A new Amiga has been announced
Only the Apollo Team makes it possible.
With so many old systems making returns lately -- the Spectrum Next, the Ataribox, the SNES Mini to name a few -- it seems only right that another name from the past should head into the fray...and this time, it's the Amiga. You know, the computer that us Europeans love to an utterly unreasonable degree, to a point that usually leaves Americans scratching their heads in total bemusement. A bunch of folks by the name of Apollo Team have announced the release of a brand new standalone Amiga for the 4th quarter of 2017, and this news has certainly made a bunch of folks happy.
So, who are Apollo Team? In short, they're a big name in the Amiga community thanks to their Vampire accelerator boards -- they've made these boards for the past few years for the older Amiga models such as the A500 and 600, and they basically turn your faithful old Miggy into a comparitive beast, with the addition of an FPGA core, tons more RAM, USB ports, HD video and all sorts...some might think this to be a little overkill if they're just interested in firing up something like Sensible Soccer every once in a while, but for people who still prefer to use Amigas for their computing needs nowadays these boards are a godsend because they bring the computer up to relatively modern standards.
Apollo Team's latest board is set to come in three different flavours -- one board is designed for Classic Amigas such as the 500, 600, 1000, 2000 and CDTV. Another board is designed for the enhanced Amiga 1200, which is the first time that 1200 users will have been able to install a Vampire into their system, and the third is a standalone system powered by a 68080 CPU core and a complete SAGA chipset that promises to be the most advanced Amiga system yet to be released.
What does all this mean, exactly? A standalone Amiga Vampire will very much have an emphasis on new hardware -- this machine will not come with the capability to use floppy discs for example, although it'll certainly be able to load up any Amiga program you want either through USB, MicroSD, or a FastIDE-compatible hard drive. It will be powered via Micro USB, there's 512 MB of DDR3 RAM...hell, you'll most definitely be able to browse today's Internet through it. Still, there are some who say that you could get all of this by loading up an Amiga core on a Raspberry Pi.
Whether the Vampire V4 interests you all depends on what sort of an Amiga user you are and how much you care about authenticity -- this may not be something for those who need the sound of the floppy disk whirring away, or the joys of firing up Workbench on a classic Amiga monitor...but for those who want it, it's certainly more usable in this day and age. As with a lot of things retro related, it's all about the balance between logic and feelings with this one, and both are equally important. Manufacture will begin on Vampire V4 boards in the 4th quarter of 2017 -- the price is yet to be determined, although expect the V4 to be more expensive than other boards in the line, which usually sell for around 300 Euros.
