Ok.. I have been under a rock for the last X amount of years...

[Shadowfax]

...and I'd like to tell you all I've been Commodore fan starting with the Commodore 64. Having said that, I have lost touch with the Commodore Amiga community for many years now. I was a former Commodore/Amiga Repairman back in the day and still have some parts (chips mostly) that have never been used in the older machines.

When the Amiga market started to dry up, (No thanks to Alexander Haig for draining the money out of the company), I archived all my hardware and software. Placing them in a trunk wrapped in plastic.

Only recently have I opened up that trunk after more than 8 years now. I had forgotten what I had till yesterday.
__________________________________________________
2 A-500's (One with a Dataflyer sidecar)
2 A-2000's (Havent cracked open the cases to peer inside yet)
1 A-600 with a PCMCIA card
1 CD-32 with the A-1200 multi-port AGA upgrade hardware
1 CMD Hardrive box
1 Commodore 128
Verious SCSI devices (Drives, CD Roms, Bays, etc.)
And a slew of keyboards, joysticks and other assorted devices and cables.
__________________________________________________

I have found the Amiga Corporate Website, but little is there. What has been happening with Amiga since I've been away in my PC coma?

I saw something about AmigaDE, but the description was vague at best. And what is this AmigaOne all about?

Has Amiga made a comeback somehow?

If so, I want in on it ! (Im so tired of Microsoft and their security patches).

Last thing in me Amiga world was a 56k Dialup and the Internet was mostly NEW. So it was BBS's back then.

Thx !

Steve (Shadowfax)

[Trezzer]

Eyetech have a board out called AmigaOne. It's a PPC-based motherboard and it runs AmigaOS 4, which isn't out yet as such, but a working developer pre-release is, and as far as I understand it will ship with all new boards.

So yes, Amiga is back. I'm having more fun with my A1 and OS4 than I've had with any computer in ages

The name is owned by Amiga Incorporated, the OS is owned by KMOS, the OS is developed by Hyperion.

There ya go

[Kronos]

Well best way to snoop in is with the help of (Win)UAE. Shouldn't be so hard since you should have some legit OS-copies.

Just imagine a miggy running at 1GHz or more (depending on host-CPU) at no extra cost.

The AmigaDE is nothing Amiga-related, just something with "the_Name"-badge, and has been at a complete standstill for ~3 years.

Their are also 2 attempts of creating "next-gen-Amigas", both utilizing a PPC on PC-like mobos. Nothing in the HW that is Amiga-related (and most would argue that as a good point  :-)  ).

The Pegasos is rather expensive (299-499Euro for just the mobo) has on-board sound FW, GBit-net,USB ..... and uses DDR-RAM.
All fitting onto MicroATX. Comes in G3/600 and G4/1000Mhz.

The A1 is insanly priced (sorry no other way to call something starting at ~800Euro) lacks sound, FW and the GBit, uses SDR-RAM on a full size ATX-board. A 800MHz G4 seems to be the only CPU available atm.

The A1 currently runs OS4-pre-dev (or something like that), while the Peg runs MorphOS1.4.2.

MOS1.4.2 is offer compabilty with all old formats, be it 68k or PPC/68k-mixed(+MOS-native offcourse), while OS4 only support 68k and OS4-native atm. MOS is much faster, both running 68k and native SW, is more stable, but lacks a few extras (all of them can be taken from Aminet or similar). OS4 still struggles with a non-JITed EMU and some system-components in 68k, but it also features lost of stuff that was taken from OS3.x plus a native TCP-IP-stack.

And now await both sides coming in and telling you that this&that is allready in beta for the OS of choice, but those should be safely ignored, since rule No.1 in Amiga-land is:

Something that isn't available for joe-6-pack does not exist !!

A bit cynic, but that will help you very much if you decide to stay here  :-o

There are also Amithlon and AROS for X86,but the 1st isn't available anymore  :-x while the 2nd is still faaaaaaar from being useable.

But as I wrote, better stick with UAE for the time being.

[redrumloa]

2 A-2000's (Havent cracked open the cases to peer inside yet)

Egad I hope you removed the battery before storing them! If not open them up and see how bad they have leaked.

1 CMD Hardrive box

Gimme gimme gimme :-D

[Framiga]

Hi Kronos

i really hope that no extra galaxy visitor, will read you post and report it to his people :-)

[Kronos]

@Framiga

WTF ?

[LP]

Kronos wrote:
@Framiga

WTF ?

:lol:

[itix]

What has been happening with Amiga since I've been away in my PC coma?

You missed soap opera :-)

[cecilia]

You missed soap opera

I wish we all had missed that one and that the various "(dick)heads" of companies had done all this public fighting in some other universe.

fortunately, all that nonsense is over and we can just play with our amiga toys in peace now.

get WinUAE from there. I use it and it's way cool!

OS4 just got released on CD and I've gotten a chance to see it in action at a couple of meetings. ImageFX4.5 works on it and I even got ZoneXplorer to work - altho it's the 68k version (so it's slower than the MOS version). but it still WORKS!!!

this is a good time to come back to amiga. welcome!! :lol:

[minator]

This sort of question comes up ever so often so I thought I'd write a generic answer that can be given out, it's not perfect but here goes:


Re-introducing the Amiga

So, you've been away and want to know what's been happening in the Amiga scene?
If so this is for you.

The original Amiga was based on a Motorola 68K processor and a set of custom chips for graphics, sound etc.
Machines based on this technology have not been manufactured since 1996 and things have moved on since then.

As with any popular platform the users have decided to continue with it when the company went bust or did something incredibly stupid (unfortunately both common occurrences in the Amiga world).  For those wanting to get the feeling back there are now several ways of running old and new Amiga software, these range from emulators to not one but two complete platforms.

If you intend to run old A500 / A1200 games you'll need an emulator such as UAE / Amiga Forever.  The other systems can only run Amiga software which does not require the custom chips.


UAE
UAE is an emulator which runs on a variety of different platforms including Windows (WinUAE).
This emulates various types of Amiga including all the old favourites and even includes things like CD32.
You'll need to get hold of the Amiga OS for this.  There are various ways of doing this which usually involve having an original Amiga but your best bet is to just to get the commercial version.


Cloanto's Amiga Forever
This is the said commercial version.  It includes WinUAE, Amiga ROM and disc files and a whole heap of other stuff besides (extensions, applications, games).  It's cheap, easy to use and well recommended.


AROS
AROS (Amiga Research Operating System) is a portable open source OS designed to be compatible with AmigaOS 3.1.
It is designed to be source compatible rather than binary compatible on different platforms so it wont run your amiga favourites on the PC.


New Platforms
There are two entire platforms which have updated the Amiga experience to modern PowerPC CPUs and standard PC expansion cards, neither can natively run orignal titles which require the custom hardware but can solve that with UAE.


AmigaOS 4.0 / AmigaONE (The Red pill)
This is the "official" solution sanctioned by the AmigaOS copyright owners.
AmigaOS 4.0 is a PowerPC native version of the AmigaOS, it is (at time of writing) available as a pre-release, it only runs on the AmigaONE PowerPC motherboard.
There are plans to make it available for Amiga PowerPC cards.
The AmigaONE also support PowerPC Linux.


MorphOS / Pegasos (The Blue Pill)
MorphOS is a PowerPC native OS developed by long time 3rd party Amiga developers.
It can run binaries for AmigaOS 3.x as well as those which require 3rd party extensions.
It currently runs on the Pegasos PowerPC motherboard though an old (limited) beta will run on Amiga PowerPC cards.
There are plans to get it running on Mac systems and possibly on the PC via the PearPC PowerPC emulator.
The Pegasos also support PowerPC Linux and many other Operating Systems are in development.


eBay
You could of course just buy an original.


And finally
The Amiga on-line boards can at times be subject to big flame wars.
Most Amiga users are reasonable prople and get long fine, unfortunately the Amiga community also has a small number of very loud idiots.  While this is true of any on-line community the idiots are for some reason louder in the Amiga community.

[Lo]

Nice post Minator, I was tempted to steal it and add links to all the references. :-o

[blobrana]

Hum,
impressive post even by A.org standards...



-----------
Kronos wrote:
@Framiga

WTF ?
-------------

[jeffimix]

last time I checked though, atleast in US, it seemed that the 1000MHz Pegs and the 800MHz AmigaOnes were a lot closer in price(both in the ~750USD range). Of course 600MHz pegs would be cheaper, and those 600MHz A1SE, but I heard the SE was junk, so I guess peg certainly takes the bottom price point, but at the upper end, they seemed, close.