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.

Follow my work on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/jeriellsworth

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/p...

Ustream
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jeri-el...

• Category

  People & Blogs

[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.

[Jeri Ellsworth]

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.

[Jeri Ellsworth]

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.

[Jac Goudsmit]

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!

[Jeri Ellsworth]

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.

[konfyoused]

Too bad you couldn't produce something like this as a DIY kit. :-(

[pastorrtom]

Your voice sounds alot like a computer generated female voice.

[Runar Holen]

Any possibililty that an Amiga DTV could be financed by kickstarter or something like that? I would really like an Amiga DTV (but would really like it to be able to read external adf-files instead of just having built-in games, like I say in my newly opened amiga dtv poll at amiga.org forums )

[Scott Lawrence]

So sad it never happened. Perhaps kickstarter.... ;)

[hubzcaps]

wow you rock

[russhurley]

What are you doing these days? Still designing?

[VodkaSeledka]

A500 in FPGA is already done.

Check "Minimig" on wikipedia

[Bastet Furry]

No mention of the C-One and Jens Schönfeld where you got all that knowledge for the C64OnAChip from? :3

[SleepWalkDroid]

Awww, watch this wonderful project and see how it was cancelled makes me feel sad :(. Anyways, really nice done, keep up the good work and good luck. Hopefuly we will see this in the future :).

[Horror Delic]

This would be a fucking DREAM ..