Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: rednova on March 19, 2008, 11:51:14 PM
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Hi all:
Forgive my ignorance, but:
what the hell is an amiga one?
I am a few months new to this forum, so I do not know what the A1 is, I just saw it mentioned here -I was away from amiga world for years-.
Is not it just a pc clone with amiga emulation software?
Pls explain!!!
rednova
-mobilis in mobile-
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It was an ill fated attempt to get the Amiga a POWER PC based motherboard to run os4 and beyond. A number of them were produced but a final version of Amiga 0s4 was never released.
Finally OS4 gets released.... but only for Amigas with phase 5 PPC Turboboards. Yes, you read correctly...
For whatever reasons current boards like the Sam440 or Efika are not allowed to run OS4.
The boarsd are no longer made and there is little hope of getting anymore PowePC based Amigas. But you never know, things can turn around.. Or not...
Such is the pace of the Amiga...
if you're ever sick in bed with a laptop and hours to kill, I suggest you google it and find the colorful story online.
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@crom00
OS4 final was released for the A1 long before the classic version was.
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The AmigaOne SE, AmigaOneXE and uA1 were all Teron reference boards re-branded by having a boing sticker slapped on it and the price marked up ~300%. After much disinformation by certain individuals and companies, much infighting occurred in the community for a long time over the reliability and performance of these boards.
History has proved these boards to be of very poor quality by most accounts. I personally would strongly recommend you avoid buying a 2nd hand board.
-edit-
Re-worded to sound less inflammatory.
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Saddest thing is, I have a 1GB RAM stick that works in the A1...
any takers? 8)
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LMAO.
That is a mighty fine question.
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@rednova
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne
I own a MicroA1-C with IBM PPC 750GX CPU and 256MB of RAM.
Currently running AmigaOS 4.0 July 2007 Update (the last public update for A1 users).
The MicroA1-C has onboard Radeon 7000 graphics, onboard audio, onboard ethernet port, onboard IDE disk drive interfaces, onboard USB, onboard serial port, onboard parallel port and one PCI expansion slot. I use a P/S2 keyboard and P/S2 mouse.
I would have to agree with redrumloa. There are lots of users who have encountered untold grief and difficulties with their boards and consider the boards to be total crap.
However, I was one of the lucky ones, who had a usable system right from the start.
Of course, I've had my share of issues with old software, software bugs, config issues, issues burning CD-RW discs, and random glitches with USB mass storage devices. Most of these problems have been solved and my system is very stable now. Some of the problems were bugs that were weeded out with newer releases. On the other hand, my issues with burning CD-RW discs appear to be related to my LiteON combo drive. Through trial and error, I discovered it writes more successfully if I use high speed CD-RW discs or high speed CD-R discs.
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redfox
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Onboard onboard onboard. Therein lies the death of any expandable computer. Get all that obsoletable stuff OFFboard and now your expandable computer is more future-proof.
Without OS4, even OCS, ECS, and AGA can be a serious burden to those of us with graphic cards!
I had hoped to get a still working A1 for my girlfriend so she could run OS4, since she had so many problems with UAE a la eXPee. Well, now she has a A2000/060/50, which is just fine. Too bad it's turned off 90% of the time and not rendering 24/7! (yet ;-) )
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I'd say it's a PC pretending to be an Amiga but I will get plenty of abuse for saying that... =/
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@redrumloa
Completely agree, they have bugger all to do with an Amiga, they must be the worst put together piece of crap I've ever encountered and should be avoided at all costs.
AmigaOne = CRAP!
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redrumloa wrote:
The AmigaOne SE, AmigaOneXE and uA1 were all Teron reference boards re-branded by having a boing sticker slapped on it and the price marked up ~300%. After much disinformation by certain individuals and companies, much infighting occurred in the community for a long time over the reliability and performance of these boards.
History has proved these boards to be among the worst, if not the worst consumer product of all time. Avoid these 2nd hand boards at all costs, total garbage.
Dude I have some Cyrix based packard bell P1 clones I'd like to show you...!
:-o
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B00tDisk wrote:
Dude I have some Cyrix based packard bell P1 clones I'd like to show you...!
:-o
I had a Compaq Presario with a M2 too! :destroy:
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Not allowed? Is there some sort of OS4 Fairy that stops them?
Crom00 wrote:
For whatever reasons current boards like the Sam440 or Efika are not allowed to run OS4.
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@persia
Sam440 and Efika are not licensed to use OS4.
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redfox
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B00tDisk wrote:
Dude I have some Cyrix based packard bell P1 clones I'd like to show you...!
:-o
:lol:
Oh yeah, Packard Bell was bad back then!! But really, I still think the AmigaOne takes the crown.
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On the other hand, OS4 is a joy to use and it is what I have always dreamt AmigaOS to be. This is one of the reasons why I don't regret having bought my AmigaOne.
Varthall
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persia wrote:
Not allowed? Is there some sort of OS4 Fairy that stops them?
Actually yes there is... and the fairy's name is AmigaInc. :crazy:
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The A1 is ... controversial. :)
However, three important facts:
1) It's the fastest and stablest way of running AmigaOS 4 by far.
2) There's no way you're having mine because it's far too nice a machine; AOS 4 runs beautifully on it and I've had zero troubles whatsoever with it.
3) See 2). It's important enough to mention twice.
So you can listen to people without them moan and gripe all you like, fact is you can't get one because hardly anyone wants to sell them. That's a bit strange for what is apparently "the worst consumer product of all time", don't you think?
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rednova,
The AmigaOne was more of a scheme than a product, concocted by Alan Redhouse of Eyetech. He wanted to figure out some way to squeeze a little extra cash out of the sagging Amiga community, and in rehashed-game publisher Hyperion he saw his opportunity.
Hyperion at the time had ambitions of doing more than just re-releasing staid old videogame titles, in fact they had their sights on becoming the new Amiga. To achieve this goal they came up with the idea of creating an Amiga-branded OS. All they needed was hardware to run it on.
For whatever reason both Hyperion and Eyetech were fixated on PPC-only hardware. Eyetech had a line on a Chinese wannabe chip fabricator named MAI, who to promote their product produced a series of evaluation boards to allow their potential customers to try out their bus controller component. These eval boards, which carried the name "Teron", were PPC-based.
Eyetech and Hyperion got in touch, pleaded with Amiga Inc. for license to use the Amiga name, and Eyetech began ordering Teron evaluation boards like there was no tomorrow, labeling said boards as "AmigaOne".
Unfortunately there was a problem with MAI: their bus controller was buggy. However, this didn't seem to phase their biggest customer, Eyetech, who continued to buy MAI's evaluation boards throughout serveral redesigns. To explain away the differences in MAIs board designs Eyetech began labelling them differently: AmigaOne XE, Micro A1, etc. As for the faulty bus controller, this wasn't much of an issue for Hyperion as they explained it away by saying the MAI controller was simply too advanced for lowly bus operations. While this didn't address any of the problems with the bus controller, it did have the effect of placating many AmigaOne purchasers who apparently believed that Hyperion would somehow release a version of OS4 "advanced" enough to be able to magically repair the faulty hardware.
In fact the MAI controller wasn't the only problem with the Teron aka AmigaOne boards. Initially a number of the boards didn't include the sound controller component, most likely because MAI felt that an evaluation board didn't really need audio. But when their biggest customer (Eyetech) complained, they began adding audio. Also MAI had also chosen to use a faulty VIA component for the USB bus.
MAI seems to have rectified the USB problem in the final iteration of the Teron (aka Micro A1), but by then it was too late - MAI was geared towards selling components not motherboards, yet their main customer was only interested in buying whatever evaluation boards they could slap together. Their flagship product, the bus controller, was broken and apparently MAI lacked the expertise, time or money to redesign it. MAI went out of business around 2004 - 2005.
Eyetech continued to sell the evaluation boards they had stockpiled under the AmigaOne name, but with MAI out of business even Alan could see the gig was up. Eyetech sold all of their Amiga related stock to a well-known Amiga product vendor, and thankfully closed their doors and left the Amiga scene entirely.
Hopefully that answers your question about the AmigaOne. But it might leave you wondering about Hyperion and their OS4 product. Well, it turns out Hyperion wasn't as smart as Eyetech. With no new PPC hardware left Hyperion was forced to revert to their original (circa 2000) idea of producing a version of OS4 that could run on the almost forgotten Blizzard and Cyberstorm PPC expansion cards. While recuperating their development losses thru OS4 sales on these old expansion cards seemed like a long shot, it's really the only chance Hyperion had, so they spent a couple of years finishing up that version which eventually went on sale a few months ago. While it does seem to have helped to bolster the sale prices of the expansion cards on Ebay, whether Hyperion made enough from the "classic" OS4 sales to get them out of the red remains a matter of speculation.
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@jorkany
That's funny but fairly accurate, in a trollish kind of way :lol:
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I was wondering why some of the other Amiga sites are getting refugees from Amiga.org ... after posts like this one I can see why.
I've not read such a biased and unfair post in the name of "fact" in quite some time.
The reality is simply that Eyetech needed a PPC board, and MAI were the only ones making one cheap enough; it turned out there were flaws, some of which (i.e. the USB) were easily fixed, some weren't. That's what you get when you buy low-volume products. The sound chip was on the original boards but Eyetech didn't think they could be used, but eventually enterprising A1 owners worked out how to. By this time, however, A1s had been made without the sound chip as it was deemed useless.
If you want to know what AmigaOnes are really like there are sites that are more AmigaOS 4-focused. They'll still be biased (in the other direction), but at least you'll be able to see the truth between the two of them.
In the mean time can we please stick to facts rather than attacking companies which for one reason or another we don't like?
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@jorkany
That's how I saw it, too: Amateurs ripping people off. Just the fact that there was no working guarantee program is just inexcusable (at some point the higher price of the hardware was justified with extensive "quality assurance" testing and guarantee program... yeah sure).
At the same time as this silly "amiga"one debacle was going on there was some real, working PPC product available.
Oh, and lets not forget that Amiga Inc and Hyperion are now engaged in bitter legal fight over ownership of OS4. The fight has gone on for aeons and there's no end in sight...
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spirantho wrote:
I was wondering why some of the other Amiga sites are getting refugees from Amiga.org ... after posts like this one I can see why.
I've not read such a biased and unfair post in the name of "fact" in quite some time.
The reality is simply that Eyetech needed a PPC board, and MAI were the only ones making one cheap enough.
Really?!?! If only that were true... :roll:
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As I recall it there were three available PPC motherboards:
1) Macintoshes. These were no good because of difficulty getting developer info and because the designs would keep changing because Eyetech would have no say whatsoever.
2) IBM PowerPC reference boards. These were very expensive or demanded large production runs.
3) The MAI board.
It was the lesser of three evils.
That's how I remember it anyway. One thing's for sure, it wasn't some great anti-Amiga user conspiracy like people are trying to make out here.
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@spirantho
The reality is simply that Eyetech needed a PPC board, and MAI were the only ones making one cheap enough
And the board by competition didn't have the flaws, was better built, and cheaper.
By this time, however, A1s had been made without the sound chip as it was deemed useless.
No, actually the sound chip was dropped because the programmers didn't know how to initialize it properly and they thought the chip or related parts of the board didn't work properly. The sound chip was always ok.
That debacle alone speaks volumes. Never let amateurs run a HW project.
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spirantho wrote:
I was wondering why some of the other Amiga sites are getting refugees from Amiga.org ... after posts like this one I can see why.
People are fleeing from freedom of speech? Think about this for a moment. Anyone is free to point out how great the AmigaOne is, as a few such as yourself have. Amigaworld.net also allows freedom of speech nowadays, last time I checked. There are a few extremely low traffic self proclaimed OS4 centric sites out there AFAIK, but I've been told they heavily censor free speech. Is that what you are promoting?
The reality is simply that Eyetech needed a PPC board, and MAI were the only ones making one cheap enough;
Genesi was making the Pegasos II for half the price, and there was at least one other company. The Pegasos II worked as avertised and carried a true warranty.
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Oh boy, this thread is so overloaded with spin, hearsay, and spit and venom, that it's pretty hard to pull the facts from fiction.
Here's my understanding of what the A1 is:
Designed to run Amiga OS4, the A1 boards were produced by Eyetech to be the next generation Amiga. It uses PowerPC CPUs mounted on a card; both G3 and G4 cards exist (apparently there are a few prototype dual-processor CPU cards in existence, but I've never seen them). They use SDRAM (133 MHz), have a 2x AGP slot and several PCI slots.
They are pretty much the Teron reference design created by MAI Logic. Eyetech claim to have worked on them and made improvements, but any changes probably made their way back to the Teron dev. boards too.
Unfortunately MAI logic's northbridge chipset is buggy, and they are now out of business. This results in a series of flaws for which software workarounds are in place, wherever possible. Added to this, the southbridge is a VIA686b, which is known to be buggy, even on x86 boards (VIA refusing to help out with undocumented features, etc., didn't help).
I have an A1, and for "the worst consumer product of all time" and "total garbage," it actually works quite well. The bugs have a performance hit (e.g., memory access is slower than it should be), but Amiga OS4 works well on it and is fun to use.
They are no longer produced, for obvious reasons: the chipsets are buggy and the specifications are dated. Unfortunately, no replacement system has been forthcoming. Sure there are plenty of PowerPC hardware that could theoretically be used to run OS4, but no licenses have been given, and legal issues are blocking this.
Hans
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redrumloa wrote:
spirantho wrote:
I was wondering why some of the other Amiga sites are getting refugees from Amiga.org ... after posts like this one I can see why.
People are fleeing from freedom of speech?
There's freedom of speech, and then there are people spewing out opinions as facts and generally deriding things other people like. Most of the "facts" here come from people who have never used an A1. Having to listen to negative BS is unappealing.
The reality is simply that Eyetech needed a PPC board, and MAI were the only ones making one cheap enough;
Genesi was making the Pegasos II for half the price, and there was at least one other company. The Pegasos II worked as avertised and carried a true warranty.
I would have preferred it if they had gone that route. The Pegasos II is undoubtedly a better board.
Hans
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I have an A1, and for "the worst consumer product of all time" and "total garbage," it actually works quite well. The bugs have a performance hit (e.g., memory access is slower than it should be), but Amiga OS4 works well on it and is fun to use.
I think you are confusing OS4 with AmigaOne. OS4 may work well and assist the hardware with workarounds, but that doesn't make the A1 any less buggy / unreliable. Even in your explaination you explain the problems.
Can you name a worse motherboard or other mass produced consumer product in recent history? I am curious.
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Can you name a worse motherboard or other mass produced consumer product in recent history? I am curious.
Link (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/default.aspx)
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Piru wrote:
@spirantho
By this time, however, A1s had been made without the sound chip as it was deemed useless.
No, actually the sound chip was dropped because the programmers didn't know how to initialize it properly and they thought the chip or related parts of the board didn't work properly. The sound chip was always ok.
That's what I said.... the sound chip was removed because they thought they couldn't use it and by the time they worked out how to it was too late.
@redrumloa
I think Hans has pretty well summed up how I feel w.r.t. the "freedom of speech" (a.k.a. opinionated trolling) of the earlier posting. Sure, he has a right to mouth off about stuff but claiming it as fact should always be frowned upon, even if he is free to do it.
The Peg II probably is a better board - I've never used one so I can't comment.
However, from what I recall by this time Bbrv was already advocating the Peg for MorphOS. For Eyetech to have used the same board would have ended up in their playing second fiddle to Bbrv. You don't want to be at the mercy of the competition you're trying to beat, do you?
As I recall it it was simply that the money from Eyetech wasn't enough to keep an already beleagured MAI Logic from going under. This left Eyetech up a certain creek without a paddle, and they weren't making any real money anyway so they left the market.
The option to use the Pegasos boards were down to Hyperion and Amiga Inc, not Eyetech because Hyperion refused to support it, IIRC.
@rednova:
As you've probably noticed, there used to be and there still are red vs. blue wars about who's better and who's best, and opinions still run strong. If you really want to know more you need to ask users of both platforms and ignore the diatribe, and form your own opinions. It remains, however, that the AmigaOne is the best way to run AmigaOS 4, and it runs very well indeed - no amount of forum nonsense is going to change that.
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There's freedom of speech, and then there are people spewing out opinions as facts and generally deriding things other people like. Most of the "facts" here come from people who have never used an A1. Having to listen to negative BS is unappealing.
Many posting here with a negative opinion do have, or have owned an AmigaOne. Slash and Redfox are 2 examples. Others posting here have a technical backround. Now Jorkany is obviosuly bording on trolling, but afaik has not crossed the line into moderation teritory.
I don't think anyone called A1 buyers dumb, I almost bought one myself. I was an early pre-order customer of the AmigaOne SE, and only canceled my order after the 3rd delay and seeing on the preoder mailing list the few people who had already received their board get viciously blasted by Alan Redhouse.
I count my blessing I never bought that AmigaOne SE. It was 100% advertised as an "end user product" and "meets Amiga Inc quality assurance". Do you remember at the very end when Alan Redhouse announced that in fact every AmigaOne ever made, including uA1, was nothing more than a developer board? That pissed off even most of the biggest A1 fans.
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McVenco wrote:
Can you name a worse motherboard or other mass produced consumer product in recent history? I am curious.
Link (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/default.aspx)
touche!! :roflmao:
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redrumloa wrote:
I have an A1, and for "the worst consumer product of all time" and "total garbage," it actually works quite well. The bugs have a performance hit (e.g., memory access is slower than it should be), but Amiga OS4 works well on it and is fun to use.
I think you are confusing OS4 with AmigaOne. OS4 may work well and assist the hardware with workarounds, but that doesn't make the A1 any less buggy / unreliable. Even in your explaination you explain the problems.
For all its bugs, my Amigaone has been very reliable. Yes the workarounds are necessary; yes there are some pretty sizable flaws, but it's not randomly crashing, nor is it a pain to use.
Can you name a worse motherboard or other mass produced consumer product in recent history? I am curious.
Try those no-name DVD drives that work half the time. Try those $10-$20 MP3 players that are unreliable and have poorly finished UIs that just don't quite work right. What about those fancy new TVs that crash every half hour or so? What about those cheap toys/gadgets that half work?
How about baby toys containing dangerous amounts of lead? Or t-shirts with dangerous amounts of formaldehyde.
There is a whole range of really bad/ partially usable consumer products out there. Heck, the MacBook Air is supposedly semi-usable because of design flaws. It overheats (even in temperate climates) and locks up regularly. I've heard people say that it's currenty unusable as-is. At least my A1 runs for hours without locking up randomly.
Hans
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redrumloa wrote:
I think you are confusing OS4 with AmigaOne. OS4 may work well and assist the hardware with workarounds, but that doesn't make the A1 any less buggy / unreliable. Even in your explaination you explain the problems.
Can you name a worse motherboard or other mass produced consumer product in recent history? I am curious.
If the A1 was that bad as you said, though, it wouldn't be capable of running OS4 - which it does very nicely.
There are problems with it, it's not perfect, but right now it does its job just fine.
As for worse systems, there have been many many worse systems. Some PC motherboards, such as budget models at the end of the last century (i.e. PC Chips etc.) were far worse.
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That's what you get when you buy low-volume products
Thats the lamest excuse of all-time, no offence. You BUY stuff which should be WORKING. If they are not working they should not be for sale at all.
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My Compaq isn't "licensed" to run Leopard, but it does so quite nicely. What is it that prevents someone from buying a Sam board and an OS4 disk and ging to town?
redfox wrote:
@persia
Sam440 and Efika are not licensed to use OS4.
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redfox
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As for worse systems, there have been many many worse systems.
Trabant is worse than Lada but Lada is still Lada.
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redrumloa wrote:
History has proved these boards to be among the worst, if not the worst consumer product of all time. Avoid these 2nd hand boards at all costs, total garbage.
You see you say this, but my A1-XE has been in heavy daily use for the last ~5 years, and has proved to be very reliable and i've never regretted buying it for one nanosecond, even at the high price i paid.
I'm not denying the articia has bugs, but OS4 works great on it and i don't have any problems at all with it.
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I guess my main problem with Red's post is that he is saying it is total garbage and that people should avoid buying it.
Well, if I had avoided buying my A1 i would have missed out because I have thoroughly enjoyed owning and using it all this time, so i'm VERY glad i didn't pass up on the opportunity.
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hooligan wrote:
That's what you get when you buy low-volume products
Thats the lamest excuse of all-time, no offence. You BUY stuff which should be WORKING. If they are not working they should not be for sale at all.
It's not an excuse, it's a reason.
You deal with low-volume products where they don't have the time to go through rigorous testing, you can expect troubles. It's always been like that, and always will be, it's just life.
The first Sinclair ZX80s overheated because they were new, minority equipment; they were still very popular because they were unique.
The Pentium-60 had the FDIV bug because it was a new architecture and very expensive (though Intel should have known better).
Some IBM mainframes' CPUs actually had an 'undocumented' HCF opcode - Halt and Catch Fire. Which is exactly what happened when you executed it. Why? Because it was very low volume equipment, so the lack of testers hadn't spotted the race condition.
More recently, the Xbox 360 - we all know about the red ring of death. If MS can't foresee such problems how the heck can MAI or Eyetech afford to?
History is littered with low-volume products having problems like this. We live in a capitalist society: if you don't like the product (including it's bugs) then don't buy it. But don't complain to the maker that they didn't test it all, because until they've sold a load of them they won't have had the cash to have done so. Hence why if you want more rugged systems never buy first generation equipment.
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@redrumloa
I think you are confusing OS4 with AmigaOne. OS4 may work well and assist the hardware with workarounds, but that doesn't make the A1 any less buggy / unreliable. Even in your explaination you explain the problems.
The A1 and OS4 are basically one thing. AmigaOne has been marketed in order to use OS4, and likewise OS4 has been developed to be run on that platform (and on classic PPC machines). I (and I believe most, of not all the A1 buyers) have bought it in order to run OS4, I have not bought it only as a motherboard as such.
I don't think anyone called A1 buyers dumb, I almost bought one myself.
Still, I always get that feeling when I read most of the comments here.
@jorkany
With no new PPC hardware left Hyperion was forced to revert to their original (circa 2000) idea of producing a version of OS4 that could run on the almost forgotten Blizzard and Cyberstorm PPC expansion cards.
I might be wrong, but from what I have read the Blizzard and Cyberstorm version of OS4 has being developed from the beginning together with the A1 version, and it was being shown by betatesters on various meetings. It has been released after the A1 version since it had a lower priority.
Varthall
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Quote:
I don't think anyone called A1 buyers dumb, I almost bought one myself.
Still, I always get that feeling when I read most of the comments here.
Ok, speaking for myself maybe I worded my post to harshly. It was off the cuff of what my gut feeling is, but I will go back and re-word a bit since it seems I offended a few people.
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If MS can't foresee such problems how the heck can MAI or Eyetech afford to
Actually any serious HW business must account for such things. It's quite possible that some flaw is found and that you must replace quite a bit of equipment. Intel and m$ did. It wasn't cheap, but it didn't ruin their business because they had planned for such an event.
Obviously it's much harder to deal with these issues when you have a single product, but nevertheless you should. If you can't, you shouldn't be doing the business in the first place.
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Piru wrote:
Obviously it's much harder to deal with these issues when you have a single product, but nevertheless you should. If you can't, you shouldn't be doing the business in the first place.
Ideally yes. And if the problem was a big one I'd be more inclined to saying the same thing...
... but the fact is the A1 does do what it advertised, and it actually does it rather well given the financial constraints on its development cycle. I'm perfectly happy with mine and seeing how hard it is to get one second hand, I suspect most other people are too.
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@rednova
I'll put it simply for you in terms of running AmosPro:
The AmigaOne series runs AmigaOS 4.0 but it doesn't have an Amiga multimedia chipset. To run AmosPro on it, you'll need to run it from EUAE. Likewise all of the software you write in AmosPro will require EUAE until we get Mattathias to a state where it can recompile Amos source code into native PowerPC code.
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Hardware : Guru Meditation Offers AmigaOne XE Repairs (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=45827)
That sums it all up pretty well.
Now back to beer.
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For whatever reasons current boards like the Sam440 or Efika are not allowed to run OS4.
Amiga Inc. never granted licenses to anything from anyone since Eyetech's AmigaOne.
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Why is it accepted that software companies can say what you can do with your hardware, is it legal?, the car manufacturers cannot tell you what fuel you can use or where and when you can drive their products so why do software companies think they have that right?, it is only through not challenging this attitude that we are faced with DRM schemes that will stop you doing things "they" don't want you to do.
It is about time software companies were held accountable for their unreasonable license terms.
Does Elbox really destroy your hardware if they detect "misuse" of their drivers?
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rednova wrote:
Hi all:
Forgive my ignorance, but:
what the hell is an amiga one?
Thanks for asking. This thread was really interesting. Always wondered why that product had ended so abruptly. Now I have some sort of idea, bias or not...
My oh my, even Lada and Packard Bell and and... Vista got a mention along the way. I learned to drive on a Lada. It came new with a set of tools in the trunk. :-) Loved my dad's Lada. We drove it 'till the bumpers fell off. Engine never quit though...
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1) Macintoshes. These were no good because of difficulty getting developer info and because the designs would keep changing because Eyetech would have no say whatsoever.
OS4 with mona files enable some MacMini PPCs to run OS4...
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I'd suspect the cases you mentioned had proper quarantee, unlike the A1s.
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@thread
An actual definition from Apr 8, 2001:
The AmigaOne is a licenced zico specification which uses PPC explicitly for the purposes of running the AmigaOS4 family of products. Amiga has never said AmigaOS4 would run on x86 flavour or any other flavour zico devices.
Just to make it clear.
fleecy moss
cto
Amiga Inc.
#6
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spirantho wrote:
As I recall it there were three available PPC motherboards:
1) Macintoshes. These were no good because of difficulty getting developer info and because the designs would keep changing because Eyetech would have no say whatsoever.
2) IBM PowerPC reference boards. These were very expensive or demanded large production runs.
3) The MAI board.
It was the lesser of three evils.
That's how I remember it anyway. One thing's for sure, it wasn't some great anti-Amiga user conspiracy like people are trying to make out here.
The Genesi Pegasos
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@rednova
As you can see, the amiga community is alive and well. ;-)
Not sure if your original questions were actually answered, so here is a quick summary:
The AmigaOne is a computer platform based on the Teron series of PowerPC POP mainboards, mainly intended to run AmigaOS version 4.0 created by Hyperion Entertainment in Belgium.
The AmigaOne hardware is similar in concept to a regular pc of the same vintage, except that the AmigaOne has a PowerPC CPU and a different Northbridge chip.
AmigaOne SE had the CPU chip soldered on the motherboard, plus an AGP slot and PCI slots.
AmigaOne XE had the CPU chip on a daughterboard, plus an AGP slot and PCI slots.
MicroA1-C had the CPU chip on a daughterboard, plus onboard graphics chip and one PCI slot.
None of these boards are produced anymore. Some other boards were planned but not released.
AmigaOS4 is an actual PowerPC operating system. It has built-in ability to provide emulation for programs and sequences of code which were written in 68xxx code.
For the AmigaOne, this allows for compatibiliy with older programs which are "system friendly", which do not depend on the old Commodore Amiga hardware, or features present in older versions of AmigaOS. There are many really old programs which are not compatible with AmigaOne. The AmigaOS4 version of E-UAE creates the right environment for these programs.
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redfox
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Hi,
The Amiga One was a pretend Amiga computer which was used with the highly touted and recommended OS4 operating system. It was
suppossed to be the new Amiga Computer. It was a computer that
I waited for to see if it could actually replace the Amiga 4000 computer that I had. It was suppossed to ship with the OS4 operating system, but since Amiga Inc. with its great leadership qualities could never get anything together properly, you could buy the Amiga One with Linux but had to wait for the OS4 operating system. Well I held off buying one until I could get an Amiga One with the OS4 all together in one package, I don't think this ever happened because I never bought the New Amiga One. If it did happen it probably only happended for one week or so. Any how I finally lost interest in the Amiga One and started buying PC's to replace my aging 4000. I now use Amiga forever on a PC and I am totaly happy with winuae. Not to happy with Windows XP or Vista, but it gets me into winuae and thats all I care about.
By the way the Amiga One was very over priced for what they gave you. Anyone who would of bought this computer for what they were asking was either very rich or a complete fanatic or a person who lost some of their marbles and not in marble madness, but then again I consider myself a completer idiot for staying with the Amiga so long and hoping that someone would possibly bring it back.
smerf
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smerf wrote:
Well I held off buying one until I could get an Amiga One with the OS4 all together in one package, I don't think this ever happened because I never bought the New Amiga One. If it did happen it probably only happended for one week or so.
AFAIK later AmigaOne SE/XE and all MicroA1s were sold with OS4. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne), the firsts were shipped until 2004, while the Micros in 2004/05. The first prerelease of OS4 has been released on 2nd June 2004.
Varthall
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I ordered my Micro AmigaOne (MicroA1) motherboard from an online dealer at the end of November 2004. It arrived with a CD containing OS4 update #1. I purchased a case, power supply and combo DVD drive locally, and used a spare hard drive, keyboard, mouse and monitor from an old pc. On December 18, 2004, I powered up my machine for the first time and installed AmigaOS 4.0 from the CD. Within a few hours, I was browsing the internet.
AmigaOS 4.0 was a joy to behold. Up until that time, I had been running AmigaOS 3.1 on an ancient A2000HD.
I still feel that way. I use my machine every day. Sure there have been a few bumps along the way, but I am very pleased with my system.
Never had to deal with Linux at all. It was OS4 all the way.
Unfortunately, some other people have had alot of grief with their hardware and that is why I do not recommend purchasing used AmigaOne or MicroA1 boards now.
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redfox