Four new Amiga products for September 2024

Since the June Amiga Expo, I have been developing some new Amiga related products. I challenged myself to launch four of these throughout September. I managed to achieve this, so I figured I should talk about what I have launched.

ZonKEY

I had a request from a friend to develop a replacement keyboard controller for the Amiga 500, as the custom IC in theirs had died. I decided to actually start two projects for this, the first called ZonKEY.

The ZonKEY is a direct replacement for the 6570 keyboard controller IC used in all models of Amiga 500 keyboards. It contains firmware I have written completely from scratch using the Amiga hardware manuals and reverse engineering the original chip.

I spent a long time working on the anti-ghosting algorithm in this chip, to the extent that it takes up half the source code. But it is much more advanced than the algorithm Commodore used.

It has a built-in crystal, so if the super rare crystal on the keyboard controller board has failed, it doesn’t matter.

ZonKEY is available at Retro Supplies here. It is available in green, black and purple.

Zinc

Earlier this year I launched “Hafnium” which is a 72pin SIMM that will diagnose which RAM traces have been battery damaged on a motherboard. It is called Hafnium because that is the 72nd element on the periodic table.

I was asked to create a 30pin SIMM version of this tool, and of course, the name came naturally, with “Zinc” being the 30th element on the periodic table.

Simply pressing the button will light up an LED for every good line in the system. You do not power up the computer to do this.

The Zinc board is available here.

DoohicKEY

With ZonKEY above, I mentioned a second keyboard controller, this is called DoohicKEY. DoohicKEY is a full keyboard controller replacement board for the Amiga 500 Mitsumi keyboards, which is the most common type of keyboard for the Amiga 500.

This uses the same base firmware as ZonKEY and adds extra features such as a bi-colour LED (orange/green) for the drive indicator. Orange for FDD activity and optionally green for HDD activity.

It uses 100% new parts, even the LEDs are new, using specially designed 3D printed lenses to fit in the Amiga case.

The DoohicKEY is available to pre-order here (whilst I catch up with demand). It comes in green, black and purple with the option of green or red power LED. I am looking at making other colour boards available in the future too.

Revised low-profile RGBtoHDMI for Amiga 500

At the Amiga Expo, I launched a low-profile RGBtoHDMI for the Amiga 500, low enough to keep the HDMI port and board well out of the way of your accelerator, with or without a relocator board.

Based on feedback and some changes to solve a low-yield issue with the PCB, I have launched a new revision of this board.

This revised version is available here.

What’s next?

A break! Launching four products in a month ate up many weekends. But I am slowly designing even more cool parts for your Amiga computer.