AmigaKit Ltd

Christmas and Amiga memories often go hand in hand together. Many in the community had their first Amiga experience when they found a Commodore Amiga 500 Batman pack or Flight of Fantasy pack wrapped under the tree. Those fond memories persist.

Building an Amiga 1200

At this time of year we often get asked to build an Amiga 1200 machine to a customer’s specification. These are boxed of course, just like the original Amiga 500 packs of yesteryear.

The heart of a good system is a reliable motherboard. Most Amiga 1200 motherboards are approaching three decades old but with some refurbishment and renewal of components they can endure for decades more.

The first port of call is to select a motherboard from our warehouse and bench test for some hours. It is put through it’s paces with a comprehensive list of tests ensuring every part of it is operational. If it passes all the tests then every capacitor is changed for high quality new components, usually from notable manufacturers such as Panasonic.

This specific client wanted some extra goodies installed such as an A1200 4G CF Hard Drive for storing his classic games and an extra 8MB Memory installed. To complement this retro-gaming computer an Indivision 1200 Flicker Fixer with DVI backplate was installed. The DVI socket was placed in the small expansion area under the floppy drive using a custom made DVI backplate.

Christmas Themed Amiga Games

There is nothing like a good seasonal themed game to get you in the festive mood. If you have children who haven’t yet shared the joy of Amiga gaming at Christmas there are a selection of games that are worth dusting off and sharing with them.

Here are some of my favourite Classic games worth revisiting at this time of year:

Cannon Soccer

Sensible Software produced two levels as a festive treat for an Amiga Format magazine coverdisk.

This short seasonal game blended Cannon Fodder with graphics from both Sensible Soccer and Mega-lo-mania. A roving helicopter attempts to bomb your small platoon of brave soldiers- its not easy to avoid it’s attack whilst avoiding the enemy dressed as a soccer team. A bit of fun and a nice distraction at Christmas.

Christmas Lemmings

DMA Design created two special Christmas releases of Lemmings, one in 1991 and another in 1994. Both were given away free on Amiga Format coverdisks at the time.

Instead of the Lemmings’ usual green hair and blue suits, they were all given red Father Christmas costumes for this seasonal release. The high quality pixel animation of their red bubble hats bobbing around adds to the game’s charm. Furthermore, the levels were covered in snow lit up by twinkling coloured festive lights. With a rendition of the tune “Rudolf The Red Nose Reindeer” playing in the background it nicely rounded off these special editions. Don’t expect the levels to be easy though- they were challenging to ensure their longevity through the Christmas holidays.

Fire And Ice

Graftgold’s fun platformer saw Cool Coyote dressed as Santa complete with white beard in this special Christmas edition of Fire and Ice.

Just a single level but lots of fun if you like platform games.

Robocod

Robocod is programmer Chris Sorrel’s hugely popular follow up to James Pond. This time the game is set in the Artic at the toy factory of a certain S. Claus.

If you like platformers then this will be a firm favourite – jump and collect toys to complete each level avoiding enemies. Bizarrely the main character (a walking fish) can drive toy cars and fly planes as he navigates around the toy factory.

Purple Is The Colour

The majority of our memory expansions are the standard green, matching the majority of Amiga motherboards.

A few customers sent us unusual requests for an alternative colour. When we enquired we were told they all wanted purple.

We were happy to oblige to this suggestion so a custom production run of A500 Memory Expansions Purple Special Edition was manufactured. To supplement it even a purple real time clock module was produced.

Amiga Ireland 2023

Over the years it has become traditional for an annual Amiga community event to be held in Athlone, Ireland.

The pandemic put this temporarily on hold however this coming January it making a welcome return. The small show is being held on the Saturday 14th January with a meal and get together on the Friday evening.

Amiga Kit has once again sponsored the event and helped with the rising costs of hosting a show.

The show usually sells out quickly with less than a hundred attendees – a few tickets are still on sale at the time of writing. The atmosphere of the event is always warm and friendly. Many famous faces have attended over recent years. There are Amiga experts in attendance with helpful advice and suggestions for those with questions. Throughout the course of the show there are group gaming competitions – a great opportunity to test your skills at Sensible Soccer against other gamers!

If you are interested in visiting this unique gathering of Amiga users, then go to the website to book your tickets- you won’t be disappointed.

Step Into Christmas

Ross joined the Amiga Kit team over a year ago and has made a welcome contribution since arriving.

If you placed an order this year on our main store or Ebay, then the chances are that your order has been carefully packaged by him.

When not armed with a packing tape gun, he has also proved his good soldering skills over the last year. This extra pair of hands has been a great help to Chris, our Technician when assembling batches of Amiga memory expansions and adapters.

Ross is certainly getting into the festive mood. I am not too sure on the glasses- he assures me that he doesn’t wear them whilst assembling an A500 RAM card!

Thank you to everyone who has placed an order in the run up to Christmas this year. Your orders keep the Amiga Kit team busy and are appreciated.

Finally we wish you a happy Christmas. We hope you can spend good quality time with your family, friends and loved ones.

It has been a few years since a large scale Amiga community European show due to the pandemic lock down across the continent.

When Amiga 37 was announced, there was an eager anticipation, understandably more so than in previous events. The experience of vacating your computer desk and attending a show for a few days is both exciting and refreshing. So that is what I exactly did: Thursday last week my computer was powered down, a small flight case packed and I jumped on the train with the morning commuters on route to London City airport.

The intermediate destination was Dusseldorf with a plan of getting a train to Monchengladbach where the show organisers recommended an “official” hotel.

After a brief one hour flight, I touched down in Germany and waited half hour to be reunited with Trevor who had flew in from Dubai.

Together we tried to fathom out how to use the train ticket machine and had to ask a sympathetic lady who showed us how to retrieve our ticket. Two hours later we arrived and had checked in at the Leonardo Hotel in Monchengladbach.

Despite us arriving a day early, there were others with the same idea. So that evening we met up another Amigan, Dr Adam Spring who had flew in all the way from the US to attend the show and also extend the stay for tourism.

Friday Fun

Most international visitors arrived on the Friday for the first part of the weekends festivities. That evening no classic computers were warmed up. Instead the opening even was hosted in the town centre at a rock music bar.

Pizza and drinks at the bar were complementary until 10pm, including some good German beer. Some individuals kindly offered chances to sample shots from drinks originating from their home country.

Around 1am we proceeded back on foot to the hotel with Dave Haynie and Costel Mincea. The promise was to sample Shackleton Blended Malt Whiksy kindly supplied by Trevor. The bottle was finally exhausted at 4am.

It’s Show Time!

The main show was spread over the two days of the weekend.

Saturday morning, 7am: Trevor woke me up after I failed to hear the alarm clock. It turned out that only three hours sleep was my permitted quota in preparation for the first show day. It felt like someone had woken me in the early hours of the morning.

After a strong coffee at breakfast we grabbed a taxi. We were driven the twenty minutes journey from the hotel to Kunstwerk, the sizeable venue of the event. Upon entering the hall, it was already bustling with exhibitors setting up their stands and tables.

At 10am the public were let into the exhibition space. Tickets were sold out for the event. I was told there were unconfirmed reports of attendance being in excess of a thousand people.

The backbone of Amiga has always been the community; ideas and innovations to keep the flame burning bright. This event did not disappoint in that tradition. The show hall contained a mele of creative hardware and software demonstrating how to enhance a thirty year old computer platform.

The Amiga Kit stand was consistently busy with visitors asking questions about hardware upgrades for their Classic Amiga systems. Franck was diligently taking their orders throughout the weekend. I talked to so many familar returning customers and new customers that my throat went hoarse. Bottles of cold water and cola helped.

The A-EON tables displayed flagship X5000/40 computers running different system software and some 3D game titles. MorphOS was running on one and even a development version of the Enhancer Software V54 on another. Christian Zigotsky ably demonstrated to any curious bystanders the features of the computer. Unfortunately at one point there was a problem with the hard drive of the X5000 running MorphOS preventing it to boot. Thankfully, the Frank and other MorphOS team members quickly helped fix the issue and MorphOS was up and running once again.

The MorphOS stand contained a Commodore Amiga 4000 desktop with a very unexpected surprise: MorphOS version 3.18 running in all of it’s glory! I was told that Mark Olsen had worked on it in the short time before the show to get it ready. Prior to this development, the last version of MorphOS (1.4.5) for this machine was released all the way back in 2005. A public release date of this latest version is unknown at the time of writing.

Dimitris (a.k.a Midway) maybe familiar to many of you as the author of the excellent Amiberry Amiga emulator. He was demonstrating the latest version running on ARM based hardware.

Close by, Enrico Vidale from ACube had an array of new hardware on display. The PCB of the PowerPC laptop along with an A1222+ motherboard and the new SAM 460LE were all present on their table.

Jens Schoenfeld of Individual Computer was showing his latest development, the ACA 1240. This high end Amiga 1200 accelerator was a striking purple in colour. He explained to me that it had been in development for many years and was likely to be priced for retail in excess of 500 Euros due to scarcity of high quality 68040 CPU chips. However for this price point the user will get 30 MIPs of power as reported in SysInfo. I asked him to show me some tests in AIBB benchmarking software. The Beachball test was rendered rapidly- as if it was running on a emulation system. He also had the same Amiga 1200 outputting through his Indivision AGA 1200 MK3. This latest version of the popular flicker fixer produced a crisp looking display.

There was some history on show too. The Commodore-Amiga 4000 desktop that was used for production in James Cameron’s 1997 Titantic movie was on display.

Amiga Developer Team

One great by-product of the show was that members of Amiga Developer Team could get together. Not everyone could make it, but at least some of our team did. After three years of lock down, it was good to finally meet in person some new team members such as Constantinos. His contributions to the team have been numerous in recent years but no one had met him outside of cyberspace before.

Speeches

Above the main exhibition hall was a double staircase leading to another level. This large seated area was used for talks and speeches through out the weekend. Trevor, Dave Haynie, Ron Nicholson, Jim Collas, Mev Dinc, Jon Hare and Dave Pleasance all had allocated time slots to speak to the crowds gathered in the space.

All good things sadly come to an end. Before long it was 5pm on Sunday and time to wish people good bye. I was kindly driven by Laurent and Franck to Dusseldorf airport to get my evening plane back to Heathrow.

On reflection, an exhausting but highly enjoyable four days.

Special Thanks

Sincerest thanks go to the group of people that helped setup and run the A-EON and Amiga Kit stands over the two days. Merci ! Danke !

During the long hot summer the Amiga Kit team celebrated our 18th Anniversary and took some time off from the office with family. Now the summer has passed, all attention is now preparing for the run up to Christmas. Behind the scenes, new products are being developed and preparations being started for events.

PiStorm 600

Last year’s Amiga hardware sensation was PiStorm. This was not exception following on from the ingenuity of Amiga Community hardware developments. It is the amazing creation of Claude Schwarz and the army of contributors to the firmware and software it relies on. For those that haven’t yet seen it, the adapter replaces the 68000 CPU on the Commodore-Amiga 500 or 2000. A Raspberry Pi plugs into the adapter and then emulates the 68000 albeit at astonishly better performance than the original chip. The results are very impressive with MIPS CPU benchmark going stratospheric to the delight of many users who run SysInfo.

Now it is the turn of the Commodore-Amiga 600. This computer is more technical engineering problem because the 68000 CPU is not socketed, it is soldered on the motherboard. Fortunately for the community, Leigh Russ saw the opportunity to take the original PiStorm design and adapt it for the Amiga 600. He used the method of an inverted PLCC socket to sit upon the motherboard’s CPU. Once he finished his design, a quick negotiation resulted in him collaborating with us to add PiStorm 600 to our Amiga Store. Thanks Leigh!

It’s Show Time!

It is that time of year again and the traditional Amiwest show is approaching. Once again it is hosted in the Holiday Inn Express Cal Expo hotel in Sacramento. The main show is held over the weekend of 21/22 October but there are fringe events on the Thursday and Friday preceeding it. The two spacious conference rooms in the hotel offer good facilities for the events. They are then combined to create a large show floor for the main event on the weekend.

If you have not been before and can make the journey, then it is worth meeting up with the friendly Sacramento Amiga Club members. They are a welcoming and knowledgable group of Amiga enthusiasts. Attendees may also get to see or meet Amiga personalities at their traditional after show banquet.

Before that on 15-16 October in Germany is Amiga37. This annual show has been organised with a lot of hard work for some years by Markus Tillmann and helpers. In previous years this large European event was held in a huge hall in Neuss, but this year the venue has changed to Mönchengladbach. We look forward to seeing our Amiga friends there, sharing good German beer and food.

Floppy Drive Switching

If you have a Commodore-Amiga 500 or 2000, you may want to make your external disk drive (DF1:) the boot drive, instead of the internal drive (DF0:). This could be very convenient especially if one of your drives is a Gotek floppy emulator. There is a new neat solution to do this.

The Switchless DF0: / DF1: Floppy Drive Boot Selector is an adapter that plugs inside your Amiga 500 or 2000. When the three reset keys are held down for five seconds, the adapter will sound a short beep. It will then swap the boot drive to the external floppy disk drive or vice versa.

Why not use the Early Boot Menu and select the boot drive instead? Well unfortunately most games dump the operating system within seconds as soon as they load the bootblock of the floppy disk. They then ignore any system settings such as Early Boot Menu options. Therefore a hardware solution like this is essential for many games.

Killing Grounds Revisited

I remember whilst in University the much anticipated release of Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds by Team17. After collecting the game from Electronics Boutique shop, I rushed home to install the many floppy disks on my hard disk. The game was very resource hungry and pushed my lowly Blizzard 1230/IV accelerator to the limit. It is hard to believe that this then cutting edge game was largely the work of lone programmer Andy Clitheroe. In contrast to these days where huge teams are used to craft 3D games.

The late ninetees were the time when Team17 were exploring other platforms and wrapping up their Amiga projects. AB3DII seemed at the time that it was pushed out prematurely and as a consequence sufffered from glitches in gameplay. There were attempts by the community to patch the game to make it better experience. One notable update was TKGTurboPatch made by Aki Laukkanen.

Since then the mists of time have resulted in the game becoming largely forgotten. However, in July a post was made on EAB with a link to Github page hosting a new effort to clean up and improve the original source code. It has caused much excited discussion and rejuventated interest in the much loved game. We are looking forward to see what advancedments can be made in coming months.

Commands

Over the last few years we have instructed our in-house developers to write from scratch a collection of basic CLI Commands. Intially our new command set has been written for the Commodore-Amiga with Kickstart 2 or better in the Volker Barthelmann’s excellent VBCC compiler. They were then ported to PPC and we contributed a lot of them to be included with A-EON Technology’s Enhancer Software. Intially it didn’t go as well as we hoped. Our brand new implementations of commands had bugs and courted some critical voices. Implementing system software when you don’t have the original source code is hard and challenging work. It means that trial, error and best guess methods have to be used. So in the forums there were reports of strange bugs and issues. Thankfully, over many months of bug reports these issues were eliminated one by one. We now have a polished repository of Commands which we can continue to develop and improve over the coming years.

You maybe wondering what we will do with these? In the near future, we hope to add them to our A1200, A600 and A4000 hard drives. It will mean that customers can boot directly without needing Workbench disks, which they often get lost or corrupted. This will be very useful in emergencies and better user experience for our customers.

AMIGA.org Server Upgrade

Christopher, Amiga Kit’s technician has been working hard migrating the AMIGA.org Forum to brand new server hardware. He also took the opportunity to update the forum software and make efficiency upgrades to the database.

AMIGA.org is the longest running Amiga website since 1994 so the database is mammoth in size. It records many historic events in the Amiga’s history since Commodore’s demise in the same year as it’s inception. We are pleased to be custodians of this community resource and maintain and preserve it for the future.

Other parts of the AMIGA.org website have also benefitted from the server upgrade. The AMIGA.org Wiki is now more responsive, along with the Amiga Developer Team section.