From what Dave Haynie says, Commodore was going to move to a RISC platform.
And perpetual backwards compatibility rarely occurs.
Most X64 systems have trouble running legacy programs.
What makes you think that if the Amiga had survived it wouldn't be a vastly different system by now?
I agree, it would be vastly different and I also believe that many users would have moved on because of it. I think most people still interested in the platform today got into the Amiga because of the core product that Jay Miner and his team created. Incredible graphics & sound, and a great multitasking OS.
Commodore advanced the product but not the core. Sure they slapped on faster processors, more RAM and more expandability, but that wasn't core to the Amiga - it's not what made the Amiga different. They made marginal improvements to the core (ECS, AGA, etc.) but it was way too little and way too late.
You do realize the the AAA chipset was not meant to be an upgrade, rather it was a replacement.
Understood, but if AAA was released early enough and a substantial enough jump over AGA it may not have mattered to many. Lack of compatibility did not stop most people from moving from C64s to Amigas because the jump was significant. Back then compatibility between significant platform jumps was not as important. I do believe that when AAA was canned and development of Hombre started they were planning on implementing AGA compatibility in some shape or form.
Today compatibility is critical because new software development is virtually non-existant. The Amiga is a retro platform. People like me are interested in it because it's what we grew up with, we loved the software, and loved how the system worked. If you kill compatibility, if you kill the core, you kill the nostalgia.
Your position is not particularly attractive to me.
FPGAs CAN'T approach ASICs in performance.
The only reason that they perform better than a real 68K is that that processor is SO dated.
Right, and from a retro point of view that's all that's needed. If people are happy with a 68020/30/60 when they use their Amigas today they should be ecstatic about something that might exceed the 68060 performance.
Right now, the primary problem I have with OS4 is that it struggles too hard to retain the look, feel, and basic structures of previous versions of Amiga OS.
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So if I were to follow your logic, I would find myself waiting for the fulfillment of fantasy projects that, even if they are produced, would not be competitive.
Personally, I can't see our market expanding without drawing in new users. And legacy hardware has limited appeal to anyone not already familiar with the Amiga.
So the real challenge is not to cater to community members like you, but to make the NG OS' powerful enough to be reasonable substitutes for more mainline hardware.
That's where we're different, and I think many Amiga users differ. Expanding the Amiga to replace the PC is not interesting to me because it is so far behind. For every step the AmigaOne takes everything else takes 20 steps. AmigaOS never had a reasonable implementation of Java or Flash and those technologies are already dated. Modern day computing is a moving target that a small development team working part time cannot keep up with. I can understand the motivation, but for me I'd rather just use a PC than struggle with every day tasks on an Amiga.
I'd rather use my Amiga to play some games, tune my workbench, play with some applications that I never used before - things that I did back in the day. If I want to browse the web, create a PDF, read email, or work on a spreadsheet there are much better tools for the job.
I would never want to replace my PC with a Nintendo Wii U, and I would never want to replace it with my Amiga.
Back in the 80s/90s the draw to using the Amiga instead of the PC was because it was different and BETTER. Nowadays it's just different and way WORSE - different is not sufficient to me to replace my PC.