ACube and A-EON announce One Vision on future Amiga co-operation

[Rob]

What does the ARM CPU on the Minimig+ do?

Probably the same features as the Arm board on the standard Minimig.

[Rob]

and what does the ARM CPU on the standard Minimig do?

I thought it was all done in the FPGA but it seems not.

The ARM controller fits in place of the PIC that loads the Minimig BIN file into the FPGA.  I think there may be a few feature's not listed below.

From Acube's site;

The ARM controller will enhance your Amiga hardware emulation experience! It gives your Minimig all these new features:
- emulates four floppy drives
- adds write support to harddrive and floppy disks
- allow increase of the CPU speed from 7.09 to 49.63 MHz with a 4kb zero waitstate cpu cache
- allows usage of long floppy file names
- allows usage of directories on the SD card
- allows unlimited number of files by directory
- support for 2 HDF files
- fast firmware boot

https://acube-systemsbiz.serversicuro.it/shop/en/82-arm-controller.html

[Rob]

Price is matter of quantities. Hope with aeon support could help with that, producing low end PPC mobos in china would cost about 30€ per mobo.

But would 10 000 OS4 capable mobos sell?

I would like to see threads like this without x86 fantasies and whining

If you have something produced in large quantities you don't have to go to China for low prices.  Raspberrry Pi production took place about 15 miles away from AmigaKit.

[Rob]

Which Raspberry Pi?
I know of several Chinese versions.

The ones manufactured by Sony UK in Pencoed.

[Rob]

I believe the X1000 punctured the hopes some people might have had about a growing or sustainable future for the OS4 platform, with more users and more developers coming in. The X1000 communicated that there is no hope of this anymore, it was simply an impossible machine to build any kind of future on. Some people have been finding a new home in MorphOS (lots of new MorphOS users has been spotted on MorphZone and other Amiga related web sites the last year(s)) which of course is good, but a great deal silently left altogether instead, which is bad. Even if the "Amiga NG" community is kind of divided into three factions (plus a "68k retro"), I don't think it's as divided as you try to make it sound, that each faction would be isolated from the others. Most MorphOS users are Amigans since long, and care for the entire platform. And a diminishing OS4 faction will mean that the total possible consumers of cross-ported Amiga SW decreases, affecting those developers who is kind enough to care for all factions when they develop/port their SW, like Airsoftsoftwair/Hollywood, effectively meaning that it gets less and less attractive to develop for Amiga as a whole. I'm also thinking of bigger projects that would really benefit of being cross-faction within this tiny "NG" community, like web browsers, office suits, Dopus Magellan, etc. IMHO it would probably have been easier to raise the Odyssey bounty three years ago (had Odyssey been equally mature back then as it is today of course) and you could probably have raised more money as well. In three years from now, it will be even more difficult than it is today. A decreasing total size of "Amiga NG" can never be good. And this is what A-eon (together with Hyperion's no-sign-of-life development pace) does, IMHO.

In the last few years I've seen quite a few people buy OS4 systems including the X1000 who had either never owned an Amiga before, had been away from the scene for a long time or had simply been holding off for some time.  That's just the people who choose to announce.

I think that the Odyssey bounty would have happened a lot quicker if there hadn't already been the Timberwolf bounty.  I guess a lot of people who donated to that maybe don't want to pay again for another browser and are hoping for something better from now with talk of Steve Solie taking over the project and getting more people involved.

[Rob]

Yeah I know there are a few people who was new to both the X1000 and OS4 when they bought one, like AmigaDave, AmigaNG, clusteruk, darkon_turas, gerograph, Haranguer, ggw, klx300r, musa, otakui, sam, Tuxxl, VingtTrois, Zenzizenzizenzic. Probably a few more, right (feel free to add the others you know about)?

And then of course we have VOX, who (according to his friend djnick) paid €3600/$4850 (which equals to 10 months full time salary in Serbia (almost a full year's worth of payment(!))) for his X1000, and to manage the purchase he put himself in debt until 2018 (which is still kind of an aggressive payment plan for 10 months of full time salary IMHO, when you still have a life to live with all those day-to-day expenses like food and rent and the usual bills), and then he got banned from Hyperion's support for asking too many questions about the X1000 driver situation, he seems to be banned from all other sites as well, but on moobunny he talks about class action lawsuits now.

And even if you manage to double the list above, we are still counting in the range of tens of people. That's virtually nothing. And it still isn't a sign of platform growth at all, you would have to count those who left as well! And you don't have to do any counting at all to understand how HW this expensive (with that performance) can't create any real platform growth whatsoever, it's just a matter of common sense.

I think personally think Vox was crazy to get into such a debt to get an X1000.  I don't think Vox was banned for simply asking questions but the manner in which he was making complaints.  Whether it was right or wrong to ban him I will not be the judge of but regarding complaints, he was aware of the pace of OS4 development and like someone else said, he can't expect the pace to suddenly increase just because he spent a small fortune to get one.

Counting people who have a system is irrelevant since many people simply don't make it known.

As for growth I guess it is a case of wait and see what happens.  There were people that were saying that X1000 wouldn't make it out of the door, that it only ship with Linux and Trevor would cut and run etc etc but by all account it has sold very well considering the seemingly small market and high price.  Acube are still around too and the Sam460 is there third product aimed at OS4.  All this is years after Bill Buck said that the Amiga PPC market was saturated.

I think there is still a lot to be positive about in the Amiga scene whether 68k or NG with plenty going on.  It's just some people prefer to focus on the negative.

[Rob]

@takemehomegrandma


In reality, there are hundreds of new X1000 users, I am sure you do not think three consumer production batches constitute a few dozen boards?

The AmigaOne X1000 is still current, still on sale and has kept us very busy the last 18 months with assembly.

I can confirm that on the 4 or 5 times I have visited AmigaKit since X1000 production began that there has always been a number of X1000 systems being built and others ready to ship.  It's certainly been keeping Chris busy with all the system builds.  I guess there is a reason why other dealers now have the X1000 on sale.

[Rob]

You can count on Amigans to complain whether they get what they want or not.

OK, TMHGM, I WILL purchase an X2000 (or whatever it is called).
Where do I sign?

Maybe if you contact Trevor you can get on the list for the beta program if it isn't already oversubscribed.

[Rob]

Of course not, but if you pay attention and follow the discussion in this thread to which you responded, the point was what the X1000 did to *grow the platform*, meaning attracting people *from outside* the Amiga community, or at least outside the OS4 community. In this context, people already using OS4 doesn't count. And in this context, the question is also how many *left* because of the fact that the "Amiga future" was positioned way out of their reach, and they felt that there is no hope of a future (or that the risk is way too high) when the future builds on $3,000+ machines with ancient (in computer evolution terms) performance? Surely not even you can think that this *hasn't* taken its toll?

After I bought my X1000 somebody got a complete AmigaONE XE G4 1GHz system with 1GB ram 2 video cards, 320GB HD and a DVD rewriter for just over£400 IIRC.  Does the guy who bought it count as a new user?

Remember while some people might horde their old systems others sell their old system putting cheaper hardware onto the market and thus growing the users base.