Dennis van Weeren - from the Netherlands - has managed to recreate a Commodore Amiga 500 on a FPGA. All the necessary software - excluding Kickstart - with all the documentation is presented in Open Source Format on his website.

The home-built Amiga started to take shape early 2005 after many speculations on Amiga-forums whether or not is was possible to recreate an Amiga in a similar fashion like the C64 has been with the Commodore 64 DTV. Dennis thought this to be possible and thus the idea of Amiga-in-a-joystick was born. Together with a programmer experienced in FGPA boards they started programming the FPGA. After little over a year they succeeded in booting Lemmings on the machine lovingly named the 'Minimig' - short for Mini Amiga.

Minimig rev 1.0

After this huge triumph, work was started on improving the prototype. By placing a true Motorola 68000 CPU on a custom made PCB with the CPU being driven by the FPGA-chip, things were starting to move rapidly.

With help of a PIC controller - which acts like a sort of BIOS - a flashcard is accessed containing a real Amiga Kickstart image. This Kickstart image is loaded into the machine's 2Mb RAM and the 'Amiga' is then booted. Once powered up and booted the 'Minimig' functions like a real Amiga 500, albeit with hard-drive and floppy-drive missing. This is remedied by loading disk images from a flash-card. So the whole thing pretty much functions like Amiga emulators using disk- and rom-images.

People are really warming up to this idea and on all sort of Amiga sites propositions are made to create the PCB's in batches in order to make this system available to less Hardware-savvy fellow Amiga enthusiasts. Lively discussions can be read on expanding and even improving on the initial design made by my fellow Dutchman. Perhaps the Amiga-in-a-joystick is not that far away?