Powerboard Tyche unveiled at Pianeta Amiga

Posted on September 27, 2026 by Communications Team

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

Prototypes of Desktop Powerboard Tyche

Thanks of this donation campaign we will pay for three Dekstop Powerboard Tyche physical prototypes, a very important step that will: put the PCB design to the test allow to learn how to correctly initialize the hardware enable the fine-tuning the configuration of U-Boot The sources for our desktop board have been reviewed by NXP Open Hardware Schematics Sources Our GitLab repository https://gitlab.com/power-progress-community/oshw-powerpc-desktop-tyche/-/tree/main/KiCad?ref_type=heads the OrCad schematics source, converted to Altium and then imported into KiCad, thanks to our association members.

€5,630.56 donated of €9,100.00 goal

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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.

*Map of the Empoli area, which lies halfway between the city of Pisa to the east and Florence to the west.*

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.

*I arrive at Empoli railway station on the local train from Florence.*

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.

*One of Empoli’s many squares; it looks empty here because the photo was taken very early on a Sunday morning, but on Saturday evening it was full of people strolling around until late at night.*

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

*Signpost for the nearby village of ‘Vinci’, where the famous Italian artist ‘Leonardo’ was born.*

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.

Next to the building, there were several football pitches where the classic kids’ matches take place at the weekend. These matches were well-attended by parents and friends, busy cheering whilst enjoying a beer served by a small volunteer-run bar.

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.

We have been working with Enrico Vidale (left) and Max Tretene (right), the two pillars of ACube Systems, for some time. It is only thanks to their collaboration that we have been able to produce the board prototypes. Thank you guys!!

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

*Here it is at last! The prototype circuit board is right in front of me!*

*Here’s the best photo I managed to take of the Powerboard Tyche motherboard*

*Max Tretene showed me that the Powerboard Tyche can hold two graphics cards, with each card occupying more than one slot.*

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.

*This is a screenshot of AmigaOS 4.1 running on a Sam460ex. The brand-new driver developed in-house by ACube Systems controls the AMD Radeon RX 570 graphics card.*

*This is a screenshot of AmigaOS 4.1 running on a Sam460ex with only an NVMe SSD, which is controlled by an in-house developed driver by ACube Systems.*

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.

*A screenshot of the still-in-development version of AmigaOS 3.3 running on an unmodified Amiga 1200.*

*One of the new tools for configuring the Workbench’s settings in the version of AmigaOS 3.3 that is still under development.*

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!

*Andrea Palmaté from AmigaLabs, who tells me enthusiastically about his recent kernel experiments.*

Andrea Palmaté from AmigaLabs shows me his private GitHub repository, where he is developing a new kernel based on the open-source AROS kernel, which is capable of supporting the AmigaOS 4.x operating system for PowerPC.

*This is a screenshot of AmigaOS 4.1 running on an AmigaOne X5000 with the AROS-derived kernel developed by Andrea Palmaté. The kernel features multi-core support.*

George Sokianos, also known as Walkero, was filmed struggling to understand what Mike Battilana was saying in Italian, a language he unfortunately doesn’t speak. Come on, George! Just a couple more issues of Pianeta Amiga and you’ll learn Italian!

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.

*Timothy De Groote from Hyperion Entertainment and me.*

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.

*Mike Battilana presenting the revised Amiga logo.*

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

*What an honour to meet Andrea Battilana from Amiga!*

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.

This is the moment when the Tyche Powerboard was officially unveiled to the event’s attendees. From left to right: myself, representing PowerProgressCommunity; Max Tretene from ACube Systems; and Enrico Vidale from ACube Systems.

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.

*A photo of the ACube Systems team with Timothy De Groote, the director of Hyperion Entertainment*.

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!

Prototypes of Desktop Powerboard Tyche

15% of Donations for Prototypes production of Powerboard Tyche Desktop

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Communications Team

As of 31 May, we have completed the fundraising campaign to cover the cost of the PCB designs for our Tyche Desktop Open Hardware Powerboard. Thanks to your generous donations, we have exceeded the campaign’s target, meaning that the new campaign to produce prototypes of the board is already underway with 15% of the funds raised.

All the donors who have been supporting the project for years – first the Notebook and now the Desktop – want something tangible and functional; this is why we must continue this race against time to raise funds so that we can produce the prototypes by September 2026.

We remain absolutely committed to making an Open-Hardware Notebook-based PowerPC machine a reality. The desktop version is the right step to allow more people, spending less money, to soon own, enjoy, and test software on this Desktop version. With a few changes and reintegrating the battery part of our previous Notebook, it will give rise to the Notebook version!

Open Hardware schematics

On the 24th of April 2026 we published on our GitLab repository https://gitlab.com/power-progress-community/oshw-powerpc-desktop-tyche/-/tree/main/KiCad?ref_type=heads the OrCad schematics source, converted to Altium and then imported into KiCad, thanks to our association members.

The meaning of our Open Hardware projects

It is so important that every country, every community needs to have people capable of designing, producing and validating electronics and software powering every building, vehicle, hospital, medical devices, school, university, aqueduct, sewage treatment, power plant, every piece of the infrastructure we depend on for our lives.

And that’s why is so important that we complete an Open Hardware Desktop designed around free software, involving students, and young, and previously young people, to be able to build the bricks of our society.

Thanks to your support, this Open Hardware Desktop first, and then the Notebook, will demonstrate in practice that a group of common people could create computers that respect our freedom.

Join us to Help on Debian PPC64 Big Endian packages

In case you have not PowerPC hardware we can give you access to the Power9 VM we have free at Open Source Lab at Oregon Stage University. thanks to the support of , so you can test and fix the package inside this VM.

More Info

Let’s stay in touch!

We have been on the Fediverse for a few years now. You can find and follow us at: hostux.social/@powerprogress. Please follow us and share our posts to spread the word. Thank you for your continued support!

Arctic Fox v47.0: the modern web on PowerPC is still possible!

Posted on March 7, 2026 by Communications Team

It has been six years since we published our interview with Riccardo Mottola, one of the pillars of software development for our favorite architecture. In it, we talked about the vital importance of having an up-to-date browser to make a PowerPC computer usable in the modern world. At that time, we were anticipating the release of version 27.11.0.

Today we are happy to announce that that mission not only continues, but has reached a new, important milestone: Arctic Fox version 47.0 has been released.

While our hardware team fights with oscilloscopes and development boards, tireless developers continue to refine the software that will run on our future notebook.

Six years of evolution: from v27 to v47

The numerical leap from v27.11.0 to v47.0 represents far more than just a version bump; it signifies a massive architectural overhaul. In the silence between our blog posts, Riccardo has been relentlessly bridging the gap between legacy hardware and the increasingly complex modern web.

During these years, the focus has been on two critical fronts: compatibility and standards. The web didn’t stop evolving in 2020, and sites that worked then would be broken today without this work. Riccardo has backported hundreds of security patches and functionality updates from the Mozilla and Pale Moon codebases. This includes implementing modern TLS standards to ensure secure connections, rewriting the media backends to fix audio/video playback on Big Endian systems, and optimizing the code to leverage AltiVec instructions, ensuring that the browser feels responsive even on older G4 and G5 processors, as well as our target NXP T2080.

What’s new in v47.0?

This release is not a simple maintenance update. The recently released v47.0 brings fundamental structural changes to navigate the web of 2026 with dignity on “alternative” hardware.

Here are the main novelties extracted from the changelog:

JavaScript Engine Enhanced: Extensive updates have been made to the JavaScript engine, introducing critical new capabilities such as async functions and support for Wasm (WebAssembly). This is a giant step for compatibility with modern web apps.
Graphics and Multimedia: Significant updates in WebGL and ANGLE, as well as an update to the libcubeb library for better audio management and video playback.
Security and Core: Updates to NSS (Network Security Services) and fdlibm libraries, as well as improvements in the netwerk module, DOM, and DevTools.
Mac Compatibility: For friends following us from the vintage Apple world, the minimum target compatibility for compilation on macOS has been raised from 10.9 to 10.10, although native compilation remains possible on 10.6 and WebCam available there.

*ArcticFox running on real PowerPC G4 Hardware and GNU/Linux*

A solo journey (that needs you!)

Maintaining a fork of Firefox/Pale Moon on a Big Endian architecture like PowerPC is a huge technical challenge. It requires solving bugs that developers on x86 or ARM will never see, handling endianness, and optimizing code to exploit specific instructions like AltiVec.

We want to give special credit to Riccardo Mottola, who has been carrying this torch almost single-handedly. His dedication to keeping this browser alive is practically a solo effort, a labor of love that benefits us all. It is our sincere hope, and his too, that other developers will step forward to lend a hand. If you have experience with C++, Mozilla’s codebases, or PowerPC optimization, your contribution could make a massive difference.

Arctic Fox v47.0 is proof that planned obsolescence can be fought with code and passion. You can download the binaries for Linux PowerPC (and other architectures) directly from the official release page.

Thanks again to Riccardo for his tireless work!

Beyond the code

Riccardo’s passion for keeping classic technologies alive extends beyond computing. He is also an avid photographer with a deep respect for tradition. Coming from a family of photographers, learning the essentials from his grandfather and even using his great-grandfather’s cameras, he specializes in traditional film and manual photography. Much like his approach to software, he values the authentic process, often developing his own black-and-white film and avoiding digital manipulation. You can admire his work, which ranges from landscapes to aerial photography, in his photography portfolio.

Prototypes in production despite heavy chip shortages

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Communications Team

We were supposed to start the production of the laptop prototypes at the end of last September but we stumble upon skyrocketing prices, especially regarding four fundamental chips. We had no other choice but to pay those incredible much higher prices, the only alternative would have been to stop all our activities.

We are glad to inform you that this week the prototypes production has started and – finger crossed – we are expecting them to be ready in the beginning of November. The following are the four fundamental chips and their actual cost:

Marvell Sata 3 controller 88SE9235A1-NAA2C000, around 130 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces
TPS544B20RVFT 4.5-V to 18-V, 20-A synchronous SWIFT™ buck converter with PMBus programmability and monitoring around 550 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces
6-port, 12-lane, PCIe 2.0 Packet Switch PI7C9X2G612GP – Diodes around 250 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces
Surge Suppressors 100V OV, UV, OC and Reverse Supply Protection Controller with -50mV Reverse Threshold LTC4368IDD-1#PBF around 100 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces

The HDMI connectors (2041481-1) were completely impossible to find on the market in a reasonable amount of time. After long research, we could finally solve the problem thanks once again to the kind support of Slimbook, they will soon send us three connectors, one for each prototype.

Considering all chips, the cost of each prototype resulted 1200 euros higher than what was initially planned, 3600 euros more ( + 22% VAT) considering all three prototypes currently in production. You may find more information about these three prototypes in the post of July 2022 and May 2022.

As already stated in our post back in July, we are still asking you to continue donating as to help us supporting the dramatic increase in the actual costs we personally anticipated to proceed with the production. You may continue use the current campaign to donate.

Our presence for October-November in Free Software and IT events

We have planned our next speech at the LinuxDay in Milan (Italy) on the 22nd of October.

We are at NXP Technology Days in Milano on 27th October with our exposition, we are very glad for this opportunity that NXP has given us.

We hope to first show at least one prototype at the SFScon – Free Software Conference – on the 11th of November in Bolzano (Italy) in the occasion of our next speech.

PCB Design nearly complete, preparing for the next campaign aimed at working prototypes

Posted on December 7, 2020 by Communications Team

The campaign aimed at the “Fast simulations bus” is nearly complete, and we will receive the resulting PCB design before the end of 2020. As soon as we have reviewed it, we will publish it in our GitLab repository. Here a screenshot with the PCB design currently being finalized.

_{our PowerPC Notebook Motherboard design screenshot from Mentor Xpedition}

Similarly to what we did for the current campaign, the next donation campaign for financing the “Production of five working prototypes” will start as soon as the current campaign will reach its end. In coordination with ACube Systems, we fixed the cost of the five prototypes to 10.500 euros, and we aim at delivering them during late Spring 2021.

Freedesktop-sdk for PPC64 Big Endian Compiled!

We have patched freedeskop-sdk to compile perfectly on PPC64 so now we are preparing, according with Freedesktop-sdk teams, the merge requests to send to the mainline repository.

So we have successfully compiled 432 packages that it involves even the last version of go lang.

We thanks OSU Open Source Lab and OpenPower Foundation to provide us a Power9 VM with 8 cores and 16GB of RAM that permit us to compile Freedesktop-sdk for PPC64.

Now thanks to OpenPOWER@UNICAMP we have a Power8 VM to recompile freedesktop-sdk for PPC64 in Continuous Integration for gitlab freedesktop-sdk pipeline.

As Flatpak binary is running on Debian 10 PPC64 Big Endian and need the Freedesktop-dsk layer to prepare the flatpak packages starting from hundreds of manifests, now we are a step closer to see flatpak packages prepared for PPC64 .