potential PPC Amiga REAL CHEAP

[Hattig]

What it shows is that a PowerPC system that will sell in the millions (around 20 million for the Gamecube) can be sold for $99 retail and probably still makes a profit.

The Gamecube is too limited for a general purpose computer however (although I had considered it before as a nice AmigaOS platform). Now the XBox360 ... three 3.2GHz PowerPC cores, 512MB memory, Hard drive (SATA), DVD drive (SATA), high end graphics - that'd be a nice hardware platform. Still, it is being sold at a significant loss right now - given the retailer markup it must be at least $200 to Microsoft per console.

I'd rather that the company making this neat A1200 accellerator just made a standard MiniITX sized motherboard, with a full PCI slot and maybe some useful PCI devices like a SATA controller, good audio chip, and so on.

As for PDA/Mobile Phone applications, I think AmigaOS would be a great match.

[Hattig]

Quite disappointing specifications for the Revolution there. Still, if it means a cheap console ($149) instead of a $299 one... it could sell quite well being better than the XBox.

96MB isn't a lot of memory however. However when you are only targetting standard definition games you cut the texture memory to a quarter ... 256MB of textures becomes 64MB. It'll probably cut it for games, but it isn't enough for a standard OS + modern applications.

If Nintendo sells them for a profit from the first day, maybe they won't care about people hacking them either. Maybe Linux will be running on it within weeks of release.

You would have thought that they'd have done better than doubling the clock speed in 5 years though! Misinformation? The original clockspeed was 485MHz. Will it really be 970MHz or less? Maybe it'll have more cache...

[Hattig]

JLF65 wrote:
 I plan to keep folks here and at the AROS forum abreast of how it goes, so there will be plenty of time for more arguing the pros and cons of Amiga-like OSes on the GC.  ;-)

Good luck!

[Hattig]

First, until you actually use C, or Java, you shouldn't be commenting on it.

BASIC is an ass-backwards language, it teaches poor programming techniques, it looks really ugly on screen, and really is a language for beginners. VisualBasic only looks good because it interfaces with the entire Windows API.

C, a late 70's language, is a very clean language that anyone with half a brain can pick up quickly. It was designed by intelligent people and not because it could fit a lot onto an 80x25 display - a remarkably uninformed viewpoint!

C++ is very different when you start using the additional features. I personally don't like C++ however.

Java has a quite nice language structure and if it wasn't for some poor decisions at the GUI library level it would be the application language of choice in many areas now. C# has forced it to evolve again though, which is good.

Any programmer who can't handle curly brackets for blocks of code should shoot themselves in my opinion. Indentation of code is the natural way to read block structure - indeed Python went as far as removing all block keywords/symbols and using the indentation directly.