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.
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.
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.