What a banana party-feel this summer is with this announcement from Apollo Team. Lot’s of dancing bananas in the Amiga community now for sure with this Amiga News set on fire!… I have been asking Gunnar a lot to do this since 2018 when HotHardware.com made the hype of it back then. V1200 wasn’t the V4-based feel that I hoped for that it would be. But today… Now….! 2021 pandemic will be crushed because of Apollo Team!

Ever since V2 came out. I always wanted to see AGA on OCS and ECS. But these new V4-based cards are getting SAGA!!! This is unbelievable cool news to be spreading. Love it <3 and I love what Apollo Team is doing for Classic Amiga.

FireBird and IceDrake Classic Amiga Accelerators

Apollo Team is now proudly introducing the new V4-based Apollo accelerator series for Classic Amiga.

FireBird is the New one for Amiga 500, Amiga 1000, and Amiga 2000. Also, the Amiga 1200 owners won’t be left out as in this announcement of IceDrake will also give those Classic Amiga computers power too. The production place for the V4 cards in Germany, and thus the Apollo Team can guarantee rapid upscaling of manufacture when production gets underway in late 2021 and in the beginning of 2022.

This is what you will get with FireBird and IceDrake

  • C5  FPGA (V4) with twice the capacity of the C3 (V2)
  • 512MB DDR3 memory
  • 16bit Audio
  • 2x IDE port for CF and CD-ROM
  • 100 MBit Ethernet
  • USB Joypad support
  • SDcard

Apollo Team is committed to supporting the requested features for these new accelerator cards which also includes the output of the native Amiga screen modes over DIGITAL-VIDEO output. This will require substantial R&D and we will update you with progress when they have more details to share.

The remarkable team of these super-fast accelerators for Classic Amiga is already testing operational prototypes. The first boards will be ready for Christmas as mentioned above if everything goes as planned. The Vampire V2 era is over, and it seems that learning by doing seems to be the way of telling what sort of features a Vampire card can have. Don’t say more than what you can give.

There is also mentioned for Amiga 4000 board planned. But I wonder the most about the Amiga 600? Or how about a limited Amiga CDTV version?