New Products
The Catweasel design will be ten years old this year. At the moment, only a version for the PCI slot of modern computers and the ISA version are available. During the past few months, a lot of requests for a Catweasel controller for classic Amiga computers came in. This demand is now met with the Catweasel MK2 "anniversary edition": We have revised the design from 1997, and made another production run. The Catweasel MK2 works on the clockport fo the Amiga 1200, the IDE-port of the Amiga 4000, and on the clockports of our Zorro-cards. It even works on the clockport of the Amiga 600 memory expansion that starts shipping next week, so the controller covers the complete line of classic Amigas.
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Production of Amiga 600 accelerator completedIt took more than two years, but waiting was worthwhile: Our accelerator for the Amiga 600 is completed. The technical details:
*68030-33 processor clocked at 40MHz
*128MByte RAM option, selectable speed
*512K flash-memory
*PCMCIA-friendly
*low-heat design
Click to enlarge
Since heat is the main problem in the small case of the Amiga 600, we have skipped on an FPU, and designed large parts of the logic in 3.3V technology. The 68030 processor is in a socket not just on this picture - every card has a socket, so the user can increase the performance with a faster processor and crystal oscillator. Such a modification might need active cooling parts!
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As opposed to other Amiga 600 accelerators, we have found a good solution for mounting the card in the computer: Two screws hold the board safely in place. A distance sleeve keeps the card from bending.
Amiga 600 accelerator mounted with screws
Even with the mass-production already completed, the delivery cannot start before august of this year. The main cause for this is of course our vacation until july 26th, but we also have to adapt the Kickflash software to the flash memory of the card, and ensure proper operation with all versions of the Amiga 600 mainboard. After that, the quality control of the mass-production can start. Please understand that we will first supply the customers who have signed up for the card by eMail. We want to prevent an artificial monopoly of someone buying out the complete production run of only 110 units. This is the only way to ensure that every customer gets his card for 129,- EUR incl. VAT, and not more due to artificial reduction of supply. We have seen too much overpriced Amiga-hardware in internet auctions lately! Please request the shipping cost to your country when you place your order.
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RoHS-compliance ensuredStarting today, the
RoHS-directive of the European Union is in effect. The abbreviation stands for "Restriction of Hazardous Substances". This directive restricts the use of dangerous substances in electronics production. During the transition period, many articles were only talking about lead-free electronics production, but lead is only one out of six substances that are banned by the EU directive. Two of them are substances used for fire protection in many plastic parts. This makes development of new production processes and the search for new plastics extremely difficult, because the use of pure tin instead of a tin-lead alloy requires soldering at higher temperatures.
Individual Computers,
E3B and an assembly service house have already started collecting experience with the new production processes in 2004. According to these experiences, we can already say that the new EU-directive will not affect the prices of our hardware, although it takes more energy and higher investments. The new soldering processes (phase conversion soldering for SMD, wave soldering under nitrogen atmosphere) increase production quality so much that manual re-work is almost eliminated. Our estimate is that the reduced cost of manual re-work will compensate the increased cost of the new production processes.
Since our target market, the retro-computing and Amiga-market, requires special electro-mechanical parts, even more investments had to be made, mainly into die-casting tooling for plastic parts of computer connectors (insulating bodies, often just called insulators). These were necessary because the new kinds of plastic can only be processed at higher temperatures and with higher pressure. We're happy to be able to deliver brand new RoHS-compliant connectors fort he userport of the Commodore 64, Commodore 128 and plus/4 computers. The die-casting tool can be adapted to any other numper of pins, so we can deliver any other edge card connector in 3.96mm raster. We're looking forward to your request!
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C64-userport connector, lead-free, RoHS compliant
In the Amiga-market, attention has been drawn to the CPU-slot connector of the Amiga 1200 already a few months ago, because the vendor of the PowerPC-accelerator "PowerVixxen" has asked for help in a public message. At that time, the development of our new connector had already begun. The new connector shall solve all problems that the previously available connectors had. Our connector has a much stronger insulator that allows much higher spring forces. Contact problems between the A1200 mainboard and an expansion board (such as an accelerator or a PCI bus board) are eliminated, increasing the overall stability of the system. During development, we have done measurements with the
x-ray fluorescence (XRF) method, and it turned out that the black dye of the plastic is not RoHS compliant. The mass-production will therefore be done without any dye, so the connectors will be white.
Amiga 1200 CPU-slot connector, RoHS compliant
With availability of the new connectors in september of this year, individual Computers ensures the legal availability of Amiga 1200 hardware. Special thanks goes to ACK software controls Inc. from Canada, who have ordered a large quantity of these connectors for the first production run of the PowerVixxen accelerator. We also deliver small quantities at very competitive prices, because having our own tools means that we do not have to pay any dealers in between.
Vacation until july 26th, 2006We're going on holidays. After the
Codex Alpe Adria 2006 show in Italy, we'll only be in the office on july 4th. After that, we will not be able to answer eMails on a regular basis until wednesday july 26th, 2006. We wish all our customers, suppliers and business partners a good time!
