Amiga accelerator to breathe new life into old systems

If you still have an old Amiga somewhere, for example a 500, 1000 or 2000, there is a chance to breathe new life into it. A number of fans have built a new accelerator that should take the device from the 1980s to new heights.

For those who no longer have an Amiga at home, there is also a standalone accelerator. The signs are made by Apollo Team, which has named its new creation Vampire V4. It is based on an Altera Cyclone V-FPGA and has 512MB of RAM. That doesn’t seem like much, but it’s still a lot more than, for example, the 256kB of an Amiga 1000. That system ran on a Motorola 68000 cpu at about 7MHz. Existing systems can be upgraded with the accelerators.

In addition to ‘modern’ specs, the accelerator is equipped with USB, Ethernet and a micro-SD slot. Commodore’s Amiga systems were popular with gamers and designers for their speed and capabilities for working with image, sound and video, according to The Register. The signs should be released at the end of this year, but the makers have not yet determined what the price will be. If you want to get started now, you can turn to the Amiga 500 emulator that was made by a Google developer.

Amiga 1000, Photo by Kaiiv, CC BY-SA 3.0