Lukas F Hartmann is a Time Lord with one special power: he can bestow 1280x720-pixel HDMI compatibility to the Commodore Amiga PC family, which is now 30 years old and predates the HDMI standard by about 20 years. His original Amiga, known in its time as having truly groundbreaking video graphics, was limited to 640x256 pixels and 64 colors.

Hartmann accomplished this feat of time travel by designing and prototyping a new video board based on a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA that plugged into the Amiga PC’s video slot. (See “A High-Performance Graphics Card for the Amiga 2000! In 2016??? A very strange Spartan-6 FPGA story” for additional details about the development of the prototype.)

Now, Hartmann is in production with his VA2000 video board and you can get a copy of his open-source design for €189.00 through his company, MNT. (Or you could, if it wasn’t already sold out. Wait! Wait! Batch 2 on pre-order sale here.) Here’s a photo of the VA2000 board:

And here’s a photo showing an Amiga 2000 driving an HDMI display at 1280x720:

Seeing a vintage PC from the 1980s driving a high-res HDMI display is sort of thrilling for a student of old PCs like me. More to the point: Hartmann’s use of an FPGA to bring a perfectly good product forward in time with enhanced capabilities is one of the things that FPGAs do really well because they can easily implement older interfaces like the Amiga’s 68K bus, they can implement new interfaces like HDMI, and they can implement complex logic like a graphics accelerator—and all on one chip. And yes, you can take that FPGA-based design right into production, especially if you’re using a cost-effective device like the Spartan-6 FPGA.