Amiga vs. Hyperion - Any updates?

[Wayne]

It would be nice it one or the other party would talk a little bit.

Problem is, there are two sides to every story, so aside from a joint press release, or a court document outlining a "winner", it's probably never going to be widely known.

All I know is that this is a helluva lotta fuss over a now slow, outdated, overpriced system based on dead technology (PPC).  

AROS impresses me more at this point in that it can at least be run on reasonable, readily available hardware..

If they wanted to impress anyone, they'd have pulled an Apple and put AmigaOS on true commodity hardware, not one-offs and closed-end hardware from questionable developers/vendors.

Wayne

[Wayne]

Pentti Kouri, chairman of Amiga inc.

aka, the guy with the money.

[Wayne]

PPC is far from dead.
Mind you, the Cell processor of the PS3 is PPC based, (as well as the processor of the Xbox 360, which is essentially a slimmed down Cell processor).
And AFAIK a new Cell processor has been released very recently.

Sorry to disagree, but as a DESKTOP processor on a commercial scale, the PPC is, in fact, quite dead.  

Commercially speaking, no one will run out and buy a sub 1ghz desktop machine when they can run out and buy a 3+ghz Intel or AMD for the same price.  

Besides, neither Amiga nor Hyperion are building a game box like the wii or xbox, so your point in this conversation seems rather moot?

Wayne

[Wayne]

Well I guess I'm no one then because I just ran out and bought an 800mhz Sam with OS4.1 from Amigakit and am really enjoying it so far.

One purchase, or even 100 (which is about all the sales left in this community) does not a "commercially viable" product make.

People still buy C64's and Jeri's Joysticks.  Doesn't make them commercially viable either.  

Makes it a hobby niche computer at best.  I truly wish I still felt the internal need to own one, but my money is better spent on the bike.

Wayne

[Wayne]

I could be wrong, but it seems that Amiga Inc have been working on AmigaAnywhere 2 during the last years. Also Bill is a great guy, according to the person working at Amiga inc (Jamie something IIRC?). There is a fairly big thread on amigaworld.net about this.

I can't say "great" guy.  I don't know him well enough for that, but yeah -- despite what will become the cries of others -- Bill McEwen is a good guy.  I'll attest to that in my book, as he's always been a decent bloke with me.  

I know all the stakes are being sharpened and the torches lit, but unlike a lot of you, I don't think McEwen ever woke up and said "let's screw everyone over for the fun of it".  I just think that he was a little short-sighted and got screwed over by both circumstances and people through the years.  

He's also tried -- unsuccessfully -- to keep the company alive through the years when I'm sure it would have been easier to simply walk away and say the hell with it all, so I give him full marks for that.

Yes, there's the $50 t-shirt and all sorts of nightmares that have come about due to the circumstances around it all (mainly the dot com bust) but ask yourself this:  

If McEwen had instead come out and said "we've lost funding (or whatever happened) and need to pay rent, so we'd like to arrange to sell private stock to the community" you guys would have jumped at the chance without hesitation.  

Some of you still would..

[Wayne]

Wayne,

So do you know what's up with Amiga Inc?  They seem to have had their phones disconnected and I suspect their world headquarters above the Amish furniture store may be closed, is there anything left of Amiga Inc besides the Website?

I have no first-hand knowledge, sad to say.  It seems that Bill stopped talking to me about a year or so ago when I expressed my general disinterest at a ping he made as to using Amiga.org to support the cell-phone gaming community.  

In fairness, he didn't ask me that directly, but wondered if I was still interested in working with them as before.  I said "yes", but then stupidly offered (without being asked) my rather negative opinion of their direction towards cell-phone gaming.  Never heard another word from him after that, so that's all my bad.

Hmmmm.  Thinking back, it might have been more than a year ago because the iPhone 3G hadn't been released yet and they still stood a 1/10 of 1% chance.

Come to think of it, he didn't even respond to a Merry Christmas e-mail I'm afraid, which I find very unusual.

Wayne

[Wayne]

Hi Wayne,

Didn't Jeri sell like over a  million of those C64 Joysticks on QVC?

It was some good number, but you're forgetting one very important point.

Jeri didn't build a computer.  She built a way to play all your old favorite C64 games in a joystick form.  

I think we might all be surprised the number of lurkers that hold Amiga fondly in their hearts who would buy a new computer if it was released.

Unless that machine is comparable to what is currently available in the PC and/or Mac world both on a price and performance level, then I'm afraid you'd be in for a bit of disappointment.

Most people cannot fathom paying $2k (or even 1k)+ for a desktop machine with an unsupported OS that runs slower than their $399 laptop from Dell.  Dedicated hobbyists, sure, but they're not "normal" where the average computer buyer is concerned.

Build the Amiga on a joystick, add in the top 50 games and/or a way to import them off of SD memory card and yeah, it'd sell a few hundred thousand at best, but that's still not enough, because it's sales/impact would be a short-lived event and there's not much to follow that up with...

Everyone these days wants real computers, or wants popular and expandable game consoles (XBox PS3, Wii, etc) but no one wants an underpowered, overpriced desktop solution with zero software support.

Sorry to be so brutal, and yes, you'd think as "the Amiga.org guy" I'd be a little more supportive, but I've been fighting this fight to no avail for 15 years now and still no one (except maybe Dammy and AROS) "gets it".

Wayne