Amiga Unveils New Machine Specs

Amiga has made good on one promise, releasing details of a $500 Freescale-based design supporting up to 1 GB of RAM, three PCI slots, and gigabit Ethernet.

Following up on last week’s announcement of pending new hardware designs, Amiga and ACK Controls have revealed details of a base hardware design for new Amiga hardware, intended to provide existing Amiga users and new customers an affordable, capable way to get started—or keep going!— on the platform.

“The first product release is designed for flexibility and meeting the needs of the Amiga user, as well as offer a design that takes advantage of available hardware”, said Adam Kowalczyk President of ACK Systems, in a statement.

The new systems will have a suggested retail price around $489, and will be built around Freescale MPC8349E processors at speeds ranging from 400 the 667 MHz, living on a Flex-ATX form factor motherboard. The units will offer a single DDR2 SIMM slot (enabling up to 1 GB of memory), along with three PCI slots (two 33 MHz and one 66 MHz), two gigabit Ethernet ports, four high speed USB ports, two serial ports, four SATA ports, and a C-Media CMI8738 onboard sound chip.

The new systems won’t include a monitor, and the companies plan to announce a manufacturing partner and ship schedule in the near future.

If this design looks like a blast from the past, first consider the price point (under $500), then consider what die-hard Amiga users have been coping with the last few years: a handful of ever-aging systems from AmigaOne and even older makers, and Amiga emulation on alternative hardware.

Amiga and ACK Controls have also announced plans for a higher-end PowerPC-based design.