fun, perhaps even a decade worth, then this one is definitively in that category.

Alternatively, you can buy a stock Playstation 4 BT controllers and use that (ps4 controllers are spectacular, but dont expect more than 4 years lifetime if used daily). This will save you $30-$35 perhaps. But the lack of a USB dongle means it cant be used on older, non BT compliant PCs or devices. If you fancy turning an old PC into a gaming station at some point, this is worth keeping in mind.

You can read about the Steelseries Stratus duo here.

Software, what do you need?

There are plenty of options out there, from Recallbox to Emulation Station to Lakka and a couple more. You can either download these from their respective websites, where they will have no games to play — or you can do like everybody else and download a ready to rock system, pre-loaded with a ton of games.

Recallbox pre loaded with a train of games for a ton of different platforms

Lets not beat about the bush, you will need to visit websites like kickass-torrents or TPB (the pirate bay) and search for “emulation station”, “RetroPi “or “recallbox image for raspberry PI 4”. There are also some retro websites out there that offer magnet links (that a torrent client can use to download such images) for custom disk images for a variety of SBCs (single board computers), not just for Raspberry PI.

If you want something a bit more powerful than the PI4, I strongly suggest you buy the ODroid N2+ with active cooling and the simple case they offer. That board is much more powerful than the PI v4, and will run more demanding titles, including PS2 titles. You can pick that up for $70 from Hardkernel website (also Ares computing have them).

If you somehow have any moral quarrels about such downloads, then please fuck off. I do not fraternize with the ompa-lompas of moral judgement. I dont pirate modern software because that hurts people, but when its 20 or 30 year old software that you cant even buy even if you wanted to — then i honestly dont care.

The best damn Amiga Mini you will ever own

If you go the route that I did above you will get a nice, shiny metal case with SSD support and active cooling ready to rock that you can put neatly under your TV. All you will need is a USB-C power cable and a normal, large HDMI cable. No clutter, no cable soup, no flimpsy case that weighs less than the hdmi cable, just a good looking case that fits neatly in with your TV decoder or NAS.

Good looking, no nonsense case with everything you need!

You can just snuggle up in the sofa or chair, and enjoy thousands of titles from a UI and system that is nice looking and user-friendly. Most Recallbox images come with Kodi pre-installed (media center), so you can plug in a harddisk with movies and it will download box art and display them more or less like netflix. It also plays just about every movie format and codec out there, so its been my go-to system for playing downloaded movies and documentaries.

All the ports you expect to find, and then some (!)

So, building a better system than the Amiga Mini, one that is 1000 times better to use and completely open, supporting every platform and game system out there, can be done in a couple of hours. And it will only cost a tiny bit more than the Amiga mini does. If you already have a pi 4b floating around the place you cut costs in half.

While on torrents, you can download pretty much all the games that each platform have in a single archive. Just imagine that. All the megadrive games ever made. All the SNes games ever released. All the PSX games that came out. And all the CD32 titles that came out too 🙂

This is why i picked the DeskPI case, for that SSD support. Adding a 1 or 2 Terabyte SSD wont cost the world, at least not considering what you get! Or just buy a 1Tb SD card (if you dare) and just fill it up from your windows PC over the network.

Perfect for kids and grown ups alike. The games of the 80s and 90s were more innocent than the dystopian, ultra violent games that we have today. So if you have kids build this.

The PI will register with the network so it shows up in Windows Explorer, then just copy the rom-files (game files) to their respective folders (e.g PSX games into the playstation folder and so-on).

Oh and in case you wondered, you get Amiga compatability out of the box. Even better is that you can download every CD32 game known to man and just copy the disk images over to your device (into the Amiga folder ofcourse) and enjoy the media enriched versions of your old favorites.

WHDLoad games are also supported (It’s Amiberry after all, same thats in the Amiga mini, except not crippled), harddisk games and ADF games.

I already owned a Raspberry PI 4b, so this system cost less than what Cloanto (or retro systems or whatever the fuck they are called) are asking for the Amiga mini. Dont bother, you build this in an hour or two.

People expect devices released today to have the features of today (or at least the bare minimum like BT support). Sure, the mini is a retro system, and those systems had a ton of cables. But that cable soup was something we dreamed about getting away from. I mean -they are competing with off the shelves hardware costing less, that delivers more! I did not expect much, honestly, but i did expect BT, networking and being able to control my own goddamn emulator session.

I would have respected the mini and it’s makers if they had at the very least offered some thought to the Amiga community. They are essentially selling our own software back to us in a crippled state after all. Had they done so, i would have supported them 100% and done my part to boost sales and spread the word.

Sure, the mini might be a useful start for people who sold their system 30 years ago, or young retro fans wanting a go. That is a fair point ofcourse. But why cripple it? Why on earth would you go out of your way to cripple the software, removing the chance that amiga users could use your product as their daily driver? It makes absolutely zero sense. I would have understood it if it cost them money to cater to our community, but it’s actually the direct opposite. It cost them money to exclude the features we need.

Well, roll your own is my advice. It will be so much better and requires practically zero effort 😎🤘🍺

Cheers!

Amiga, Emulation

The Amiga Mini, is it worth the price?

Before we get into the device itself, I feel I have to give a full disclaimer. Back in 2018 myself and my good friend Gunnar Kristjansson (the man behind the Amibian Linux distro for Raspberry PI) had a little Amiga meetup at my place. As we started talking it became clear that we both wanted to create a ready to use Amiga device, more or less the exact same thing as the Amiga mini that is now being sold (except ours would cater to both gamers and the creative type equally).

We spent the next few weeks defining our goal and concretize what exactly needed to be done with regards to hardware, case design and software. I contacted a person I know in China and got a rough estimate on case prices (per 1000 units), and I also contacted the Raspberry PI foundation about buying 1000-by-1000 units and what sort of discount they could offer us.

Amibian running on a PI-top, it makes booting into Workbench on a Raspberry PI like it was a real Amiga easy

At the same time, Gunnar contacted Cloanto. At the time it was possible to buy the Amiga ROM files via the Android store for 1€ (if memory serves me correctly), but we wanted to buy 1000 licenses at a time as well as Workbench – so that the device would be legally secure and ready to rock out of the box.

Sadly, Cloanto stonewalled us completely the moment we shared our plans (which is why i suspected they were involved with a “mini” project, something they denied at the time, but which turned out to be correct). Without going too deep into the nitty-gritty, it resulted in a somewhat nasty argument between myself and Mike, and ultimately our Amiga Mini was never released. Gunnar has continued to make the Amibian distro, and I ventured into creating Amibian.js, which is a re-make and modernization of Amiga OS designed to scale from a Raspberry PI all the way up to massive cloud based clusters.

Amibian.js is my longest running project ever, I have worked 3 years non-stop on making this a reality

I know that some of you will conclude that I carry a grudge against Cloanto, but that is not the reason I have been vocal against them in the past. Seriously, if that was the case, i would say it. Pretending is not my strong suit.

My issues with Cloanto is not rooted in our mini project (holding a grudge for 4-5 years is a bit much), but rather the fact that they have spent the past 20+ years selling software someone else has made (UAE), without giving anything back to the developers behind UAE. They also have a culture of lawsuits, both against individuals and companies, which has helped keep the Amiga in limbo for decades (note: Hyperion is also a part of that, so its not solely Cloanto’s fault).

It is that fine line between what you can do, and what you should do. They are not legally bound to give back to UAE, but they should have done so. But then again, this is just my personal blog and my subjective view. I have no problems with other people holding a different viewpoint. Ultimately, what matters is what is done with the legacy, not who said what.

I welcome the Amiga mini, but have expectations

While some would say I am too biased, I still feel my criticism of the device on Facebook holds merit. I have been against it because I was hoping that the A1222 and Vampire would put the Amiga into the public eye again, so getting the official stamp of “retro” and “a computer from the past” is the last nail in the proverbial coffin as far as I’m concerned.

Sadly the A1222 never materialized, and the Vampire stand-alone needs more time to become a polished product (with regards to software, support for 080 in popular compilers, and AROS surpassing Workbench in terms of stability, compatibility and features). The Quartex Media Desktop is on it’s way, I have just spent a whole year working on the development tools, which is due out in a couple of months (if all goes to plan). The desktop system will need refactoring, so I dont see it finished until this fall (before xmas).

It is no secret that I feel Cloanto is the worst possible owner for the Amiga IP. The way they have treated Hyperion is distasteful and simply serves to keep Amiga in the dark for another decade; continuing a pattern of behavior that Amiga Inc was convicted for in a court of law. So I have my reasons for my critique of Cloanto -and it’s not about our plans being thwarted, but rather how the Amiga intellectual property is mismanaged.

I welcome a mini that was better than our own design and that gave something back to the community that fostered it. So in this post I will unpack why I think this device comes up short.

Price point

To put things into perspective with regards to hardware: The Amiga Mini retails at €120 where I live, which is very expensive compared to other mini devices in the same category (e.g SNes, Megadrive or Neo-Geo). For this amount of cash you could instead pick up a very capable x86 single board computer, one that runs WinUAE at excellent speed.

The mini has excellent packaging and is very easy to assemble

Even if you stick with ARM single board computers, you could pick up an ODroid N2+ with 8Gb ram and a good eMMc storage for roughly €80, which has features like onboard Bluetooth, support for remote controls, SD card reader and onboard wi-fi. So in my view the Amiga mini appears wildly overpriced compared to the alternatives. Although you do need to be somewhat technical to install Linux, Amiberry, and finally recompile for the SoC you are targeting.

To underline: the Amiga mini is not designed for a technical audience, and as such works out of the box with zero configuration needed.

Access to UAE and common features

Putting hardware to the side for a moment — what I think is the most puzzling with this device, is the lack of ADF and harddisk support. We know it’s running a fork of Amiberry so mapping a USB drive as DH0 (or a folder on a USB-drive) is technically there and ready to be used.

In other words, the device is more than capable of supporting a harddisk mode (where a folder or USB stick acts as the medium), it also has ADF support as a part of the emulator software it’s running. But in their infinite wisdom, the designers consciously chose to disable these features.

Strange palette of games

You would imagine an Amiga mini to be filled with all the hits the platform has to offer, yet the selection of games are .. curious. Sure, there are some amazing games included, like Kick-Off, Chaos Engine, Battle-Chess, Supercars and Another World — but these are not the games that made the Amiga into a spectacular success and cult classic.

For example, they have included 2 versions of Alien Breed (both 2D and 3D), but this is a late game that met with limited success. The games that truly made the Amiga were titles like Rocket-Ranger, It came from the desert, Defender of the crown, Kings of Chicago, Wings and Shadow of the beast (just to name a few). They should have dropped one of the Alien Breed releases and at least gotten Rocket Ranger in there.

Also, you would expect XENON-II to be one of the titles, it’s such an archetypal Amiga hit after all. But instead they have gone with something called Project-X that is nowhere near the quality of the former. I’m sure this is a great game (I only tried it for 10 minutes) but this is a game I have never played before now. It’s not a game that instinctively makes you think about Amiga.

The palette of games contains awesome some cult classics, but at least 50% should never have been included

There are also some very strange picks, like The Sentinel. A 3D game that was visually poor even when it was released, and is safely in the obscurity category. At the same time they have completely ignored games like Ruff’n Tumble, which is probably one of the most playable platformers – and graphically excellent – in Amiga history. Ruff’n Tumble really is a game that gives Sonic and Super Mario serious competition. I know a lot of people say that Superfrog holds that title, but visually Zool and Superfrog dont even come close. It is also a damn playable and really showcase what the Amiga could do for 2d gaming.

Other strangely boring titles that is included are Paradroid 90 and Lost Patrol. I’m sure they have their odd fans here and there, but comparing those to aforementioned Rocket Ranger et-al, they seem completely out of place. I would even say that California-Games should have been excluded, because that was ultimately a C64 game that never truly got any traction on the Amiga. The graphics are poor, sound is awful and animations very much C64-ish.

The Indiana Jones adventures would likewise be titles that could have lifted the whole product. I do realize that getting a license would have required more work, but probably not as much as you think. These titles are wildly popular free downloads and is generally seen as abandonware. LucasArts would have little leverage to press for outlandish royalties. One might even argue that including them would help retain the LucasArts label.

It kinda feels like the games were thrown together in the 11th hour based on what they could cheaply license or take, rather than carefully planned in the years it took to create this product.

Corrupted games and instabilities

I also experienced the odd crash and instability with two games. Dragons Breath and Simon the sorcerer. The latter seems most affected by this. When you go to meet the wizards at the pub (very early in the game) and start a dialog with them, the game crashes 2-3 questions into the dialog. Some times it works, but the sprite graphics for Simon is corrupted, but most of the time UAE just crashes to a black-screen.

This can be a problem with UAE itself, but it’s more likely that that game data is damaged – or indeed that the runtime model for UAE must be changed to accurate rather than fast. At least that tends to fix problems with some games suffering the same instability – it’s impossible to determine when the product is essentially a black-box.

Not really representative

Whenever I have argued against the Amiga mini, someone has reminded me that this box is not for developers or hardcore Amiga users – it’s for people that either owned an Amiga briefly in the 80s, or people that never could afford an Amiga.

The Chaos Engine is a smashing great game, and a perfect title for the CD32 controller

If we run with that logic, then the Amiga Mini is a form of presentation, a way of saying “hey, look at what the Amiga could do and join the fun!”. If that is the case, then why not include the titles that truly are distinctive Amiga? Again, there are some very good titles here, but when as much as 50% of the bundled software are “lesser games” that never sold machines or had a large following – then some criticism is warranted.

This spartan selection would have been understandable if they at the very least bundled Workbench and the ability to mount a folder on a USB stick as a harddisk — and further, ADF support. Because then the users would not be “locked in” to a palette of titles as representative of the Amiga as an Atari magazine.

WHDLoad

The only way to play games that are not hardcoded to the system, is to use WHDLoad. This is a nice feature, but somewhat limited.

My rationale here is simple: when you are making a mini machine that has a large, cult like following to this day – excluding that group is not a smart move. Yes, the device is clearly for the casual gamer or console owner, but considering that UAE already have the functionality I am arguing for, it quite frankly makes no sense for them to have gone out of their way to disable it. It only serves to exclude the massive resource that is the Amiga community.

Option system is good, sadly it lacks the most useful settings: boot to workbench and UAE control

Historically speaking, such moves tends to have dire consequences, because if there is one thing Amiga people are known for, it’s breaking into impossible things. Heck, our community even produce carbon copies of the Amiga hardware! No other community has our level of technical excellence per capita. None.

What they should have done was to recognize that the Amiga community would help drive their sales – IF – they threw us a bone. Again, all we needed was a way to run Workbench and use a USB stick as a harddrive, and preferably a settings option where the machine would boot to workbench. Hardly asking for blood here, it’s all included in UAE / Amiberry anyways.

Keyboard support

Most amiga games were coded in a non system-friendly manner. Typically using assembler or a hybrid mix (e.g Blitz Basic, Pascal, C with inline assembler). As such there is no uniform way of supporting a keyboard inside games, except plugging a keyboard into the third USB port directly.

I can confirm that this does indeed work. You can plug in any ordinary USB keyboard and use that for in-game typing. Sadly they have blocked the F11 command which normally displays the UAE emulation menu.

There is a way around this though. If you download a WHDLoad setup for workbench, you can force the menu to be displayed via the 68k uae-control shell command. The downside being that you have to manually load the Workbench WHDLoad packag, and then further load games there.

I think that eventually someone will roll an alternative boot.rd image for the device that you can flash, turning it into a “normal” Amibian machine. Sadly such an operation would violate the warranty, but to be frank – the device is useless for anything but casual gaming (if you can live with games that crash that is).

The good stuff

The benefit of bolting the device to WHDLoad, is that we are going to find a ton of game collection disk-images on BitTorrent after a while. And knowing how detailed gamers are, there will be little or none that is not working. So if you always had some WHDLoad titles that did not work properly – I think we will see less of that as gamers get to grips with the system.

I also think the case is ok. It’s not great, but definitively a good case. In the design Gunnar and myself made, we wanted to re-use the floppy disk slot as an SD-card socket. I played around with the idea of having a small, fake disk that you placed the sd card into, and further pushed into the floppy drive. The smallest sd cards can be fiddly to deal with after all, and such a sideloader would help fix that; And visually it would look like a semi-inserted floppy disk which brings back fond memories for everyone. The Amiga Mini case sadly lacks any fun features like that – instead it supports a third USB port around the back suitable for a USB thumbdrive or extra joystick (i presume, I dont have an extra controller handy).

The case is very detailed and larger than I expected, which is a good thing (+1 for that). I hate those tiny Raspberry-PI cases, because the weight of the cables tends to drag the device around so it falls to the floor. This will not be an issue here, and it is sturdy and has a little weight to it. So execution here is good.

The mouse and CD32 joypad are likewise good quality. I was surprised that they had made the mouse smaller than the original tank mouse. It’s not terrible or anything like that (actually works quite well), but I dont see why they chose to do this. In terms of packaging there is more than enough space for a full-size tank mouse, and the extra volume would have been air. At the price this device sells for, I think a real size tank mouse would be a bonus, but it’s ultimately not a huge issue.

I guess the only bonus for us hardcore Amiga fans, is that we now have a source of easily available Amiga USB mouse and CD32 joypads. That at least is something. Not quite worth the 30 year wait by any stretch of the imagination, but it is something.

Oh, and the menu system is excellent. Its easy to pick a title, and they have solved save-states in an elegant and effective way. So they deserve a +1 on the integration and menu. Fair is fair.

HDMI splitter and wi-fi

The device is clearly designed to be used with a TV, which is perfectly fine. But if you want to use a monitor like I did, especially if you want to show it off at the office, you will need a HDMI splitter because there is no audio-jack available.

The menu system is smooth and solid. Not too sure about the choice of game art though..

Since it’s designed for casual gamers, i cant really subtract a point for this. But I am very puzzled why they didn’t use an established SBC inside. Speed wise it performs close to an ODroid XU4, which retails at $20. Hardkernel would no doubt be willing to bend backwards for a contract, and could have delivered an overclocked version with even more bang for the buck at $10 a piece — including audio jack, bluetooth and wi-fi. I can only imagine what the price tag is on the guts here, because it lacks all of these things. Most likely $6 worth of hardware inside this case. The lack of wi-fi is likewise strange in 2022 for an ARM device.

Having said that, the GPU performs exceptionally well. I have not experienced any graphical glitches or artifacts, which is typical for Raspberry PI 3b and other cheap ARM devices. There are no artifacts, no flickering — and it’s silky smooth. There is also an option for switching between 50Hz and 60Hz refresh rates.

So fair is fair, the GPU is performing without issues.

Still time to fix it

The people that made this device can still remedy the situation via updates. The concept of “firmware” here is — and this is an educated guess — a small Linux disk-image stored in flash memory. So updating the executable front-end to UAE should be easy enough.

They can enable the UAE / Amiberry features that would make the device usable for us normal Amiga users via an update if they want to. This is only a cheap ARM device running an emulator after all, so there is no legal or technical reason why the emulation should not expose all it’s features.

But, I am not really worried. People are already busy hacking this thing, so I dont think it will take too long before it’s made usable by someone in the community. Just a shame that we have to do this ourselves, all things considered.

Is it worth it?

I honestly think the price is absurd, but if you have zero skills and simply cannot be arsed to buy a Raspberry PI and install Amibian, then I suppose this will be useful.

I think the price will be a negative for the adoption as a whole. You can pick up a SNES-Mini + Megadrive mini for roughly the same price. There needs to be a bit more incentive I think, but it is a smooth package if you are happy with the games that are there, no doubt about that.

One thing that this product doesnt recognize, is that most of the value in an Amiga was that it doubled as a serious computer for creative teenagers. The amount of people that bought an Amiga to use DPaint, Soundtracker, Blitz Basic, Amos Basic – or learn to use one of the classical programming languages like C, Pascal or Modula 2, was huge. It was completely disproportionate compared to other platforms where people either used a computer for business or purely for entertainment. The Amiga managed to strike a balance between creativity, art, programming and gaming that really was unique.

By leaving out Workbench and the possibility to access the creative aspect of Amiga, the Amiga mini feels incomplete. It’s a representation of Amiga without the stuff that made the Amiga such a monumental success; which coincidentally is the reason why thousands of people still love and use the platform 30 years later.

The irony is that what will drive the sales to begin with, is the Amiga community the designers went out of their way to block. I honestly dont get their rationale here. They must have spent a fortune producing this product, so i would imagine they want to get as much return on investment as possible.

Either way, it is what it is.

Personally, I will donate this thing to my son. He always wanted an Amiga but dont have time to learn anything — so this is perfect for him once I get a good WHDLoad collection, because he will not find any of these titles interesting (except Chaos Engine and Supercars if I know him correctly).

Amiga, Emulation

What is Amiga Disrupt?

If you are accessing Amiga Disrupt from Reddit and have no experience with our group on Facebook, I would not blame you for being a bit confused. Just what the heck is this group all about? Is it Amiga, Embedded technology, PinUp pictures, tracker music, art, coding or modern software development?

Amiga Disrupt is many things to different people, but we all have one thing in common: The Commodore Amiga

Amiga Disrupt is a group about the upcoming Quartex Media Desktop (also known as Amibian.js). Quartex Media Desktop is a remake of the Amiga operating system, but for cloud, embedded, IoT or personal use. The members are known for being practical, meaning that they are not fundamentalists when it comes to Amiga hardware. The Amiga community is somewhat known for having bombastic and eccentric characters, people who often refuse to call any other hardware except the original from Commodore for “Amiga”.

Amiga Disrupt started in defiance of that stark view. We found a lot of the other groups toxic, stuck in the past or outright insane. So we decided to start a new group where we could enjoy our hobby in peace. A group where we could talk Emulation, which SBC (single board computer) to use for UAE, alternatives like Aros, OS4 and Morphos – without being hounded by puritans hell bent on trolling a calm, reasonable conversation to death.

Finding a new home for Amiga Disrupt

While Facebook has a very good social component that other sites might lack – the Facebook platform has become notoriously difficult to deal with for administrators. Facebook went from being a relatively open place where people of all ages could meet, talk, debate and even argue – to having a lower age limit of 12 years old. And while we applaud Facebook’s effort to get rid of bullies and trolls of the worst kind – the way their A.I operates makes it very difficult for adults to express themselves naturally. Everything from common swear words to movie quotes or jokes is now enough to get a perfectly decent, law abiding human being blocked from their service.

The Amiga Disrupt feed on Reddit is identical to the one on Facebook

For an Admin like myself who manages six large groups, with a total of roughly 60.000 members under wildly different topics, things such as revenge reporting has grown to an all time high. Disgruntled people that have been ejected from groups often come back under a different profile – only to report the admin obsessively, thus destroying the administrators “hit score” with the Facebook A.I. Add multi-language meaning of words to that mix, and it become tiresome to remain on the platform.

Amiga disrupt is a group with an average age of 40 through 60. We are not political correct in the slightest, and members often talk about things in the AD group that they are unable or unwilling to mention publicly (just like you would talk to your friends about some subjects). We have members of every color, creed, sexuality and nationality – and we have found a good balance to get along and see past our differences. What matters is how you treat other people, and that you respect that each member have their own personal preference.

What binds us together into one big family, is our mutual love for the Commodore Amiga and our shared memories and experiences that spring from that.

The Move To Reddit

Reddit seems like an obvious choice for Amiga Disrupt. Our group is not run like other groups, but more as an actual community or club. One might even draw some parallels to a Men’s magazine, since we feature some pin-up pictures, loads of memes and jokes – side by side with technology, games, programming and “the creative aspect” of computing.

It should be underlined that we do not post hardcore porn. Pin-ups are typically nudes or topless pictures with some artistic quality. We have zero interest in anything degrading to women – because we adore women and find them to be the most fantastic creatures in the universe. So some cheeky pictures does appear in our feed, but the intention is admiration of beauty. There is a difference.

Reddit is more or less perfect for AD. It has groups designed for 18+ content (which takes care of adult humor, jokes and expressions in natural language) – and pictures of a more erotic nature can be marked NSFW – and those images will be blurred out so people can chose not to see them. There is also an option to filter out all adult content, which elegantly solves the issue (Facebook might want to take some notes from Reddit on how to handle various issues).

Come join the fun!

Everyone is welcome providing you are 18+ of age, and want to get involved with Amiga or Quartex Media Desktop. We do ask that you respect the rules of the group, and that you dont post stuff that dont belong there. Technology news is fine, memes are fine, the odd pinup picture is fine (remember to tag it as NSFW), coding is awesome, JS demos or remakes are great – and demoscene is epic!

Amiga Disrupt on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmigaDisrupt/

Amiga Disrupt on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/145371752679409

Amiga, Emulation

Amiga DISRUPT moving to REDDIT

I suppose it was only a matter of time before I landed myself in Facebook Jail again. It seems having the Amiga Disrupt group on Facebook is the problem, because the community is operated literally as a community; which means people talk, joke and banter like old friends having a pint.

I’m not going to bore you with the details, but I think I have had enough of this rubbish. So when this 3 day ban is over, Amiga Disrupt on Facebook is archived and I move it to Reddit permanently. It’s just become a hassle having to deal with rules that were designed for woke kids incapable of ignoring things they don’t like. Heck, I find cars boring as fuck, but I don’t hang around car groups looking for something to complain about. And I sure as shit don’t implement a word filter that automatically bans people without any context.

My impression is that Facebook want groups that are sterile, identical and on topic; like an endless body of soulless rss-feeds that blindly conform to the Silicon Valley hipster mentality. So we old hackers that created the fucking internet and the associated tech these millennials take for granted, we that have been running communities since before they were even born -we just have to find someplace else to socialize.

Why Reddit?

In short, Reddit has 18+ groups. Now before you jump to any conclusions, keep in mind that Facebook operates with an age group of 12 years old. So all that censoring of jokes and comments which makes Facebook so god damn annoying, is because you are supposed to use language suitable for children. This was not always the case. It’s something Facebook arrived at in their attempt to strangle political opponents. Because in their view the entire universe rotates around american domestic politics (the fucking arrogance is astounding).

Come join the fun on Reddit instead @ r/AmigaDisrupt

Obviously such a forum poorly suited for a community consisting of men and women in their 40s and 50s that grew up in a society where freedom of speech was sacred. Amiga Disrupt has been hounded by the Facebook’s “alleged” A.I for years because, ironically, we have an actual social component. We talk, laugh, share jokes and even hold on to principles that might not be popular to the vast majority (in terms of technology, nothing more sinister than that). But the moment you have swear words involved, even casual ones, you hit the age limit pretty fast.

The founding principle of an A.I, the keyword if you will, is intelligence. The ability to deduce meaning based on context rather than blind, automation and word censorship. Facebook doesn’t have an A.I, they have a rudimentary word filtering system that a child could engineer. And to be blunt it’s never ending mistakes is killing the platform.

Looking back at 14 years of Facebook community building

I have been running groups on Facebook before “groups” were distinct from “pages”. I still manage a wealth of software development groups, and consider myself a positive asset for the Facebook platform. It’s people like me that drive the platform forward, create content and engaging posts. But when it comes to natural language and real socializing, like we have in Amiga Disrupt, Facebook’s absurd regime is making that impossible. Human beings are expressive; humor, opinions and even foul language is a part of that. Not that we MUST use swear words by any means, 99% of all communication is practical in nature and without any swearing at all. But being censored and “punished” for quoting a movie or a joke of poor taste is now enough to get you shut down for days or weeks. It has just reached a level of wokeness that I find unpleasant to deal with.

My cup is full and Facebook loses a person that has helped them generate a wealth of activity and business this past decade. I’m not irreplaceable or special by any means, nor will me leaving show up on their radar. But I am a very tolerant person, and when people like me leave, that also means others are leaving too. Where there is smoke there is fire.

I am not sorry for moving my groups away from the platform. Facebook has become a political hotspot and the wokerati and twitterati is doing what they do best – letting their narcissism ruin everything for the majority. A tiny slither of the population on earth, barely in the sub 0.1% range, has in less than two decades managed to spawn an online reality so intolerant and hostile, that they strangle the very thing they swore to protect. Well done.

Come visit the new Amiga Disrupt here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AmigaDisrupt/

Amiga

A look at the Vampire v4 stand-alone FPGA, first impressions

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The Vampire line of FPGA based accelerators is perhaps the most anticipated piece of hardware in the history of retro computing. The hardware itself has taken on near mythical properties, mostly because of how difficult it has been to actually getting a hold of one. Access has for a long time been utterly disproportionate to its popularity.

“the Vampire FPGA is not the final destination. Its is the blueprint for a complete ASIC motherboard that should, if all goes to plan, arrive in a few years”

Unlike ordinary hardware like an x86 PC or one of the many ARM devices that can be sourced at the click of a button – the vampire cards were produced manually. So for each order, one of the Apollo team members had to literally solder on parts, do testing, and ship it off to the customer. Since Apollo didn’t have the infrastructure and financial backing to mass produce the boards, it was not uncommon for customers to wait as long as 12 months. A situation that caused considerable tension for both fans and the Apollo members themselves.

Thankfully, Apollo resolved the situation and ramped up production. And the latter boards such as the Vampire v2+ (covering Amiga 500, 2000 and 600), and the upcoming Vampire v4 for the Amiga 1200, are all mass produced and assembled by a separate company.

Vampire v4 Stand Alone

After the death of Commodore there has been many attempts to bring the Amiga back from obscurity. Pretty much all of these attempts have failed, because the intellectual property that makes up the Amiga legacy, is fragmented between different owners. So while motives may have been pure, the Amiga has been stuck in a form of legal limbo, where the owners of the various parts have engaged in a perpetual cycle of lawsuits since the mid 1990s.

83311551_10156851952710906_4775159487394742272_o
The Vampire v4 is small, the same form-factor as the ODroid N2

Bringing a platform back that has spent two decades without any R&D, is no small challenge. I mean, producing the old hardware itself is a formidable accomplishment – but bringing the hardware up to speed with modern standards at the same time? Well, many have tried. But at the end of the day, the value of the Amiga is no longer the hardware aspect, but rather the software. And being able to run 68k software  while seamlessly updating the capability is what needs to be done if the Amiga is ever going get out of it’s predicament.

This is ultimately what the Vampire v4 stand-alone is all about. Where the cards i mentioned previously require a classical Amiga machine to work, the stand-alone model does not. It is a self-contained, re-created and seriously updated architecture that fits neatly on a single FPGA chip.

So its important to keep in mind that the Vampire V4 represents not just reverse engineering on an epic scale, but also a fair bit of vision and grit to see it through.

The fastest Amiga to ever exist

To give you some idea of what we are talking about here: The Vampire v4 SA (stand alone) is 300 times faster than the Commodore Amiga 500, and it ships with 1000 times more memory (512Mb). But the power of the V4 is not just a hyperactive 68k CPU with some Ram thrown in for good measure. People today look at ARM devices and wonder how these cheap, over the counter devices can deliver so much; but that approach to hardware was the predominant way things was done before x86 became the norm.

“if the Vampire V4 is somewhere  between Playstation 1 and 2 today at 50MHz, just what will we see coming out of Apollo’s lab when its clocked at 500Mhz?”

The Amiga in particular is a tight combination of custom chips that all help the CPU, and that each specialize on doing a few tasks extremely well. Just like an ARM SoC (system on a chip) contains a graphics chip, a sound chip, and a network chip – so did the Amiga. The success of ARM in both mobile, gaming and embedded – comes down to this winning formula.

What Apollo has done, is to take the original  chipset design, made it hundreds of times faster, and then augmented it with modern features. So where the Amiga 1200 (for example) shipped with AGA (advanced graphics architecture), the Vampire has super-charged that to include a wealth of new operations and display modes, known as SAGA.

83246042_10156851952760906_2522939527123697664_o
This is a demo of the sprite/blitter capability. You can add as many as you like. It takes quite a few before you notice performance drops More than impressive!

The display modes are especially important, because the original Amiga architecture operates with low-res interleaved modes that were common for television and video back in the 80s and 90s. This was long before high-resolution modes with thousands and millions of colors were commonplace.

And while the Amiga was very effective for video production, it didn’t always translate well into games and system software. 3D games in particular was a challenge for the Amiga, because interleaved graphics required 5 times as many operations per pixel compared to chunky-graphics modes (read: modern pixel buffer modes). The Amiga was awesome for its day, and over a decade ahead of the competition – but as it entered the mid 90s it was easily beaten by affordable, off the shelves graphics cards.

These PC graphics cards operated with something called “RTG modes” (retargetable graphics), which means that all graphics work can be offloaded to a secondary card. The Amiga always had support for RTG, but cards for the Amiga was reserved for big-box machines like the Amiga 2000, 3000 and 4000 models. In other words, machines costing a small fortune and out of bounds for the ordinary joe.

The good news about the Vampire (both standalone and the accelerators), is that it doubles as a RTG card. Its SAGA graphics architecture provides RTG chunky graphics modes ranging from 8 bit to 32 bit, with resolutions that are modern. The SAGA standard also boosts sprite sizes (on screen objects that are drawn by the graphics chip, thus costing nothing for the CPU. Common in games, multimedia and as a mouse-cursor), the pixel depth sprites can use — and much, much more!

The audio capabilities have likewise been boosted. The Vampire can use twice as many channels at double the bit depth. So where the Amiga originally only had 8 bit samples, the vampire can use 16 bit samples.

So if you get a Vampire, you dont really need an expensive RTG graphics card, or an equally expensive sound card. Amiga hardware is ridiculously expensive, especially now when there are so few left making them.

MMX and Vector operations

MMX is a set of CPU instructions that helped put the PC ahead of the Amiga when it came to high-end graphics. Without digging too deep into this, MMX is a collection of machine-code instructions that are designed to help the CPU do memory operations very fast (and by consequence, graphics). Today PC users don’t really think much about MMX and how important it was for their platform. The x86 architecture has several layers of instructions, and MMX is just another instruction standard on their list.

Its due to MMX support that the Vampire can play full-screen movies and play MP3 tracks. The processing power these commonplace things demand, was simply way out of a stock Amiga machine’s capability.

The Vampire team have added a ton of awesome features to their CPU design (called the 68080), which includes something called AMMX. This is more or less identical to x86 MMX instructions, but adapted to the 68k standard. This also involves new registers, which helps keep the CPU compatible with legacy software – while advancing its capabilities by a decade or more. In short: using the AMMX instructions won’t interfere with the traditional registers or states. Developers can tap into AMMX at will if you like.

Another awesome feature are a special group of instructions meant for 3D calculations. This might not sound so impressive compared to a modern GPU, but you have to keep in mind that Apollo is not building a competing product; they are building something that aims at being as compatible as possible with the Amiga legacy. Yet at the same time, set the standard for the next step in the evolution of the Amiga.

MMU and FPU

In order to have modern memory management, you need a MMU chip. On x86 PCs the MMU has long since been incorporated into the CPU design itself, so you dont really hear x86 coders talk much about that any more. The MMU is also essential for swap-file memory, or memory mapping as the term is called, where chunks of memory can be paged down to disk – and those pages fetched when the CPU needs them. A pagefile system typically triples the amount of memory a machine has. So if your machine has (just to take an example) 100mb of ram, once a pagefile system is in place – you would have 300mb – where 200mb is dubbed virtual memory. This is how a Linux swap partition works to this day.

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Having tested a ton of distros, i ended up with an illegal one from The Pirate Bay

The FPU, or floating point unit, is likewise a chip PC owners wont think about. This is for dealing with floating point numbers, and on x86 its been incorporated into the general CPU design ages ago. The FPU is essential for all things mathematical, especially 3d graphics, 3d rendering, animations – and pretty much everything that needs accurate maths.

Since the Vampire is based on FPGA, the hardware can be updated through software (explaining FPGA here is way out scope, so if you don’t fully grasp what FPGA is, i urge you to google it. It’s amazing technology), so Apollo can add new logic, update existing logic and do optimizations long after the product has shipped. You simply flash the board manually.

The reason I mention that, is because the MMU and FPU is not yet activated in the design (or not 100% complete), and Apollo will return to that once the cores have merged. There are presently two designs available: Gold 2 which is the most evolved core, and the most compatible with legacy software. And then there is Gold 3, which has SAGA, but lacks much of the tolerance that Gold 2 has. These will be merged and editions of the final architecture will be adapted for V2 and V4 of the boards.

Flaws and oddities

I know that the Vampire has been hyped beyond all realistic expectations, and as such I did not want to raise my hopes, but instead be pleasantly surprised once it arrived. There is a danger in building up a product too much, because you risk doing Apollo a disservice. And I wanted to give it a fair shot at the title.

Before we look at what I found incredibly impressive, I want to point out what I find odd with the Vampire v4. Every product has its bells and whistles, and the Vampire is no exception.

SD Blues

The first thing that struck me, was that the machine comes with an SD card slot, but for some reason you cannot use that to boot from. The SD card slot is actually used to get files and data into the device – and my impression is that the Apollo team regards it more as a modern floppy disk. And while I have no issue with that idea, not being able to boot from the SD card in 2020 seems wildly counter-intuitive.

Note: Apollo promises to fix this as the cores have been merged, and they go over to patch up missing bits and pieces. So while not critical in any way, I did find it odd to ship a product with so many missing features.

USB is not USB

The second thing that was strange, is that the USB ports actually don’t work as ordinary USB ports should. There is no USB stack involved, so you cannot simply take a normal, modern keyboard and mouse – and use that. This in my view is perhaps the most annoying design flaw so far, especially when you consider the price the Vampire V4 Stand-Alone sells for.

Apollo could have used an FPGA model that has an ARM SoC on it. If they had, a small Linux setup that runs completely unattended in the background (booting in 5 seconds) would have dealt with things like USB and the SD-Card issue. I know this, because other Amiga FPGA designs do this, and simply delegate signals from the Linux drivers over to the FPGA. This way they remain compatible with more or less all modern keyboards and mice, courtesy of the Linux driver database.

Note: The Linux im talking about here is a tiny, embedded style Linux setup. It has no visual output on the screen, and costs only 5-6 seconds when you start the device. That is a small price to pay for transparent support of every mouse and keyboard known to man.

Instead of letting Linux deal with external devices in the background, the USB ports are mapped in a special way directly into the FPGA (from what I understand, it maps it to the now legacy PS2 standard, but don’t quote me on that). This limits the keyboard and mice you can use considerably. You can only use keyboards and mice that supports the “boot ready” part of the USB protocol. And while its not hard to find keyboards that does this (Apollo has a growing list), it’s very frustrating to find this out when the product arrives. Luckily, i was able to borrow a mouse that was compatible from a friend – and by pure luck i had an old Microsoft keyboard that worked. A great shame though, i had just bought a really cool backlit keyboard and mouse for it, which look fantastic.

Network is there, but not really

One of the reasons I bought the stand-alone version, is because I am sick and tired of clutter. I have very little space in my home-office, so i physically cant fit my A2000 without losing 50% of my desk space. I also have no room for an A600 or A1200, because the number of adapters and nips accumulated over the years to make it “kinda work” like a normal computer, would have taken up my entire desk. So getting the V4 seemed like a perfect solution. No more adapters, exposed motherboards and wiring all over the place.

Turns out that the network socket on the Vampire SoC is not active yet! So its there, but the FPGA logic to make it work has not yet been incorporated. This is one of those things the Apollo team will fix after merging the cores.

I knew this was the case on the accelerator boards, but I must admit I did not expect the V4 SA to lack this on release. Its not a huge issue though, you can buy a $5 cable and small external socket and you have network access — but that brings us right back to the same old clutter that i wanted to avoid.

But — i want to underline that Apollo have been frank about this, so it didn’t really take away from its value. Annoying yes, but hey — we have waited 20 years, what’s another six or eight months? Apollo is not a huge company, and most of the work is done in their spare time. We are only human, so I trust these issues will be resolved once the A1200 production has evened out, and the cores will have the focus of the whole team.

Boot issues

The next oddity was that of available disk images. With the SD port out of the question you are left purely with an 2.5″ IDE connector. Which means you have to get a CF disk adapter (so you can use a CF or SD card as a hard disk) in order to get started. This turned out to be more difficult than I had hoped. The device is flashed with the Aros ROM, and as you probably know, the Aros rom is not 100% compatible (although very, very close!) with Workbench. Since I own a Vampire v2+ for my Amiga 2000 I thought I could just use the same CF card and be up and running in no-time, but sadly that didn’t work.

The logical conclusion was to download AROS, and on the AROS nightly build page there was indeed a build marked Vampire. Actually there were two of them. But having downloaded and tried both of them – none booted.

After much searching I was able to source a bootleg release Coffin (release 55 from october 2019), the Vampire distribution, from The Pirate Bay. Not exactly the place you expect to look considering the price tag involved! I would have expected to find a download link on the V4 Wiki page, not rumble around user-groups and IRC channels in desperation. So there is definitively room for improvement with regards to helping users get ut and running. Many customers will be people that havent used an Amiga for ages, and providing something to boot (and yes, i know the legal challenges with regards to Coffin) on the website, is paramount.

Before you nod and start to judge them, you have to remember where these guys are coming from. Like me they grew up in the hacker culture of europe. They love to build complex stuff — and it’s a typical coder’s tendency to love the challenge, but hate the finish.

I see this all the time in software engineering circles. Heck, Linux is prime example, where you have this super advanced software – that for the longest time was visually unpleasing. Hackers care about the tech, but things like design and easy access to info not so much. It’s a common mistake we coders make, because we imagine that everyone else thinks exactly like we do, or know the same stuff that we know.

So cut the Apollo guys some slack, because they have just pulled off the impossible, and succeeded where all other have failed – namely to bring the Amiga kicking and screaming into this century.

First impressions

Having finally found a disk-image that worked (with the help from Amiga community members), I burned that to my CF card, plugged it into the 2.5″ IDE CF adapter – and fired her up. And within a couple of seconds I was looking at a juiced up, 24 bit Workbench screen.

I double-clicked on the System disk icon, and it opened instantaneously. I clicked on preferences, and once again the result was instant. Wow.

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I started with a relatively low resolution (800 x 600 x 24 bit), but the responsiveness is pretty close to instantaneous. I am extremely impressed by this

If you are wondering why that is wow-worthy, keep in mind that Amiga keeps its icons in a separate file. And on a vintage Amiga, loading and presenting the icons in a desktop window, is an experience where you can count the icons as they appear. I have never experienced Workbench showing a full windows with some 50 icons in under one second. This abodes well indeed!

I spent a couple of hours checking out the Demo folder, and to my amazement the V4 ran even the most demanding of 68060 demo without breaking a sweat. Perhaps not that surprising since the performance ratio is said to be 5 times more powerful as a stock 68060 CPU. And that doesn’t take the RTG and optimized IO into account either. So yeah, the stand-alone is much faster than anything else, including the V2. Perhaps to be expected since it doesn’t have to wait for the old 1980s hardware any more. The bottleneck for the Vampire v2+ is without a doubt the actual Amiga machine itself!

A natural next stop is ofcourse the performance benchmark program SysInfo. And I was surprised by the speed results. The V4 scored 147311 dhrystones, which is just off the charts! It is 8 times faster than a standard Amiga 4000, and 120 times faster than the A1200 (!) So you got some serious firepower to play with here; 153.76 MFlops even – holy shit!

Now before you start comparing those numbers with your Raspberry PI or your WinUAE setup, keep in mind that you cannot compare real hardware with emulation. You should only compare emulation with emulation, because emulators like UAE will never give you a reliable number. UAE (Unix Amiga Emulator) is subject to a host of interference from the operating system you run beneath. The emulated CPU also hogs all the clock cycles available when you run a test like this, which means the chipset will be robbed of attention. So even though SBCs (single board computers) like the Tinkerboard yields better numbers, those numbers are useless in a real-life scenario.

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Very impressive stats. And this is real hardware, not unreliable emulation stats

For example, when compiling a large codebase with Freepascal, the otherwise super fast UAE installation on my Tinkerboard, would come to a grinding halt. The virtual cpu hogs all the clock-cycles, and coherence between display, sound – even the mouse pointer (!) becomes unresponsive.

This however, is not the case with real hardware like the Vampire. Its clock cycles are persistently honoured regardless of what each chip is doing. And likewise the custom chips, display and whatnot – are not affected by the CPU doing heavy chores.

But yeah, the vampire numbers are pretty freaking awesome! Its is the fastest Amiga ever, end of debate.

But now that I have the fastest Amiga in history, i can’t help thinking .. now what? I mean we have been fighting for so long that when the war is finally over and we can get on with it again, I have almost forgotten what we were fighting for.

I think its important for the Vampire team to setup a developer outreach program when things cool down a bit. Talk to the Freepascal team, the guy behind VBCC, SAS C, the Amiga E guys, AmiBlitz, and the guy updating Amos basic too — Support for 68080 and AMMX etc. should be done on compiler level. And further, all the 68k libraries should be recompiled as well.

When this is done, you will most likely see a 30 to 40% speed boost, which means the V4 will officially match the Playstation 2 RISC specs. And most likely give the PPC based A1222 a run for its money.

Developers, developers, developers

Of the machines that were produced in the 80s and early 90s, the Amiga is probably the only one that still sees development, both software and hardware. Its limitation has spawned a kind of subculture in itself, where coders love to push the old girl to the absolute limits and beyond – just because they can.

The Vampire v4 just upped the ante on those limitations. And the V4 is performance wise short of a Playstation 2. Miniscule compared to modern hardware, but one hell of a evolutionary step since it represents only two years of continuous development.

But it gets more interesting than that, because the Vampire FPGA is not the final destination. Its is the blueprint for a complete ASIC motherboard that should, if all goes to plan, arrive in a few years. And when the design is moved from FPGA to a normal motherboard, that’s when you can start running the CPU at modern clock-frequencies. So if the Vampire V4 is somewhere  between Playstation 1 and 2 today, running at 50MHz — just what will we see coming out of Apollo’s lab when its clocked at 500Mhz? Yeah, that’s something to think about!

Right now we have hardware to blow every legacy machine away, and the added memory and CPU speeds opens the door for all those cool features Amiga coders have dreamt about since the golden 90s. This places the next step firmly in our hands, as developers. Not just demo coders and game developers, but far more important now is to establish a comfortable ecosystem for the desktop.

And that, in my view, starts with the developer tooling itself. The compilers we use must be updated to take full advantage of the new CPU instructions and registers. Applications that have been limited to the old display modes and graphical boundaries, must likewise follow suit and make the new stuff available for everyone. Browsers, office packages, music software, all of it. DPaint and PPaint are great for pixel art, but the time has come to bring in PhotoShop level functionality.

It took 20 years to break free. Two decades to get away from the greed and arrogance of the legal owners, who to this day are occupied by lawsuits and endless bickering. They are now the kings of nothing, because the Vampire is a free agent with no legal or intellectual ties to any of them. And the OS? Aros is likewise an open-source and free agent – one of the longest running open-source projects on the planet (a seed planted when it became clear that Commodore was imploding). And it has already evolved far beyond the capabilities of the ancient, official desktop distribution. Ah the sweet smell of irony, they must be choking on it..

Now lets ram the Vampire down the throat of those that tried to bury the Amiga. Not because we have to, but because we can 😉

My verdict? I have never given any product a score of 10 out of 10. And I am tempted to give the vampire that. But due to some fpga features still missing, I will give it a 9 out of 10, which is the highest score I have ever given any product.

When Apollo merges their cores and back-track to fixup various bits and pieces, the curse of Amiga is officially lifted. And it didn’t take some wealthy suit or company to kill that dragon – it took a dedicated team of Amiga hackers.

The cult of Amiga is forever

Amiga

Which FPGA is the best for Amiga?

During the weekend I posted an article on the Vampire V4 Stand Alone, which is without a doubt the most awaited product within the Amiga community in years. I don’t think I have seen this much activity around any Amiga product to be honest, not since Commodore was alive and kicking.

But the Vampire is not the only FPGA that has been adapted for retro computing, far from it. On the more affordable end of the spectrum you have the UnAmiga FPGA, which is a straight-forward, easy to use Amiga system. There is also the much more powerful MiSTer FPGA, which has tremendous potential.

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The UnAmiga and MiSTer FPGA in all their glory

Who is this article for?

This article is based on the needs of 3 distinct consumer groups, or types of people. And what matters for one group doesn’t always matter for the other. You could say that the needs accumulate vertically (downwards) from the casual games towards the power Amiga user. The groups are:

  • Casual gamer that just want to play some whdload games
  • Power gamers that want to use multiple console and computer cores
  • Power Amiga user who wants MAX ram, MAX Speed and plenty of hardware options

A casual gamer won’t need 300 megabytes of ram, 8 USB ports and the option to buy extra plug-in boards. Instead he/she will be happy with 20mb ram so that WHDLoad games (just to take an example) can run.

A power gamer most likely want to use more cores, not just Amiga, and will benefit from extra ram and add-on boards. In which case a more flexible solution is preferable.

A power Amiga users wants as much speed, as much ram and as many features as the boards can carry. Things like RTG and raw performance will be the determining factors.

Is it worth it?

Since my article was published people have been asking me this very question. Is the Vampire v4SA really worth the asking price? And while this should be a boolean questions, yes or no, it turns out that it’s a lot more complex.

Let me explain.

What separates the Vampire from the two other models, is its purpose and goal rather than just raw, brutal power here and now. The company behind the Vampire, Apollo, have as their primary goal to produce traditional asic motherboards (normal motherboards like those inside the classical Amiga machines) – and the FPGA stuff should actually be regarded as a prototype.

The MiSTer has the same potential as the vampire, but for some strange reason, the people involved seem uninterested in more powerful Amiga systems beyond the A1200. In fact some of the individuals I talked to on the Facebook group, were outright hostile to the idea, because in their mind the MiSTer is just a “retro device” and “Amiga should remain true to the classics” (that type of mentality). To me that is absurd and not even worthy of a reply. People can like whatever they want, but those selling the MiSTer hardware should then inform their customers that the Amiga core is what it is (I made it  very clear what I was going to use it for). I would never have bought it had i known about the mentality in those circles.

So the issue is not really skill and time, because a Patreon project would no doubt help fund a better core. The issue is how these people view the Amiga, which is clearly cemented in the past as a dead legacy system.

Right now the MiSTer is running on a bog standard MIST core, which means it’s setup to function as a slightly faster Amiga 1200 (performance wise its somewhere between a 68030 and 68040). But that’s about it.

People have even offered to donate a ready-to-use RTG module, which would have given MiSTer users modern display modes (8, 16, 24 and 32 bit graphics) and opened the doors for a ton of software that the MiSTer currently can’t run — yet for some strange reason this was declined (!). In the comments on the subject one of the maintainer has made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t see the MiSTer as anything but a games machine, which to me (based on my subjective need for the device) is a complete and utter waste of money.

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When googling around for info on RTG and the MiSTer, i stumbled on this. And also a dialog from the Atari forum asking for the same thing, with a less than nice reply.

Picture above: This comment is why i contacted the MiSTer group directly on sunday to ask what the status was. My experience of the community up until that point was largely positive. I figured that instead of listening to rumors that it would be best to ask directly.  Sadly the members there was more interested in telling me what an idiot i was for wanting RTG and more speed, twisting my motivation for needing said features, just to troll the question to pieces -and eventually resorting to name-calling. At which point i left the group for good.

I was quite shocked when I read those comments, because I bought the MiSTer purely as a 68k developer machine. I was given the impression (by the person selling the hardware) that the Amiga core was constantly being refined and evolved, and that more and more features would be added (especially RTG support, and perhaps 68080 support [following a dialog on an open-source alternative to the Vampire]). So there is clearly some discrepancy between those selling the hardware, and those actually working on and maintaining the cores. I mean, why else would an Amiga fanatic spend $200 on a system (I bought the 128mb memory module + RTC) that is identical to what he already owns? If all you want to do is play some old games and reminiscence  about “the good old days“, then a $20 Raspberry PI 3b got you covered (and then some!). The entire purpose of FPGA, is that you can evolve, update and adapt the platform. And the MiSTer has such wonderful potential in that respect; it’s a shame to see it wasted.

The guy behind the UnAmiga have shared somewhat similar sentiments (that he feels the Amiga core is purely retro), but his challenge is more practical and boils down to time and money. His solution is a fast, affordable and very easy to use Amiga replacement. But if you are expecting anything beyond the A1200 architecture, then both the UnAmiga and MiSTer won’t deliver.

A question of vision

Out of these three FPGA solutions, the Vampire from Apollo is the only one where the developers seem to have a clear-cut agenda and vision, namely to build the best damn Amiga they can; one that remains true to the 68k legacy, compatible with existing Amiga software, yet updated to modern performance and features.

Apollo is likewise the only company (again, from my subjective viewpoint) that have a realistic, long term financial goal. They are offering the Vampire line of accelerators and the stand-alone as a means to fund their journey to that goal. So enthusiasts get awesome new tech to play with, Apollo get to refine and perfect the technology, and everyone is happy. Focus so far has been on getting the FPGA out there, and then funneling sales back into the project for the next step.

Apollo have made no secret of the fact that FPGA is simply a means to an end, and that once the FPGA technology has been perfected – it will be converted to an ASIC (ordinary) motherboard that can run at much higher clock frequencies. So this is for all means and purposes a brand new Amiga architecture that is organically compatible with it’s roots.

So the question is not as simple as “which of the FPGA solutions offer the best value for money”. Because you are not investing in just a board or FPGA device; you are investing in an idea and the people involved.

The UnAmiga

The UnAmiga was the first FPGA I bought and also the one I have used the most. It comes complete out of the box, you don’t have to source separate parts or anything like that, and is literally plug and play.

The model I have came with a standard VGA out (I am unaware of a HDMI version?). It also has a mini-jack audio out (which the Vampire lacks). And two traditional Amiga joystick ports. Convenient and to the point.

The only thing that was a bit surprising was the PS2 sockets for keyboard and mouse. So i had to buy a  PS2 adapter kit and keyboard/mouse that would work with the adapters. But you can pick that up for $20, so not exactly a huge thing. The device boots from a normal SD Card, and you can download a premade disk image.

There is also a simple menu system built into the device for selecting stuff like ADF floppy disks, hard disk image – and a fair bit of visual prefs (like fake scan lines etc). You can prepare a hard disk image via WinUAE, which makes the whole process very smooth. The only downside is that the menu is in Spanish! Not a huge thing since the options are largely self explanatory; Google Translate to the rescue.

Beyond this there is not much to say. Ordinary rules apply, like making sure you are using a kickstart compatible with the software you want to run. Trying to run AGA software on an OCS setup will have the exact same result as on a classical machine.

So if you are looking for a clean cut retro experience, one that delivers a classic Amiga out of the box, the UnAmiga delivers in spades. Highly recommended.

The MiSTer

The MiSTer is more expensive than the UnAmiga but also more powerful. The FPGA chip that is at the heart of the board, is from the same family as the Vampire V4 (actually slightly more powerful!). So there is great potential in the MiSTer setup, which is also why it’s so depressing to think -that a vanilla A1200 is the sum of their ambition.

Again you have standard joystick ports, as well as proper USB support (a huge plus!). The MiSTer is actually an add-on board that you attach to the Intel DE-10 Nano (bought separately), which contains a full ARM SoC for development (!). This means that the ARM side of things takes care of stuff like USB device drivers, SD card drivers etc. So you can pretty much plug in any keyboard and mouse you like -and the Linux driver database will deal with the rest. Needless to say, this is an excellent solution, one missing from both the Vampire and the UnAmiga.

From what I understand, the signals are delegated from the Linux side into the FPGA space. So the Amiga core does not “run on linux” or anything like that (FPGA is not emulation) – these two systems exists separately on the same SoC. The Linux part is simply used to take care of signal processing and device compatibility. Its worth mentioning that the DE-10 Nano is a developer board designed for education. Having a full ARM SoC on board makes the system extremely versatile.

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The MiSTer board is the top add-on board. Beneath, the Intel DE-10 Nano FPGA board. This particular setup as a third board (bottom) yielding a wealth of USB sockets.

Another cool thing is that both the DE-10 Nano board and the Mister daughter-board have SD card slots. So you boot from one and use the other as an Amiga storage unit. I found this to be very practical indeed.

We have to remember that the MiSTer device is not just for Amiga. It’s actually a board that can host a ton of custom hardware modules and cores. If you like the Sega Megadrive console for example, there is a core for that – and add-on cards for using real megadrive controllers. There is a wealth of cores available for the MiSTer board, and they work really, really well.

So if you are looking for a system that gives you a wealth of consoles, like NES, SNES, Megadrive, Atari, Amiga, NeoGeo [et al] – the MiSTer is by far the best system to get. On that there is no doubt whatsoever.

But, if you are looking for a dedicated power Amiga setup, I cannot recommend this board at all. First of all, the UnAmiga is more affordable and delivers the exact same performance and features (they both use the same core). Secondly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot happening with the Amiga core in terms of RTG and higher speeds (nor 68080 compatibility). The potential is there, let there be no mistake about that, but I was pretty much told straight up “it’s not a priority” on their group. So what can you do.

If you want a kick-ass multi-core experience. One where you enjoy various consoles and retro systems faithfully reproduced, then the MiSTer will be the bomb.

Casual Amiga gaming on a budget though, is better served by getting a $20 Raspberry PI 3b and install Amibian.

The Vampire V4 Stand Alone

I have already written a very large article on the Vampire V4 Stand Alone, so I wont rehash all the details here.

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The Vampire is a marvel. Modern graphics, outstanding speed and highly compatible

What is important to understand, is that the Vampire V4SA is for dedicated Amiga users that want a more powerful experience.

I was puzzled by why the V4SA didnt have an ARM SoC in my previous article, but it makes perfect sense when you realize that Apollo is really making a new Amiga computer, one that doesn’t rely on third party technologies. So the USB ports will eventually be mapped as-is, and a dedicated USB stack will deal with device recognition from Amiga OS / AROS.

So a lot of what I found annoying in my review, turned out to have logical reasons behind it.

Is it worth it?

For me, yes. And for anyone who always wanted a power Amiga with all the trimmings. I could never afford an A3000 or A4000 back in the day, especially not with RTG graphics, sound cards and all the fancy stuff such a dream machine was capable of.

And here I have a machine just slightly larger than a Raspberry PI (same form-factor as the ODroid N2) that is 300 times faster than an A500, 8 times faster than the A4000 — with RTG, 16 bit audio and all the stuff that never materialized under Commodore. Commodore drove our dreams into a ditch, and we had the misfortune of watching the Amiga slowly fade into obscurity.

So is it worth it? Yes indeed. Every goddamn last penny!

Amiga, Emulation

32bit png icons for Amiga OS 3.x? Yes!

A couple of days back I posted a couple of pictures of my Raspberry PI 3b based Amiga setup. This caused quite a stir on several groups and people were unsure what exactly I was posting. Is this Amiga OS 4? Is it Aros? Scalos? Or perhaps just a pimped up classic Amiga 3.x?

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The more the questions arose the more I realized that a lot of people don’t really know what the PI can do. I dont blame them, between work, kids and mending a broken back it probably took me a year before I even entertained the idea of setting up a proper UAE environment. And as luck would have it, two good friends of mine Gunnar kristjánsson and Thomas Navarro Garcia, had already done the worst part: namely to produce a Linux distro that auto-boots into Workbench (or technically, into a full screen UAE environment).

Taking advantage of speed

Purists might not be happy about it, but the PI delivers some serious processing power when it comes to Amiga emulation. The version of UAE Thomas and Gunnar opted for is UAE4Arm, which is a special version that contains a hand-optimized JIT engine. This takes 68k code and generates ARM machine code “on the fly” and is thus able to run Amiga software much faster than traditional UAE variations like fs-uae.

But what should we do with all that extra speed? I mean, there is a limited number of tasks that benefits from the extra processing power of the PI (or an accelerator for that matter). Well, being a programmer the process of compilation is one aspect I really love the extra grunt. When using modern compilers like freepascal 3.x on a classic 68k Amiga, there is no denying we need all the cpu power we can get. So compiling on the PI is a great boost over ordinary, real Amiga machines.

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Freepascal is great, although the old “turbo” ide is due for an overhaul

The second aspects is the infrastructure. And this is where we get to the pimping part. By default Workbench is optimized for low-color representation. Meaning that icons and backdrops will be 4-8 colors, fixed palette and fairly useless by modern standards. Since UAE4Arm has built-in support for RTG (re-targetable graphics), which means 15, 16, 24 and 32 bit screen-modes (the same as any modern PC) then surely we can remedy the visuals right?

Well, I had a google around and found that there is an icon library that supports the latest png based icons. These are icons that contain 32bit graphics with support for alpha blending (transparency). This is the exact same icon system that is used in Amiga OS 4.

So what I did was download  the version 46.x icon library from Aminet (Note: I type 46.x because this library is seeing some heavy development so what version will be the latest when you read this is hard to say. Just download the latest and best). When emulating a desktop environment like I do, you naturally want the very best settings UAE can provide. On the PI this means a MC68040 cpu with the Amiga 4000 model. This is important because when you download libraries you can often pick different builds based on your machines CPU. So I picked the 040 optimized library file and copied that to my “Libs” folder.

A quick reboot later and voila, my Workbench was now able to show 32 bit png icons just like OS 4! In fact after giving it a nice background and cleaning it up a bit, a lot of people were unsure if this was indeed Amiga OS 3.x or 4.x (!)

Getting some “bling”

With OS 4 icons supported, where do I get some icons to play with? Well, again I went on Aminet and downloaded a ton of large icon packs especially for OS4 (I think the largest was 120+ megabyte, that is a lot of icons for an Amiga). I also visited OS4Depot and downloaded some cool background pictures and even more icons there.

I also own a proper OS 4 license. I must admit I havent used it all that much, but I absolutely love it!

Then it was the time-consuming process or manually replacing the *.info files. All files that you can see via Workbench has an associated .info file with the same name. So if you have a program called “myprogram”, then the icon file will be “myprogram.info”.

And that’s basically it! I spent a saturday replacing icons and doing some mild tweaking in VisualPrefs (again on Aminet), and suddenly my old, grey workbench was alive with radiant colors.

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I love it! It might not be perfect but i have seen Linux distros that looks worse!

What I find amazing is that even after 30 years the old Amiga OS 3.x can still surprise us! If nothing else it’s a testament to the flexible architecture the guys at Commodore knocked out, an architecture that thrives in extremely low memory situations – yet delivers in spades if you give it more to work with.

Doing some modern chores

One of the first things I installed on my PI was a copy of freepascal. This has been updated to version 3.1, which is just one revision behind the compiler used on Windows and OS X. This is a bit too nifty for standard Amiga machines. You need at least an A1200 with 64 megabyte ram to work with it. Although the size of the binaries is reasonable small if you stay clear of the somewhat bloated LCL framework.

So I was able to use my object pascal skills to create a unzip/zip command-line program in 15 minutes. Doing this on my Amibian box felt great, and I really enjoy the fresh new look of Workbench. In a perfect work OS4 would be 68k and the CPU’s would all be fpga’s that ran close to Intel i7 speeds, but alas – a humble PI will have to do for now.

Amibian

If you want to re-create my experiment then start by downloading Amibian. This is a clean Linux Distro and doesn’t contain workbench. So after you have made an sd-card with Amibian you need to copy over workbench. I suggest you copy over the raw files and mount a Linux folder as a drive. Using hard disk images is possible, but I don’t trust them. And should an error occur you lose everything. So yeah, stick with folder-mounted drives if you want less frustration.

You can visit Amibian here: https://gunkrist79.wixsite.com/amibian