Despite what we believe nowadays, about Minimig being the first true available Amiga clone, there was a very old Amiga cloning development which actually materialized in a commercial and successfull way, the so called "DraCo" or sometimes "Dracovision", named after a later model.
It all happened around 1994, in Germany, when a group of talented developers working for what was called at that time MS MacroSystem Computer GmbH, started to deal with the fact that Commodore was going bankrupt and the supply of Amigas would eventually dry up, finnishing their commercial venture.
They were not rookies, in fact, they had, at that time, already designed and commercially sold a dozen or so of different Amiga hardware devices, ranging from accelerators, framegrabbers, soundcards, scsi adapters, to graphic cards, etc. So yes, they had plenty of knowledge on the Amiga platform, both on hardware and software fields.
The design
In 1994 MacroSystem took the decision of building an Amiga clone geared towards affordable digital video. The task was accomplished in a period of nine months by a group of sixteen people.
It took them four months to have a booting prototype and five more to finish it.
They cleverly integrated, and then slightly modifyed most of the hardware devices they already sold in the past, in this new computer.
The CPU card called "Eltanin" was designed Steven L. Kelsey of CompuWise Technologies, designer of the CSA Magnum and the Warp Engine accelerator boards. He used a 68060 processor at 50 Mhz and on some special models he even used a 68040.
The computer bus had some peculiarities. The "Rastaban" was a passive motherboard full of expansion slots. It had 5 Zorro II compatible slots, and three "DracoDirect" slots. There was also a special cpu slot for an Alpha processor, that never saw the light. Zorro II slots offered a fair degree of Amiga compatible hardware. On the other side, the DracoDirect slots provided faster speeds and 32 bit transfers, as they were merely created by putting the majority of the microprocessor signals in those slots.
The graphics card was a slightly modified Retina Z3 now called Altais, that used the DracoDirect slot instead of the Zorro III slot, as it provided faster transfer rates. It was supported by the Operating System by the then new Cybergraphics retargetable graphics subsystem.
The soundcard and framegrabber ( modified Tocatta and Vlab Motion), were eventually built together in a standalone DracoDirect card called Dracomotion.
DraCos featured a Fast SCSI II interface to provide fast disk access with minimum cpu usage (transfer speeds were aproximately 9 MB per second).
The case was a standart PC AT one, later replaced by the "cube" shaped one, which provided more space, better shielding and improved PSU. The marketing goal behind it, was to give the sense, by its different shape, that the machine was not an ordinary PC.
The 1´s and the 0´s
On the software side, it ran AmigaOS 3.1, and had a full range of applications and utilities that came as a bundle, and on a cd-rom since version 5.
Curiously, it used original Amiga 3000 kickstart roms, along with a different setpatch command which did some serious patching to the former at boot ups.
It used a custom, but otherwise powerfull software to manage digital video editing. It was called MovieShop (From MovieShop 4.0 to latest MovieShop 5.3 BETA 3 (jun 13th 2000), and was really flexible, flexible enough so that many studios adopted it as their primary editing suite.
The price of the DraCo was a little steep, at about 14.990 US dollars, and a lot cheaper in Europe.
MacroSystem sold and supported DraCos upto the year 2000 when, as the clever company they are, they tryed to redesign the DraCo to produce a more affordable system, so was the successfull Casablanca, now called Casablanca Classic, born. But that is just another story!
The team
This is part of the talented group of people that made it happen:
MS MacroSystem Computer GmbH 1994-2000
General Manager & Vlab Motion designer:
Jorg Sprave.
Hardware:
Steve L. Kelsey
Hartmut Sprave
Layout:
Bernd Gronemann
Software:
Claus Bönnhoff
Klaus Deppisch
Henning Friedl
Other:
Edwin H. Bielawski
I hope you enjoyed the story:)
