AOS4 & Amigaone

[MskoDestny]

Tigger wrote:
OS4 is not done, AmigaOnes are not available and there is a good chance they won't be available again, so I think AmigaOne with its hardware flaws is a bad idea.  Troika is supposed to be coming, it gets away from MAI's flawed part, so it should run better then the AmigaOnes, however the OS is still not done, why buy a computer to run an incomplete unfinished OS thats 3 years late at the moment.

Done seems to be a rather arbitrary metric at the moment. It seems that OS4 is complete enough that Hyperion can declare it done whenever they feel like it. Besides more 3D drivers, I don't particularly see what's not done at the moment.

WinUAE outruns them all if you need to run your old software faster, ImageFX is really fast

Petunia seems pretty fast from the videos I've seen. I suppose if you throw a fast enough machine at it, WinUAE is probably faster since current PCs are quite a bit faster than either of the PPC new "Amigas."

MorphOS computers are cheaper, better and the OS runs more older programs then OS4 at this point, so if its a compatibility issue, OS4 is the low one on the totem pole.

There's always E-UAE for stuff that won't run in OS 4's OS native emulation.

Of course there's always AROS. It's not as far along as either MorphOS or OS4, but it's free and runs on plain PC hardware. It doesn't have built-in emulation, but it does have an E-UAE port.

[MskoDestny]

Well comparing it to the Mac Mini isn't terribly fair since it's arguable that the Pegasos is overpriced in comparison to the Mac Mini as well. Not as overpriced as the A1 of course, but neither are exactly great deals.

I don't understand why it's so important to you that the folks at Hyperion declare OS4 finished. What the people in charge say about it's level of completion has no effect on the user experience. I might question their business sense, but I suppose I might question the business sense of anyone trying to revive the Amiga platform in any way shape or form.

The cache coherency bug is unfortunate, but it's not a showstopper (at least not as far as OS4 is concerned, it's a problem if you want to run PPC Linux though). Obviously manually flushing cache lines before doing DMA is less than ideal, but it's not like there aren't other platforms with this limitation (the SH-4 for instance doesn't support hardware cache coherency at all and it did a reasonable job in the Dreamcast).

On a personal level, the showstopper is the price. A1 boards are just too expensive for my tastes (the lack of availability besides second hand sales is a bit of a damper as well). Hopefully Troika's board will be out soon, but they haven't set a release date.