Amiga 34 in Neuss by zxshoe
As some of you already know, the Amy-project was never put on ice. The interest for the platform was simply too big. After that MrA worked pretty hard to optimize, improve and overall simplify Amy Spellbound, the focus was now to do a release with no less then THREE new motherboards. The choice not to publish this in advance has turned out to be correct (damn, mrA should always get all right đ ) but the catchphrase âno vapour, just amazing hardwareâ seem to work as concept.
The tickets down to Neuss were already paid so I decided to get some new contact and participate in the fair more as a visitor than exhibitor.
Because we already were a bit late to participate on the fair, Amy & Friends had no own table, but thanks to Chucky/The Gang, we could squeeze us into the space of the âhobby-hardware-cornerâ together with him and the Belgium Amiga community which demonstrated A1200+.
The fair was AMAZING! Now I have not participated on an abroad Amiga fair earlier, but the activity, atmosphere, and energy were great! Think said around 750 visitors that had paid entrance and that showed! Even if we didnât have anything new to demonstrate, the interest around Amy was enormously. Highly over expectations. First fair day had more or less a constant stream of visitors at our table. I talked so much so had no voice left at the evening. Interesting was that half of them I talked with havenât heard about Amy earlier. Now we have consciously not made advert for our products, but international Amiga-news have talked about Amy since 2017.
Since we are very close to finish the new cards, we can to tell that new cards will come out this year, and the specs of these will be published when we are ready for release. But I can reveal a couple of details.
- Three new cards. At least one of them this year.
- These will be much easier to construct (for those who not feel comfort with SMD-soldering).
- We hope to get down the price on both cards and components.
- A new webshop will sell Amy & Friends current and future products.
Amy âSpellboundâ from 2017. The built system is an early fully working prototype (1.4) and the two blank are âEarlyBirdâ to the right (1.6) and âspellboundâ that we halfly released last year (1.8) to the left.
One extra cool surprise was to meet Marcin from S.U.G.A (Swedish User Group Amiga), who together with a friend have developed a small card that via Raspberry Pi give a vanilla A500 access to things like accelerated video playback (still through Amiga custom chip), playback of MP3, USB-ports, wifi and Ethernet. They had also developed a new filesystem (PiDrive?) thatâs shown as a custom unit on the Amiga, but on the Pi-side, more or less all can be connected. Even more impressing was when he ran 2 videos side by side, playing simultaneously. I might have misunderstood it, but according to Marcin, the bandwidth between Amiga and the Pi could play up to 15 video streams at same time! The speed of the WiFi and Ethernet was also very impressing â much more than what we Amigans are used to!
During the fair, I also too the chance to establish contact with all of these amazing developers who attended the fair. For example, the polish guys from CS-Labs (Warp-accelerators to A500/A1200 showed up playing Quake on 060/AGA in full speed etc.). AmiKIT was released in a new bundle, packaged as a sweet USB containing all their products. Checkmate A1500 looked really nice, Phillippe from A1200.NET showed status on their new keyboard also looking very promising. I also spent some time socializing with Timoty and Ben Hermans and Olaf showing up the progress with OS4 and LibreOffice. Matthew and Trevor showed up new Warp3D Nova thatâs very impressing!
Note: Article original posted as a blog on Amiga Safir 2019-10-16 (https://safir.amigaos.se/) translated as-is by Browallia. All images by zxshoe.
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