I see this news from a slightly different perspective. I really don't care if a hardware dongle is needed for running OS4.0, and I think there must be some way for the other PPC solutions to implement similar protection without costly redesigns. For one, since the Shark boards are attached to a 1200 motherboard anyway, I don't see why they couldn't use the same technique as a Cyberstorm or Blizzard PPC and read data from the 3.1 Kickstart ROM.
My beef is that the AmigaOne has just one BIOS socket, just one. If we are forced to put a puny 512K unwriteable ROM in there, it compromises the potential of the board by keeping us from installing the *mother of all flash ROMs* instead. I think the ArticaS chipset can address an 8MB flash ROM...so that's what I want. I want a modern, writeable Kickstart, so Amigas can continue at least one hardware tradition that made them unique...not being completely tethered to a hard drive. Since we're talking about larger PowerPC code, we need a larger (possibly a much larger) flash ROM. If Eyetech is not willing to add any Amiga-only features to the AmigaOne, I thought they might at least push the hardware to its limits, and in the process perhaps evolve the industry in some small way. Instead, this ROM dongle seems to imply that since mundane, cookie-cutter motherboards are good enough for PC users, they're also good enough for us.
Todd
