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.

Some friends of mine are visiting the big Cebit convention in Hanover Germany (March 15-21). What is striking is the fact that this year console gaming is getting very little attention. The X360 and Wii are sitting in fewer stand displays than last show. The Sony Entertainment division is even more absent.

So will we be getting rid of our Soundblasters? Well, we very well might be. GPU-Chip producer ATI has demonstrated a technology that enables the gpu of a graphics card to calculate sound effects. The company showed a Radeon X1300-model that was being used in the processing of audiodata. A simple equalizer program running on the gpu demonstrated how the graphics card could function a sound processor.

Contrary to first rumours about the HD-DVD system not getting region codes, the system will get them anyway. The official term for this coding system, prohibiting playback in areas that aren’t allowed to, is ‘Region Protection Coding’. A very positive term for something that will eventually lead to Europeans paying more for lesser-quality-releases that will come out months later. At least this was the case with the older DVD-standard.