4 ms·

The ARMiga Project – Amiga 500 Retro Gaming Console

52 points by nallerooth 11y ago

zantana 11y ago
Interesting project. I tried to boot my old A500 a couple of weeks ago, but the add-on hard drive, not surprisingly given its age, had some problems reading the disk. For me the joy of reliving the heyday of the Amiga is lined to the aesthetic of the keyboard, mouse and CRT, so I was looking at something more along the lines of a floppy emulator like https://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/ https://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/ as I still have the original hardware.
- bwldrbst 11y ago
  Forget about old mechanical hard drives. I installed one of these in an Amiga 2000 a couple of weeks ago: http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD. It lets me use an SD card as a HD. It's not the fastest but works perfectly even with my really ancient SCSI controller. It's also cheaper than finding an IDE controller for these machines or a SCSI to IDE adapter. I installed some 3.1 ROMS a few days ago, now I just need a 68030 or 040 card for it :]
bane 11y ago
For people on Windows machines, a group called "the Company" builds self-contained emulator+kickstart+games. http://thecompany.pl/ http://thecompany.pl/
- kyberias 11y ago
  Are they or were they? The latest news (recruitment) is from 2014.
dkx 11y ago
I would luv for it to also support the A1200 spec and AGA games. Still, it's a great idea and I'm seriously considering ordering one.
- nallerooth 11y ago
  +1 for A1200/Kickstart 3.1 support. It would be nice to have a bootloader/hardware switch allowing the user to select which to use.
zak_mc_kracken 11y ago
Kickstart 1.3? What year is this, 1988? At least use a Kickstart 3.0.
- LeoPanthera 11y ago
  It's specifically for games. Plenty of Amiga 500 games won't boot on Kickstart 3. 1.3 is the most compatible version.
kenjackson 11y ago
I have a bunch of old Amiga disks. I've always wanted to get the data off of it (mostly old programs I wrote). Can this project read old disks (and ideally allow me to get the data to my PC)?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- pizza234 11y ago
  Yes: "The controller allows to make dumps of your unprotected disks directly to ADF images"
- kstenerud 11y ago
  You can also use disk2fdi, which works on PC as long as you have two floppy drives and are willing to modify a floppy cable (or buy a pre-modified one). http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi
zokier 11y ago
I checked the review that was linked on their blog; it looks like this is basically Cubieboard2 (i.e. Allwinner A20 SBC) with custom(?) Linux based Amiga emulator. Not really sure if it is really any improvement over existing PC based emulators (e.g. UAE). edit: the comments in that review mention MiST which seems very interesting project. The board is bit more expensive, but it has an FPGA which can be configured to be an Atari or Amiga or some other retro hardware. Here is the Amiga version: http://somuch.guru/minimig/minimig-mist/ http://somuch.guru/minimig/minimig-mist/
franzpeterstein 11y ago
SNES controller in gamepad control info? For a pure retro gamer a horrible screenshot. Sorry.
shmerl 11y ago
Fun, but I just use fs-uae for that :) Cinemaware started selling some old Amiga games on GOG for the reference. Once you unpack them, they work in fs-uae pretty well. I tried it with Aros ROMs[1] (which are open), but games were stuttering. Using closed ROMs shipped with those games (I think it's 1.2) works much better. 1. http://aros.sourceforge.net/nightly.php http://aros.sourceforge.net/nightly.php UPDATE: Hm. Looks like amiga-m68k-boot is gone from there. Not sure what happened to it. UPDATE2: It was moved. See http://aros.sourceforge.net/download.php http://aros.sourceforge.net/download.php http://www.natami-news.de/html/distribution_download.html http://www.natami-news.de/html/distribution_download.html

52 points by nallerooth 11y ago

Interesting project. I tried to boot my old A500 a couple of weeks ago, but the add-on hard drive, not surprisingly given its age, had some problems reading the disk. For me the joy of reliving the heyday of the Amiga is lined to the aesthetic of the keyboard, mouse and CRT, so I was looking at something more along the lines of a floppy emulator like https://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/ https://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/ as I still have the original hardware.

bwldrbst 11y ago
Forget about old mechanical hard drives. I installed one of these in an Amiga 2000 a couple of weeks ago: http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD. It lets me use an SD card as a HD. It's not the fastest but works perfectly even with my really ancient SCSI controller. It's also cheaper than finding an IDE controller for these machines or a SCSI to IDE adapter. I installed some 3.1 ROMS a few days ago, now I just need a 68030 or 040 card for it :]

bane 11y ago

For people on Windows machines, a group called "the Company" builds self-contained emulator+kickstart+games. http://thecompany.pl/ http://thecompany.pl/

kyberias 11y ago
Are they or were they? The latest news (recruitment) is from 2014.

dkx 11y ago

I would luv for it to also support the A1200 spec and AGA games. Still, it's a great idea and I'm seriously considering ordering one.

nallerooth 11y ago
+1 for A1200/Kickstart 3.1 support. It would be nice to have a bootloader/hardware switch allowing the user to select which to use.

zak_mc_kracken 11y ago

Kickstart 1.3? What year is this, 1988? At least use a Kickstart 3.0.

LeoPanthera 11y ago
It's specifically for games. Plenty of Amiga 500 games won't boot on Kickstart 3. 1.3 is the most compatible version.

kenjackson 11y ago

I have a bunch of old Amiga disks. I've always wanted to get the data off of it (mostly old programs I wrote). Can this project read old disks (and ideally allow me to get the data to my PC)?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pizza234 11y ago
Yes: "The controller allows to make dumps of your unprotected disks directly to ADF images"
kstenerud 11y ago
You can also use disk2fdi, which works on PC as long as you have two floppy drives and are willing to modify a floppy cable (or buy a pre-modified one). http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi

zokier 11y ago

I checked the review that was linked on their blog; it looks like this is basically Cubieboard2 (i.e. Allwinner A20 SBC) with custom(?) Linux based Amiga emulator. Not really sure if it is really any improvement over existing PC based emulators (e.g. UAE). edit: the comments in that review mention MiST which seems very interesting project. The board is bit more expensive, but it has an FPGA which can be configured to be an Atari or Amiga or some other retro hardware. Here is the Amiga version: http://somuch.guru/minimig/minimig-mist/ http://somuch.guru/minimig/minimig-mist/

franzpeterstein 11y ago

SNES controller in gamepad control info? For a pure retro gamer a horrible screenshot. Sorry.

shmerl 11y ago

Fun, but I just use fs-uae for that :) Cinemaware started selling some old Amiga games on GOG for the reference. Once you unpack them, they work in fs-uae pretty well. I tried it with Aros ROMs[1] (which are open), but games were stuttering. Using closed ROMs shipped with those games (I think it's 1.2) works much better. 1. http://aros.sourceforge.net/nightly.php http://aros.sourceforge.net/nightly.php UPDATE: Hm. Looks like amiga-m68k-boot is gone from there. Not sure what happened to it. UPDATE2: It was moved. See http://aros.sourceforge.net/download.php http://aros.sourceforge.net/download.php http://www.natami-news.de/html/distribution_download.html http://www.natami-news.de/html/distribution_download.html