Amiga Thread.

[Ian J]

Very nice, might have a go at one of these myself as I'm still using an Amiga optical mouse.

 

[pmprog]

One thing I occasionally see pop up, but never really seems to have been mentioned on here - is the ARMiga project
https://www.armigaproject.com/

Looks really nice, proper Amiga styling. Never used one, so no idea if it's any good. I can imagine the standalone Vampire blowing this out of the water when it emerges, but still...

 

[ClockworkCoder]

One thing I occasionally see pop up, but never really seems to have been mentioned on here - is the ARMiga project
https://www.armigaproject.com/

Looks really nice, proper Amiga styling. Never used one, so no idea if it's any good. I can imagine the standalone Vampire blowing this out of the water when it emerges, but still...

That ARMiga project looks really interesting. Although I was put off a bit when I read in a review that it's built off an Ubuntu build...

 

[Ian J]

ProCon CD32 - Third party gamepad for the Amiga / Amiga CD32 that looks awesome

 

[levi]

Does that have half convex and half concave game buttons? I feel that might take a bit of getting used to.

 

[TrashyMG]

ProCon CD32 - Third party gamepad for the Amiga / Amiga CD32 that looks awesome

View attachment 31502

Good find! I really like my Arcade stick I made, but for some games I feel a gamepad is a better choice.

 

[Ian J]

Does that have half convex and half concave game buttons? I feel that might take a bit of getting used to.

Yeah looks like green & blue are concave, red & yellow are convex.

I liked that buttons can be mapped, would be useful for replacing up on the d-pad to jump or accelerate with an actual button, never understood why developers did that.

 

[levi]

I think it's a hangover from keyboard only games on the 8-bit machines, where it really didn't matter to me whether jump was on space, shift, return or the key to the right of L. You were using two different hands for the left/right and up/down controls, so pressing up at the same time as left and right wasn't a problem. It took developers a while to realise that when you were doing it all with one thumb, putting jump on 'up' was a nuisance.

 

[TrashyMG]

I may just order the kit, I need some SMD soldering practice.

 

[sm0kew0n]

Does anyone have any experience of the GBS-8220 VGA converter board with Amiga? Seems like a cheap and cheerful way of hooking up an old monitor.

Cheers.

 

[TrashyMG]

Does anyone have any experience of the GBS-8220 VGA converter board with Amiga? Seems like a cheap and cheerful way of hooking up an old monitor.

Cheers.

I was considering getting a few, I guess they can handle the 15Hz RGB video without issues.

There is reports of minor artifacts in the picture, but it seems there is a fairly easy fix to improve quality, I watched this video the other day.

 

[sm0kew0n]

Yep, YT fed me that video, which lead me here. Only £22 on Amazon.

 

[Ian J]

New Bomb Jack Amiga Remake, ‘Bomb Jack Beer Edition’, Beta 1 Released!

Looks very nice, just shows what could have been accomplished if the coders back in the day had been given more time & support.

 

[TrashyMG]

So yeah this is happening now on my Amigas:

 

[Silent-Hunter]

I wish I had owned an Amiga. I wish they were still made, or at least less expensive. I was gonna get a MiST FPGA thingy, but ED appears to have run out of them.

 

[TrashyMG]

I wish I had owned an Amiga. I wish they were still made, or at least less expensive. I was gonna get a MiST FPGA thingy, but ED appears to have run out of them.

Yeah I hear you, every Amiga I bought was AS-IS on ebay and got them for fairly cheap, but had to put some effort in repairing them in some form, replacing capacitors or in the case of my A2000 repairing heavily damage PCB caused by a leaking RTC battery.

The MiST is alright, and will give a fairly good Amiga performance, AGA graphics and what not, but you may want to hold out for the Stand Alone Vampire V4 FPGA board that may appear sometime later this year. It'll be the fastest Amiga m68k device on the market.

 

[rygD]

Do you mind looking me to info about it? Any idea if there will be community super with chore or whatever?

I went to ED's shop to look for a MiST last night, before reading this thread, and noticed they were sold out. Still trying to decide if I should get an FPGA to play with.

 

[TrashyMG]

@rygD
The Apollo core used in the Vampire Accelerator/Stand-Alone boards are actively worked on, where the Amiga minimig FPGA core used with the MiST hasn't been updated in 2 years and seems development is dead. The Atari ST core amazingly gets a tad more love.

This is the link to their announcement documentation:
http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/files/V4_announcement_v1_5.pdf

Here is the link to the announcement on the Apollo core forum, note that the Apollo core and the Vampire are seperate entities. It just happens the Vampire is really the only one that uses it at the moment.

http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1&note=7626

 

[levi]

@rygD
The Apollo core used in the Vampire Accelerator/Stand-Alone boards are actively worked on, where the Amiga minimig FPGA core used with the MiST hasn't been updated in 2 years and seems development is dead. The Atari ST core amazingly gets a tad more love.

Could that be because the Vampire boards are FPGA boards (unless I've been misinformed) so the FPGA lovers have mainly moved over to those boards. Presumably they take larger designs than the minimig boards. Maybe the vampire boards will also take ST/FPGA lovers eventually, as I think you said an ST core was in development. But the ST as an active platform is much more retro than the Amiga has been (even though the Amiga scene is pretty retro by modern standards) - there have been faster and newer Amiga machines since the demise of Commodore as a going concern, but as far as I know there have been no Atari 16-bit compatible systems since the Falcon I think.

 

[TrashyMG]

From what I understand there is little to no collaboration between the people behind the mini-mig core and the apollo team and working with FPGAs you essentially need to be a Processor designer and finding people with those skills that also like Amigas are hard to find. Some of it I guess it's a difference in philosophy, the Minimig team just want a small core that does everything the same as original hardware, just faster. Where the Apollo core team, wants to modernize the 68000 platform and do what Motorola and Commodore couldn't finish, yet maintain compatibility as best as possible.

Yeah there is an Atari ST core for those that are attempting to do that with the vampire, also using EmuTOS, using some mapROM feature I know little about apparently you can boot into Atari TOS on your amiga and run Atari ST games and applications.