On the pics section of reddit.com there is a screenshot of how Google looked like back in 1999, what OS is running in the background of the browser?!

Speedlink Competition pro USB Amiga style joystick

To be honest with you I have never been a big fan of the Competition Pro joystick even though that joystick is heralded as one of the best joysticks for the Amiga.

I do not even like the Tac 2, it is difficult to register fire button presses on that one so I was very pleased to use Sega MasterSystem joypad on my old A500. I remember I played so much on that A500 with the joypad that the “thumbpad” cracked

Anyway, Speedlink is celebrating 25 years of joystick mania and decides to release this limited edition version of the classic Competition Pro, which I think many Amiga users will recognice.

One small difference, this is a USB joystick so you wont be able to connect it to your Amiga 500 to play Bubble Bobble with it. But I guess you could always mod it to 9-pin Atari joystick standard.

Each joystick is stamped with its unique serial number, very cool!

Check it out yoursel on the official Speedlink website!

It seems Acube have been teasing us all fall and winter for their new upcoming SAM460ex AmigaOS 4.1 compatible motherboard, finally it is available in the usual 4.1/motherboard combination from well known Amiga dealers on the net.

The SAM motherboard now hit GHz speeds as the SAM460ex runs at 1.15GHz, it is also the first Amiga compatible motherboard from ACube systems that has an PCIe slot, which I think is the main selling point of this motherboard.

If you remember the first SAM motherboard it had tiny GFX memory, so with a PCIe slot you can add a Radeon with 256MB memory or more in theory, perfect if you want to run huge resolution Workbench.

ACube states that the version of AmigaOS4.1 is a beta and you will be able to download the stable version of 4.1 once it is released.

Price for the motherboard and AmigaOS4.1 is 750 EUR, with taxes expect that price to hit 900 EUR. A bit expensive yes, but either you are one who pays this much for an 4.1 system or you are not.

Info on ACube systems www

The legendary CMD SuperCPU

Sometime I like to monitor stuff in other areas than just Amiga system on this blog. Such as this Super CPU addition for the Commodore 64 that recently sold on eBay for 1460.61 dollars!

Though the dollar is not quite as strong as it have been before, this is still an incredible amount of money an old hardware expansion for the C64.

I remember during the 90′ies when Super CPU was available for sale. I thought about purchasing one back then, I think it cost around 500 dollars, give or take a couple of hundreds. But eventually I bailed out because I have always liked Amiga much more than C64.

Still CMD is an famous old school company of C64 hardware and the SuperCPU is a legendary if a bit unused piece of hardware for the C64. You might also remember the SCSI harddrive systems CMD had for the C64, those where crazy times!

If you begin salivation of the thought of adding 20MHz turbo to your C64, begin reading here.

Oh, check out the auction also! Link to eBay auction.

Is this a reminder what the CyberStormPPC cards will sell for in the future (IIRC one card already hit 1400 dollar).

Hit the thread or read the important bits Jens wrote on the forum below!

Although it’s floating-point-less (if that’s the “bad joke” you wanted to throw – pardon the question from a German), I don’t know of any useful software that requires an FPU these days. If you want to render something with an Amiga, you either go ‘060 or emulation, but not ‘030.

I created these cards because I was amazed about the prices that A1200 memory expansions go for on eBay. The goal was to make an accelerator at the price of a memory expansion. Now that 72-pin SIMM sockets are more expensive than SD-Ram memory chips (and hardly available RoHS-compliant), a new logic design was required. I have access to brand new Winbond 200MHz SD-Rams (AFAIK, I’m the first in Europe who has them in quantities), and I wanted to play with them.

To take advantage of 3.3V rams in a 5V system, you need 5V-tolerant drivers between the voltage domains. The drivers I’m using have a guaranteed propagation delay for up to 50pF capacitive load. If I add the pin capacity of the translators, the data bus drivers and the CPU to the trace capacity of the board, I end up barely below 50pF, so the 2-cycle access that I use here is within spec. If an FPU would be on the data bus as well, I’d have to add another waitstate to the memory timing, which would add up to 4 waitstates for a cache line burst, which is currently 2-1-1-1. Although my target was never “high performance”, the 28MHz-A1200 version (which is the only functional model at the moment) is probably the fastest non-static mem 28-MHz-68030 ever made for the Amiga.

Great news!

Amongst sugestions of water cooled Core I7, PPC/68k/x86/SDRAM and 060 boards for 100 euro there was actually a few good sugestions.

Most opionions pointed towards a new turbocard for the A1200, and on a1k.org Jens of Individual computers started a thread in the German language with the title “Neue 030 Turbokarte für Amiga 1200″

I know that little German language that:

“Neue” means new
“030″ mean o-drei-o
“Türbokarte” means faster CPU for the Amiga
“für” means for
Amiga is Amiga and 1200 is 1200. .. so there you have it, you be the better german language knowing person to decide what that means, he also mentions SDRAM.. lol good times ahead..!

Find out yourself the truth about the future of the Amiga turbo-cards at a1k.org thread!

Wolfenstein on MOS

I mentioned the Amiga mouse from the Essen show in an earlier post, now there is an easy way for you to order it yourself without going to a1k.org and Google translate (if you can not speak German language).

Just go to this thread on amigaworld.net and follow instructions, price is around 15 euro which I think is a great price for a neat Amiga USB optical mouse. Keep in mind this is a mouse for a next-gen system and not for 68k systems although I guess it will work fine with Deneb and other USB solutions if 68k floats in your boat.

Oh, and it seems to be filled with water and has a boing ball in the transparant part of the mouse, how neat!

If you are a computer user from the 80′ies and early 90′ies I think you have most probably heard about Norton/Symantecs fabulous file manager for MS-DOS: Norton Commander.

Back when I was young, everyone who had a 386 or 486 ran Norton Commander or NC for short when dealing with files in MS-DOS.

NTP is an inofficial Amiga version of Norton Commander, there is rumour Symantec did not like this almost 100% clone of NC on the Amiga.

Now, most of you probably say this is stupid program and it is old school etc, give me DOpus any day etc. But if you used NC back in the day you will be jumping with joy that the keyboard shortcuts are mostly the same in Amiga NTP, amazing. Yes, press F10 for quit, F5 for copy, you do not have to relearn your filemanager.

Recently NTP have been made freely available and the code have been released so we are all waiting for MorphOS/OS4/68k ports and refinements.

While we wait, be sure to download latest updated Norton Commander for your Amiga from AmiNET!

This mystery Amiga mouse was observed at the Amiga Essen event. Ball in water, how nice. I want one. Rumour is that the mouse was ordered by the crew over at a1k.org from China, but do not tell anyone because it has not been certified for use in Europe.

Anyways, I do not care about RoHS, I want this Amiga mouse!