A new Amiga Classic ?? Discuss!

[Holley]

Why not put a new AmigaOne into your old A2000 case and have the hotrod, with UAE for playing old games?

There's at least one place that'll build you a new PC into an A1000 case out there ... they also do 'em in Atari 2600s, too ;-)

UAE works for using the old stuff, but Pegasos and A1 are the only feasable new designs, if the other ideas (Walker, boXer, the A1200 on a PCI card) were feasable they would have reached production, all had enough funding to get all the hard work done.  I really wanted one of those PCI jobbies with an 060, too!

[Holley]

I guess he was thinking of Amithlon, easy to get confused unless you've read up on them both ;-)

Plenty of people come back after a break from Amigas and see there's a whole bunch of stuff going on - thing is apart from UAE none of them have anything to do with the old A500 shoot 'em ups that most associate with the word 'Amiga'.  It takes alot of trawling around to find out what it's all about, and get your head around the current Amiga-related world which revolves around serious work, internet and 3D games now!

UAE is technically proficient enough to make ANY 68k related hardware project a non-starter (I mean, come on - like OS 3.9 at faster than 060 speeds in software alone isn't enough?), and while it's nice to dream the world /has/ just moved on ... even the (non-emulated) Amiga world!

[Holley]

Unfortunately I don't see any difference between emulating an Amiga, and booting Workbench on non-Amiga hardware - there would be if there was some magic way to run 68k code on an x86, but only on a speed basis.  The hardware would be a PC, and it would behave like an Amiga (as AROS does) ... note that I'm not talking about booting from an Amiga-on-a-card installed in a PC.

Running UAE on my work laptop Pentium3 1200MHz can blow my 25MHz '040 A3000 out of the water on processor heavy apps, never mind anything else.  Audio and Ethernet support is fine, and as stated elsewhere there's no reason you can't replace the Windows shell with UAE in 'GUI bypass' mode, and just use your PC as an Amiga.  WinUAE is now the lead version BTW, so yes, it's ahead of even the Unix version.  Macs have a 68k emulation layer for old apps in the OS anyway, so I don't know why another emulator might run quite so ineffectually ...

PCs are cheap enough that upgrading the processor & MB for more emulating speed isn't a big deal (the rest is easy to make as quick as the fastest Amiga extras), IMO theres only four reasons to be using a classic Amiga right now - to access old floppy disks, to use the raw 68k speed of a high flying '060, to access PPC programs, or for the love of it.  I have my A3000 for the first and fourth reasons.

Oh, and of course there's if you want to use a Toaster!