ACube Systems is an Italian company that is engaged in the fields of sale, distribution and engineering of hardware and software for both mainstream and alternative platforms. For people into the Amiga, they are mostly known for producing the different Samantha (SAM) motherboards, which are compatible with the AmigaOS 4 operating system. They’ve also distributed the Minimig. This is a hardware emulator of an Amiga 500 were the whole chipset is re-implemented in a FPGA. The Minimig has been and continues to be popular among people interested in retro gaming.
The Sam460EX
Recently there was an announcement about something labelled as “top secret” on the official homepage of ACube Systems. There was also a full-page advertisement about the same thing in the last issue of Amiga Future. I’ve included a snapshot of the announcement below:
It is clear from the announcement that ACube Systems has something exciting in store for us, but it’s of course impossible to know for sure what it is. People have been discussing the announcement on different forums, like Amigaworld.net, Amiga.org and Amigans.net, and the guesses are both diverse and interesting.
We can see from the snapshot that there’s a polaroid photo at the bottom-right of the folder. If you look closely, you’ll see a boingball. At the top-right, you can see the number “500″. Now, what does this mean? The first thing that pops into my head is the Amiga 500. Could it be that ACube will release a Samantha motherboard in an Amiga 500 replica case? Or perhaps they are launching an alternative to the AmigaOne X1000 in co-operation with A-EON Technology called the AmigaOne X500?
As mentioned earlier in this post, there has been plenty of guesses in the various discussion forums. Here’s a few of them:
- The Natami priced at 500 EUR (Natamix at Amigaworld.net)
- The SAM500 motherboard, in succession to the SAM460 (Kas1e at Amigaworld.net)
- Price drop for existing SAM-systems (Amiboy at Amigaworld.net)
- PCI-card to run classic Amiga software on AmigaOS4 (Metalheart at Amigaworld.net)
- Amiga tablet called the “Samlet” (Hypex at Amigaworld.net)
- “This doesn’t seem like much of a mystery to me. With the X1000 around the corner, it only makes sense to introduce a SAM-powered AmigaOne named X500 – and who better to build and assemble it than ACube.” (Thom_Holwerda at Amigaworld.net)
Many interesting guesses there. 
I for one have a gut-feeling that agrees with Thom Holwerda. Could it be that a new machine called the AmigaOne X500 will see the light of day? Quite a few people, also here on this blog, have been sceptical of the pricing of the upcoming AmigaOne X1000. It will be expensive, no doubt about that. There might therefore be room for an entry-level alternative from ACube that is cheaper.
We’ll get all the answers on the 19th of September 2011! I certainly look forward to that. It will be very interesting to see what ACube Systems has in store for us. Then we’ll get to know who had the best guess as well.
What are you guesses? Please feel free to leave a guess below.. Thanks!
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