What will drive the New Amiga?

[stuart]

If you're still reading this...then here's my gem... :roll:

Whilst I do not condone software piracy, :-o I remember that it was a major part of my amiga experience during the 80s and 90s. I used to swap disks with friends at school, the point was to see and play the newest games and demos. There was what seemed an endless supply of new games all the time...I dunno what anyone can make of that, but that's what made amiga (and commodore 64 for that matter) fun.

getting to more honourable pursuits... The exciting part of watching demos was seeing how cleverly the chips had been programmed and what impressive results were achieved.

 :banana: I think this level of coding expertise can still be expressed through modern amigas because even though you cannot anticipate what hardware a person will have on their system, there are standards and a handful of chip manufacturers that actually limits us to a common RANGE of chips to program just like was done on the custom chips of old...

:argue: This brings me to another point about amiga that can draw us through to success - We have the opportunity to have a platform that can utilise the hardware on graphic and audio cards etc to much greater detail than PCs and Macs do...can't we?

VR is another area the amiga could excell at. It's still not an 'everage joe' product yet... ;-)

:angel: I hope that Amiga always stands for fast, small, reliable, acurate codes. The Amiga will never be exactly the same as what it was (is) but we can bring with us the best parts and work on the bits that are lacking...cant we?

I apologise that my thoughts are not fully thought through, but I'm at work and only have a few minutes to post...

Cheers, Stu.  :pint:

[stuart]

It seems the point is to get people to want one, I wanted those demos and games... I remember when some coders managed to get sprites in the border of a commodore64 screen. That was unheard of, but towards the end of the '64s reign there were coders out there that were clever enough to squeeze out some amazing capabilites from their chosen hardware like extra colours, hi-res with no border and border sprites. Many of those coders moved to Amiga (I'm no historian, I just assume that many people took the path from C64 to Amiga - others didn't) and produced some outstanding audio visual effects on those machines as well. (Most demos I ran crashed my machine because it didn't have the same memory config, or chipset or other setting just right - so why does it matter if that happens now) but the ones that did were amazing. My point is we have that ingenious spirit as part of Amiga legacy. :pint:

@bhogget - you might be right - I'm talking about pixie dust, but to start with, for one small aspect of this discussion - if driver coders can produce software that really pushes the hardware to it's limits, ie get them to run faster, or a few more colours, or more polygons per second, or an extra voice because they really liked and studied the hardware and were encouraged to out-do their coleagues and gained status for their work, then there's the amiga advantage right there.
You ask how to get chip makers to notice...How is up to Amiga the company (or KCOW or whoever it is these days) to gain support, but even lunatic :insane: individuals who might go and ask a company for datasheets of their chips so they can learn to program them themselves can do that if they want to ...blah blah blah...

[stuart]

Yep, a silent Amiga is very cool. Who's turned on their PC at night and thought they'd wake the neighbours! :pissed: :nervous:

:pint: There are lots of little things that can be put together to in the amiga form that will make an amiga system stand out from the crowd, yes, yes, a silent case can be put onto any PC, there will always be similarities between species of computers.

:juggler: It appears to me that the first full amiga systems are going to be DIY jobs anyway.

Cheers, Stu.

[stuart]

Wayne said: Most people, like myself, leave their machines on 24/7 so their is no waiting. A few extra seconds booting isn't going to really matter to the average person, ...

I'd say most people turn their PC off at night, who's right? who's wrong? it doesn't matter, a faster booting PC is better for those who wait for it to boot and irrelevent to those who leave it on, so therefore it's a good inclusion to the amiga spec because it can only be a benefit. ;-)

Cheers Stu.

[stuart]

:pint: I read somewhere that some motherboard makers were approached by IBM because IBM wants to expand its PowerPC line and so that may herald cheaper motherboards and chips and then...cheaper PCs and also possibly settop boxes capable of running AOS. If those of us that are working on amiga projects can keep going and get some results, if AOS is sent to market again then in a couple to a few years we'll have a lot more people playing. and maybe some of us can even earn a crust from our beloved amiga.

I'd just laugh my guts up if i went into K-Mart and saw amigas on the shelf again! - next to the DVD players. :roflmao:

Cheers, Stu.