Our Story

It might be hard to envision the start of all of this, so let's go back almost 21 years in time.

The whole project started in 2003 when Gunnar got a job at IBM, as they were looking for more developers at the time. Gunnar knew Thomas Hirsch from way back and proposed to setup an interview for him.

As a result, IBM wound up with five Amiga fanboys in their CELL Processor Development Team. There was Gunnar (BigGun), Thomas, Jens (DeepSubMicron) and Chris (ceaich). It turns out this new team working at IBM on the latest CELL processor consisted of some talented Amiga fans who got their start coding demos and games back in the day.

Jens, Thomas and Gunnar - the guys behind Playstation 3

One thing was obvious - even after so many years of technical advancements, the revered Amiga still did many things better than the latest technology.

Thomas was already working on recreating the long lost Amiga chipset back then. Not only that but his recreated chipset was far along and worked quite well.

Through his own technical expertise and hours of hard work Thomas had motivated Gunnar and Jens to help him. They offered Thomas any support they could provide. This was how the plan of reviving the Amiga was born. They formed the Natami Team later renamed to the Apollo Team.

It was September 2013 when Igor joined the Team. Gunnar and the the Apollo Team then fashioned a cut down version of the 68050 Apollo-Core (the Mini version that reached around 70 MIPS) to fit into Igor's FPGA.

The FPGA on the Natami was much bigger, so they had to spend quite some time to shrink it down to fit into the Vampire 1 test board. But the results were well worth it! With this core the Vampire really started to fly about 20 times faster than the TG68.

This milestone made it clear that a good modern CPU implementation is what makes the Apollo accelerators so special. Apollo Team road-map intended to extend the lifetime of popular Amiga computers, hence the idea of 68080-powered Amiga accelerators range.