Have you heard about the Natami?

It is a project that has been on-going for a few years now. The goal of the developers is to get the original Amiga design up-to-date. Their approach is to rebuild the original system from scratch without emulation, legacy drawbacks and/or abstraction layers. It is not to be considered a remake of the Amiga 500 for example, but a new machine in its own right. The Natami will be an Amiga compatible machine, allowing you to run original software natively. In some ways I guess we can call it a successor to the Amiga 1200/4000, which was the last models to be released by Commodore.

Doesn’t that sound great? I sure think so.

I won’t go into all details concerning the specifications, but I’ve noticed a few things I just have to point out. Let’s have a look:

• SuperAGA chipset (will be compatible with AGA, but also enhances it)
• Supported resolutions up to 1280 x 1024 (!)
• Pixelformats: Planar 1-8 Planes, HAM 6/8, 8bit Chunky, 16bit Hicolor, 32bit Truecolor
• VGA/DVI-I output (15kHz screens are automatically scandoubled)
• Original AGA Copper
• SuperBlitter (I do like the sound of that!) with a 3D Accelerator
• Amiga Compatible Floppy Disk Controller (this is important us that hungers for the genuine experience)
• Old Amiga IDE hard drives can be used without any fiddling or hacking

I could comment on all these points, but I believe I can shorten it to a few words: I want a Natami – NOW! 🙂

From what I’ve read over at the official homepage (http://www.natami.de), it will be like having an Amiga 1200 on steroids. Can’t wait to see it in action. I’m sure people belonging to the Demoscene will be interested as well, as the Natami will open up a whole new set of possibilities for coders that loves “banging the metal”.

For those (including myself) that loves old Amiga games, the Natami is good news. Running games like Project X, Crazy Cars III, Superfrog or Lotus straight from the original floppies gives you a special nostalgic feeling. You can also install games straight to the hard drive via the excellent WHDLoad package if you prefer that.

So, when will it be released? I don’t know, but hopefully a release is not too far away. In February 2011, the first MX boards was assembled. Check it out here. That indicates that the team are making great strides.

Let’s wish the team behind Natami the best of luck! Keep up the good work!