anniversary

Amiga 30 event
Gallery

amiga30.eu event in Amsterdam

Leave a comment

Last weekend the Amiga: 30 years event took place in Amsterdam.

It was great seeing and hearing some of the original Amiga engineers and other people involved in the Amiga ecosystem sharing their stories, and I can honestly say that the dedication and love these guys put into the Amiga can still be felt today. Thanks guys for making Amiga what it was (and is!).

There was a tent outside with lots of Amiga hardware on display, some nextgen systems, plus lots of rare-ish Amiga models that I never saw in person, like the A4000T, the CDTV, the Walker prototype, the A1000, etc. There was also one original minimig on display, unfortunately no MiST boards (I wanted to take my MiST board with me, but I missed the exhibitor tickets – they were gone like hot cakes! Maybe at the next meeting in ten years 😉 ).

Plus, I got to meet Joe Pillow!

Thanks to the organizers for making this event possible, I had a great time, hopefully there will be another event like this for the 40th anniversary of the Amiga!

amiga30-2107 amiga30-2108 amiga30-2110 amiga30-2112 amiga30-2114 amiga30-2119 amiga30-2122 amiga30-2045 amiga30-2047 amiga30-2050 amiga30-2053 amiga30-2054 amiga30-2055 amiga30-2056 amiga30-2057 amiga30-2060 amiga30-2065 amiga30-2067 amiga30-2070 amiga30-2072 amiga30-2074 amiga30-2076 amiga30-2080 amiga30-2082 amiga30-2089 amiga30-2090 amiga30-2095 amiga30-2098

Here are some of the videos of the event I found on Youtube:

I finally know how the hand holding the floppy came about 🙂

Amiga Anniversary

2015 – The Year of Amiga Anniversaries

Leave a comment

On this day 10 years ago, Dennis van Weeren made the first recorded commit on his then new project, Minimig (see Changelog here), so this makes today the 10th anniversary of Minimig.

The project started as a sort of proof-of-concept, showing that it is possible to re-create Amiga custom chipset in an FPGA. In around three years, Dennis made a fairly complete implementation of the OCS chipset. Amiga community – with history of disappointments behind it  – met the project with much disbelief at first, a lot of people didn’t believe it could be done until first public demonstrations of the minimig design were made. Unfortunately, Dennis stopped working on minimig and it seems he left the Amiga community, but he did publish the sources of his project under the GPL license, which allowed others to continue where he left off.

One of those developers was Jakub Bednarski (yaqube), who upgraded the minimig design, added missing features, basically bringing minimig to almost 100% compatibility with OCS/ECS Amigas. He too, so it seems, isn’t involved in the Amiga scene or minimig development anymore. He did make the first AGA chipset upgrade of the minimig with RTG graphics, AHI sound etc, but the project was never published.

I got involved in the minimig project somewhere at the end of 2011, trying to upgrade the minimig port to the DE1 board from where Tobias Gubener (tobiflexx) left it, hopefully adding some nice additions to the design. At that time, I already heard of work being done on AGA minimig, so I patiently waited for the design to be published. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, so I decided to try and implement AGA for the minimig myself. Currently, most of the AGA chipset seems to be implemented correctly, with some missing features and probably a lot of corner cases working incorrectly. Hopefully, I’ll find some time soon to finish it!

The minimig project has grown from its beginnings on the original minimig board to quite a few other boards, like MiST, Terasic DE1/DE2, Terasic DE2-70, Chameleon64, C-ONE, FPGA Arcade Replay board, etc …

It certainly seems the project is alive and well, and will continue to thrive even after me and other current ‘generation’ developers leave the project. So here’s to (at least!) another ten great years for the minimig project!

Incidentally, this year also marks the 30th anniversary of Amiga! It is so long ago that I first played with mine I can barely remember, but I sure do remember the fun I had and awe I felt towards it.

Happy birthday old gal!

(obligatory Only Amiga song ;))