That Computer that doesn't die!

By Don Burnett

 

I am doing something really off-topic today, but it's a very very cool thing that I want to direct folks attention to...

 

If you don't know about this, or haven't seen it.. Well it's pretty cool..

 

Lets take a walk back into days of "tech past" into the 1980s.. Most of the cool gamers and multimedia people of the time weren't working on the PCs and Macs of their day to do multimedia and slick gaming. The PC and even the Mac was a monochrome single color experience for most people of that day...  Then enter the Commodore-Amiga 500.. It rejuvenated a large segment of the home market. Alas mid 1994 time frame the Amiga platform passed on (and onto other hands and companies) with the demise of Commodore and their unavoidable bankruptcy.

 

Now let's spin ahead to 2007, where we have seen some cool items like the C64 Joystick, a Commodore 64 that fits in a joystick along with 26 games..

 

Now and Open-Source Hardware picture enters the Picture..

 

Dennis Van Weeren's "Minimig".. It's 68000 based, has all the functionality of the Amiga Custom Chips re-invented on one huge FPGA.  The board has a standard VGA SERIAL MOUSE KEYBOARD and CF card slot...

This is great news because Amiga Classic Hardware compatiblity with the OCS (Original Chipset) is back in a very small device. This is a big boon to a very small user community, but if you like retro gaming the minimig might be for you..You might consider this a serious hardware emulator, but whatever it is, it reminds me of a classic computer I used to love..

Lemmings for the Amiga Playing Below..

 

 

For more

info on this device... (you can build it yourself!) check out..

AmigaForever.com

and

Dennis's Minimig Project Page