Kickstart 2 & Classic Next Gen Amigas?
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So just a few weeks ago, I got to go to the Amiga Kickstart show in the Uk, no2.
It was another successful event, it was great to see a high attendance and always reassuring you’re not the only mad Amiga fan. I feel like I didn’t take as many photos as I did last year, sorry. Again I only attended the Saturday and didn’t do the after party, that went on to 2am in the morning apparently. Im from the other side of the UK, so to stay to see that I would have have had to get overnight stay and suddenly a little day out that cost £50 jumps to £200+. Plus need to save my money for the 40th anniversary shows next year, where I might try and attend more shows.
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As always, got to catch up with a few folks of the Amiga world and met a few people of the community. There is definitely a rise in people I feel using Pistorm in their Amiga. The main items of interest this year was the A1222, which was available for sale, which was good to see and got to talk to a happy user. Checkmate Monitor / Steven jones again was there, showing off the quality of the case and display. Retro EZ announced an Orb Case at the show. And Finally there was Amiga Kit with their new A600GS.
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I have to give them some credit, the packaging was very well done, nice and shiny. I got to try out the device and talk to guys behind it. I was mainly interested in Amibench and the software, the hardware is nothing too special. I mean, I like the fact that they went on and did the extra work and added 9 pin classic joypad and mouse controls to the system, but most will know this is another ARM powered device. I have nothing ageist this, and I think it makes sense now to move the Amiga to ARM. PPC I think unfortunately has run it course. It made sense to go PPC in late 90s, early 00s as some work had been done to make PPC on Amiga possible. Phase 5 did a great job and so did Hyperion, A-EON, Eyetech etc to push the Amiga brand from 68k, but PPC since Apple drop it has had very little development.
The New Amiga Market?
This brings me to this new merging Amiga market that’s kinda appeared. The new high-end classic Amiga, Vampire, Pistorm, A600GS, A500mini, and Emulation has all pushed the Classic Amiga platform and the 68k performance far above anything the original 680XX platform could do. I think the fastest 68060 was pushed on real hardware was 100Mhz. Most ran at 50mhz. Most users only ever had 68030 or 040 running around that speed, and these were great Amigas for their time. Again most users only had 8, 16 or 32mb of fast Ram only hard core Amiga fans and top end user had 128mb+ of Ram. Plus, the software that required this much was very little back in the day. Now thanks to these new platforms we got 680xx system running as fast as PPC system! Now I know some may not like this, due to it being virtual or FPGA based but I just see these as tools bring us an Amiga platform we could only dear to dream about in 90s.
This new platform is starting to get an increase in software support, Amikit XE a high end Amiga Desktop system that was design more for emulation platform, due to it slow performance on classic Amiga, has finally come back on to the system, thanks to things like Vampire or Pistorm. Hollywood and Hollywood Designer runs so much better on these Enhanced Amiga’s. Quake 2 port really works well on these platforms and so do many other high end 3d games that would struggle on real hardware.
Gorky 17 a 3d RPG game that Hyperion ported to AmigaOS4 will soon be ported to these Advance Amigas as well, hopefully proving that this new classic Amiga market is now here to stay.
Which leads me to this question what should the name and spec be for this new platform. In a way I guess Vampire V4 system could be the formation of the minium spec being that Pistorm and Emulation system can push a bit above it grunt. But in this Blog post i have referred to it as “Classic Next Gen Amiga”, “Advance Amigas”, “Enhanced Amiga’s”, “New Amiga Market” other ideas I had was “Amiga Plus”, “68K+”, “ClassicNG” what do you think, does this new platform need a name and a minimum spec standard to encourage more devs to target these platforms. Discuss more at