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!

I wonder what the price is going to be for the board? This is a really interesting project and with the right price I can see myself going for one.
LikeLike
That’s a good question. I haven’t found any information concerning this, but hopefully the machine will be affordable. 🙂
LikeLike
Great news. This I will follow, since I didnt have the luxury to owe a Amiga back in the days. It will be perfect for me to experience some of the good stuff.
LikeLike
That’s nice to hear, Kirenaj. There’s a ton of stuff to look forward to if you are going to adventure in Amiga-land. The software library of the machine is incredibly vast. On the Natami you should be able to experience the best it has to offer. 🙂
LikeLike
[…] Natami: Advanced Amiga Compatible (31st of March 2011) Amiga, Hardware Amiga, FPGA, hardware, MX board, Natami, Thomas Hirsch […]
LikeLike
[…] team behind the Natami are making progress. The latest news is that more MX-boards have been delivered to […]
LikeLike
[…] platforms are both classic and next generation Amiga systems. It’s worth mentioning that the Natami will be supported as well when it is […]
LikeLike
[…] really hope these guys can pull this off, especially after what happened to the Natami-project. If they do, I’ll be first in line to purchase one or more […]
LikeLike
[…] After a few more texts, I made a piece about the Natami, an advanced Amiga compatible machine. This one was published on March 31st 2011. Little did I know back then that the Natami would lead to the Vampire project, which is now very popular amongst Amiga users. You can read the text here. […]
LikeLike