Ok, I finally got around to knocking the dust off my old Amigas, sold many spare parts like CPU upgrades, Nic cards, etc.
Out of it I have 2 nice A3000s, an A4000, and a nicely equipped A1200.
But I had some knee jerk reactions that had me scratching my head.
When I powered up the first A3000, it was equipped with the latest OS, the Cyberstorm 060/50, the Cybervision 64/3D, and about 128mb cyberram, 16mb mobo ram, and 4mb on the scsi card. Some utils like Dopus WB replacement, PFS, executive, etc. Not a bad machine. Not modern, but not bad.
But after 5 minutes of using it, I was like DAMN! this sucker is responsive as all hell. After 2 years of Mac OS X and Linux, this sucker is really really smooth. The starting and stoping of apps is great, the seat of the pants action was head and shoulders better than the painfully slow Mandrake AMD 1700+ system I have or the G4 mac on my main desktop.
SO then I loaded up the apps. Web browsers, DTPs, worpros, spreadsheets.
What I noticed was that it wasn't the machine or OS that was bad, but the Apps that SUCKED!!!!!
Now I read the threads that after all the development on AOS 4, the best I can get is a PPC "feeling" like a fast '060. Well I have that, so what's the exercise for?
Now, I'm not hatng on the PPC move, in fact, I'm loving it, but it seems to me that all this talk of memory protection, blah blah blah, we're missing the point that it's the application that we really need and an updrade to the APIs for these applications.
Now with that said, is it the transition to PPC that is necessary to get good apps, was the OS the problem, and can the apps have been improved with just a new OS?
I hate the fact that I have such a nice machine in front of me, but I have to face the fact that such a nice and responsive machine will never benefit from another OS updgrade or improved apps unless I jump to a new platform to get the exact same '060 feel.
Now the REAL million dollar question that begs is, does the AOS 4 and PPC upgrade really finally spell the true end of the current Amigas, or will people continue to support the older stuff once the new comes out.
I do understand why people held onto their dollars until the solid direction was laid out, but I think that if more people had upgraded from a crappy 030 1200 to a full on kit with video and 060 upgrade, we might have seen that we already had nice firepower for decent apps and supported their development via purchases as opposed to waiting for the PPC saviour.
Let's not forgt that an 060 has the basic horepower of a 100mhz pentium which ain't that bad expecially considering how wicked quick our OS is.
So unless people start re-investing in their current Amigas in tandem to the new, the only thing you'll be keeping from the good 'ole days is the software and the hardware will become scrap with a final OS.
Babble mode off......