Many people wonder or think about whether a board like the ZZ9000 designed and manufactured in 2019 will ultimately bring real practical benefits and utilities or not on Commodore Amiga systems that are more than 30 years old. I actually didn't think until now to write down what I took for granted before I bought it. I discovered the ZZ9000 because driven by a specific need before others, that is I needed a video output from my Amiga 4000 qualitatively equal to those of the modern PC video cards. Having the PC monitor next to the one of my 4000, I had in front of my eyes the evident difference of video quality between PC and Amiga, the analog video output of the CyberVisionPPC was always accompanied by some noise and in rare cases a colour was missing because of the internal flat connection for the transport of the video signal from the CyberVisionPPC to the SVGA port, in my opinion inadequate and without shielding. Certainly nothing serious or unbearable for a hardware developed more than 30 years ago, but the poor pixel sharpness, the limited maximum resolution together with the above mentioned annoyances were not a nice sight. .  Another rather important and relevant aspect was just the useful resolution on the screen, today the standard allows a graphic working area of 1920 x 1080 pixels which is not bad at all for any kind of work. With my CyberVisionPPC I could get up to 1280 x 1024, but that was it. So for these reasons I started to look for a solution to the problem and it was so that surfing the net I discovered the ZZ9000, a board that alone is able to catapult in the present the Classic Amiga systems not only for the Video extension that is Phenomenal but also for the fact that it has a USB controller, an Ethernet port (Gigabit), microSD slot and of course an HDMI port, it allows to extend the functionality of an Amiga Zorro 2 or Zorro 3 occupying only one slot and providing the hardware resources needed today. The ZZ9000's video output basically allows you to work with WorkBench in FullHD 1920 x 1080 per hour up to 16bit colour depth, with a video quality equal to any modern PC graphics card. It's a flawless signal with which to comfortably do everything from software development to launching DrawStudio Caligari 3D ImagFX Provector WordWorth PageStream, to name but a few, but what's more important is that standing in front of your monitor with a ZZ9000 installed gives you the best possible video experience in the production environment, things don't change when it comes to the gaming environment. Having also integrated a digital flickerfixer de-interlacer the ZZ9000 captures the signal of the original Amiga chipset directly from the video slot, so maximum signal purity, samples it and shoots it directly to the HDMI port. All this means that you can see ECS OCS AGA graphics in the highest possible quality on a modern digital monitor. Let me open a parenthesis: probably who is reading this is wondering, but why do you use PageStream (for example) to work? The answer is NI, or rather no, but now I can! Personally, as far as the video aspect is concerned, I am not a cathode ray tube "fundamentalist", I believe that what is good in technology should be accepted and the LCD screen is good! Much better than any screen based on the cathode ray tube for several reasons, consumption, emissions, space requirements, etc.. and video quality with contrasts and colours unmatched by any tube. So being able to see on the modern digital LCD software such as Brilliance or ImagFX open in their natural environments then on AGA with two custom screens one for the control panel and the other for the graphic render in the background, perfectly deinterlaced and without any kind of disturbance is in my opinion a great thing! But yes, even the games and demos are obviously spectacular because you don't expect to see the native fluidity and vividness of certain Amiga graphics scenes on modern digital monitors!

OK, I've described the practical side that the ZZ9000 offers immediately after installing it, but it doesn't end there, a new digital story begins. The ZZ9000 has two integrated ARM coprocessors, one of which runs the board itself while the other sleeps.... Yes, because the second coprocessor is available for running ARM code that can be launched directly from the Amiga. This means that it could for example be used to accelerate a web browser or an emulation environment or anything else. At the moment the Ethernet port is fully functional and the USB port will be active soon.** This means that after testing the USB functionality I might decide to sell my X-Surf 100 with the USB RapidRoad module on board! And recover almost all the money I invested for the ZZ9000, not counting the money I already recovered from the sale of the CyberVisionPPC! In the future the perspectives are more than fantastic, thanks to hardware acceleration, digital audio output via HDMI, the ARM coprocessor and also considering that soon it will be possible to access the micro SD port on the Amiga side, the functionality of our classic Amigas will be up to date again with all the advantages of all time.

** 12/2020 USB port working with fixes and corrections to the device already solved several months ago