This weekend, together with our friends from ACube Systems, we unveiled the Powerboard Tyche card to the public for the first time at the “Pianeta Amiga” event held in Empoli, a small town near Florence. The card was hot off the press; the company responsible for assembling the components had delivered it to Enrico Vidale of ACube less than 24 hours earlier.

During the event, several people asked us about the relationship between the PowerProgressCommunity association and ACube; the diagram below aims to clarify the situation.

Below the This is the complete features list of the board:

• Form Factor: Micro ATX (fully compatible with most standard PC cases and power supplies on the market)
• CPU: NXP T2080 processor, 64-bit e6500 Power architecture with Vector AltiVec technology
• Core & Performance: 4 physical dual-threaded e6500 cores (8 logical threads), 2 MB low-latency backside L2 cache, 16 GFLOPS per core
• RAM: 2-slot 64-bit DDR3/3L SDRAM memory controller with ECC support
• NVMe SSD: 1x M.2 NVM Express Gen 3 slot and 1x M.2 NVM Express Gen 2 slot for ultra-high-speed solid-state drives
• SATA: 2x SATA2 ports (Sil3132 controller) for traditional HDDs/SSDs
• Primary Video Slot: 1x PCIe 3.0 (x4 electrical, x16 mechanical) to support modern graphics cards
• Secondary Expansion Slots: 1x PCIe 2.0 x4 open-ended slot (mechanically compatible with x16 cards) and 1x PCIe 2.0 x1 slot
• HD Audio: Dedicated C-Media 8828 audio chip
• Audio I/O: Analog jacks (3×2) for Audio IN and surround/stereo Audio OUT; Digital optical and RCA inputs and outputs
• Ethernet: 2x Gigabit Ethernet RJ-45 connectors for advanced network configurations and redundancy
• Rear Panel USB Ports: 2x USB 3.0 + 2x USB 2.0
• Internal USB Headers: 2x USB 3.0 headers for case front ports
• Card Reader: 1x Integrated SDHC card reader
• Advanced I/O / Debug: Pre-equipped for secondary diagnostic/debugging displays via a dedicated bus (SPI/GPIO) during the booting phase

Thanks to your donations, we were able to present the prototype of the board. You can continue to make donations by visiting

What follows is an account of my participation in the event.

I am Mario Locati, a long-time enthusiast of the Amiga world and one of the founding members of the PowerProgressCommunity association. This combination of interests drove me to participate in person at the “Pianeta Amiga” event, which was held on Saturday the 26th and Sunday the 27th of September 2026 in Empoli, a small town near Florence.

I arrived in Empoli on the morning of Saturday the 26th on a train from Milan, travelling through the beautiful scenery of the Tuscan hills.

Empoli is a typical Tuscan town, with beautiful squares and delightful pedestrian streets that fill up in the evening with people enjoying the lovely early autumn evenings.

Interestingly, nearby lies the town of “Vinci”, the birthplace of the famous Leonardo, one of the greatest Italian artists of the 16th century.

The venue for Pianeta Amiga was in a suburb of Empoli. Only a part of the indoor exhibition area was dedicated to the event: it was a huge hall with wooden walls, featuring the presentation area in the centre and the various exhibitors’ tables along the sides.

My friends from ACube Systems immediately welcomed me to their three tables. There, I finally saw the Powerboard Tyche desktop motherboard for the first time, which the whole community has worked so hard to help create. Right during this weekend, together with our friends at ACube Systems, we presented the board to the public for the very first time. The hardware was hot off the press: the company that handled the component assembly had delivered it to Enrico Vidale of ACube less than 24 hours beforehand. I must admit I held it in my hands with great emotion; after the failure of the notebook prototype, I had genuinely feared that the project might come to an end due to a lack of community support.

Our friends at ACube Systems have just issued a press release, which I’d encourage you to read.

Besides our board, there were various Sam460ex boards on the tables showcasing the latest software developments by ACube Systems. These include a series of drivers designed to run the hardware peripherals present on the Powerboard Tyche: the SiI3132 SATA2 controller, the NVMe SSD controller, and a brand-new driver for a wide range of Radeon board versions, which breaks away from all other existing drivers to date.

As Enrico Vidale is a beta tester for AmigaOS 3.3 (currently under development), there was also an Amiga 1200 on one of the tables running a snapshot of the new operating system version.

On the other side of the room was the AmigaLabs table, with Georgios Sokianos (aka “Walkero”, here a link to support his work) and Andrea Palmaté (here a link to support his work). Stopping to talk to them, I discovered one of their latest and extremely fascinating projects: a new kernel, based on a slightly modified version of the open-source source AROS operating system, capable of running natively on the AmigaOne X5000 sold by the company A-Eon and the Sam460ex from ACube Systems. Andrea Palmaté has been working on it with extreme passion for only a few months. Started almost as a personal challenge, the result has gradually proven to be increasingly solid and, as of today, it has reached a state of progress that allows AmigaOS 4.1 to boot and various applications to run. This milestone introduces two previously impossible features, shown to the public for the first time: support for all cores present on the CPU and better memory management, making the system decidedly more stable. For those familiar with the AmigaNG world, this news is quite groundbreaking also because, unlike the current kernel, Andrea will release the source code as soon as possible. As a representative of an organisation that supports open hardware and open source, I would like to congratulate Andrea on this decision. Thank you, Andrea!

Being aimed at an Italian audience, the entire event featured various talks given in Italian. Unfortunately, this meant that some foreign attendees were a bit lost when someone spoke into the microphone. However, the language barrier allowed me to interact more with various international participants, trying to translate what was being said for them; amongst them were George Sokianos and Timothy De Groote from Hyperion Entertainment.

Among the various presentations was one by Mike Battilana, a highly renowned figure in the Amiga world who is involved in all things classic Amiga for 68k. He began his career as a developer for the company Cloanto, which sold excellent productivity software widely used in the community, such as the text editor C1-Text and the graphic editor Personal Paint. Obviously, as an Amiga enthusiast, I couldn’t help but ask Mike for a selfie, which we took with great cheer.

Everyone in the room held their breath while Mike Battilana unboxed the TheA1200, which is distributed by RetroGames.

In the afternoon, ACube Systems gave their presentation. While they were taking their seats, Enrico Vidale gestured for me to join them on stage. I must say it took me by surprise — a pleasant one, as I had the opportunity to speak on behalf of the members of the Power Progress Community association and all the people who had donated to help us reach this point.

Various exhibitors showcased systems based on original Amiga models at the event, although the majority were AmigaNG systems, including A-Eon X5000 and ACube Systems’ Sam460ex models.

There were far fewer customers on Sunday mornings than in the afternoon, partly because people had to go home.

Ultimately, I must say that I was very pleased to take part in this year’s Pianeta Amiga. It was a brilliant opportunity to meet the people behind this diverse community, who are united by a passion that began in their teenage years in the 1980s and 1990s.

The impression I take away is that all the hard work and moments of discouragement associated with the project’s ups and downs – in our quest to produce a new, modern motherboard based on the PowerPC platform – are underpinned by a community that relentlessly pursues its dreams.

To all of you who want to get your hands on a Powerboard Tyche, I ask you to support us with your donations for just a little while longer – we’re almost there!