Acube Minimig price announced

[Tripitaka]

@ Delta

DIY or DIE. I'm right with you on that one. I have an A500 and I don't need another, building a Minimig however is something else entirely.

[Darrin]

The price is about what I expected from a private company who are in business to make a proffit and who have to stand by the product with some sort of support.  Considering the boards on eBay go for around double the price and if they fail in 1 month then it's your problem, I think a $200 price tag is a great deal.

Just remember, Acube are taking a risk with this run and they have to pay from them up-front.  Not only does this proce have to cover their time and effort, it has to cover after-sales support, dead boards and the interest on their investment (say $100,000 or so).

They can add me to their customer list just for having the balls to do this.  I look forward to seeing who the USA distributer is going to be and what the configurations are.

Hell, if I could spend $50 on an invisible OS4 coupon then I can sure as hell spend $200 on a real, working Amiga.

[InTheSand]

Seems a fair price for such a (potentially) reconfigurable machine...

If someone could port the existing ST, Spectrum and C64 FPGA implementations to it, it'd make a great multi-purpose retro machine!

 - Ali

[Darrin]

InTheSand  Posted:

Seems a fair price for such a (potentially) reconfigurable machine...

If someone could port the existing ST, Spectrum and C64 FPGA implementations to it, it'd make a great multi-purpose retro machine!

That's something I keep forgetting.  The potential is there to have several MMC cards and depending on which one you insert on boot-up will decide whether you end up running a C64, ZX Spectrum, a Sinclair QL, a BBC Micro, a Dragon 64, Atari ST, etc.

The possibilities are endless, providing someone actually writes the code for the FPGA.  I'm sure that the larger the potential user-base is for such code then the greater the chance of such code being published or even marketed.  At the end of the day, it boils down to people putting their hands into their wallets and supporting bulk production runs.  $200 when devided over a year amounts to 55c a day.  I'm sure we can all find that amount of cash, even if it means visiting friends and family and sticking a hand down the backs of their sofas to look for loose change.

[InTheSand]

The on-board 68K would certainly help with ST and QL emulation anyway!

And not forgetting the FPGA implementations of various old arcade machines too...

Would be great if those old 8-bit systems were ported over... I haven't plugged in a real 8-bitter for a while, don't want to risk damaging the hardware or having the machines blow up when I switch them on!

 - Ali

[Darrin]

I just treated myself to a C128 off eBay in order to get back into the old 8 bit computing.

I still have the BBC Micro emulator software for the Amiga on floppy and it will be interesting to see that run on the Minimig.

[InTheSand]

Ah, the good old "The Emulator" package! I paid GBP £50 for that brand new in early 1990! I still have it and the disk still works!

Great 68K implementation of BBC BASIC and the Beeb's basic screenmodes, but not much cop for running commercial BBC software!

Would be great to see a "real" Beeb implementation using the Minimig's FPGA....

 - Ali

[Darrin]

Ah, I never ran any BBC commercial games on it (just as well) and just used it to play around with the BBC Basic.  When I was doing my A Levels and we had to write a program for 30% of the total marks, we had the choice between using the Basic on our ancient Research Machines 380Z or the new BBC Micro model B machines - no competition really!  Just before the deadline however they changed the rules and you could use any machine running Basic to host your program as long as you didn't mind lugging it in to the classroom for the teacher to evaluate it while it was running.  I dumped my original project and substituted one that I had written at home using Simon's Basic on my C64.  I remember wishing that my C64 had the screen modes and speed of the BBC.

[InTheSand]

Ah! I also wrote my A-level project in BBC BASIC! Worked on it at home on the Amiga, then had to go from Amiga floppy to PC 3.5", then via a dual-drive PC to get it on to a 5.25" bendy, then I forget the final step for getting it on to a DFS-formatted disk!

Oh for the good old days!!!

 - Ali

[denli]

Poster: redrumloa  Posted: 2007/12/30 7:39:21

Can't get through to the site. Has it been Slahdotted?

Appearently Acube have changed from .com to .biz
http://www.acube-systems.biz/eng/hardware.php