Tuesday 18 March 2014

, , ,

Copy that floppy; it's armless

Imagine taking the guts of the hulking Amiga 500 and smushing them into something the size of an external floppy drive case, and it would look a lot like this retro revival prototype set to hit a crowdfunding portal near you soon.

The Armiga is a cunning fusion of old and new technology which aims to recreate the misty-eyed experience of playing classic Amiga games on real hardware via original floppy disks.


It's no coincidence that the design is reminiscent of the Amiga 500 case with its parallel heat vents and convex, bold, upper-case typeface appellation. Beneath the elegant surface lies a 'new-old stock' floppy drive, custom controller and ARM CPU mounted on a Raspberry Pi sisterboard featuring contemporary USB and HDMI connections.

Complimenting this impressive array of hardware is the software-based Amiga emulator solution, UAE4All. United these will allow you to boot games from your gloriously antiquated, grungy, chewed-up old floppy disks, store the ADF dumps onto an SD card, or run downloaded floppy images from a pen drive or memory card. With no capacity restraints you can swap disks to your heart's content... without swapping disks, unless, of course, rekindling that particular torture pushes your nostalgia buttons!

0 comments: