

ARMiga – home made prototype of the next Amiga - Corrado
http://www.indieretronews.com/2014/03/armiga-home-made-prototype-of-next.html

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pjmlp
Anyone trying to replicate the Amiga in 2014 doesn't understand what make it
so special 20 years ago.

It was a home system with a powerful GUI, real multitasking, had a CLI if
needed, special purpose audio and graphics chipsets blowing out anything else
that was available on the home market. No the Atari ST wasn't on the same
level. :)

Additional the whole demoscene culture and squeezing the most out of it in
68000 Assembly.

The symbiotic relationship of hardware and software is what made it special.

In the world of multicore and GPGPUs there isn't a space for the old Amiga,
except due to nostalgia.

~~~
spingsprong
You're right, the Atari ST wasn't on the same level, it was $500 cheaper and
had a faster processor.

~~~
vidarh
And still it was slower for almost everything, and had an OS befitting an
8-bit...

EDIT: Now lets get on USENET and start another Amiga vs Atari ST flamewar on
comp.sys.aiga.advocacy.

~~~
Zardoz84
A ZX Spectrum +3 was better that an Amiga and Atari ST in all universes. xD

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tluyben2
I'll just keep my real 500 + 4000 for now... Emulation is not very well done
still. A lot of games and demos have quirks in the emulators and there are
still enough random crashes for me to not to enjoy emulation too much even
though I would want to.

Edit: is the disclaimer crap on top mandatory at IndieGogo? I would not
imagine anyone from Spain caring about that; I don't anyway; you cannot do
much in the EU with that kind of nonsense. It's an honest question though as I
don't really like disclaimers and am wondering if this is something Indiegogo
makes you do.

I'll sponsor the project anyway as it's a new ARM gadget, it looks nice and
it's made in my favorite country :) If not for emulating Amiga, then for other
hacking purposes.

Edit: does anyone know why emulation is still not perfect though on modern,
very fast machines? I know it's hard to do the timing, but random crashes and
some stuff still not working should be ironed out by now? (Example; I haven't
found an emulator which can do SOTB 1 fully ; it always just crashes somewhere
in the game; it definitely doesn't do that on real hardware).

~~~
vidarh
Regarding the disclaimer, keep in mind that there are companies out there that
are actively licensing and defending these trademarks. It's a sore topic in
the Amiga community, as the Commodore and Amiga related trademarks are owned
by companies that have no ties to the community, and/or are actively hated
(Amiga). Amiga Forever is owned by Cloanto, a company that's reasonably
popular. Kickstart I'm not sure about, but I believe Cloanto have the license
rights to distribute the kickstart files, so they might have rights to the
trademark as well - not sure.

In any case, it pays to be careful here - there's a history of multi-year
lawsuits. And yes, for someone in Spain too; Cloanto is Italian, and Hyperion
(the company publishing the current versions of AmigaOS) is Belgian, and the
two current manufacturers of AmigaOne hardware for AmigaOS are respectively
Italian (ACube) and British (A-Eon), and while the most litigious party (Amiga
Inc.) is US, they've shown in the past they're perfectly happy to sue parties
in the EU (multi-year fight with Hyperion), but recently C= Holdings B.V. - a
Dutch company that claims to hold worldwide licensing rights for the Commodore
trademarks - have also been involved in international lawsuits (suing another
company claiming to hold the Commodore trademarks - Asiarim - in New York)

~~~
tluyben2
Thanks for clearing that up; that's insightful! I've been in a few of these
suits before in the EU (not about Amiga stuff by the way) and I always got
away with no more than a slap on the wrist while the stakes on the table were
high. I know friends with companies who had similar cases; in the US we
would've paid dearly. So I mistakingly then assumed it is normal not to get
screwed in the EU by stuff which isn't relevant in most ways today. Sorry for
that uniformed remark and thanks for clearing that up!

~~~
vidarh
It's not really that it's normally a big deal in the EU, as long as you're not
intentionally and knowingly trying to profit of creating trademark confusion.

But if the other party is intent on making it as painful as possible it _can_
get just as nasty in the EU as in the US simply by tying you up in court for
years. And in this case some of the potential litigants seems to be rather
delusional.

~~~
tluyben2
Any bigger examples of that? Now i'm curious.

Edit: I see you already named lawsuits. Checking out those online now.

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kken
So this is a boxed RPi with an Amiga Emulator?

There are a number of projects out there emulating an Amiga in a FPGA. That
makes much more sense.

~~~
ekianjo
NO it's not. You misread the article. Check the indiegogo page:

[http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/armiga-
project](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/armiga-project)

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ChuckMcM
Interesting, if you use the Zynq the system is already designed, get a
zedboard [1] (dual core ARM-A9 + FPGA + HDMI). But perhaps what would be a
much better project would be the spirit of Amiga on an ARM system with a
blitter and a copper chip. (Although jamming copper changes in during the
frame for color rotation was fun, and benchmarking with the green pixel line,
the chip itself seemed to have limited use)

Mostly I see it as a call for a "PC" for the current generation which doesn't
have one.

[1] www.zedboard.org

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voltagex_
It's sad that they're tying open source & hardware to 1M in funding.

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Paul_S
They should also sell a version with no drive. Let's be honest - you don't
really need the drive. All the disks have already been dumped for you. If for
some reason you still have a disk you want to dump there are other ways to do
it.

~~~
vidarh
If all you want is to run ADF images, a Minimig is a good alternative. There's
a bunch of other FPGA based alternatives too. Or you can pick up refurbished
A1200's + WHDLoad (which patches a large number of games to make them
installable on harddisk and behave in a system friendly manner)

