6 ms·

ARMiga – home made prototype of the next Amiga

71 points by Corrado 13y ago

kken 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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
tluyben2 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        Any bigger examples of that? Now i'm curious. Edit: I see you already named lawsuits. Checking out those online now.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    True. When Commodore went bankrupt, there were tons of companies who went in court to pick up the assets or confirmed what they owned of the technology. The Amiga Basic was for example made by Microsoft.
  - zokier 13y ago
    Regardless of the legal situation, the wording in the disclaimer is painfully confused. "[..]trademarks named in this campaign are copyrighted[..]" Trademarks and copyrights are two very different things, usually with separate laws governing each. Trademarks are usually not copyrighted because they are not eligible for copyright protection due the lack of "creative authorship".
pjmlp 13y ago
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.
- ido 13y ago
  Nostaligia is what this is for, and that's a legitimate reason.
- spingsprong 13y ago
  You're right, the Atari ST wasn't on the same level, it was $500 cheaper and had a faster processor.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      A ZX Spectrum +3 was better that an Amiga and Atari ST in all universes. xD
    - leoc 13y ago
      Don't forget the MIDI though.
  - clef 13y ago
    Thanks for bringing some memories back, I had a 520 ST after my Amstrad CPC664.
voltagex_ 13y ago
It's sad that they're tying open source & hardware to 1M in funding.
Paul_S 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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)
- zokier 13y ago
  The drive is the differentiating factor here. If you don't need the drive then you can just load an emulator on any computer, either one of the many ARM boards available or just your PC.
ursul_fram 13y ago
http://fs-uae.net/ http://fs-uae.net/
ChuckMcM 13y ago
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

71 points by Corrado 13y ago

kken 13y ago

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 13y ago
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

tluyben2 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      Any bigger examples of that? Now i'm curious. Edit: I see you already named lawsuits. Checking out those online now.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  True. When Commodore went bankrupt, there were tons of companies who went in court to pick up the assets or confirmed what they owned of the technology. The Amiga Basic was for example made by Microsoft.
- zokier 13y ago
  Regardless of the legal situation, the wording in the disclaimer is painfully confused. "[..]trademarks named in this campaign are copyrighted[..]" Trademarks and copyrights are two very different things, usually with separate laws governing each. Trademarks are usually not copyrighted because they are not eligible for copyright protection due the lack of "creative authorship".

pjmlp 13y ago

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.

ido 13y ago
Nostaligia is what this is for, and that's a legitimate reason.
spingsprong 13y ago
You're right, the Atari ST wasn't on the same level, it was $500 cheaper and had a faster processor.
- vidarh 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    A ZX Spectrum +3 was better that an Amiga and Atari ST in all universes. xD
  - leoc 13y ago
    Don't forget the MIDI though.
- clef 13y ago
  Thanks for bringing some memories back, I had a 520 ST after my Amstrad CPC664.

voltagex_ 13y ago

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

Paul_S 13y ago

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 13y ago
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)
zokier 13y ago
The drive is the differentiating factor here. If you don't need the drive then you can just load an emulator on any computer, either one of the many ARM boards available or just your PC.

ursul_fram 13y ago

http://fs-uae.net/ http://fs-uae.net/

ChuckMcM 13y ago

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