New Amiga Soundcard: AmiGUS

It's no secret that I love making music on the Amiga. I've recently made videos on the native Amiga soundchip, realtime Amiga guitar effects and even exotic Amiga soundcards, not to mention an EP of Amiga-based music, so today's news of a new Amiga sound card interested me greatly.

AmiGUS, a Zorro II-based card (for so-called big box Amigas) features an updateable FPGA core, 24-bit Audio, 32 channels of PCM sound, hardware ADSR envelopes and crucially - an open hardware approach. My complete speculation, is that open-sourcing things means that versions for the popular wedge-shaped Amigas might be a possibility.

Check out the specs here; this will be a wildly impressive sound spec for a late 80's computer!

AmiGUS is a modern high quality sound card for the Amiga. It was designed to provide the right combination of accelerated hardware and software features to bring the full multimedia experience to all Amiga users.

By supporting established frameworks such as AHIand MHI, we ensure that the card is compatible to a wide range of already existing applications. In addition, the card's true power lies in its highly sophisticated wavetable engine, which provides a powerful feature upgrade to PAULA, supporting 32 true hardware voices using 32 MB of sample memory.

The good news is that, in order to use all these features, you don't need a fast CPU. AmiGUS can be used on ALL Amigas with a free Zorro Slot, since all of the computational heavy-lifting is performed by the hardware acclerated functions on the card.

And since we are at it right now, you can own an AmiGUS too, either by buying it from one of our supported resellers, or you just download the card's design files and build one on your own!

AmiGUS Feature List

• Zorro II card for Amiga 2000 / 3000 /4000 computers, or compatible bus boards.
• Standard RCA stereo output, 192kHz @24-bit.
• TOSLINK optical output, supporting 48kHz, 96kHz & 192kHz @24-bit.
• 3x analogue audio inputs (PAULA, CD-ROM, EXTERNAL), sampled at 192kHz @24-bit.
• High-quality digital mixer which operates at full 192kHz @24-bit resolution.
• AHI buffered stream interface, supporting 8-/16- & 24-bit modes for playback and recording.
• MP3/OGG/FLAC/WMA hardware decoder (VLSI VS1063), enhanced by a powerful DMA stream buffer.
• 32 channel wavetable engine - featuring per voice:
  • 8-/16-bit sample support, 192kHz @24-bit mixing rate.
  • Sample start, stop and loop pointer for effective one-shot or continuous playback modes.
  • 32-bit sample phase accumulators for extra fine grained pitch definition.
  • Optional per-voice sample interpolation for smooth sounds.
  • Channel independent left / right stereo panning.
  • Hardware ADSR evelope generator.
• 32 MB on-board sample memory - ready to be used for Multichannel Sample Tracking or MIDI.
• Flash-based mixer settings which are automatically loaded on start-up.
• Upgradable FPGA Core via JTAG, or Amiga-based flash tool.
• Open Hardware - Software, PCB Gerbers and FPGA Bitstream freely available.

Minimum Amiga Configuration

• Amiga 2000
• 68000 @7.09MHz
• 1 MB Chip / 4 MB Fast
• OS 1.3

Recommended Amiga Configuration

• Amiga 2000 / 3000 / 4000
• 68030 @25Mhz
• 2 MB Chip / 16 MB Fast
• OS 3.9 or 3.2.2

Release: June 2025.

Why make music on the Amiga? Check out this article.

Original Thread on English Amiga Board: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=120290

Posted by MagicalSynthAdventure an expert in synthesis technology from last Century and Amiga enthusiast.

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