Amiga Zorro HDMI Graphics Card Hits The Market

If you were a computer enthusiast in the late 1980s or early 1990s, the chances are that one of your objects of desire would have been a Commodore Amiga. These machines based on the 68000 line of processors and a series of specialized co-processors offered the best compromise between performance and affordability at the time, with multitasking, a GUI, and graphics capabilities that were streets ahead of their competition.

The Amiga story is littered with tales of what might have been, as dismal marketing and lacklustre product refreshes caused it to lurch from owner to owner and eventually fade away from the mainstream in the mid 1990s. But it’s been one of those products that never really died, as a band of enthusiasts have kept a small market for its software and hardware alive.

Workbench as you may not have seen it before.
Workbench as you may not have seen it before.

Earlier this year we showed you a prototype of an unusual graphics card, a modern GPU implemented on an FPGA board that brought up-to-date HDMI monitor support to the Zorro expansion slots found in the big-box Amigas. It’s thus very interesting today to find that the board made it to market, and that you can buy one for your Amiga if you have a spare 189 Euros (now sold out but taking pre-orders for another production run). Producing any niche electronic product is a significant challenge, so it is always positive to see one that makes it.

As well as HDMI output the board features a micro SD card slot that is mountable as an Amiga volume, and an expansion header that is toured as “Hacker friendly”. Best of all though, the whole board is open-source with all resources on a GitHub repository, so as well as reading our coverage of the prototype you can immerse yourself in its internals if that is your thing.

It’s always good to see a new piece of hardware for an old computer see the light of day, though it’s fair to say this development won’t revive the Amiga platform in the way that the Raspberry Pi has for RiscOS. Still, the mere fact of an open-source Zorro FPGA implementation being released should mean that other cards become possible, so we await developments with interest.

[via forums.xilinx.com]

19 thoughts on “Amiga Zorro HDMI Graphics Card Hits The Market

  1. Stuff like this and the Vampire accelerators help people trick out their retro rigs without paying through the nose for unobtainium hardware. 68060s and Picasso cards don’t grow on trees. I’d consider buying a Vampire just to play the copy of Birds of Prey I bought back in the day. A stock A500 can’t play that game worth shit.

        1. There is a PC version and of course, rasz_pl was being facetious, grab an Amiga emu and put it on a nice newer Core i7 Win7/x64 PC with any DX9 card and above and you can play that game until your fingers and eyes bleed!

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  3. why dont we start thinking about putting it on an amiga 1200. the only computer that really needs any type of rtg these days is the amiga 1200. a gpu on an fpga, puts type right up there with the 4000. now all we need is a good sound card with midi and wavetable synthesis. dual strung cable with accelerator pass through anyone?

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