OSNews reader Rodney, writes: “The Amiga Coldfire project announced a radical move to create a 100% compatible classic Amiga that shall take advantage of modern technologies such as PCI, AGP and of course the Coldfire CPU. It is thought the project will first create a Coldfire accelerator card for the A1200, which will then aid the developers in creating a standalone motherboard which should than be ready for the general community. There has been a non-technical FAQ posted @ Amiga.org and a mailing list created. To avoid confusion, this has nothing to do with the AmigaOne from Eyetech and is not made to run the new operating system AmigaOS4, but as a replacement for OLD Amiga’s and to run the OS3x series of AmigaOS. In other words, a hobbyist’s machine!” Update: Fred Horvat wrote: “There’s a similar project under way for the Atari computer platform.”
The Coldfire Amiga Project
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Good to see that the Amiga community is considering this path too! The remaining Atari-supporting companies have teamed up to help bring a Coldfire-based Atari clone to market. The new system is designed to be compatible with the Atari ST/TT/Falcon line of computers and features AGP, PCI, USB 2.0, and a whole lot of other good crap. Plus they’re packaging a very powerful DSP with the system. The system should see the light of day before the year is out. Check out http://acp.atari.org/ and see what the Atari world is doing with the Coldfire. It really is a very good chip (and cheap)!
Wouldn’t most people be better off using an emulator on a modern OS/hardware combination if they wanted to run all that old Amiga/Atari software? Like someone here once mentioned before, a Playstation 2 Linux box would make a very interesting platform for implementing emulators and would probably be a good community standard.
That’s just my outsider’s first-impression opinion when I look at these Coldfire projects.
I wish they would make a generic accelerator board so you upgrade all those great old 68K computers.
Atari
Amiga
Apple
NeXT
I’ve been trying out Amithlon for a while and I don’t really see the point in making a new platform to run old amiga apps on. Sure, the hardware is probably better than what you get with an x86 box.. but I think the performance of Amithlon is good enough. Or what specific advantage does this solution have?
I don’t think that the Playstation 2 with linux would be such a good box to emulate the amiga on. Because it wouldn’t be much faster than an A500. But you are probably just thinking about running Amiga games anyway. Right, the speed wouldn’t be important for most games.
Amithlon has its problems now. Such as no more copies can be shiped because of licencing details. Amiga Inc contacted the create a while a go and pretty much said, sell anymore and your done for!! :} Vicouse :}
Dont bother