AMIGA LOVER Michael Carrillo gazed enthusiastically at the antique graphics running on his 2004 Amiga One and said, "Stunt Car Racing. 1987. Geoff Crammond. It's an all-time classic. Why no-one has not updated the graphics for a more modern era I don't know."

His Amiga One from Eyetech, using an 800MHz PowerPC chip, was clearly capable of far better graphics and the game was not even running natively. The old Commodore Amigas used Motorola 68K series chips, while the Amiga One and all modern Amigas use a PowerPC chip and run older software, including the classic games, only in emulation. So why do people to buy them, when they might as well use an emulator on a Windows PC which would probably be cheaper and would certainly have more software available?

Carrillo, of the North Thames Amiga User Group, counters, "Why do people ride Harley Davidson motorbikes when a Yamaha or Kawasaki is so much better? Harley Davidsons are more elegant."

He was speaking at the Vintage Computer Festival held last weekend at Bletchley Park where a new model, the Amiga One X1000, was unveiled, although not demonstrated, for the first time in public 25 years after the launch of the original Amiga A1000.

It might be overkill for running old games but it is an interesting machine, using a 1.8GHz PowerPC processor conforming to the Power ISA 2.04 specifications. A-eon Technology, which will sell the machine, would not say who makes the chip. The motherboard, designed by High Wycombe-based Varisys and actually made in the UK, uses proprietary Xorro expansion slots that conform to the PCI form factor.

Most attention is likely to focus on the 500MHz Xmos co-processor dubbed the Xena, which is desbribed as effectively a descendant of the famoua Inmos transputer chip of the late eighties. David May, founder of Bristol-based Xmos, was chief architect of the transputer .

Paul Gentle, managing director of Varisys, described the Xena, which is the square chip between the two lower dark slots in the motherboarfd pictured above, as "half way between an FPGA [Field-Programmable Gate Array] and a microcontroller." Basically it allows people with a working knowledge of C to control hardware plugged into the Zorro slot.

"Amiga users are hackers. They will like it," Gentle said.

A-Eon says the X1000 will be sent out to beta testers this autumn and the company hopes to have it on sale by Christmas at a price "north of £1,500".

Carrillo doubts if he will be able to afford one. But he says the Amiga scene has gained momentum since last October, when the Belgian-German company Hyperion Entertainment gained full rights to exploit AmigaOS 4. "A lot of stuff is getting ported over," he said. µ