Amiga motherboard project to add NVMe SSD boot support and a driver for the onboard Ethernet — Mirari project hopes to ‘breathe new life into the next-gen Amiga platform’

Amiga fans have several projects to watch as we near the end of 2025. Today, we're looking at the intriguing Mirari, a new mainboard that is designed to “breathe new life into the next-gen Amiga platform.” The developers are several prototypes in and currently refining drivers to prepare the Micro-ATX form factor Mirari for a mid-2026 release. Amenities will include NVMe, USB3, PCIe slots, SATA (via card), and FPGA custom logic - all in a convenient Micro-ATX form factor. Expect to pay about $600 to $700 (€500 - €600) for this AmigaOS4 and MorphOS platform when it is ready.

Mirari is designed for those of you who still cradle a ‘next-gen Amiga dream,’ rather than simply want a modern interface plus I/O remake of the classic Amigas of the 1980s and 90s. This motherboard isn’t intended for casual retro fans who just want to play some old classic 16-bit games, use Workbench from v1.X to 3.x, or dabble in undemanding pixel painters like Deluxe Paint or PPaint. That’s easy enough on old mass-produced hardware or in emulators.

Instead, Mirari tackles the Amiga computing niches where AmigaOS4 or MorphOS is desired, running on a true next-gen Amiga. This means Mirari departs from the 68K lineage and embraces PowerPC (echoing the Mac’s architecture transition).

Moreover, Mirari is a PPC native platform standard for developers and the community. It continues the lineage established by the Phase5 PPC and AmigaONE X1000/X5000/A1222 systems, with up-to-date hardware that complements the PPC processor.

You can check here to chart the progress of Mirari’s development. There, you will see the design phase began in May 2024. Mid-2025 saw the arrival of the second prototype mainboards. Since that time, work has continued apace, showing off the latest Mirari at shows and events, as well as the more serious work of getting drivers produced and wrinkles removed. Specific drives/updates have recently been produced for Intel HD Audio (Azalia) specification PCIe sound cards, the fan controller, the NVMe storage driver (now able to support booting), and the onboard NIC driver.

According to a hardware preview shared by December’s WhatIFF magazine (head to the reviews/previews section), the latest specs include a T1042 quad‑core, 64‑bit PowerPC e5500 processor, DDR3L SO-DIMM support, three PCIe slots, 2x SATA 2.0 and 2x NVMe slots, USB3 ports, and an FPGA socket for additional functionality. This will run AmigaOS4, MorphOS, or some PPC Linux distros.

The Micro-ATX form factor Mirari should be ready for mid-2026. Expect to pay about $600 to $700 for a board. Not sure if that includes the RAM, but Amiga systems only need a few megabytes, not gigabytes!

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