What's the point of the MiniMig?

[Ral-Clan]

When all the original A500s are gone, it'll be good to have an open source method of making more.

Baby steps.  You need to develop a clone A500 as a test-bed before you can develop a clone A1200, then a clone A4000 then a new MiniMig 060/PPC with PCI slots, USB, etc. etc. etc.

Did you learn to crawl before you could walk, and walk before you could run?  Or did you start off as an olympic sprinter from day one?

[Ral-Clan]

gdanko wrote:
A MiniMig would be "cool" if you could tune the CPU from 7.16 MHz to 060/50 and beyond. Or if it was socketed to allow upto G4 speeds.

But I would rather use a TV or 1084 and a trusty old A500 than to drop $200 on a board with some chips on it.

I think you missed the point.  A minimig A500 clone needed to be built, used & improved upon BEFORE you can have those things you wish for.  As I said above, it takes baby steps.  You have your fancy multi-gig Intel computers today because someone developed the 8088 XT PC back in 1980.

[Ral-Clan]

Yeah, that's the big issue for me.  The open source nature of the MiniMig finally puts the Amiga's hardware development future in the hands of the user community.

The MiniMig is open source through reverse engineering, the original A500 is not unfortunately.  So even if someone online got the original production plans for the Commodore A500/A1200/A2000/A4000 etc., no-one would be allowed to do more runs of the hardware, or build on it, due to copyright.