Lecta's Den

The Sam460ex board

ACube Systems unveiled their next mainboard: the Sam460ex.

The board is the third product in the 4×0 series after the Sam440ep and the Sam440ep-flex. Sporting the AMCC 460ex SoC processor it features modern technologies like PCI-Express, Gigabit ethernet, USB 2.0. A full list of features has been published on the above link.

Debian Linux already runs on the pre-production board (screenshots here, here, here, here and here). While AmigaOS 4.1 support has not been officially announced so far, it’s very likely that work is already in progress on a port for this board.

ACube Systems will attend the Amiga 25th Anniversary Vintage Computer Fair in London and chances are high that we will see a first version of AmigaOS 4.1 running on the Sam460ex.

At the same event A-EON technologies will demonstrate, for the first time, the new High End Amiga One X1000 running AmigaOS 4.1.

June 2010 will probably be remembered in the (tormented) History of the Amiga Platform.

No, I’m not talking about a software emulator like WinUAE or Cloanto’s AmigaForever…

At the beginning of February ACube Systems released the MiniMig, a small (12×12 cm) board that try to reproduce the mighty Amiga500. This is achieved thanks to the use of a Spartan FPGA and an onboard 68000 processor from Freescale.

The original idea and project came from Dennis van Weeren who kindly put his work under an opensource (openhardware?) licence.

ACube Systems then assembled all the pieces together, packaged them in a nice box with a brief user guide and started distributing the board.

You can see a review of the Minimig here.

There is also a page on Wikipedia about the Minimig.

(BTW, 12×12 cm is approx. the size of a CD-ROM, hence the title of this topic)

Dr. Michal Schulz published on his blog the first screenshots of the Open Source reimplementation of SLB. This is the first step for booting AROS on Sam440ep.

Michal picked up the Bounty for porting AROS on ACube Systems‘ Sam440ep platform. Judging by the continuos progress report we can read on his blog it seems that Michal is very skilled and that a working AROS port will be ready very soon.

Today, for all the Amiga community, is a great day.ACube Systems announced the availability of the AmigaOS 4.0 for every old Amiga equipped with PowerPC expansion cards (Amiga 1200, 3000 e 4000 models). You can read the press release here.More info here and here.Have fun!