The Commodore 64 has been pulled apart, reverse engineered, replicated, and improved upon to no end over the last four decades or so. The Amiga 500 has had less attention, in part due to its greater level of sophistication. However, you can now order a brand-new Amiga-compatible PCB if you’re looking to put together a machine from surplus parts.
The design is known as Denise, and is apparently the work of an anonymous Swedish designer according to the Tindie listing. It’s not a direct replica of any one Amiga machine. Instead, it’s best described as “a compact A500+ compatible motherboard with two Zorro2 slots and a few additional features.”
Denise is just a PCB, though. No emulated chips or other components are included. To use the PCB, you’ll need a full set of Amiga custom chips and a suitable Motorola 68000-series CPU to suit. It can be used with either OCS or ECS chipsets. At this stage, it’s only verified to work with the 2MB version of the Agnus chip, though the creators believe it should work with a 1MB “Diet Agnus.” Some modern conveniences are on hand, too. A pair of microcontrollers will allow the use of Amiga or PC keyboards, along with Amiga or PS/2 style mice, including support for scroll wheels.
Given the number of damaged, battered, and corroded Amiga PCBs out there, it’s great that there is a source of fresh, new PCBs for restoration purposes. Video after the break.
“You Can Now Order A Brand-New Amiga PCB”
Uhmm…. NO! YOU CAN’T!!!!
This has been “Out of Stock” for months, to a year now!!!!
Here’s some “news”. “Commodore goes bankrupt.”
I’ have been waiting for what feels like forever for a restock on these things.
How about just a little bit of due diligence , like clicking on the very link you provide and READING!!!
Holy shit dude, deep breaths.
I was hyperventilating. If you are just learning about this, you just can’t understand the epic disappointment of thinking there was actual news only to find out… “Well. No.”.
I actually own an Original AMI-ITX, but have been too afraid to attempt to build such a rare item at my current, atrophied, skill level.
I was hoping a $99 Denise could fill the build.
Well you won’t have to hold your breath much longer friend. The next batch is on it’s way and I think you’re gonna like it – if everything goes according to plan the boards will include all SMD components pre soldered.
You’re welcome :-)
Make sure you sign up on Tindie if you haven’t already. Stock is limited since this is a spare time hobby project, I’m sure you all understand.
Take a look at https://www.enterlogic.se/?page_id=34 and https://twitter.com/enterlogic for news. And join the excellent Retro Tinkering Discord server too!
Stay safe.
Hi Joe, thanks for your interest in Denise <3
I appreciate that you and others respect the authors decision to keep the source material of the products to himself for the time being.
As you can imagine, completely reverse engineering and optimizing designs, writing several custom firmware programs from scratch. As well as prototyping several revisions up to the current R2.1. It's been an exciting, interesting and expensive journey, that he/we would love to compensate for. At least in part, financially.
This is the fruit of over ten years of spare time work. We enjoy this and we'll keep doing it for as long as it's fun and not too stressful.
Also, we LOVE the Amiga / Retro community. We talk, trade and cheer with the creators of many of the other awesome ReAmiga boards, clones and accessories. Next up is a local gathering in Landskrona, Sweden. Where we historically have revealed our new products. ;-)
Lastly, never forget that The Official Rules of Acquisition #9 clearly states that, "Opportunity plus instinct equals profit." :-)
I completely concur. After years of moving to another industry I know what you mean about atrophied skill level. Once learned you wouldn’t think it was a perishable skill. There are some fantastic online learning resources that could help you and I brush up. I was shocked at the headline myself. I have an Amiga 2000 version 6 motherboard and in a very pristine Amiga 2000 case.
Why should be this out of stock? The author should publish at least the Gerber files so everyone could produce them.
I wish he would. I respect his choice not to, but I really wish he would.
If you want gerbers, look at https://github.com/jasonsbeer/Amiga-2000-EATX it is bigger but it is available.
I like the EATX project, but I really think the Mini-ITX form factor is better.
Is the amiga community we are talking about, there are not free things.
There are plenty of free things, but there are also a lot of vultures picking the 30 year old bones of the corpse.
Still, for whatever reason, this creator just doesn’t want to give his work away, and until I can learn enough to do it myself in KiCAD, I respect his choice.
I don’t understand it. Mine will be completely Open Source if I can ever learn enough to accomplish it. I would be so honored to see versions of my board bringing new life to the dying relics of the Amiga.
But I haven’t made one yet. Honestly, I would probably make an ITX 1200 and just leave the entire Zorro side of the board an edge connector so you could add whatever expansion you wanted like a Micronik busboard.
Why should these be out of stock? Manufacturers aren’t required to support old products indefinitely especially one from four decades ago. I hope you’re not waiting for parts on a 1960s vaccuum tube black and white TV either.
Why? The author spent all his time designing the board and now you want him to turn around and let some mail order stores and other people profit from it? I totally get where he is coming from.
Just contact the guy. Keeping an online store stocked is hard and it’s probably easier to sell directly to people individually given the probable size of the customer base.
Bit of an exaggeration that! It’s been in stock several times over the last year, I know this as I have one and have been following the project. Don’t blame others because you missed out.
More are on the way, but will be considerably more money due to the next one’s being partly populated with SMD parts.
If you subscribe, you’ll get some information when available. Yes it’s often out of stock, but simply because stock goes fast… I have 2 of those and look forward to my third since he will be selling them with SMD already pre-populated.
You can buy a full mini a1200 complete for about £100 on Amazon. It comes with some games and you can put anything you want on it via USB.
> 1MB “Diet Agnus.”
Sign of the times: once there was the “Agnus” (OCS DIP package, A1000), the “Fat Agnus” (OCS PLCC, most common the 8371), the “Fatter Agnus” (ECS, 8372) and the “Obese Agnus” (A3000, A500+ and A600, 8375) .
Diet Agnus is just a PCB I designed to fit the 1MB 8372 in a machine in a machine that normally takes a 2MB 8375
https://github.com/LIV2/Diet-Agnus-A500-plus
Very interesting, thanks!
“YOU CAN NOW ORDER A BRAND-NEW AMIGA PCB”
You can order any kind of Amiga replacement PCB on ebay. And that is nothing new.
I have an Amiga 1000 and 2000 that still work.
Psst. Don’t tell anyone or they might be stolen! 😉
Seriously, though. These things go for crazy prices these days.
If you have any emotional bond to them, please never sell them, even if something breaks.
Because, you may never get them back.
The number of these models is getting fewer and fewer.
It’s better to keep them and try to learn to fix them in the future.
PSA: If you’re trying to sell reproduction boards instead of releasing files YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.
The Amega scene is absolutely INFESTED with people who think they can get rich off collectors by keeping their stuff (boards, 68080 cpu, add-ons, cards, etc, etc, etc) closed source and selling small batches if/when they have time. This is not a benefit to the retro collector community.
The common refrain is that they’re only protecting their reputation in case of chinese cloners. Over in reality, collectors obsess over the origin of every single IC.
These people are just parasites trying to turn a buck. They don’t meaningfully contribute anything to the wider community.
Eehh, that’s bollocks. This isn’t a reproduction board, it’s a compatible custom board. The guy who put work into designing it doesn’t owe you ANYTHING.
They’re certainly contributing far more than leeches who just want everything for free and never actually give the community anything themselves.
From where I sit most new things I see are open source
* Sukkoperas Rämixx A500 Board and his other designs
* The most recent 060 accelerator – Matzes BFG9060 (and everything he releases)
* ZZ9000 code & schematic are open source
* Terriblefire accelerators are open sourced after a bit of time
* Re-A4091 released open source complete with a new open source driver
* PiStorm
* Buffee
* Various re-Amiga boards
* Every one of my projects is open sourced
Besides that, it is not trivial to implement a new board like Denise, to fit an A500 in an ITX form factor with a bunch of improvements and have it work would have taken a lot of blood sweat and tears.
If you still think it’s just a reproduction then you would be happy to know that all original Commodore schematics are available.
I am a strong proponent of Open Source in the Amiga community but I think that people who design novel new things deserve to be rewarded for their efforts.
Although I really love the efforts and appreciate the smartness on doing these re-amigas, they do all need the hard to get NOS parts as most people buy these machines additionally and not as a replacement. This makes the parts going up in prices extremely over the last 5 years and thus the repair is for the cheap machines like the 500 gets slowly expensive then buying another used one. as this other machine will fail as well over time, there was no machine saved but 2 are doomed and the spiral will go on to accellerate :-(
Especially considering there is FPGA based solutions, where none of the NOS chips are needed, and which are fully open source as well down to the gate level.
Woot :-)
Let me know, Martyn brown (ex t17)