Amijoe anyone?

[Argus]

With all the recent posts about re-creating the BlizzardPPC and PPC development boards, the rights to which are owned by DCE, has anyone considered the merits of the Amijoe design.  I know at least a prototype board was finished (there are more photos of it than ACK hardware  :-D ).  

Does anyone know the Amijoe developer and whether he'd considered releasing the design open source for the Minimig/hacker crowd?

[monami]

hi,

i was waiting for this years ago. drooling over it in af way back when. it seemed it was just about to be released and then and then... erm nothing! i would love to see it come out even now even though i no longer remember nothing but the name. what kind of reasonable price would it be? could a board be made at a resonable price? perhaps not compaired to a ppc mac you could get for free. amijoe was a dream upgrade for me. but that was 7 years ago. and things have moved on.

[HenryCase]

Argus wrote:
Does anyone know the Amijoe developer and whether he'd considered releasing the design open source for the Minimig/hacker crowd?

Good thinking Argus.

I'm tied up in dealing with DCE right now, but if you want to do some research on the Amijoe, here's some info you will find useful:

Company who developed board: Met@box AG of Hildesheim in Germany
Info about Met@box: http://www.alacrastore.com/company-snapshot/Met_box_AG-2500310
Couple of employees who worked at Met@box: Andy Finkel, Henk Jonas
Website of Henk Jonas: http://www.metaviewsoft.de/

Hope that helps.

[Kronos]

Well the card was never finished ..... unless you fancy coupling a G3 with 2MB chip-mem (and I mean only chip-mem) that is.

So you'd need more work to finish the design, hunt down parts long out of production make those parts ROHS-compatible by pure magic, write SW for it .....

Honestly I sometimes started to wonder how much of an FGPA one would need to couple an Freescale MPC5200B (or similar) to the 680x0-bus. Sure one would still need to write SW, but getting the pur PPC-side of the HW up and running should be pretty much stressfree (maybe even by licencing the EFIKA-design).

Much better approach then trying to regreate something that did(n't) make it to market 10 years ago.

[Crom00]

I actually saw an AmiJoe at the Met@Box booth at a New York, MACworld trade show in 99? Anyway a nice middle aged German fellow told me all about it and showed me hardware and said it was a few months away. They took an existing G3 card and reworked it into an A1200 card from what I was told. The PPC took over via an Emulation similar to OS9.

This would have been ideal. I was totally waiting for Emplant- later called IFusion in the PPC release to run on this. Such a shame.

[AeroMan]

Kronos wrote:

Honestly I sometimes started to wonder how much of an FGPA one would need to couple an Freescale MPC5200B (or similar) to the 680x0-bus.

I'm just drooling about this...
Believe it or not, the main problem is not the 68K side, but the MPC. The 68K's bus is far more flexible.

[Varthall]

I have read once about someone in Italy having bought a prototype board off EBay and asking help to try to boot it.

Varthall

[number6]

Company who developed board: Met@box AG of Hildesheim in Germany Info about Met@box: http://www.alacrastore.com/company-snapshot/Met_box_AG-2500310
Couple of employees who worked at Met@box: Andy Finkel, Henk Jonas
Website of Henk Jonas: http://www.metaviewsoft.de/

More recent information about Met@box:
here

#6

[ElPolloDiabl]

Would have been nice 10 years ago

[Christian Johansson]

The software wasnt done so it was pretty useless http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?49217-AmiJoe-1200-PPC-prototype-card-for-Amiga-1200

[billt]

At this point it would probably be better to start over fresh, and design using parts available today, than to revive such an aging design of questionable completeness.