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pkillo wrote:
:idea: We should start a not for profit corporation and fund it with donations made via paypal, and simply buy amiga inc outright!

Why give those criminals money? We have our own Hardware... MiniMig and UAE.. we have our own OS... AROS... Amiga Inc. own nothing of value.

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CLS2086 wrote:

Amiga Inc. own nothing of value.

Yes they do ! Patents and rights !! :rtfm:

Patents on technology that can't even be made any more... valueless.
Right to what? The name? What does the name actually matter?

You would do well not to use that smiley with me... you are welcome to disagree with me, but I am well read on the subject of Amiga.

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mfletcher wrote:

bloodline wrote:

CLS2086 wrote:

Amiga Inc. own nothing of value.

Yes they do ! Patents and rights !! :rtfm:

Patents on technology that can't even be made any more... valueless.
Right to what? The name? What does the name actually matter?

You would do well not to use that smiley with me... you are welcome to disagree with me, but I am well read on the subject of Amiga.

Calm Down! Sheesh! You sound like a prima donna.

Maybe I am!

These patents might not hold any value to you, but to a lawyer, its a potential revenue stream i.e. they can sue your ass off if you try to infringe upon them. A lot of law firms deal with nothing but Patent IP prosecution and do just fine.

Except all the patents that covered the Amiga are both of no modern technological value and expired... You do realise that Patents only have a life of about 20 years... Technological, the Amiga is to modern computer what the Gloster Meteor is to the F22...

The name, the brand "Amiga", has something in spades that perhaps Minimig, AROS, etc lack. Recognition. Picture your average 30 something joe walking into Curry's or Dixons. He may or may not have owned an Amiga at one point. Anyway, which is he more likely to recognise? Amiga, or Minimig?

It would make no difference now. The Amiga brand has no market value... Even the Commodore brand has more value, though clearly given the fact the last company to use the brand has just gone bankrupt, it isn't worth very much.

It would cost a fortune to give the Amiga brand recognition now... it's been out of the public eye too long, and even then, it was never a mass market (computers were niche in those days) or premium brand.

Ive been thinking a bit of where the Amiga is going and what hopes it has of being resurrected. To be honest, the conditions that made the Amiga popular back in the 80's and early 90's are gone now.  The Amiga sold in a price range that the PC could not compete. Nowadays you can buy PC's for cheaper.

This is all very true... it's also true of the technological problems that the Amiga was designed to solve...

And hoping that it could be bought up by an Indian or Chinese firm and sold to the markets there? Aint going to happen. You could get a PC for the same amount of money and have Linux installed on it. Bang all you want about how great OS 4 and AROS are, but Linux is more mature and has a lot more support, momentum. Theres no way an Amiga based OS could be a selling point.

And it wont take off in the third world either. As One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has demonstrated, people in these countries have more pressing concerns (ie food, water, some electricity) than owning a cheap laptop.

The future doesnt look bright.

There is no future for the Amiga as a mass market machine. But it has massive hobby potential, the popularity of Minimig has proved that.

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pkillo wrote:

bloodline wrote:
There is no future for the Amiga as a mass market machine. But it has massive hobby potential, the popularity of Minimig has proved that.

You might be right, but otoh, you might be wrong: a fast Amiga with HDMI output and an HDTV digitizer might sell really well as a set-top box! An amiga-based tv recorder that could also play existing video games, and which promoted the development of new software by not locking up the tools and documentation would be hot.

The end cost of a system like that could be lower than that of buying an HD tivo and a Wii, assuming you build the whole thing with commodity-grade PC hardware and just provide the legacy application support via software emulation.

IMHO, there's still room in the marketplace for more than one product per application.

Really? I popped the lid off my set-top box/HD recorder I have here... the box contains a single chip (which is built by Broadcom and handles everything! HD video and 5.1 stereo sound) + 16meg of RAM + a 80gig HD... the whole thing cost £99 two years ago... There is no way any Amiga based system could ever compete with that!!!

If you honestly think a late 80's hardware/software solution has any place in the modern market then you really need to look into the state of the industry!!!

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pkillo wrote:
No system that relied on antiquated hardware designs could succeed in this arena of course. But you didn't understand me; I'm not talking about selling souped up minimigs in a set top box. I'm talking about selling a modern PC in a set top box, and taking advantage of the intellectual property related to the Amiga that still has some residual value: the software.

Right... ok, But I'm not convinced that the Amiga platform has any software to offer... Remember it has been 15 years now since the Amiga was a viable commercial platform... The Open Source community has filled the space the Amiga could have competed in.

A Wii or PS3 goes for US$400 and an HD TiVo goes for US$200+, so that's $600. It's totally possible to build and sell decent computers for that price. Heck, at volume you can do it for 75% of that price - Dell does. Given the rights to and possession of the IP involved, it would be more than possible to develop a system that was Amiga-like but built around existing Intel processors and PC chipsets.

Well... yes, that would be the only way, if there is a way...

With the ability to run 68k and PPC Amiga software in emulators that worked like Apple's Classic environment for OS X but with greater transparency to the end user, you'd immediately have a large base of applications and games that could be distributed to end-users digitally, at little cost.

Apple used software translators as stop gaps only... I own several Macs... but all my software is intel... The Amiga platform has been out of action too long, and that is the problem... If you are going to use Emulators to offer the entire software base, then you may as well run the Emulator on a modern OS, like Linux for free (My set top actually uses Linux!).

Build in a few nice apps (like an iMovie work-alike that you could run from a handheld remote and an MP3 player tht can talk to your iPod) and give them away with the system, and many people would buy it.

Ahh... this is where it falls down... In order to make the Amiga platform attractive you need to write new apps... but the Amiga lacks even basic standard modern OS features... SMP support, Multiuser, Journaled File system and Memory Protection... Retrofitting them into AmigaOS would render it incompatible with all old Amiga software even at a source code level. So why waste time  try to bolt alien concepts onto AmigaOS... when you could use a free well-proven alternative like Linux.. which already has all the software already written, often free and open source?