Posted Thu Mar 04, 2021 10:12 pm
Stephen pulled the plug on all the TF projects and on this one because someone on the Polish Amiga forum threatened Stephen that he would clone and sell the TF536 "by the thousands" (this was before the TF536 was to be made open source, I think). It is thought that the Gerbers were compromised by a bug in JLCPCB.com's ordering system that allowed you to reorder any PCB they made if you knew the order number, which JLCPCB imprints on the PCB when they make it, regardless if you were the original customer or not. This person in Poland, it seems, misunderstood (poor translation) when Stephen said he would no longer ship to Poland because their postal system is terrible and many boards sent there (from authorized PCB sellers) got lost. This particular Polish person took it to mean that Stephen would not sell to the Polish, and called Stephen racist or some other such nonsense, and many on the PPL forum piled on (I haven't read this myself, and read it second hand on other forums). So, out of a desire for "revenge" on Stephen, this person caused the following to transpire:
Stephen removed all his Github repositories for past TF cards, and, will not open source the TF1260 for the 1200, and stopped development of his prototype TF4060 (060 for the 4000). If you want a TF1260, you have to be a member of his Scottish Amiga Users Group, a close friend, or, a close friend of one of the three people he will allow to build them, AlenPPC in Canada, Chucky in Sweden, and 8-bit-dreams in Germany, per his postings on Exxos. He ended design of the ReAgnus and will not open source it either. He's stated he's moving onto the Atari scene instead, where they are practically begging for all the stuff the Amiga has gotten in the past few years due to the efforts of dedicated hobbyists such as Stephen.
I can't say I blame him...I'd have been at the end of my rope a long time ago given all the criticism and demands people in "the community" have levied upon him the past few years while developing open sourced accelerators for the Amiga. Now, if you want a new o6o based accelerator for your 1200, you'll pay through the nose for one from Jens or the Warp team.
Last edited by
obitus1990 on Thu Mar 04, 2021 10:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.