Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Phantom on July 24, 2007, 05:26:26 AM
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According that I still have not a new Amiga motherboard to run AmigaOS 4.0, and after reading about the low and hi-end Amigas from ACK and Amiga Inc, I am in deeply thoughts.
Is this a fake announcement from Amiga Inc, just to make me and other people to wait for another long time when these machines will be for sale, or it's just a typical announcement from Amiga Inc (which it means nothing after all)?
I am very confused (and believe me I am still searching for an Amiga motherboard to run AmigaOS 4.0 since 2005 :P)
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@Phantom
Well, if I may modify your sig a little....
"We don't sell computers, we sell lies" - Amiga Inc.
Uh, I hope that answers your question. :-D
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Time to kill some more horses! :horse: :horse:
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Far as I'm concerned, there haven't been any Amigas made since Escom went under. Any new "Amiga" will probably be an Amiga in name only... though if they can run AmigaOS that should count for something, I suppose, unlike the name-pirates selling PC gaming systems under the Commodore brand.
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@murple
What makes a computer an Amioga
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Rob wrote:
@murple
What makes a computer an Amioga
A machine with:
1 - Low memory foot print.
2 - fast with that low memory foot print.
3 - a OS that doesn't take 500gig for the hd..
4 - Custom chips that allow "True" Multitasking.
Some people are dreaming if they think a new machine is going to be here any time soon. How long has it been since they last got made?
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Rob wrote:
@murple
What makes a computer an Amiga
Depends on who you ask. Personally, I call a modern Amiga a computer which:
- is sold with a copy of AmigaOS (which must be compiled from, or at least been derived fron the original AmigaOS sources) which runs natively
- runs most of the OS-friendly software for 68k Amigas made from 10 years ago until today (no need to natively support the old non-DOS games, there are already emulators for that)
- it shouldn't be a PC (i.e. a x86 machine using BIOS as its firmware) or a Mac (x86 or PPC)
Still, I call Pegasos machines running MorphOS Amigas, for their high level of compatibility, while I don't fell I'd call Amiga a PC running AROS native, rather a machine running an AmigaOS clone.
IMHO, of course.
Varthall
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vk3heg:
A machine with:
1 - Low memory foot print.
2 - fast with that low memory foot print.
3 - a OS that doesn't take 500gig for the hd..
4 - Custom chips that allow "True" Multitasking.
The first three have nothing to do with hardware. The forth disregards the fact that every PC has a chipset far more advanced than anything the Amiga ever was, complete with a memory controller and lots of independent busses.
Could we stop obsessing over specs and think about functionality?
It also makes me sick to hear people herald PPC over x86. In case anyone hasn't noticed, the CPU alone has never been a very important thing in the Amiga. I don't care what CPU is inside, because the GPU and chipset will be doing most of the hard work.
For me, the Amiga was special because:
1 - It didn't forcibly hide the nuts and bolts from the user, but avoided needless exposure.
2 - It has multiple interface choices, with an elegant balance between the CLI and GUI. Linux totally fails at this.
3 - Like Windows, it is document centric. Many other OSes at the time were highly application centric.
4 - It is utilitarian and uncluttered.
5 - It is responsive.
6 - Prefs were stored in the RAM disk, so you could use different settings in a session, and not have to commit those changes.
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One problem with the Amiga is that the hardware hasn't really progressed over the last lot of years. OK there are loads of addon boards to help with this but in general the basic Amiga hasn't changed cause the companies died.
If you take the PC market, its been progressing nicely with updates across the range of hardware. A modern PC will not run software of 10years ago but this isn't seen as a problem as the hardware and software have both progressed together.
Since this hasn't happened with the amiga, if a new Amiga 74000 was to be released with new spanking 2ghz cpu 4gb ram, 3tb hd etc i.e. greatly faster than what we all currently have then I think it would be in no way compatible with current software as the software is written around the hardware. This is proven in games were you add your accelerator board and the game doubles in speed. (same with old DOS games, you try wing commander on a modern pc) the games were written to the hardware. If the hardware is updated and even if they ran they would not be playable without patching of some sort. Applications would be that much of a problem as they can be updated easy enough but they would all need to be new versions and wouldn't be backwards compatible. But lets face it that the Amiga is remembered alot for its classic games (or I remember it that way) which would in no way work.
I think there is to much of a technology gap now for the Amiga to come back rocking the world again. Just gotta wonder how many years it will be before the last Amiga mobo finally dies.
Not so sure all that makes sence but you know what I mean.
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If you consider an Amiga a machine that hasn't some sort of bios, the the Amiga ONe is automatically discarded, as the Uboot is a open source kernel loader developed before the A1, so by your definition it is a PC and not an Amiga.
Classic games wont work on aros as well they don't work on the A1 with os4 without the aid of UAE.
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_ThEcRoW wrote:
If you consider an Amiga a machine that hasn't some sort of bios, the the Amiga ONe is automatically discarded, as the Uboot is a open source kernel loader developed before the A1, so by your definition it is a PC and not an Amiga.
The AmigaOne's firmware isn't BIOS, nor it is BIOS compatible. I was referring to the specific BIOS used on PCs, not to a generic firmware: the BIOS is just one type of firmware, as is UBoot or OpenFirmware.
Classic games wont work on aros as well they don't work on the A1 with os4 without the aid of UAE.
Correct.
Varthall
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Is this a fake announcement from Amiga Inc, just to make me and other people to wait for another long time when these machines will be for sale, or it's just a typical announcement from Amiga Inc (which it means nothing after all)?
It's not a fake in the sense that it *is* an announcment, but the stuff mentioned in the announcement is all fake.
But don't take my word for it. The first deliverables are due "Summer 2007". Check back when Fall arrives to find out where you can by the announced hardware. Unless pigs are flying around by then, you won't be able to make such a purchase.
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@Phantom
These are MY OPINIONS. Reality may be different.
IMHO, the timing of this announcement and some other announcements is the key. These announcements were made public just before Amiga Inc publicly cancelled the agreement with Hyperion and pressed for litigation in the courts.
IMHO, the hardware announcement was one of several announcements made by Amiga Inc. to backup the claims Amiga Inc. would be making in its preliminary court documents.
IMHO, this was simply theatrics on the part of Amiga Inc., waltz onto center stage and then sue Hyperion.
However, there is another party to the hardware announcement, and that is ACK Software Controls.
For me, this is where it gets tricky.
While I do not believe Amiga Inc., I'm not so sure about ACK Software Controls.
Even though many people are skeptical of ACK, I am still willing to give ACK the benefit of the doubt. I do believe that Adam has worked on hardware and that he has run into issues with the licenses. I do not know if the announced products exist.
IMHO, we will not see any new hardware bundled with AmigaOS4 until the court case is settled. If ACK goes ahead, he will be sued by Hyperion (and maybe even Amiga Inc. or Itec/KMOS). If ACube goes ahead, they will be sued by Amiga Inc. (and maybe Itec/KMOS).
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redfox
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What an Amiga is is NOT a matter of opinion.
no matter what anyone thinks an A1200 is............an A1200 is still an A1200 with whatever specs it has.
An Amiga is definitely a Machine with custom chips...........this is where everyone's head gets confused by the word: Custom Chips. No one is talking Fat Agnus, Denise and Paula here........those are obviously outdated...........A modern Amiga (A REAL Amiga) would be a Machine with NEW modern Custom Chips, capable of excellent gaming better than X-Box 360 and PS3, yet a full blown computer.... it's that simple. Picture a PS3 but with a Keyboard and Workbench 3.9 or OS4 if you will. PS3 is the closest thing on this planet to a REAL Amiga that is left.
AmigaONES are NOT Amigas. They are PPC clones. While a New Amiga can contain PPC chips.......it will only truly be an Amiga if it had Custom chips, and was unique and was manufactured inhouse by Amiga Inc themselves.
if Amiga Inc allows other Amiga Clones to be made, well then those would be real Amigas too, but just Clones of Amigas. I am fine with that. Just as Panasonic made Nintento Game Cubes, this would be the same idea here.
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leirbag28 wrote:
What an Amiga is is NOT a matter of opinion.
no matter what anyone thinks an A1200 is............an A1200 is still an A1200 with whatever specs it has.
There's no question about what Amigas were in the past. What differs in opinion is what are today's Amigas (or if there are any). This IMHO all depends on how everyone experiences/have experienced the Amiga, and what makes feel them it's unique. Some feel that Amiga was unique because of its hardware, some others feel the OS alone was more important, and others think the philosophy behind AmigaOS was the most important part.
Varthall
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I'd say an Amiga is a computer with a hardware design developed from the original Amiga and running (or at least capable of running) an OS developed from the original Amiga OS, and which is capable of running most software (allowing for differences in OCS/ECS/AGA) written for the classic Amigas without having to run an Amiga emulator. So, as far as I'm concerned that means only the machines made by Commodore and Escom, and of course the pre-Commodore development systems (Joe Pillow) built by Amiga.
The OS part of it is a bit fuzzy... a real Amiga needs to have the hardware part of the OS (KickStart ROMs), but while they generally run the Amiga OS (Workbench) they can run other OSes like Amiga Unix, Linux, or even the various custom "OSes" that some NDOS: game/demo floppies use.
If some company were to go back and try to develop a new system by updating/extending the old hardware design which was backwards compatible with Amiga software including the OS, that would kick ass. I doubt it will ever happen though.
The companies calling themselves Amiga post-Escom are just people buying and exploiting a name, selling products with almost no connection to the original. Say you have a good friend named Joe. You really like Joe, he's a reliable and interesting guy. Joe gets drunk and jumps off a 20 storey building to his death. Bob is walking down the street and sees the remains of Joe's body bleeding on the sidewalk. Bob whips out a hunting knife and skins Joe, removing his skin and leaving the bloody rotting carcass on the sidewalk. Bob then makes a suit out of Joe's skin and shows up at your house saying "Hi, I'm Joe. Let me come in and hang out with you." That's pretty much what Amiga Inc. is today.
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Waccoon wrote:
2 - It has multiple interface choices, with an elegant balance between the CLI and GUI. Linux totally fails at this.
I'd have to strongly disagree there. A well designed Linux system has a very elegant CLI/GUI balance/interaction. In many ways it surpasses AmigaOS in that regard. However, a poorly designed Linux system can ruin this. Someone who is very familiar with unix can set up a fantastic balanced system, and for people who arent gurus, these days there are a good number of distributions which are set up nicely in this sense... Fedora, Ubuntu, and others do a good job of setting things up for newbies. You may need to look at a few distros to find one you like.
For what its worth, as configurable as Linux and X are, I suspect someone could set up a Linux system that does an excellent imitation of AmigaOS as far as the UI look and feel. You're not likely to be able to do that with Windows or Mac, since those systems both pretty much force you into a narrow interface design with only limited customizability.
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Yeah, what is a 21st Century Amiga? What's the point of custom chips when you have graphics cards now with a minimum of 256 Mb and running up to a gigabyte onboard? Can Amiga build something to compete with a ATI FireGL V7350 1GB workstation graphics card? They need to leave the graphics to the experts.
Amiga also need to move to intel/AMD multiple cores. Apple realised that, when you are small you can't push the manufacturers, they follow their own agenda. IBM PowerPC will never produce a high end laptop chip 'cause the money is in the game stations. Intel & AMD are drive by computer needs.
The computer industry has matured a great deal, it's hard for an Amiga to make a mark, there's no modern software, Toaster won't impress Final Cut users, for example. And video is digital nowadays anyway and HD. You need an application that an Amiga does better than a PC or Mac, most of the really good alternative programmers are in Linux and they can't build a killer app, how can Amiga with it's $25,000 OS and $10,000,000 stadium do it?
Amiga can probably stand as retro, the Minimig, if real, is a great step in that direction, small is good. But again outside of retro what will bring people back? A cute OS? I spend all of 10 minutes a week worrying about my OS, I use it to load programs. I code in Dreamweaver and test it in Safari. Who cares what the OS is or does. Yeah I'll open a terminal to use grep once in a while but not that often.
Harware development is expensive, ACK is one person, and he can't even deliver a $499 system that wouldn't have been state of the art in 2000. Sadly there's no way forward, Amiga is an outsourcing company, that's it. Time to move along and remember the Amiga as it was, cutting edge and building the future, this sad rump in the corner bears it's name but that's it.
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unite wrote:
A modern PC will not run software of 10years ago but this isn't seen as a problem as the hardware and software have both progressed together.
Not exactly true. You can run plenty of very old PC programs on a modern Windows PC. In the case of some old DOS games/apps where timing is essential, modern CPUs may run far too fast, but you can run a program to slow the CPU... similar to the Degrader you could use on Amiga 1200/4000 systems to run old A1000/500 games.
I think there is to much of a technology gap now for the Amiga to come back rocking the world again. Just gotta wonder how many years it will be before the last Amiga mobo finally dies.
Sadly, I agree. Say somebody with the rights to Amiga picked up the development of the Amiga where it left off, with the AGAs in production and the AAAs in early testing. Someone could probably finish off a functional AAA motherboard, and then have a system that would've been cutting edge 15 years ago. Someone probably could go from there, or even from the AGA design, incorporate the advancements made by add on hardware (accelerators, PCI busses, USB cards, etc) and make something cool which some retrogeeks would buy. Probably not enough to justify the expense. A company with tons of money and a large R&D team could probably try and rapidly evolve this into a modern system. But I dont think enough market share exists to make that reasonable. With Macs now running on PC hardware and with high end server systems being replaced by powerful Linux clusters, we're rapidly heading into a world of a single computer architecture centered around Intel and Intel clones.
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Phantom wrote:
According that I still have not a new Amiga motherboard to run AmigaOS 4.0, and after reading about the low and hi-end Amigas from ACK and Amiga Inc, I am in deeply thoughts.
Is this a fake announcement from Amiga Inc, just to make me and other people to wait for another long time when these machines will be for sale, or it's just a typical announcement from Amiga Inc (which it means nothing after all)?
I am very confused (and believe me I am still searching for an Amiga motherboard to run AmigaOS 4.0 since 2005 :P)
The boards themselves arent hoaxes, they are basically the test boards from Amigas new PPC manufacturer. Will the boards actually show up with 4.0? Thats a bigger question, there is alot of issues with the lawsuit that may make that very likely or very unlikely to occur. If AI(D) wins the sourcecode, licenses etc, its very likely we will see new PPC boards, if Hyperion wins we'll likely only see SAM 440 and later a PS3 port. (personally the PS3 port is the clever idea).
-Tig
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Say you have a good friend named Joe. You really like Joe, he's a reliable and interesting guy. Joe gets drunk and jumps off a 20 storey building to his death. Bob is walking down the street and sees the remains of Joe's body bleeding on the sidewalk. Bob whips out a hunting knife and skins Joe, removing his skin and leaving the bloody rotting carcass on the sidewalk. Bob then makes a suit out of Joe's skin and shows up at your house saying "Hi, I'm Joe. Let me come in and hang out with you." That's pretty much what Amiga Inc. is today.
@murple: Thanks!! LMAO!!!
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@ Murple
One of the best analogies (splling?) I have heard, and fits exactly 1 million% to the Amiga situation.
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Rob wrote:
@murple
What makes a computer an Amioga
what a load of b*ll*cks in some of these answers... it should be easy... "Amiga was FUN..." and new stuff should be FUN...
Tom
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Sucks, dont it? I wonder what it'd take to get some company to start making replacement parts for vintage machines. Seeing what they sell for on ebay, there's gotta be enough money in it for a small cottage industry. Itd have to do lots of things and not get too specialized to one machine... but itd kick ass if someone could make and sell stuff like new flicker fixes for Amigas, replacement chips for custom Amiga ICs, replacement Commodore 64 SID, VID, PLA and other chips (some guy in Canada is already making new PLA chips), and parts for like old Atari 2600s, etc. That way at least we could count on keeping our OLD Amigas working for many more years, and not have to worry about when parts just arent available anymore because the last SID or Denise chip just went up in smoke.
I think the hardest part would be getting the legal rights to sell them... stupid patent laws.
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Who cares about patent laws? What's good old China for?
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4 - Custom chips that allow "True" Multitasking.
Like a GPU? :-P
Most computers today have some sort of custom chipset. The problem is that these chips are not used properly by todays OSes.
But anyways.. Who in reality decides what makes an Amiga, is the owner. If they want the ack or whatever to be an Amiga, then it will, no matter how we feel about the issue.
Not that it will ever be released anyways..
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When you say it's not used properly by todays OSes you certainly mean Windows,aren't you:) ?
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Blinx123 wrote:
When you say it's not used properly by todays OSes you certainly mean Windows,aren't you:) ?
Windows, linux, osx and so on..
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I wouldn't say, Linux and MacOSX can't handle fast multitasking. Especially MacOSX is a very fast OS,thats because of the Darwin Core,whichs some kind of Unix predecessor.
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Darwin is a derivative of NetBSD or FreeBSD, I think. Forget which. There are a few free BSD flavors for PC hardware, and they're generally pretty sturdy, fast, secure and work great for servers. Kinda suck from a desktop user perspective, in my opinion, but lots of people like them. I dont know how the modified Mac version runs with all the extra crap they piled on it.
I can say Linux works damn fast at multitasking, though. Perhaps the poster who claimed otherwise was trying to run KDE and Firefox and a few Java apps while running Linux on a 486... but on a normal modern machine running typical software, it multitasks spectacularly.
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@Tomas
Tomas wrote:
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But anyways.. Who in reality decides what makes an Amiga, is the owner. If they want the ack or whatever to be an Amiga, then it will, no matter how we feel about the issue.
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Hmmmm - I'd rather say we as the potential buyers decide if we take the owners concept (it being an Amiga) or not.
If we buy that damn thing, then we accept it as an Amiga - if we don't buy it, who else would?
Who else would care?
So I'd say we decide...
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Do yourself a favour and buy an EFIKA with MorphOS when it comes out. This will give you a better Amiga experience than OS4 - runs more 68k software and has much more native software and linux ports. Ainc is pipe dreams and this legal case will last a long time..
magnetic
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I too have found MOS to be the next step from AOS...
many good programmers work on MOS and it has stuff like MUI, AHI, Poseidon,CGX5, warpOS/3D support....
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many good programmers work on MOS and it has stuff like MUI, AHI, Poseidon,CGX5, warpOS/3D support....
Isn't it ironic that support for Hyperion's own Warp3D was dropped in OS4 "final" due to incompatibility issues, while it runs fine under Morphos? :lol:
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Rob wrote:
What makes a computer an Amioga
Being an Amiga user who have been in the scene for a long time and knowing the old users opinions about why they used an Amiga (they have long stopped using Amiga) here are few things that comes to my mind.
1) You can start programming without learning lots of stuff.
2) You have access to knowledge and friendship of many people that knows and likes the hardware and the OS.
3) You have smooth scrolling.
4) You have access to amateur video editing, module composing, image processing software. This leads to things like demos in which people are free because of the amateur spirit unlike doing things on a PC which automaticly programs people's mind to produce a wannabe professional looking things without proper education and talent and experience.
5) The custom chips are unique which leads the users and programmers to do things "original" which leads to things like demos that are always winner demos.
6) In conclusion if you can call a computer a toy which even dragging screens is going to give you the "joy" and each time you turn it on, you are eager for it to boot this computer is an Amiga.