Inspired by the Amiga, Atari, and arcade systems of the 80s and 90s — but rebuilt from the ground up with today’s silicon.
At its heart is Razz, a custom FPGA chipset delivering hardware sprites, tilemaps, vectors, copper effects, and a studio-grade audio engine with over 128 voices.
Ant64 isn’t an emulator box. It’s a new machine — one designed for games, demos, synthesis, live performance, and creative computing.
The Ant64 Creative Edition expands this vision with DisplayPort 4K/60 output, extra chipset memory, traditional MIDI ports and optical digital audio — turning Ant64 into a serious workstation for both developers and musicians.
This is what classic computing looks like when it never stopped evolving.
Why RISC-V?
RISC-V gives the Ant64 home computers a modern, open, future-proof brain. It has two cores, one handles the operating system, storage, networking, the other handles the main program and any processor emulation — while the real magic happens in dedicated hardware. No vendor lock-in, no legacy baggage, just a fast, predictable CPU designed to work with custom chips, not replace them.
It’s the perfect partner for FireStorm, Razz, and the rest of the chipset — letting software do what it’s best at, and hardware do what software never could.
Musicians Will Want Ant64
Most modern music tools are designed to make music efficiently.
Very few are designed to make music inevitably.
The machines that defined entire musical movements — the C64, Atari ST, Amiga — did not succeed because they were perfect instruments. They succeeded because:
- They were affordable
- They were programmable
- They were immediate
- They behaved in interesting, sometimes surprising ways
- They blurred the line between instrument, computer, and toy
Ant64 intentionally recreates these conditions — not by nostalgia, but by architectural choice.
What Makes Ant64 Different for Musicians
- Hardware timing, not software guesswork
Notes, envelopes, modulation, and sequencing are all driven by deterministic hardware.
- No plugin stack, no abstraction wall
Sound generation is visible, memory-mapped, and controllable at a low level.
- Sound and visuals are the same machine
Music can literally drive graphics, and graphics can drive music — sample-accurately.
- You can misuse it
Ant64 does not protect you from doing “the wrong thing”. This is where new genres come from.
- It grows with you
Beginners can treat it like a groovebox. Experts can treat it like a modular synthesizer with a CPU attached.
At its core, Ant64 is not just a workstation.
It is a platform where music is a first-class citizen, not an afterthought.
What is FireStorm?
FireStorm is designed to be the fastest possible way to manipulate memory, registers, and hardware state inside an FPGA system.
It feels closer to the Amiga's copper + blitter + 68k cpu ecosystem than to Linux-era CPUs.
- Same operand order: src, dst
- Same register split: data vs address
- Same indirect forms: (An)+, -(An), etc
- Same DBRA loops
- Same mental model
You don’t have to unlearn anything.
Zero-latency hardware control
FireStorm can:
- Write palettes mid-scanline
- Trigger blits on HBlank
- Start audio envelopes sample-accurate
- Chain copper > FireStorm > blitter
This is demo-coder heaven.
Artists and Demo Coders Will Love Ant64
Every machine that spawned a demo scene shared three traits:
- A visible raster
- Hardware that could be driven “incorrectly”
- Deterministic timing
Ant64 has all three — deliberately.
Reasons This Matters
- You can see the beam
Raster position is meaningful again. Scanlines are not abstract.
- The Copper is back
Effects can be synchronised to pixels, not frames.
- The Blitter is exposed
You control memory, not draw calls.
- Graphics and sound share timing
Visuals can be driven by envelopes, LFOs, or even raw audio data.
- Nothing stops you from doing the wrong thing
Overlapping DMA, self-modifying Copper lists, feedback loops — all possible.
This is the environment where:
- New visual languages emerge
- Techniques are discovered accidentally
- Hardware limitations become style
Ant64 is not trying to look retro.
It is trying to behave like the machines that created culture, not content.