The Amiga on a Chip Project - Too bad it was canceled

This is a project I pushed to get manufactured in 2005, but was canceled due to the cost of flash, "lack of fan base" and the declining plug and play toy market.

The games for the Amiga were usually a single floppy disk or more and would take up too much space in flash. It was difficult to convince the toy manufacturer it was worth paying for more than 2megs of storage.


The manufacuter also worried that the name Amiga was not as recognizable as Commodore C64.

The year the c64 joystick came out the market was flooded with really bad plug and play games like "Spider Man" and "Sponge Bob", which pretty much wiped out interest in this type of toy.

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Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• electronics
• retro computers
• vintage computers
• c64 dtv

[ProteusMega]

Well the "fan base" has been shrinking for years. Look at how hard the "Viva Amiga" (a great amiga documentary that is searching to be funded at Kickstart) project is having to get it's 25K USD.

[JeriEllsworthJabber]

@ProteusMega They looked strictly at the units sold when we had the "fan base" discussion. There were some unfortunate things happening to the industry around that time too.

[MrAhle2]

It hurts me see such an awesome project being scrapped. Even though I have got 5 Amigas in my collection, I still would have bought an Amiga in a joystick if available.

I will eventually try to emulate the VIC II on a Parallax Propeller MCU. Do you have any indepth documentation to share?

The goal is to make a C64 emulation running on a single Propeller MCU. I have already got the SID chip running in a single core.

[JeriEllsworthJabber]

@MrAhle2 The VICE project helped a lot. They've figured out many of the c64s quirks at a high level. I didn't think the descriptions of the quirks always matched real hardware, but it's a great start.

[jacgoudsmit]

I wish I could give this more than 1 "like"! ;-)

I owned an A500 and an A3000. The A500 spent most of its time in the same state as the one in the video: I had a Western Digital RLL ISA hard disk controller connected to a self-made PCB underneath the 68000.

The SCSI bus on my A3000 and PC were connected so I could use the PC's CD-ROM drive from the Amiga. I had to get rid of both Amigas when I emigrated from the Netherlands to the USA even though the A3000 had a US power supply.

I miss them!

[JeriEllsworthJabber]

@jacgoudsmit Sounds like you really hacked on it. :)

[8bitbubsy]

Sweet. Any chance you could scan the schematics and put them online..?

If the author is ok with that, of course.

[pcbdev]

Ah, not minimig ... I meant minimigtg68

[pcbdev]

Do you know the minimig project?

As far as I know it's quite complete ... Just one month ago (or so) there was an update for the Altera DE1 board.

[rogermp7]

I love your work Jeri! I just saw my Amiga 500 sitting in a box in my garage yesterday and wondered if there was anything interesting I could do with it. Perhaps I'll build a MIDI interface and use it for music.

[jacgoudsmit]

@jarnoob I left my Amigas behind because they were just part of my big pile of "do I really want to pay beaucoup to keep this". On the one hand, with all the interest in retro computers and retro gaming (see also my project on my own Youtube homepage) I wish I would still have all my old hardware and software (I had hundreds of floppy discs and CD-ROMs). On the other hand, my house would have been too small. I just hope that whoever got all my stuff for cheap, has put it to good use.

[jarnoob]

@jacgoudsmit saddest thing is if you left them only because of PSUs as you can use normal at or atx pc psu on amiga with an adapter :P

[nullsmack]

I never even thought of this but now I'm kinda sad it didn't pan out. Though, I have to admit the C64 stuff means a lot more to me because that's what I had. By the time I heard about the Amigas, I already had an IBM 486sx20. Still missed out on the C64 chips as well. Do those exist in retail anymore or just on the used market now?

[afachat1]

Hearing that VICE helped a lot is cool to hear as one of the (now retired) members of the VICE team!

[Squonk421]

Just replace the hxxp:// in the provided link, or try searching for "minimig de1" in google.

You will need to register with yahoo groups and join this group to access the files.