Minimig: Build Your Own Amiga 500 Clone

The Amiga 500, released in 1987, was Commodore's most successful Amiga model, thanks to its all-in-one good looks and reasonable $595.95 price tag. Dutch electrical engineer Dennis van Weeren never forgot his Amiga 500 and launched an ambitious project to build an FPGA-based version of the machine in early 2005.

The end result was the Minimig, a 12cm x 12cm board based on a modern 3.3V version of the Motorola 68000 processor. The Amiga's custom chipset was implemented in a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA chip, and the board includes 2MB of RAM and an MMC flash memory card connector for program storage. van Weeren thoughtfully included a standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors, along with a 9-pin joystick port.

It's amazing that someone managed to successfully recreate a machine as complicated as the Amiga. There are a few little glitches that still need to be worked out (some sprite bugs and a few file system limitations), but basically everything works as you'd expect.

The Minimig board design and software has been released under the GNU General Public License, so anyone with fairly decent soldering skills can build their own Amiga clone.To get the system running, you'll need an  image of the original Amiga Kickstart ROM loaded into a memory card, along with a copy of the Workbench. Now just sit back, plug in your favorite Commodore-compatible joystick and enjoy a game of Lemmings (which was the first game to successfully run on the machine).

If you're not up to soldering together your own motherboard, Acube Systems Srl in Italy offers a fully assembled board with 1GB SD flash card for €138 plus shipping. One thing you should be aware of is that van Weeren's design includes ports on several sides, making it challenging to house. Luckily, Swedish enthusiast Illuwatar stepped in to produce a version in a standard Mini-ITX form factor, allowing you to house your little Amiga clone in a standard PC case.

Minimig - An Amiga in an FPGA