hey there, hello from dull overcast london :-D
1. special? well, thats pretty dependant on each person i guess, but really for me its half sentimentality, and half learning from a time when computers were interesting/fun.
its going to be much easier to develop hobbie software/hardware for a standard platform thats as accessable/inaccessable as the amiga. like expanding an A600, if it wasn't difficult, there would be no interest. :-)
if you can use it for day to day computing instead of a PC, then good on you, :-) and all power to your elbow etc, but really, i find a reasonable PC running UAE can be an invaluable tool in keeping amigas alive. be it for backup purposes, transfering data, acting as a data server over the network.
for example,
lots of people are starting to get into using compact flash cards as hard disks. a USB to IDE adapter, and a CF to IDE socket thing, and you can backup, copy, create amiga partitons and data really quickly on the PC and then plug the card into the CF adapter on the miggy and off you go. saves mucking about with floppys.
i wouldn't buy a miggy without a PC to "help out" these days.
2. amiga needs to dev some totaly mental hardware with some venture capitalists money and blow everyones socks off again. something like the Tile64 processor with a completely radical architechture. but able to scale from games machines a-la A500, to highend A2/4000.
trouble is, we live in different times these days. there isn't the room for something new and different. even a mac is just an intel PC with a pretty skin. x86 pretty much rules all. and anything that isn't x86 these days scares off both venture capitalists, customers, and consumers, as "it is not compatable".
People aren't willing to be as savey anymore. a computer isn't a thing to investigate and learn about, its a consumer item. its for removing the red eye out of wedding photos, running iTunes, and surfing for pr0n. most people don't want to know how, or why, they just want to do what they are told it can do in magazines.
There is no room for any "upstart" in the market anymore. no more atari's, no more sinclair spectrum's, no more amstrads, and no more amiga's...
the only shot i can see, is amiga OS4.x being recompiled for cheap comodity x86 hardware, and someone developing a "killer app/game" for it, to make everyone want it.
3. market leader? wintel PC? well, your A2000 can use the Deneb Zorro2/3 USB2 card. this will allow such crazy things as USB Lan ethernet, USB sound cards, USB hard drives and CD/DVD optical drives. not to mention Keyboards and mice. if i had a zorro capable machine, i would look to invest in one of these...
also, you may look to getting a CV64/3D or Piccaso4 as this will put a 64bit GFX card in your A2000. ok its only got 4Meg ram, but compared to OCS/ECS/AGA its a dream.
another idea is a more heavyweight accelerator card. something with an 040 or 060. an 060 is roughly equivilent to a pentium1, but without the windows overhead :-)
if i recall correctly, the inferno accelerator for the A2000 had an 060 on it, along with scsi, network port, upto 128Mb ram, and a custom PCI slot designed for the wildfire graphics card. the wildfire being one of the fastest amiga graphics cards ever designed...
but mostly, you'll probably find GVP techmagic's, or Blizzard20x0's - both very good cards in their own right.
most amiga's have all kinds of hardware solutions. just what kind of solution do you need? :-)
sorry for the length of post... i'm bored this morning. its friday and its payday, so everyone just wants to do as little as possible and go home :lol:
