PC still playing Amiga catchup

[terminator4]

@DiskDoctor

Well said, could not have said it better myself.

[Karlos]

The Amiga as we all know and love it is long dead as a serious platform. CBM saw to that back in the early 90's.

There are literally dozens of operating systems out there, many of which will run on commodity PC hardware (which is the biggest hardware platform to target), are free and often a lot more mature than AmigaOS that are equally dead in the water as there's no real niche left for them. Between Windows, MacOS and Linux/U**x the OS market is totally sewn up.

[ami_junki]

I think it is still pretty amazing that the Amiga of 25 years ago is still a viable machine for doing modern day tasks, it may not have the quad core processing power that allows machines to multitask the way they do but for a 7 or 14 mhz chip to do what the Amiga still does today is just awesome.  The Amiga is still for me the little computer that could and still can.  I think it is great that people can still believe in an alternative, the Amiga may or may not arise again but there is nothing wrong in believing in what you think is the right way.  I use my Amiga as much as I can because at the end of the day I don`t need all the extra power offered by Quad Core processing, my graphics are simple, I like listening to .mods and to be brutally honest but when I word process Word is the most convoluted piece of sh*te I have ever used, I am still using Final Writer to this day as it helps me be creative.  Of course I should perhaps I should be sent to the doctors for having a such a "radical view".  The way I see it, a lot of the technology most people don`t really need - if software is programmed more efficiently and thought gone into design we would not need such power guzzling computers.  So for me the Amiga still represents an ideal platform because it offers real world usage without the power drain.

[orb85750]

Yet there is still the sad fact that the latest PCs slow to a crawl when trying to multitask.

Perhaps too many memory-intensive apps open at the same time in combination with too little memory in your system to run them all?  HDD swap space starts getting used very heavily and makes you want to tear all your hair out or do something violent?

[terminator4]

As mentioned, all it takes is one investor with capital and techy people to make Amiga work.  If there's anything in the past 30 years of computer technology  that one can learn is that nothing is for certain, nothing is written in  stone and change is a constant and only thing.  Amiga can be part of  change if it so chooses.  Even a private company can be bought. Everyone has their price.
In the late 90s certain company by name of Apple were having difficulties and were almost extinct.  And certain person returned to make MacOS viable alternative again.  To say that CBM saw this "end of Amiga" in early 90s is  plain wrong - if thats the case then why release A4000/1200, CD32/A4000T and why work on Pandora? CBM could have abandoned Amiga/8bit line and  concentrated solely on their PC  business (which I think was profitable for them - don't make me takeout the financial statements ;-)).  And what is MacOS or Linux if not a niche market?  (majority of users are still Windows and although thats changing, this  is still predominant OS at work / home environment.  Try to sell it to them instead of Windows XP hehe.)
And Amiga isn't just the family of 680x0  processors. It's reemerging in OS4.1/4.0, MorphOS, AROS, Minimig, perhaps as NatAmi - surely still very much behind (in quantity of software), but not standing still.

Anyway, I'm just stating my opinion and everyone is entitled to one, I'm not try to convince you/anyone or win an  argument over anything (especially over the net ).

[orb85750]

The Amiga as we all know and love it is long dead as a serious platform. CBM saw to that back in the early 90's.

If you mean that Amiga is obsolete, I disagree.  While not state-of-the-art by any means, even the classic Amiga is still useful in many areas (beyond just vintage gaming).  What constitutes a "serious platform" anyway?

[freqmax]

You can make a pig fly given enough power..

And even if the hardware is good enough. The software may not be.

As for Amiga revival. The hw/sw is dead-on-arrival in the current market.  
The only viable niche is a netbook that makes the competition look like lead
weights. Esp if memory protection and premptive multitasking is on the table.

The core of the Amiga concept seems to be to make the most of hardware and
software for a price that many people can afford. Keep in mind what
Jack Tramiel said: "Computers for the masses, not the classes"

There were some pretty impressive computer way before Amiga.. if your house
were made of solid gold :-)

So again max the hardware and software within a price mark that many can
afford. This will create a lot of developers. Which will attract more people..

Many Amigans also went with x86 + unix when Commodore did go p0ff.

So is there any improvement that would be groundbreaking for current breed of PCs ..?, that the big drone companies will miss even if you put in their face?

Anyone seen this?:
http://alpha-400-mips-elonex-razorbook-coby.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html
In essence Intel, Microsoft, HP, etc., are kept alive as long as they could the old truism, "The computer you need is always US$ 5000." appearently Intel made Asus drop any cheap and small Intel Atom based computers.

[amigaksi]

Your title is a little misleading.  PCs have had split-screen, multi-monitor and PIP screen displays for years and at resolutions and color depths that put OCS/ECS Amigas to shame.  The days when Amigas made PCs look lame have long since passed.  And those who think that Amigas will somehow rise from the ashes to once again surpass the capabilities of PCs need to seek professional help/therapy.

Anything can happen in the future.  I don't see how you can leave the option out that Amiga can become a marketable computer.  Didn't Apple Mac rise from the dead basically.  I am sure if someone invented a souped up processor running at 1 Terahertz (better than Intel's) and used custom chips backward compatible to Amiga OCS/ECS/AGA, it would take over the market eventually.

PCs haven't had split-screens like Amigas with different resolutions and color depths.  VGA standard only supported split-screens with same resolution and color depth.  Now, the video cards don't have any standard so any split-screens would have to be accessed via an API and software would be emulating the function if it doesn't exist on your video card.

[amigaksi]

You are joking, right? There are hundreds of processes on my PC currently as well as several large applications.

There's also a CUDA simulation running which is pushing hundreds of megabytes of data per second across the PCI express bus and several mysql client processes interrogating a mysql server on the machine resulting in heavy disk IO.

The machine is still as responsive as when none of this was happening.

Just threw EUAE on top of the pile and it's running orders of magnitude faster than my actual amiga

I doubt you have hundreds of processes running your PC.  Many things you see when you pop up the processes dialog box are just terminate and stay resident (TSR) type drivers and applications.  And even if you did have hundreds of processes running, your statement "The machine is still as responsive as when none of this was happening" is false.  It violates the law of conservation (law of physics).  I doubt even more that you can have EUAE running on top with PCI bus busy as it is.  Why only look at the processor speed-- there's other things Amiga can do besides compare processor speeds.  Why don't you try reading the joystick at 1Khz while doing all those things?  Why not time things to cycle accuracy while your running your PCI transfers?  I can't even time a 500Khz event on the latest PC without synchronization going off if I have a WIFI card plugged in (not even surfing the web).  Oh by the way, PCs do slow down to a crawl because so much viruses/spyware comes into the PC easily because no one knows exactly which file is meant for what and whether it's in its original state or tampered.

You are basically stating PCs have faster processor speeds and faster buses.  But that was true even when Amiga 4000 was being marketed and people were still buying it (for other reasons).  So you have said nothing new.

[stefcep2]

You are joking, right? There are hundreds of processes on my PC currently as well as several large applications.

There's also a CUDA simulation running which is pushing hundreds of megabytes of data per second across the PCI express bus and several mysql client processes interrogating a mysql server on the machine resulting in heavy disk IO.

The machine is still as responsive as when none of this was happening.

Just threw EUAE on top of the pile and it's running orders of magnitude faster than my actual amiga

No he's not joking.  So you can run dozens of processes and some large apps: well dammit you have 1000x the RAM that works at lightening speeds, you have 4 or more CPU's with HUGE caches each running at clock speed that are 1000x faster, you have lightening fast data and display busses   So why does my start menu stutter to open when a simple web page is loading, why don't application menus open instantaneously but there is a short pause because some irrelevant background task is getting priority over a users command to open the menu?  And i can go and on:  Windows and PC's do not have user responsiveness as a high priority.  As a test I switched on my A1200 with 40 mhz 68060 ( yes it only runs at 40 mhz not 50) with 32 meg ram and executive: 5 sec boot up, ran Dpaint, Opus,  Aweb Miami YAM, Image FX and Cinema 4d, final writer, magic menu, tools menu, oxypatcher, fblit, ftext and a few other things in the background, and it was far far more responsive to user commands ie opening a menu, opening new apps, closing apps, painting in dapint, typing in final writer, rotating a scene in Cinema 4d (whilst rendering in the background) than Vista.  Why?

Having said thatWindows 7 RC is actually significantly more responsive than Vista, at least as fast as XP ( which itself is an 8 year old OS) running on modern hardware, so clearly the problem is the OS not the hardware.

[ElPolloDiabl]

rofl,:madashell: with all these flames there will be a Phoenix appearing in no time.

[Claw22000]

@AmigaDave

I venture to think that since business seems to be the driving force behind just about all things comuter.  That almighty Dollar always telling them what we need next seems to me that Amiga would have fallen in to the same trap and ended up selling out just the same.  Imagine this if Bill would have lost out a company named Microsoft would have still existed and with the same investment capitol.  They would have just gone to visit the people over at commodor insted and fwalaw.   Windows on an Amiga. hahah

[smerf]

Your title is a little misleading.  PCs have had split-screen, multi-monitor and PIP screen displays for years and at resolutions and color depths that put OCS/ECS Amigas to shame.  The days when Amigas made PCs look lame have long since passed.  And those who think that Amigas will somehow rise from the ashes to once again surpass the capabilities of PCs need to seek professional help/therapy.

Hi,

I am attempting to build a new Amiga type computer right now. It has a halograpic display that can display a walk around image as large as you have the room. It also has traveling 3D sound so if you are watching a band, and the band players are moving around your room with the halographic display the sound of the guitar moves with the guitar player, also as you walk around the room the sound will also be 3 dimensional along with the images. You have to watch when your playing games, because you can hit the pain switch, so if your main player gets hit you feel the pain where he got hit. Right now I am working on the smell sense so if you are watching a cooking show you can smell the food cooking, I hope to be bringing this out next week or soon as I can clear up my court case with Amiga Inc. on the trademark of the name.

smerf

and if you believe this, I got some swamp land up in Canada that I can sell ya

[persia]

You aren't going to drive a daisy chain of half a dozen hi-res monitors with 2 MB of video ram...

[Dandy]

...  
And those who think that Amigas will somehow rise from the ashes to once again surpass the capabilities of PCs need to seek professional help/therapy.

Hmmmmmm - if someone had told me in early 1989 that about half a year later the wall would fall without a single drop of blood being spilled I'd have given him the very same advice.

You know - all my life I was hoping that the wall would fall one day - but noone (including me) really believed it...

(Just to say: Never say never!)

[Dandy]

The Amiga as we all know and love it is long dead as a serious platform. CBM saw to that back in the early 90's.

Hmmmm - how do you define "a serious platform"?
Unix workstations?
Wintel PCs?
Playstations or Wiis?

My POV in this regard is that Unix workstations and Wintel PCs (basically) are professional systems that companies need to get their work done. That's what I'd call "a serious platform".

But since more and more people bought Wintel PCs for their homes (fully understandable, as they needed compatible systems where they could continue to work on their job-related projects at home), they laid the foundation stone for todays quasi monopoly position of the WIntel platform by helping to pay the development costs of that platform that initially aimed at companies.

Playstations and Wiis exist to attract all the gaming kids to pull the money out of their pockets - I see them as "gaming platforms".

For me personally the Amiga platform represents the long forgotten "home computer".
I can't estimate if there is a chance today to "revive" the concept of "home computers".
It would require a powerful, cheap hardware (in the C64/Atari/Amiga-tradition) and a smart OS like AmigaOS 4.x - and most importantly it would have to provide full compatibility to the predominant office apps from the professional camp - be it that it just supports their formats, or that it offers a way to run that professional soft.
On the other hand - who wants to enhance a "home computing" platform today in that way that it's capable to do all the office stuff PLUS what people like to do at home - who has the money for it, given that the "professional systems" of today already underprice the "home computers" from back in the eighties by far and have long surpassed even the capabilities of the most promising of those "home computer" platforms - the Amiga?

Yes - the AmigaOS is by far better understandable and more clearly arranged than Windows from a users POV - but does this weigh out the enormous effort it would require to "revive" the concept of "home computers"?

I don't know...