Natami - Update

[Puni/Void]

An update has now been posted on the homepage of the Natami project in the Questions & Answers section.

For those of you who wish to visit the Natami homepage, try this link.

Natami Design Goal

Goal of the consumer version of Natami is to create a very affordable Amiga design.
An Amiga that is powerful enough to be useful for today's typical tasks.

Our goal is to develop a single chip (a complete Amiga in 1 chip) that will be used easily to build inexpensive new Amiga compatible systems.

We would like to offer this chip for little money to every company that is interested, allowing them to produce new Amiga systems.

Goal for consumer version of Natami:

* Complete Amiga on a chip
* Amiga compatible hardware
* Run original AmigaOS and Amiga applications
* Play old and new Amiga games
* Truecolor 24bit gfx and 16bit audio
* Size between a big USB key and iphone
* USB, Ethernet and flashdisk support
* Boot AmigaOS in 1 second
* Immediate system on/off
* Surf Internet, watch online videos.
* DivX, Xvid, DVD playback
* Volume production costs of less than $100

We think that in this area the AmigaOS still has some major advantages.

The original AmigaOS is very efficient. The combination of this very efficient OS and the usage of the powerful SuperAGA, will result in a very swift computer.

The computer experience will be much faster than a PC with comparable clockrate. Think about what you could do with a A4000 with AGA and then think that SuperAGA is about 100 times faster.

Our goal is not to sell these systems only by ourselves. We are fully aware that our development team is very good in development but not able to sell effectively these systems to the mass market.

The Natami will not be a competitor to a Wintel Desktop machine, nor will it be a PlayStation 3 killer.

Natami Roadmap

Our road-map looks somewhat like this:

* Natami60 developer system will come out summer 2008.
* The Natami60 dev-board has two main purposes.
- Allowing early developers to develop/port software to Amiga.
- Allowing more people to verifying the SuperAGA chipset to be error free.
* When the dev-board are out we will focus on three things:
- Designing the cost reduced Natami version.
- Developing our Next Generation 68K Core
- We will add new feature to the SuperAGA chipset

[Buleste]

I'm a bit late with this but at the beginning of August this was posted on the Natami forum.

Good news:

Thomas has finished the hardware-design! We now have
to wait for the 1st board getting produced, which will
hopefully be before our announced deadline "end of summer 2008"!

What to expect when the PCB is there? At this point Thomas
will start the bring up. We surely can and will bring many
more news and pictures!

Please keep in mind, that this process may encounter problems,
that are typical for a system bring up process. Thomas will
deceide at some point, that the system is suitable for other
developers and testers to join. This will be the time, when we
collect and process the orders and also can announce the price.

Stay tuned!

Obviously as no one knows if there will be any problems there is no news on a release date for developer/tester boards and no news as to prices. Again obviously the price has not been determined either but if the more demand there is, the greater the production run, the lower the prices. Keep visiting the Natami forum for more updates.

[Puni/Void]

You can find more info on this in this thread.

[Buleste]

OOOPPPPPSSSSS sory about that P G. Must've missed that one.

[Puni/Void]

No probs, mate.

I keep visiting the Natami forum to read the latest news about the project. It seems like they've come a long way now. They still claim that the developer boards will be out soon, so the day when we get to see the first reviews and movies might come soon.

I've also noticed that developers are interested in making new games and software for the platform. Let's cross our fingers and hope for the best.

[Buleste]

This is the latest news on the Natami board

Hi altogether,

we'd love to post hardware-footage, but we
are also waiting for the board and you can trust us
that we will post pictures ASAP, when it is physically
available.

There have been more optimizations on the design:
Thomas is a perfectionist with a lot of experience so Gunnar
and me as software-people of course would love to have the
board ASAP - as everybody here. But we trust the strategy
to design it as good as possible instead of doing compromises
in a sloppy hurry. For instance he choose high class components
for the analog audio output and did extensive testing before
on this matter. Even if this takes time, it is important to
work with foresight, instead of - like in most payed projects
nowadays - to make compromises so often, just because of time
frames and tight budgets on development - with a bad or
mediocre product as the result.

And as everybody who works hard for more than 40 hours a week to make his living will understand, the time for a fun-project is sadly somewhat limited.

Anyway - the main point is: everything IS advancing, even if not
with rocket-speed. Slow but steady progress will bring this to a success. Being devoted and not dependent on anybodies budget or licence makes this effort and Thomas unstoppable.

I know it doesn't tell us much but be assured that the project is still ongoing and that unlike PC and Macs the delay is because they want the board to be perfect and with few or no bugs at all.

[tonyyeb]

I hope this does come to something close to what is being promised. I've held off buying a Minimig, SAM, Pandora, A4000 etc... in the hope that the next big Amiga thing is just round the corner!

[Buleste]

I have read on the forum that they hope the 060 based dev boards to cost around (but hopefully under) $500 and the final board to be even less. 6 months ago that would have been less than £250.00 which is less than what it would cost to buy a Blizzard 1260 so if they can do it then it looks like it'll be at a bargain price.

[tonyyeb]

Hopefully production boards will be even less then. Got a link to the post with the price in?

[Buleste]

@tonyyeb
This IS the link you're looking for.