TL;DR: Could you build an Amiga computer that’s capable of running both the 68k OS3, as well as PPC OS4 natively on the same hardware, outside of using the old Blizzard PPC Accelerators?
To start off, the Amiga was well before my time. Commodore was long dead by the time I was born, and I’m admittedly not the most knowledgeable when it comes time hardware setups.
From what I can tell, the current Amiga community is very much split into two categories: The vast majority that are running classic 68k machines with some form of classic AmigaOS, and those who are running OS4 and MorphOS on PowerPC Amigas. These appear to be mostly different ecosystems, which is understandable considering the vastly different CPU architectures.
I’ve been quite fascinated by the late 90s push to PPC processors, in particular the Blizzard accelerator cards that effectively allowed Amiga’s to be both a 68k and PPC machine at the same time. This seems like it would be the ideal hardware setup, were it not for the fact that Blizzard cards are exceptionally rare and expensive, along with being quite underpowered for really anything that OS4 is capable of.
I’ve gotten the idea in my head about trying to build effectively the Ultimate Amiga, something that could run most 68k games well (some older A500 games having compatibility issues notwithstanding) while also having the horsepower to run OS4 applications such as Blender properly as well. I figured this computer could pull triple duty as a powerful Classic Mac as well via Shapeshifter.
I’ve read about PCI cards that supposedly allow you to use newer PPC processors and even graphics cards on Amigas, but I’ve been mostly unable to find much information about them, and whether they actually allow you to still use the 68k processors or not.
Basically, I’d like to know if a build like this is feasible:
- An A1200 level board with AGA support, and a 68060 or 68040 depending on what’s easily acquireable.
- A (relatively) modern PPC processor, ideally something with more than a 1Ghz clock speed. Maybe an equivalent graphics card as well.
- Capable of dual booting OS3 and OS4, probably installed on different hard drives.
I imagine this would more or less require a from scratch build, likely with a custom case and a replica motherboard, but I’m just curious if a machine like this would even be possible to build in the first place, or if anybody has ever experimented with something like this.
