Why was Natami a failure?
bearing in mind that all of this is my personal recollection of things and I was only a little involved with some software and ideas etc...
Because of a number of reasons. Thomas Hirsch felt it was time to announce NatAmi and take on some help after MiniMig appeared. However it was a lot of pressure upon what had been a fun hobby project for him and I think that he lost interest.
Also he kept it all very close to his chest so people involved in NatAmi never got to help out with the hardware except for investigating an FPGA based CPU that they called the N68070/N68050 at the time. That was the only group part of the project. NatAmi itself was 100% Thomas.
As NatAmi got closer to working it conversely also put more pressure on Thomas and he decided to go quiet for a time. It looks like that's now become permanent sadly. I liked what he'd done and hoped that he'd eventually release it with a real 68060.
The people who had worked on the N68070 CPU didn't want it to disappear, they liked what they'd done. So it became the Apollo Core.
Majasta had released his V1 accelerator for A600 using the tg68k.c core but it had various issues.
The both teamed up and between them built the newer Vampire A600 accelerators with the Apollo Core replacing the tg68k which is where we are today.
TLDR; I think the pressure from the community and it's usual "supportive" behaviour drove away Thomas's interest in finishing the Natami.
Andy
