FAQ

• Do I need the original C= ROM/Kickstart? Where do I get them? Yes, you do. The Amiga ROM is an integral part of its operating system, there's no way to avoid this without seriously harming compatibility. You can either recover a ROM chip from an broken board, buy one from the many online shops or make your own from files available in AmigaForever.

  Most single-chip ROMs should work. Some early ROMs, typically found on Rev.3 and 5 boards will need some "wire patching" because they use a slightly different pinout.

  It should also work with the new 3.1.4 (and later) ROMs sold by Hyperion.

• Why did you make a (almost) 1:1 copy of the original board? Why didn't you add <your_favorite_expansion>? Making a new Ami board is a complex task: as it has a large number of components, tracks and vias, it's pretty easy to make mistakes. Even though the process used to make this board allowed some kind of "double checking" every step (as every track drawn on the board had to match an actual connection in the schematics), there's still the possibility that I got something wrong. Thus, before going any further, it is essential to make a first verion as close as possible to the original, build it and test that everything is working correctly. Only then we will have a solid basement upon which future improved mainboards will be possible to be built.

• Why wasn't the board tested? Free software thrives under the Release early, release often philosophy. As I am first of all a software developer, I strongly believe in that and I decided to apply the same principle to my development of Open Hardware. Thus I released the board as soon as it was complete (some can argue I should have done that even before, and they are probably right) in the hope that other developers would join me in this huge effort, making boards and doing the testing.

  So actually you should not be complaining about this, but rather ask "How can I do my part?". Remember that this project was gifted to the whole Amiga community and so every member of the community should be willing to contribute some effort.

• Can C= stop this? Maybe C= cannot (they do not exist anymore), but all the intellectual property regarding Amiga was sold several times after they went bankrupt, and I guess that whoever holds that property now (which I think is Cloanto) can technically order that this project be halted.

  That said, I think this is unlikely to happen, for a couple of reasons. First, this project is not harming their business at all: they are not selling Amiga systems or chips, actually all they can get is an increase in sales of their Amiga Forever product, as a legal way of obtaining ROMs for this board. In any case, in the current state, this board can only be used to repair broken boards that already exist, as they are the only source of the many custom chips it needs.

  The other reason is that...