Is Natami Vapourware?

[commodorejohn]

Well, it's certainly taking its sweet time in getting anywhere, but on the other hand, they haven't taken anybody's money for preorders or (to my knowledge) announced and then missed release dates. Draw your own conclusions, but I'd say "no."

[commodorejohn]

Judging by what little information is on the FPGA Arcade site, I'm guessing it'll be something more like Minimig where it's a reimplementation of an A500 - NatAmi is more geared towards people who use or want to use a 68k Amiga for serious day-to-day computing. Not that there isn't overlap between the markets, but I'd think one hardly kills the prospects for the other.

[commodorejohn]

As for fpgaarcade, Im not nearly as informed as some, but I was under the impression it's somewhat more "ambitious" (for lack of a better word) than minimig.

Could be; there doesn't seem to be much at all on the site about it, so maybe it's one of those projects (like Natami) where most of the information is on forum or blog posts and I just haven't encountered it.

In any case, there might be more overlap than I thought, but I still think both projects have clearly distinct appeal and target markets (such as those would be, with no actual marketing.) FPGA Arcade is obviously aimed towards retro gamers, seeing as the Amiga functionality is only one of a variety of platforms supported, while Natami is aimed squarely at Amiga fans and aims to support one system extremely well. Not saying that there's no overlap, but I'm thinking there's certainly room for both in the world.

[commodorejohn]

I accept the comment about the lack of info on the FPGAArcade web site. We are currently developing a new web site. We have been busy producing the board and working on the firmware. I'm in china at the moment and have just send the 3rd revision data to manufacture.

Yeah, that makes sense. Interesting to hear that it's actually quite an improvement - I'd kind of figured that it was more a general-purpose gamer-targeted multisystem from the description.

[commodorejohn]

who uses floppys in 2011, guess you ain't heard of flash drives and sd cards etc.

I do! Floppies kick ass.