TheMagicM wrote:
.... If I want to run something Amiga, it'll have to run on my EFIKA or under EUAE.
Anyway, carry on. :-)
Those are two viable options to use.
persia wrote:
Amiga's future is as a retro machine, the people it will attract are the retro hobbyists. It's like amateur radio or antique cars. Speed and power mean nothing in that world. There will never be a modern Amiga because there is no market for one.
Another valid opinion of the current and possible future of the Amiga platform.
codenetfx wrote:
I wish I could buy a modern machine with a modern CPU and coprocessors for graphics, sound, networking, media DSPs...something like a real supercomputer 
not this consumer-oriented garbage with flashy stickers and a gutload of branding messages.
A wish that many of us have, but few feel is a possible reality for an Amiga. That will take many years, if it happens at all.
codenetfx also wrote:
Promise of multicore design is to provide the same coolness of co-processor designs (provided you have software that supports it); you would get a very responsive system (orders of magnitude more responsive than the fastest machine today), but the trouble is that it will take years for software to support multicore designs. Windows (XP and Server) allegedly support multicore *and* dual CPU hardware, but I am yet to "feel" the difference beyond perf. improvement with more RAM added.
AND
Multicore support is significant because old-fashioned software is wasting a lot of hardware you paid for in a new machine. When you push a lot of data through your wireless (or wired) LAN, you are using too many (single) CPU cycles *and* you are keeping the data bus very crowded and that chokes up the overall performance while other cores are idling. This is why even the GHz machines do not feel as fast as they should be.
A CPU/mobo designs which are 100 times faster on paper than CPU/mobo designs from 20 years ago, *should* feel at least several orders of magnitude faster than "old software" And yet it does not.
I wholeheartedly agree that new computers and their OSes do not feel as fast as 15+ year old Amigas, which is very disappointing. We should be light years ahead of where we currently are. For some Amiga users, this "feeling" is what keeps them going and hoping for a rebirth of a commercially viable Amiga. My personal hopes are not that high (unrealistic).
codenetfx also wrote:
i860 failed to capture marketshare because it did not have a lot of software written for it. Expansion boards were very expensive and that did not help either (this should sound familiar).
And
warpdesign wrote:
Unfortunately all people that wanted to move forward left the Amiga "boat". When reading everyone talking here, the most important thing is to be able to run their 10 years (and older...) applications. Not to have a new, modern OS. So development is headed toward compatibility, and not innovation... And a lot of time is spent ensuring compatibility more than having new clean (and not compatible, but who cares ?) API...
@codenetfx,
Yes, sounds very familiar and is a big reason that next generation Amiga OSes have not been very successful. Not enough good new programs for them.
@warpdesign,
A new Amiga(Like)OS is worthless if it is just a similar API that runs faster and on newer hardware. You have to have useful and/or entertaining software for it.
This is why some of us want the backward compatibility to be kept and improved upon. We want the ability to run some of that 78,000 software titles currently on Aminet, as well as the commercial Amiga software on which we have spent good money, to run on our new Amigas until more new PPC Amiga software can be written.
Sort of goes hand-in-hand with the idea that many of us want to see AOS4.x and MOS2.x ported to all the used PPC Macs out there as a short term solution to the hardware shortage until newer Amiga hardware can be invented and produced in mass quantities (a few thousand anyway). Yes, I know that the Efika is available right now, but for some of us, it is just not fast enough, or have all the features we would want in a new Amiga computer. That being said, if I had the extra cash, I would very likely go buy one and pay the MOS2.x team their price for the latest version of their OS.
Just because we want these less than ideal, short term fixes, it does not mean that we do not want the longer term, better solutions to happen. You might argue that if time is spent completing the short term projects that it will take away time for the long term projects. That is true, but if the Amiga community is forced to wait another 4 to 6 years for the long term projects to be completed, there won't be hardly any of us left to care. Many already say that there are not enough that care right now, and they may be right.
