Amiga Unix Is Back: AMIX Returns for 68040 and 68060 Amigas

There are Amiga projects that keep old software alive, and then there are projects that apparently wake up one morning and decide that Commodore’s abandoned UNIX workstation should have a 2026 comeback. Welcome to AmigaUX. The unofficial community project is bringing Amiga Unix — better known as AMIX — back to life, extending Commodore’s old System V Release 4 operating system beyond the hardware it was originally designed for.

AMIX was released by Commodore between 1990 and 1992, primarily for the Amiga 2500UX and Amiga 3000UX. It was a genuine UNIX workstation operating system rather than another variation of AmigaOS, but its hardware support effectively froze when Commodore stopped developing it. More than three decades later, a small group of developers decided that this was apparently an unacceptable state of affairs.

The AmigaUX project now has AMIX 2.1 running on real 68040 and 68060 systems, including machines without a hardware FPU, although an MMU is still required. And this isn’t just a kernel patch. The project is building something much closer to what AMIX might have become had development continued.

Current work includes support for hardware such as the Z3660 accelerator, with native SCSI and Ethernet drivers, plus support for the Commodore A4091/A4092 Zorro III SCSI controllers. RTG work is also underway for hardware including the Z3660, ZZ9000 and VA2000. There is even a modern software installation system.

A new installer can boot from floppy and CD-ROM on real Amiga hardware, or from floppy and ISO images when using emulation. Both interactive and unattended installations are supported, with the traditional tape installation planned later. Once the machine is running, AMIX can use a new package manager called apkg to download software directly from an online repository. The initial collection already includes familiar GNU and Unix utilities such as grep, gzip, less, patch and zlib, with more GNU and BSD software being compiled and tested. Yes, somebody has essentially started building an app store for Commodore UNIX.

AMIX discovers the 68060

According to developer Jusii, the revival began after experimenting with AMIX on an Amiga 4000 equipped with a 68040 and a Z3660 accelerator. AMIX’s original hardware restrictions quickly became the problem. Instead of accepting those restrictions, the developers started investigating whether the operating system could be pushed onto newer processors and expansion hardware.

A few months later, the project had progressed to 68040 and 68060 support, SoftFPU support for LC060 systems, additional Ethernet drivers, new SCSI hardware support and RTG graphics development. Some of that work required serious reverse engineering because the complete original AMIX kernel source code isn’t available.

The developers have partial source material and can use related System V source as reference, but tools including Ghidra have also been used to analyse the original binaries and understand what Commodore’s kernel was actually doing. There’s also an interesting modern twist.

The team openly says that generative AI is being used as part of the development process, including analysing old kernel binaries, assisting with drivers and producing technical notes. Human developers still direct the work, review the results and — most importantly — test it on real hardware. For a project resurrecting an operating system abandoned more than thirty years ago, that’s a wonderfully strange collision of computing eras.

And naturally, it runs Quake

Because no operating system revival is apparently complete until somebody gets Quake running on it, the team has already done exactly that. A port of Quake for AMIX is among the project’s repositories, although the developers currently describe it more as a benchmark than a practical gaming platform.

The project also has an OpenLook desktop, X11 work, Mesa development and plans for a native modern GCC running directly under AMIX. The goal therefore goes considerably beyond simply making an old UNIX installation boot. The developers are slowly building a usable modernised environment around it.

The Year of the Amiga Unix Desktop?

The project rather optimistically — and appropriately — declares 2026 the “Year of the Amiga Unix Desktop.” Its first public release was presented at SAKU 2026 in Oulu, Finland, on September 19, with the project stating that packages, source code, installation instructions and manuals will follow as the wider release is prepared.

For decades AMIX has been one of the stranger branches of Amiga history: technically fascinating, extremely uncommon and mostly something you experimented with under emulation or on a very specific configuration of vintage hardware.

AmigaUX is attempting to change that. Thirty-five years after Commodore shipped its UNIX workstation, somebody has resumed development. Because apparently even abandoned UNIX operating systems can get software updates eventually.

Try it: https://amigaux.org/