Hi everyone,
I signed up because of "Harrison" advising me to do so. See, he told me he'd support any project trying to bring back the Amiga...
Yes, you might want to see the website from my profile (uh, I read the forum rules and it says no website promotion so I would think direct linking wouldn't be nice) because, people, it's time to make new Amigas. Sure, as the man told me in a few e-mails, there are other projects to "revive" Amigas. Not like this one, I believe.
He said, it would be nice to start with the Coldfire CPU. I say no, just talk to Motorola and tell them to make a much better 68k, 100% compatible with the old one. Then integrate all the technology from the AAA chipset into a new one (or have Motorola do that, for a price) with fall-back, 100% compatible modes to the AGA chipset and OCS. Then, add PCI and AGP buses or PCI Express and PCI, or PCI Express and PCI and AGP. Then, the system would be able to accomodate a lot of technologies like SATA 3.0 Gbps (via PCI-X or PCI Express), some top-notch video card via PCI Express (like a Radeon HD 4870 x2! If we only get AGP, we'll have an Nvidia 7600GT or an ATI Radeon HD 3850), a TV tuner, fast ram (DDR2 or 3 or XDR) and...this is why I posted here. I never had an Amiga (got a friend who did, but he's hard to reach - always busy) but since they were so outlandishly cool in terms of what they could do (yes, you could've had about that much fun with a PC, but for the price of 2-3 Amigas), I thought they very well belong to the vintage computers family in need of a ressurection.
So, what I need to know: what are the optional, hard-to-get hardware enhancements that should be included in this project ? Harrison mentioned the Catweasel PCI floppy disk controller. This is going to be quite nasty, because I was thinking about the Panasonic floppy drives, with disks that could hold over 100 MB on them (and 32 MB on a regular floppy disk). The trick is that they worked with regular hard drive controllers and not floppy drive controllers, so it will take a bit of engineering to make that floppy drive act like a regular floppy drive (or modifying the Catweasel controller). Anything else that could be had on an Amiga, hardware-wise ? I was thinking PPC CPUs (because these were developed a lot of time after Commodore went bust), but he said the software for these is limited so it wouldn't make sense.
Case design: I have another friend who liked the Amigas and owned one until he was forced to get a PC (because of work). I asked him for help on a case design that would look like the A500 or A1200. He replied with some lines that made me laugh in tears:
Step 1: beige plastic
Step 2. round corners
Step 3: grooves
To allow for USB ports etc, add plain rectangular holes. Don't get fancy. Just beige, flat and don't forget that groove. Not too many! You don't want to give Amiga users a heart attack. 7 is maximum, although, if you ask me, seven grooves is way too wild. I'd stop at 5. Maybe stick to 1.
He was obviously joking and I wouldn't get mad at him for taunting the Amiga designs. I thought about a cross between the Zenith Mastersport 386SX (I own a Goldstar clone of that laptop), the IBM 5140 Convertible and the Amiga 1200. And I also thought about an Amiga laptop, similar to the picture of the Amiga laptop prototype that can be found on the old-computers site.
A final note: if you like the idea, please, please, please promote the site - if you have a site, please post a link there. Look around, find companies that may invest in this (the keyword is "seed capital" companies).
Hopefully the admins will allow me to ask for this :D If you don't, people, please edit this request out :)
Thank you!
