Amiga

by rihahn

It’s hard for anyone who wasn’t there to understand just how amazing the Amiga was when it arrived in the mid 80’s…

See, prior to the Amiga pretty much everything was 80-column shades of green or amber – or maybe 8 colors via RF modulator on the family NTSC/PAL TV if you were lucky – and suddenly in 1985 there’s this “Amiga 1000” machine that was doing stereo sound, 640×400 resolution, and 4096 colors!

The A1000 was a bit too pricy for a highschooler like me, but it was fun to drool over the thing none the less.

Then, in 1987, the Amiga 500 came out. It did everything the machine above did, but at a price normal people (like me) could afford!

I still remember the first time I saw an A500 in person, in late ’87, which had “that” King Tut image on the screen – and I was totally blown away…

This is the actual image in all of its 640×400 32-color glory.

Contrast this with the Atari 800XL I had the year before, in 1986…

Anyway, I really, really, really wanted an Amiga – but I was in the Navy in ’87 and that had a way of messing up my computer plans… I did eventually acquire that dream Amiga though, a year later in 1989, and I used the absolute crap out of it – eventually replacing it five years later in 1994.

Roll the clock forward a few years (30-ish) and I once again have an Amiga 500… Well, at least the soul of one at any rate.

This is the rev 1.97 MiniMig, which is basically a “new” Amiga 500.

A quick tour:

  • The bottom edge is ATX power, MicroSD, USB2, and various power, reset, and status lights.
  • The lower left is the voltage regulation section.
  • The middle left is 6 megs of ram that the system can access as a mix of chip, fast, or slow ram.
  • The top edge is I/O – PS/2 ports, VGA, stereo jack, serial, joystick ports, and 12v barrel.
  • The middle right is filled with an MC68SEC000 and level converters, so this uses a real 68K CPU.
  • The center of the board is the Xilinx FPGA that synthesizes the Amiga 500’s chipset.
  • And just under the FPGA is the ARM controller that handles drive I/O.

And after some fiddling here it is running:

The MC68SEC000 CPU is stable at 60+Mhz, so this is basically an A500 with a 16-bit limited 68030 processor in it. Meaning it’s extremely high-performance while still being electrically 1:1 with an original A500.

I messed around with it for a few hours over the weekend and had a blast rummaging through my old applications and files. I do need to source a 9-pin joystick though… Mostly so I can play Shadow of the Beast. 😀

Listening to "Somebody's out There" by Triumph