Chris is an absolute legend in the Amiga world.

In addition to a bounty of youtube videos, fantastic troubleshooting & restoration work, he also puts together the amazing PiMiga distro (the compressed image size of 22GB gives you a hint of the scope).

PiMiga 3 overview (2022-12) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw4GXLq2E9Q

I remember I bought one of this but not understanding how it worked, it was wasted money :/

I kick myself everyday for throwing away two Amiga 500's in their original (but moldy) boxes and styrofoam. I just didn't have room for it and I didn't use them anymore, not even sure if they still worked.

Same. I got rid of my Amiga 500 back in 2002 and have regretted it pretty much ever since. I bought an Amiga 1200 before the pandemic but, whilst it's a great machine (and obviously more capable than my old A500), it's not the same because I don't have all my old software, programs I wrote, etc. Absolutely feel your pain.

I'm glad I kept mine, and another I was given by someone who didn't use or want his machine anymore.

Both still work, one of them I have set up and use semi-daily.

My father was a graphic designer, and jumped early onto digital design tools.

Our Amiga was my introduction to computers. I hold a lot of fondness for them.

i had one and overclocked it to be able to decode mp3s with my a4000. it was a game changer.

Do you still have the A4000? I looked on eBay yesterday (mostly to amuse myself) at what they go for now, the price is laughable! (to save you the trouble: 2-4k Euro was what I saw!)

But why would anybody sell for less than market value?

Now an FPGA would be much cheaper. Or just run IcarOS desktop for X86.

Or replace the CPU with a Raspberry Pi.

0: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pistorm-raspberry-pi-amiga...

None of these things provide 100% accurate emulation. Nothing beats real hardware.

(And the market agrees, else everyone would be selling amigas for 100 bucks.)

And real hardware? Original hardware? Slowly it gets damaged, dies, breaks, and so it becomes a rarer commodity.

But the original Amiga with just a faster CPU is pretty damn close.

Actual Amiga with FPGA-based open source accelerator board is my preference.

But such a thing doesn't exist yet (proprietary solutions do, but fuck that).

PiStorm is the next best thing. That's a fast CPU running an m68k emulator, acting as a real Amiga's CPU.

An FPGA would be close.

An FPGA isn't any better at accuracy than a software-based emulator.

Accuracy is all about understanding the original hardware. WinUAE matches the current level understanding of the platform, minimig (open FPGA core) does not.

Hardware definitely is harder than software, so FPGA is harder if anything.

... and yet I still prefer hardware. Latency and jitter relative to the target platform is a serious issue with software.

Current computers just aren't made like they used to, and popular operating systems outright suck at guaranteeing latency.