P-Vision PCMCIA graphics card

In case you've missed it: A new graphics card for the PCMCIA slot is soon to be released.

The original information seems to date back to the Amiga 40 event in Germany, and was amplified by Amiga Bill when he put it on his YouTube channel in Oct. 2025, but some updates have been coming in over the past few weeks.

The upcoming "P-Vision" graphics card, set for release on May 16th 2026 at the Amiga Ruhrpott Convention #4 (ARC) in Duisburg, Germany, is developed by Oliver Achten, who also created the AmiGUS Zorro slot sound card.

P-Vision PCMCIA graphics card logo

Some information has been published on various websites (see links below), and in an interview in "WhatIFF?" magazine Issue 5.19 (April 2026) (see links below), Oliver gives a couple more details about the design. The P-Vision is a PCMCIA device, thus it works with an Amiga 600 or 1200. A 68020 CPU and some FastMEM is required, though. It's a RTG graphics card with HDMI output, providing up to FullHD graphics resolution in 32-bit, equipped with a 64-bit blitter capable of ~320M pixels/s. The driver for P96 (Picasso96) RTG system is developed by Thomas Richter. ("...smooth, buttery screen dragging..." - O. Achten, "WhatIFF?")

Some of the specifications seem to be preliminary, full details are planned to be revealed at ARC #4. (Based on the information currently available it's not entirely clear what sort of sound support the device might have.)

It will be distributed by Alinea Computer (amiga-shop.net), but it's an open-hardware project aiming for affordability and simplicity of design, which means you can also build one yourself. The information required to do so is planned to be released after some months of commercial sales. The cost of building one is estimated at around 100 EUR.

Great stuff! The PCMCIA slot is the best i/o port the Amiga ever had, and it needs more love than just a CompactFlash card adapter. P-Vision certainly makes great use of the PCMCIA slot, and is an outstanding addition to the sadly very short list of Amiga PCMCIA devices.

As a sidenote: In the "WhatIFF?" interview, Oliver also reveals that he is working on "AmiGUS mini" soundcard for PCMCIA, and "Demon 1260" 68060 accelerator for Amiga 1200, among some other things.

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Sources:

https://amitopia.com/new-pcmcia-rtg-card-for-amiga-600-and-amiga-1200-p-vision/

https://aminet.net/package/mags/misc/WhatIFF5.19 (Issue 5.19 April 2026, "Talking Amiga", "Oliver Achten - P-Vision" interview) (.lha archive, AmigaGuide format)

https://www.whatiff.info (links to WWW-browser-readable issues)

https://www.a1k.org/forum/index.php?threads/87722 (A1k.org login required) 

https://www.amigafrance.com/forums/topic/p-vision/

https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/03/31/p-vision-gfx-an-upcoming-pcmcia-graphics-card-upgrade-for-the-amiga-600-and-amiga-1200/ 

https://en.amigatronics.com/2025/10/25/proxima-tarjeta-grafica-pcmcia-p-vision/

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8037 

 

AADevLog #7 - Creating "the demo"

Writing a demo is a lot of fun, because there are basically no limitations. You just use what you have, and there's no fixed goal. You can make it as short or as long as you like, and when something doesn't work, you either change it, or just drop it. 

While all along the way, of course, you run into a lot of issues. A proper demo generates graphics and sound, and has some sort of timing. That's a little less work than a game, which additionally needs user interaction (input) and "rules of engagement", but it's still quite a lot to handle. 

It's interesting: creating graphics and sound with some math is great, but at a certain level it's all about timing. Assembler coding gurus doing elaborate sprite multiplexing and stuff know much more about this - but even a simple piece of software like "the demo", written in C, involves dozens of little timing considerations. How long does it take to load something from disk, how long does it take to make the calculations, what needs to happen concurrently, does something have a proper effect at the given speed, etc. - and what's the runtime of the complete end result on different machines? In the end, to simplify things a bit, I decided that "the demo" is tailored to a 7Mhz OCS Amiga without FastMEM. It runs fine on faster Amigas, but you lose the nice realtime-drawing Lissajous curves, they just pop up, and the music cuts off at the end.

A tile-effect in "the demo"

Fixed-point math was used for the Lissajous curves and the 3D graphics. It not fully optimized, e.g. uses multiplications where maybe a bit-shift would've been possible, but it's still waaaay faster than software floating-point calculations. 

Sine and cosine functions were replaced by a CORDIC algorithm, adapted from the Python code found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORDIC.

The Lissajous curves code is an adaptation of the code found at BIT-101's old blog: https://bit-101.com/2017/2022/11/coding-curves-04-lissajous-curves/

The mandelbrot set code is also an adaptation of the code found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotting_algorithms_for_the_Mandelbrot_set

"The demo" uses medplayer.library for music playback. I was surprised by hearing the floppy drive load the graphics from floppy disk, while the music kept playing. Wasn't there a thing with PAULA and the disk drive? Or is it in medplayer.library? Anyway, very nice, no need to handle music pauses when loading new data.

Overall, the amount of tech that went into "the demo" was a little bigger than expected: It also has graphics double-buffering, multitasking, IFF ILBM loading, and an interrupt server.

You can download "the demo" from AmiNet, and run it on your own Amiga, if you like:

https://aminet.net/package/demo/disk/amigaalive

A bash script to run different configurations of fs-uae

Chances are you want to change your Amiga emulator's configuration quite often, for example for developing and testing purposes. A script that runs the emulator can help you to do so without effort.

There are thousands of ways to somehow simplify Amiga emulator usage. If you're a GUI & mouse user some of the work has already been done, but for the CLI user there might be some annoying typing involved.

Below is an example Linux bash script that selects fs-uae emulator configurations and sets options based on a single short command line argument. It doesn't do very much, but it saves some typing, especially because fs-uae has a somewhat clumsy way of handling floppy disk images, aka ADFs.

Linux bash script to run fs-uae with different setups

The idea is this:

- You run the script without additional command line arguments, it runs your emulator with your preferred default configuration.

- You run the script with a given keyword (e.g. "4000", see script below), it runs your emulator with another configuration.

- You run the script with a path to an ADF, it additionally inserts that ADF in drive 1 (without booting from it).

- You run the script the keyword "adf" (see script below), and a path to an ADF, it runs your emulator with a basic Amiga 500 configuration, and inserts that ADF in drive 0 to boot from.

There's of course room for improvement here, for example there's no proper error checking for the "adf" setup (ADF path?) in this script, and sometimes it might be nice to reuse some configuration with another fs-uae command line parameter than the floppy configuration, e.g. input device selection.

#!/bin/bash

UAEBIN=fs-uae

# no trailing slash here:
CONFDIR=/home/data/uae/configurations
# default configuration:
UAECONFIG=$CONFDIR/A4000-040-fast.fs-uae

OPTS=
ADF="$1"
DRIVE=1

if [ "x$1x" == "x4000x" ] ; then
    UAECONFIG=$CONFDIR/A4000-040.fs-uae
    ADF="$2"
fi
if [ "x$1x" == "x600x" ] ; then
    UAECONFIG=$CONFDIR/a600.fs-uae
    ADF="$2"
fi
if [ "x$1x" == "x500x" ] ; then
    UAECONFIG=$CONFDIR/a500-wb13.fs-uae
    ADF="$2"
fi
if [ "x$1x" == "xadfx" ] ; then
    UAECONFIG=$CONFDIR/a500-adf.fs-uae
    ADF="$2"
    DRIVE=0
fi

if [ "x${ADF}x" != "xx" ] ; then
    OPTS="--floppy_image_0=$ADF --floppy_drive_$DRIVE=$ADF $OPTS"
fi


CMD="$UAEBIN $UAECONFIG $OPTS"

echo "running fs-uae:"
echo " $CMD"
echo
$CMD

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DISCLAIMER: No responsibility is taken. Use at your own risk.

I Love The `80s - Men Without Hats like the Amiga 500

Walkman, arcade, Live Aid: Pop band "Men Without Hats" of "Safety Dance" fame released an ode to the `80s a couple of months ago, that features an Amiga 500.

Ok, admittedly, the Amiga really plays only a minor role here. But it's always fun to see one out there in the wild, and in this particular context, it's evidence how much of a cultural icon an Amiga computer is. Who would've thought that 40 years after release it shows up in a YouTube video that got 1.5 million views in its first nine months?

It happens at 1 minute and 53 seconds into the song. "Sounds like 1986!" - the editing is probably no coincidence.

Congratulations to the Men Without Hats for their success, and kudos to the video director for using the A500 literally at the right time. And it's a really nice tune they created here, good job!

I think we agree: We love the `80s.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV6SF492hNU

AMIGA alive - the demo

Going back to the oldskool: first demo by Amiga alive.

It was about time to create a demo. It runs on MC68000, Kickstart 1.2, 512KB RAM.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oettY1Dj10

 

Spot the mistake... #6

This looks oddly familiar. But it still doesn't boot AmigaOS. Sigh. ;-)

Psst, there's a really an actual mistake (aside from the mouse/OS mismatch) in the picture. Can you spot it?

* * *

Wanna spot another mistake? Click here.

Pete Cannon and OctaMED 4

British electronic music producer Pete Cannon and his Amiga/AtariST driven studio.

The video is a bit old, but if you haven't seen it, like Amiga, OctaMED, and old electronic music gear, it's a must-watch. Pete Cannon creates jungle/house/hip-hop music, and is an avid OctaMED user. This report shows some of his synths and samplers, oldskool production techniques, and is also a nice, pretty extensive demonstration of OctaMED (he uses version 4). We also get to see some vintage AtariST Cubase, hear some groovy jungle music (OctaMED playthrough), and of course listen to Pete talking about his experience. 

It's always nice to see Amiga computers still getting some proper creative and professional use, and Pete seems to be a very nice guy - very enjoyable and inspiring watch.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDn7ZDcx9w0

If you wanna get the true retro experience with OctaMED on your Amiga, you can download version 4 here:

https://aminet.net/package/mus/edit/OctaMEDv4

The most advanced version to date is "SoundStudio":

https://aminet.net/package/mus/edit/OctamedSS1.03c
https://aminet.net/package/docs/help/OctamedSSManual (updated manual)

Additional sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Cannon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OctaMED