An Amiga 1200 clone PCB I found online

[chronic8000]

Hi everyone,

I found a PCB for an Amiga 1200 someone has reverse engineered and I thought to ask people on here if anyone would be kind enough to take a quick look at it and see if there is anything I should change before sending off to get a couple made as it's cheap enough to do now and could work out alot cheaper than a real A1200.

The project is here: http://wordpress.hertell.nu/?p=587

The Gerber files I will send off are here: http://www.hertell.nu/webfiles/ReAmiga1200Rev14.zip

Be interested to hear peoples thoughts but could be a fun project.

[SiliconWizard]

Nice project. Those Amigas were something!

Just a thought though. Apparently, this is just a complete cloned PCB and not just a re-designed Amiga 1200 clone. Apart from the fact that a re-design with a proper schematic (that people could further tweak) would probably have been more interesting to many, the difference may be important. How legit is it? Someone may still hold the rights to this. I know Commodore was revived as a new company "Commodore USA" in 2010 (stopped in 2013) which seemingly bought the rights and IP. So I don't know who owns them now, but that could still be a problem. They are probably not in the public domain? If anyone knows more about this, do not hesitate to give more info!

[NiHaoMike]

Instead of using what are more or less unobtanium old chips, what about emulate them using FPGAs?

[chronic8000]

Instead of using what are more or less unobtanium old chips, what about emulate them using FPGAs?

If I had the skills to design a FPGA board I would for sure. Have you seen the price secondhand A1200's are?

[Kleinstein]

The PCB alone does not really help. The magic of the Amiga is in the special chips and the software. AFAIK in most counties the circuit diagram as a list of connections is not protected as such, only the concrete PCB layout is. A recreation with different trace width is already a different thing.

The problem is getting the software (ROM part) legally, different from original ROMs. Getting the special custom chips is similar difficult. For the audio chip, a FPGA alone may not do the magic, AFAIK it contains an DAC.

So maybe if one has a rotten board due to a leaking battery, there is limited use for such a board. Even than I don't expect a used A1200 to be very expensive. I don't even think a used A4000 is so valuable - I still have one collecting dust.