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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Apr 20, 2016 2:09 pm

The hacker mentality seems to be part of the DNA of many Amiga owners - from back in the day or, well, even today. If you owned an Amiga in the late 80s or early 90s, chances are you didn't just turn it on with a game disk in the drive. You actively found out how to modify, customize and enhance your experience either through writing demo code, hacking your OS or hardware.

To be fair this wasn't something only Amiga users did. The PC'ers did, too (Mac fans would almost never "hack" their hardware, although they did write a lot of Applescript). While Commodore floundered with scant hardware updates, PCers often invested new hardware components to fix their problems: upgrade this chip or that card, whatever. Over the course of two years a PCer was guaranteed to have a very different looking system than when he started (assuming the case or motherboard could accommodate).

Well, an exceptionally talented engineer, Lukas F. Hartmann, decided to create his own FPGA graphics card for his Amiga 2000. This is no simple exercise, by the way. But the cards that were available in the 90s to take an Amiga to 16 or 24-bit graphics can cost you your first born these days. So, Hartmann decided to make one for himself.

He still has some more work to do but plans to actually release this card as a kit.
"I plan to offer preassembled versions and/or construction kits at reasonable prices." -- Harmann
Pretty damned impressive.





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