Building a nextgen Amiga-like system.

Specs:

• CPU1: PowerPC 7447 – 1.25Ghz
• CPU2: Freescale MC68SEC000 – 7.09Mhz
• Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA
• ATI Radeon 9200, 32MB VRAM
• 1GB SDRAM

In essence the computer is fusion of an old Mac Mini G4 and a Minimig, with custom built hardware to “glue” them together to act as a single computer.

The computer runs the MorphOS operating system. MorphOS is a very nice and modern Amiga compatible operating system capable of running legacy Amiga applications as long as they are not directly accessing the hardware. It has an active community, good driver support, and runs on PowerPC based Mac hardware which can be bought for cheap nowadays. 

Howerver, legacy games and demos will not natively run on MorphOS since they try to directly access the legacy Amiga chipsets not present on the PowerPC board. This is where the minimig comes to the rescue – it contains a real 68k CPU and an FPGA which implements the full Amiga 500 chipset which allows it to perfectly run games and demos.

Merging these together creates a machine which is a great blend of old and new. MorphOS on the PowerPC is perfect for running modern Amiga applications and having the Minimig acting as a coprocessor allows it to natively run old games and demos instead of having to rely on a software emulator.