Modernising the Amiga at Forty

I'm writing this on the 23rd of July 2025. 40 years ago, The Amiga Personal Computer was revealed to the world at the Lincoln Centre in New York. Andy Warhol was invited to paint the famous Debbie Harry, live on stage with the Amiga 1000. You can watch the event on YouTube.

Things have moved on quite a since then. The Amiga was quite probably, the first multimedia computer. It was pretty big here in Europe, especially in the UK and Germany in the 80s and 90s. Today, it lives on through enthusiasts who still make games, software and hardware for this legendary machine.

I upgraded the hardware on my Amiga 500 sometime ago. It's no longer the machine from the 80s - it's better! The rougher edges are smoothed away; the machine has a new relevance. The hardware was the first part - now it's time to talk about the software.

Much of what I've written here will also apply to WinUAE or Amiberry, if you fancy doing things with an emulator, much of what follows will work too. I've setup a similar machine with Amiberry.

My Amiga

My Amiga 500, running OS3.2

I have an Amiga 500, the same kind I had in the 90s. I've added a Vampire A500 V2 as the main accelerator, an additional Ram upgrade with clock, an ENC28J60 ethernet adaptor board and a Gotek USB Floppy. These upgrades form the basis of my Amiga setup. What do these additions allow us to do?

First off, the Gotek lets us use a USB stick instead of floppy disks. This is the approach I'll use to get the software onto the machine. The ENC28J60 adapter should give us some network access. The extra memory and realtime clock will make the final experience a bit nicer. But the real difference is the Vampire card.

There are a number of accelerators one can purchase for the Amiga - the PiStorm and TerribleFire are two other examples. What they have often have in common is some sort of faster processor, compatible with the Motorola 68000 CPU and often some sort of harddisk emulation. The Vampire card does these things, but also includes a socket for the ethernet controller and an HDMI out for retargetable graphics. The hope is to get all these working.

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