I received an interesting e-mail yesterday from the folks at Arcade Retro Gaming regarding their Multiple Classic Computer (MCC), which is an Altera Cyclone 3 FPGA in a tiny box, which essentially goes one step beyond traditional emulation with a full simulation of the Commodore 64 (C-64) hardware. Commodore Amiga support will be added soon. The device has full Micro SD support and has a plethora of connection options, including joystick, mouse, and keyboard. It also connects directly to your TV via a high quality s-video connection, which is perfect for classic platforms such as the C-64 and Amiga. Of course, being a programmable FPGA design, future support for additional systems should be trivial.

There are many more details, so I suggest you check out their Website. It sounds like our own Mark Vergeer may be the first out of the gate to procure one, so we look forward to his impressions!

Amiga Forever DesktopCloanto has released the latest versions of their popular and easy-to-use Amiga Forever and C64 Forever emulators. This is great news for old and new fans of the greatest Commodore platforms, including all versions of the Amiga series (inclusive of the CDTV and CD32), and most of the 8-bit line, including PET, VIC 20, C-64/128, and C-16/Plus4. I hope to post full reviews of both of Cloanto's new releases soon.

The full press release details are below, along with all the links to the various packages available:
[BEGIN RELEASE]
Amiga Forever and C64 Forever 2010.1 Released

Amiga Forever (http://www.amigaforever.com) and C64 Forever (http://www.c64forever.com) are the easy to use emulation, preservation and support packages published by Cloanto, Commodore/Amiga developers since the 1980s. Beyond nostalgia, the packages make accessible to a wide audience a wealth of content and history that is engaging yet casual, and which can still teach a few lessons in gameplay.C64 Forever Screenshot

Features of the new 2010 versions include:

- Support for new emulated systems (CDTV, CD32, Amiga 600)
- Extended RetroPlatform Library (more than 20,000 titles) and content recognition code
- Support for Open RP9 format (packs multiple disk images and configuration in one file)
- CDTV/CD32 games run directly from original CD media, or from RP9 or ISO images
- Integrated printing via original Amiga EpsonQ drivers (via emulated printer)
- Optimizations for "power users" (content cache, performance, etc.)
- Hundreds of improvements to make the software more powerful and easier to use

RetrodeJust a quick bit of breaking news that the Retrode (formerly: snega2usb), a USB adapter for playing Super Nintendo/Famicom and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis cartridges legally on your PC, smartphone, laptop, network router, Wii, Pandora, etc., will soon have N64/GB/GBC combi and Atari 2600 plug-in adapters. Great news for a product with an ever expanding feature-set.

Check the official update below for more details or simply visit the Website:

I just got this press release in and thought it important enough to share right away for all of you Commodore Amiga and would-be/should-be Commodore Amiga fans. This is a great LEGAL emulation package based on a legendary platform for modern PCs and well worth checking out. I'll try to have some type of review up soon.

BEGIN PRESS RELEASE:

The latest version of VirtualBox (2.1.0) sports a preliminary accelerated 3D graphics layer which

Snes9x - one of the first Snes emulators out there - is now compatible with Vista.

G A S G: Some great & not so great Amiga games I've come across whilst testing out various emulators, read more about my initial findings and take a look at some of the screenshots.

Amiga emulation - especially CD32 emulation - is well what can I say "worse than on any other platform." The Amiga was a very versatile and well-known computer in its time with a lot of multimedia capabilities that you'll find on todays computers too. The OSX has sort of been left out in the cold when it comes to an easy to use emulator. If you want a quick and solid emulation experience you might opt to install Windows on your Mac and use the Windows emulators on that platform. But today I go back to OSX based Amiga emulation and I have discovered that there might be some more Amiga emulators out there for Mac OSX than I initially thought. Let's take a look at them:

WinUAE - the Unusable Amiga Emulator - isn't as unusable as it was in the past. The latest Windows versions have made huge strides. The latest release - WinUAE 1.4.6 - features a nice drop down menu that makes it possible to quickly select the appropriate machines.