Kickstart Amiga Expo and My New Products

Last weekend I was at the second Kickstart Amiga Expo, where I had a table under my “Retro Supplies” brand, and I was helped out by my amazing wife. I debuted some new things at this expo, so I figured I should talk about them for everyone else here.

The Expo

I don’t have many photos of the expo itself, but some great ones have been shared on the Kickstart Discord. I spent a lot of the time talking to people, and my voice was cracking by the end of the first day. Furthermore, I met up with many fantastic people who I have been talking to online for years, but not met in real life. I also got to chat to some old friends. It was a great experience, the organisers did an amazing job.

This is what my table looked like, I can’t take credit for the setup, my wife has done many events before and knew exactly how to lay things out.

There are some old classics on the table, such as my ROMulus and RAMesses boards. But some brand new things too, I can finally reveal what they are.

Amiga Fragrances!

Yes, you read that correctly. I’m not talking about Rifas and fishy electrolytic capacitor smells here. My wife owns a home fragrance business, and together we decided to create some candles that will enhance the gaming experience whilst you burn them.

The fragrances we currently have are:

• Just Dig (Lemmings)
• Soccer Stadium (Sensible Soccer)
• Ghost Pirate (Monkey Island)
• Blinky, Pinky, Inky & Clyde (Pacman)
• Bubbles (Bubble Bobble)

We will work on more in the future, and if you want to see the descriptions of the fragrances, head on over to the section in the shop here.

Low Profile RGBtoHDMI for Amiga 500

This is a new variant of the RGBtoHDMI board. The main new thing about it is the Pi goes through the board and connects on the underside. This means that it is actually lower than the Denise that sits on top.

With this board, you can now use an accelerator such as a TF536 with a relocator, and you do not have to raise the accelerator board by using extra sockets.

All the components are on the underside of the board, including SMD nuts, which allow you to secure the Pi even more to the board.

GoFloppy V2

The GoFloppy is my own spin on the Gotek drive, which I launched a couple of years ago. Version 2 for the Amiga has a number of changes:

• The use of micro SD cards instead of full-sized SD cards
• The ability to connect it via an FPC cable through the vent of the Amiga
• A DF0/1 switch on the GoFloppy with an adaptor board inside the Amiga to make it work
• Several improvements to the internals which are cool to me, but no one else 😊

This one attracted a lot of attention at the Expo. I’m quite proud of the final design / look of it.

Hafnium SIMM Diagnostics Board

I’ve been repairing a lot of Amiga 4000s for people lately. One common issue with nearly all of them is that the battery has damaged the RAM area. It can often be a pain using a multimeter to buzz every pin of the SIMM sockets, trying to figure out exactly what has failed.

This is where Hafnium comes in. It will instantly test all pins of the SIMM socket and will visually show you the broken traces. It is self-powered, so the Amiga is not powered up during the testing.

I designed Hafnium at the end of last year, but it has taken me a while to write the instructions for it, along with lots of diagnostics tips. But now it is publicly available, and I sold more than expected at the Expo.

Hafnium can also be used to test other machines that have 72pin SIMM sockets. I have been using it to diagnose RiscPC motherboards as well.

The Future

I had a lot of interesting discussions with people around things I could work on in the future. I have lots of ideas and notes, so watch this space!