There's the Kryoflux for reading disks…, but there's no system that works
as a whole and is truly plug and play.

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Q. Can we be clear on what this is, as most readers will think this is
just another "emulator" can you explain how the project recreates the
Amiga?

What we are proposing is a total abstraction technically. With the Armiga
you just turn on, you enter the disc and you play. The system is already configured and even includes a licensed version of Kickstart 1.3, so that
it is truly "plug & play".

People have been criticizing our project. They say it's just a Raspberry
Pi with an emulator. We want to make it clear that what we are offering is
not the specs, but an experience; the chance to play your disks back with
the best AV quality, using modern gear and in a form factor that looks nice beside your living room TV. The Tech specs came after this, and not the
other way around ;)

Having said that, it took us some time to design our custom FDD controller.
We finally decided to go for a powerful 32-bit controller on top of our
fully custom algorithm, both for reading the disk and for transferring the digital image, which is currently done at 1Mbps.

We used the Pi for the first prototype. We decided to develop the first prototype with this board because of its broad availability, great
community and documentation.

On top of the Pi we ran a custom UAE version, more precisely, based on
UAE4All (the original, not the versions for Android, for example, which all vary in quality). As you may well know, there's no ARM version of UAE that runs smoothly, so it was quite a mission to do it right. Processor
specific and VideoCore optimizations were key for the performance; however,
we kept investigating alternatives and found some nice pieces of hardware around.

Right now, our second prototype uses a DualCore Cortex-A7 1Ghz. CPU, with
a Mali MP2, DualCore GPU, with OpenGL ES 2.0 support, which the Pi lacked,
and also has 1GB of RAM. In a nutshell, just the CPU raw power in this new system is 4x what we got in the Pi and we are not even talking about
OpenGL.

This second prototype has allowed us to bring Symetric Multiprocessing
(SMP) into UAE, sandboxing the emulation side from the rendering side.
Right now we have to limit the frame rate; otherwise (unleashed mode, as we call it ;D) it climbs to more than 200fps, making games unplayable. We are talking here about HD 720p rendering, with upscaling and filters applied.

The sound side is also "pumped up" and the output is 16bit 44.1 KHz, in
stereo format.

There's nothing much to say about the system, but that is has 2 USB 2.0
ports, microSD slot, HDMI output, Ethernet connection and 4GB of internal
NAND memory.

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Q. So you supply a licensed version of Kickstart. Who holds the rights to this?

We only offer the license for Kickstart 1.3. Amiga Forever is the owner of
the rights.

Sadly The ROMs are property of their respective owners and we won't include them with the Armiga package.

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Q. The project started as a crowd funded idea, although the money needed
to achieve the projects goal is quite high. How close were you to
achieving funds target $140,000?

Yes, the Crowd funded project ended and we didn't reach our goal, but we
have launched a BETA PROGRAM focused on users who bought the Armiga Beta Edition and want to be one of the very firsts to have a fully functional Armiga.

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Q. So you do have a physical working prototype yet?

Yes. We have built two working prototypes which were showed at
RetroMadrid:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwMZdMloqfE

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Q. Although the goal is a working Amiga 500, will other Amiga machines
(such as the 1200) be emulated?

We are focused on A500 at the moment. A1200 support is a bit trickier
because the AGA support is much more demanding than OCS/ECS and really the market for this support was quite narrow. Anyway, AGA support was one of
our objectives at Indiegogo and still something we have in mind.

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Q. I presume you have researched the need for such a project. When you approached people and explained the project, what was their initial
reaction?

When we approached people the reaction was "surprise" mainly. The crowd funding campaign has been our market testing. We needed some way to
evaluate the interest of the project.

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Q. You mentioned the device runs Linux or specifically Android. Can you "boot" to this and use the Android OS to play games and email, etc.?

The system has a microSD slot and 4GB of internal NAND memory. This is
what allows us to do the DualBoot. In our second prototype, this internal
NAND is where Android 4.2.2 sits.

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Q. On the finished version, what will be the process to load games, and
can the Armiga run productivity titles and Workbench itself?

There are two ways: Choosing a ROM from our menu or dumping a floppy and
then choosing the created ROM. Armiga can run productivity titles and Workbench itself, but it is designed to be used with games.

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Q. Will versions of Workbench be included with the project, and can any external Commodore hardware be used with the project?

No version of Workbench will be included, nor will there be support for Commodore hardware.

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Q. Will there be some software to allow the user to create disk images of their favourite games with the package?

We have developed a custom controller which allows making images of games through a menu shortcut.

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Q. So you can actually load Amiga floppy disks? I presume that copy
protected disk won't work though so you would need games with this feature removed.

As you may know, ADF is the de-facto standard when it comes to Amiga
emulation and so it's our main supported format. However, ADF is just raw bitstream, with no time (and hence, density) information and so we (and no
one else that uses ADF) can read variable density tracks out of it.

There are several formats out there that circumvent this problem by
basically oversampling the disk, but there's no standard for that. We have
our own custom format that is not oversampling-based and, thus, is much
more compact.

We are still working on a single format for all the disks (unprotected,
flaky bits protected, and variable density protected) and the mechanism to automatically detect them - that's one of our goals.

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Q. The case design looks brilliant: "Floppy disk." I presume it was easy
to come up with this as an idea for a case, as it seems very logical. It
looks like a peripheral for something like the Amiga 2000, 3000 or 4000
range of computers.

It's really hard to quantify the time and effort involved in each of the


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