Amiga updates Mar-Jun 2026

As I have been not well and not updating the blog over the last two-three months, you might assume I didn't do a lot with my Amigas during that time.

Not so.

First off, I have picked up a number of new release Amiga games in 2026 for starters...I am a big believer in buying and supporting new release titles for the Amiga, Mega 65 and C64 especially.

First up is Tap Jewels and ARC4NERD I bought from Alinea computers, both work on a 1MB Amiga 500. 

Tap Jewels was originally released by Entwickler-X on AmigaOS 4 many years ago - indeed I reviewed on this blog on my AmigaOne X1000 way back in 2012 here. 
But now it has a release in 2026 on Classic Amiga systems also!

It is a game that involves selecting connected jewels of the same colour to remove them from the playing area, and the rest of the jewels above drop down, creating a puzzle to solve:

The aim is to clear the area of Jewels.

There are some plus and minus pieces scattered around that remove a whole horizontal line, a vertical line, or both! These are scarce resource in each level, and you need to plan carefully to make best use of them to help clear lines that don't have matching jewels to line up more to remove!

Admittedly, I am not great at this category of games, but I enjoyed playing Tap Jewels on my Amiga 500.

There are other play modes to explore, and I plan to make some time for that soon.

Next up is ARC4NERD, a new arkanoid inspired game for the Amiga.

Sadly the game is in German only, but it is not difficult to work it out. Bat, ball, things to hit and remove. It is not rocket science.

Your ball is a boing ball, naturally.

Disks fall from the screen with upgrades for your bat to make clearing levels easier, the same as in Arkanoid.

It is a good game, well implemented and graphically very nice indeed.

There are more new boxed Amiga games I picked up too - Farmiga, Ami Robbo 2 and Santastic. These 3 new titles are published by K&A from Poland, who produce the very excellent K&A Plus magazine covering Amiga and C64 scenes still in 2026.


Santastic is a platform game with an obvious Xmas theme:

Each level you need to collect all the presents to fill Santa's bag, which is shown in the status screen how you are progressing towards that goal.

It is a typical platform game - collect them up and go to the exit, and if you like this genre of game, you will enjoy this.

Graphically it is ok, but not a real standout in a very crowded field of classic platformers on the Amiga!
Moving on to Farmiga, this is an attempt to implement the recent popular slow relaxing cozy gaming genre on the Amiga - this genre is popularised by games like Animal Crossing, and other casual farming simulation games where the goal is to relax rather than drive or mindlessly shoot things.

It is an attractive game, but unfortunately for me doesn't have the cuteness factor such games need to hold my interest.

Grinding endlessly through farming tasks has to have something at the other end to make it interesting to keep you grinding away. 

I planted some plants and veggies, but quickly got bored as I didn't see the point of it. An intro or tutorial to explain the game would really help.
There are other places beyond the farm to visit in the game, like the store to buy animals for your farm to expand what you produce in it:

You can buy Chickens, cows, sheep, beehive, cats and rabbits.

The grocery store allows you to buy essential supplies to build your farm:

Perhaps I just need to give it some more time. I play Animal Crossing New Horizons Switch 2 patched version on my Switch 2 daily to relax, so I am no stranger to this genre of gaming. I have grinded hundreds of hours doing exactly this sort of gaming. 
I'll give Farmiga another go when I have more time and patience!
Next. let's turn our attention to developments in the world of the A1200NG, an Amiga emulation system released by AmigaKit, designed to be installed in a A1200 case. I covered it in a lot more detail in my previous blog post here if you want to learn more about my build and setup of this system.

There have been a number of updates released for the A1200NG since its release. 

I connected it back up to a HDMI screen for the first time in a few months to see what changes have arrived. Predictably, a lot! 
I needed to update the system to see the changes - not sure why the HDMI output (1080p) is wider than my 1080p HDMI screen though. I tried to play around with but couldn't improve it. I don't really want to have to swap for another screen...this is a quality viewsonic screen and I have no issues with anything else I connect to it. 
I suspect if I could access the underlying Linux configuration on the A1200NG I could tweak the display output, but as it stands, I can't see any way to do that.

Amibench has been updated with a new Amibrowser for modern web browsing from the Classic Amiga environment.

I quickly fired up the browser to check it out. Being greeted by the modern google search page with full detail was nice to see:

As you would expect, Amiga websites render well on Amibrowser, as they do on native Amiga browsers like iBrowse, AWeb, etc.

There are links in Amibrowser to info about the A1200NG if you want to learn more - mind you, I already have one so, hmm.

But of course, the important thing is can it handle modern web browsing. I went to YouTube as this never works on classic Amiga systems.

I am pleased to report YouTube works well and plays back videos clearly!

Note that moving windows on the Workbench around while playback does result in stuttering sound from Eagleplayer on my A1200NG, so don't expect miracles for multitasking. 
The base system is not that fast.

That is probably the biggest criticism of this system to be honest. It is not fast enough to emulate higher spec Amiga systems. Above 030, it will struggle to handle things. You won't be running 060 AGA demos on this system.

But if you don't care about that, and just want to run your favourite Amiga 500 games on it, it will work well enough. The Amibench environment is good for running applications, although note that it uses an AROS kickstart rom as the copyright roms can't be distributed with it, so AmiBench is not fully compatible with everything you can throw at an Amiga to run.

You can of course build your own custom Workbench 3.1/3.2/3.9 system using the copyright kickstart roms obtained legally to run everything with no constraints. Many people have done just that.
In my case, I cheated and used the latest Amiga Vision HDF distribution on my A1200NG with the genuine Kickstart 3.1 roms selected on the A1200NG and it works quite well. I had it up and running quickly once the large HDF files eventually transferred over from USB.
I have covered this Amiga Vision distribution before - I use it on my Analogue Pocket and my real Amiga 1200/030 system.

on the A1200NG, I can select pretty much any game or demo released from 1985 to today using Amiga Vision through a simple two navigate AGS application menus with joystick or keyboard.

Mean Arenas time methinks - love this game:

You can also hit escape on the AGS menu to boot into Workbench.

From Workbench you can launch a number of applications and tools, and listen to a pile of included mods using Deliplayer or your favourite Amiga audio application! 

If you have additional HDF files prepared in an emulator with extra files, you could attach that as an extra drive in this environment. I might do that later on - to add my music collection, demos and more recent game I bought that are not included in the Amiga Vision distribution for obvious copyright reasons.

There is no shortage of options included with Amiga Vision out of the box. I own this original software legally so I have no problem with using it in this distribution.

Deluxe Paint V is there, ready to use:

SCALA MM400 is there as well, dongle free and ready to use:

I should spend some more time learning how to use SCALA - it is a cool looking alternative to Powerpoint for the Amiga, released (as Infochannel originally) around the same time as Powerpoint was released on Macintosh - back in 1987. SCALA MM400 for Amiga is from 1994 and SCALA still exists in 2026, as SCALA Designer for modern computer platforms like Windows and Linux. I wonder if it still imports MM400 scripts... :-)

Development tools like AMOS professional 2 are also included on the Amiga Vision HDF. All ready to run - it agrees nicely with my laziness not to have to do it all from scratch myself :-)

I want to try MIDI output with the Amiga emulation via the serial port on the A1200NG. Something I will try when it is located near one of my Roland MIDI devices! 
 

Moving back to the A1200NG configurations, if you use the ADF disks with dedicated demoscene configurations on the A1200NG, A500 demos and low end AGA demos prior to 1996 work well.

I really hope to see a hardware upgrade module to replace the current system that opens up 060 and RTG full speed gaming and demos for people like me who want it all. 
You can also do this no compromises setup on raspberry pi 5 system, or via emulation on a modern linux, windows or mac system. But it is not an A1200 system, so it doesn't look like the real deal and can't use real Amiga floppy drives and Amiga joysticks/mice like this A1200NG can. 
Time will tell if the upcoming TheA1200 system delivers any better solution than the A1200NG, but that release has been delayed from June 2026 to the end of the year. I gather the speed is not so different.
Who knows it that slips again...I guess that is good news for AmigaKit since they can probably sell more of these A1200NG systems before it arrives!

Lastly for this post, I found out about a remake of the A600 keyboard as a new mechanical keyboard, much like the once I put in the A1200NG system above.

The keyboard in my A600 is horribly yellowed - the previous white one failed completely as I mentioned in this blog, so I had to sweep it out for an older one. And, before someone asks, I don't have the patience to remove the keycaps to swap them over...

The TS600 mechanical keyboard comes from Sordan.ie, and includes US, UK and DE keycaps in the box. Out of the box it is setup for US, which is what I need here in Australia. I chose blue switches for that clicky feel and sound. :-)

They also sell replacement mechanical keyboards for other Amiga models too. They offer a black keycap set with white lettering if you prefer that - I did consider it for a while for the A600!

I next set to work disassembling the A600 and removing the old keyboard so you can see them side by side.
My A600 is heavily upgraded. You can see this blog post to see more about the build I did on the A600 to add a Pistorm 600, A604n, Indivision ECS, USB support, CF Card adapter, AmigaOS 3.2 kickstart roms and Gotek internal floppy drive and external expansions too!
I placed the new keyboard on the A600 with the case open and it fits nicely.

The back of the new TS600 keyboard looks 3d printed compared to the metal casing for the old keyboard.

You can see the connector port for the cable to route to the A600 motherboard, and selectors for the function of the extra TS key:

The extra keycaps are in a plastic bag with an extraction tool which is included, so I can swap them out if I ever want to in the future.

Here is the old and new keyboards after I removed the old one from the A600 case.

The new keyboard has much flatter keys than the original keys, which is more visible in close up photos:

Naturally it is up to you if you like this look or not. Personally I prefer the original key sizing and appearance, but these keys feel so much nicer when typing on them. 

You also get an extra TS key on the new keyboard that is not present on the original - this is because the space bar is shorter - why they did this I have no idea. 
Perhaps if you have a Raspberry pi or some other system in the A600 case and using a Keyrah converter to use the A600 keyboard with it? That way you have a button you can use to close the emulation easily while using the Amiga under emulation? Just a theory. I am sure someone will have some ideas on that.
The grey colour doesn't match the brown colour of the original keys - it looks fine on my custom painted case, so I was less worried about that.

Here is a top view - you can see the cable is not the usual thin cable you have too worry about breaking every time you touch it - I am glad for that:
Here is the keyboard mounted in the top half of the A600 case, ready to connect to the bottom.
Indeed the cable is fully removable from the keyboard itself. It has a special converter on one end to enable it to plug into the keyboard slot on the A600 motherboard.

However, it is not thin enough to fit the connector unless you remove the plastic lift up bit securing the ribbon cable to the connector first.

Here is the plastic part I talked about removed - it unclips easily - so no worries.
Here is the cable connected into the keyboard connector on the motherboard:

It fits snugly but is easy enough to remove when needed.

Being a very busy internal setup in the A600 with all the upgrades, it is quite a job to thread everything back together to be able to close the case again!

Feeding the Indivision ECS cable, USB cables, Pistsorm HDMI output through the tiny gap in the gotek floppy drive casing and then the floppy drive port case exterior...

Here is the A600 case all closed up - looking so much better with the new keyboard:

Some other angles:

I really need a solution for the spaghetti junction of cables coming out of the side of my A600 - any suggestions that don't involve cutting the case or de-soldering chips on the motherboard are welcome! 

Perhaps a 3d printed enclosure to put them in (for example) to make it cleaner...it would need to be able to be removed though in order to do work in the A600..nothing is ever easy on the A600 when it comes to upgrades. I put it in the too hard basket for now.

I then connected the VGA and HDMI outputs to the Checkmate monitor to test it all works still - I am glad to say it does:

The RTG Workbench soon appears, powered by the Pistorm 600 installed in the system.

The keyboard works as expected, and I am very happy with the outcome. My A600 looks great again!

I have more blog posts in the pipeline that I will release as I am well enough to do so. Thank you for your patience and I hope you enjoyed this post!
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