The ARMiga Project – Amiga 500 Retro Gaming Console | Hacker News Reader

The ARMiga Project – Amiga 500 Retro Gaming Console

armigaproject.com

52 pointsnallerooth14 comments

Interesting project.

I tried to boot my old A500 a couple of weeks ago, but the add-on hard drive, not surprisingly given its age, had some problems reading the disk.

For me the joy of reliving the heyday of the Amiga is lined to the aesthetic of the keyboard, mouse and CRT, so I was looking at something more along the lines of a floppy emulator like https://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/ as I still have the original hardware.

Forget about old mechanical hard drives. I installed one of these in an Amiga 2000 a couple of weeks ago: http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD. It lets me use an SD card as a HD. It's not the fastest but works perfectly even with my really ancient SCSI controller. It's also cheaper than finding an IDE controller for these machines or a SCSI to IDE adapter. I installed some 3.1 ROMS a few days ago, now I just need a 68030 or 040 card for it :]

I checked the review that was linked on their blog; it looks like this is basically Cubieboard2 (i.e. Allwinner A20 SBC) with custom(?) Linux based Amiga emulator. Not really sure if it is really any improvement over existing PC based emulators (e.g. UAE).

edit: the comments in that review mention MiST which seems very interesting project. The board is bit more expensive, but it has an FPGA which can be configured to be an Atari or Amiga or some other retro hardware. Here is the Amiga version: http://somuch.guru/minimig/minimig-mist/

Fun, but I just use fs-uae for that :) Cinemaware started selling some old Amiga games on GOG for the reference. Once you unpack them, they work in fs-uae pretty well.

I tried it with Aros ROMs[1] (which are open), but games were stuttering. Using closed ROMs shipped with those games (I think it's 1.2) works much better.

1. http://aros.sourceforge.net/nightly.php

UPDATE:

Hm. Looks like amiga-m68k-boot is gone from there. Not sure what happened to it.

UPDATE2: It was moved. See

http://aros.sourceforge.net/download.php

http://www.natami-news.de/html/distribution_download.html

For people on Windows machines, a group called "the Company" builds self-contained emulator+kickstart+games.

http://thecompany.pl/

Are they or were they? The latest news (recruitment) is from 2014.

I have a bunch of old Amiga disks. I've always wanted to get the data off of it (mostly old programs I wrote). Can this project read old disks (and ideally allow me to get the data to my PC)?

Yes:

"The controller allows to make dumps of your unprotected disks directly to ADF images"

You can also use disk2fdi, which works on PC as long as you have two floppy drives and are willing to modify a floppy cable (or buy a pre-modified one).

http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi

SNES controller in gamepad control info? For a pure retro gamer a horrible screenshot. Sorry.

Kickstart 1.3? What year is this, 1988?

At least use a Kickstart 3.0.

It's specifically for games. Plenty of Amiga 500 games won't boot on Kickstart 3. 1.3 is the most compatible version.

I would luv for it to also support the A1200 spec and AGA games.

Still, it's a great idea and I'm seriously considering ordering one.

+1 for A1200/Kickstart 3.1 support. It would be nice to have a bootloader/hardware switch allowing the user to select which to use.

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