a golden age of Amiga

[Tripitaka]

Has anyone else noticed that this thread has descended into red/blue bickering?   ....yawn, pass the popcorn.

The only cunning plan I can see to revive a golden age of Amiga involves flesh eating nanites and a lunatic Amiga fan controlling them. Hmmm.... maybe I'll get to work on that after I've finished the washing up.

[Tripitaka]

I have a plan that would achieve exactly that. Issue now is getting the technical skills to implement it, but that's something I'm working on. The architecture isn't exactly like the Amiga, but things I picked up from the Amiga and discussions around it have partly inspired it.

Pah! My plan was awesome, but I'll be interested to hear yours anyway.

[Tripitaka]

@Henrycase

I have a very good friend who is far more technical than I am. He used to code for Amiga systems funny enough, mostly touchscreen based point of sale systems. Now he's freelance but the bulk of his work comes from a system he wrote for transferring large amounts of securely encrypted data. It's quite well known apparently.

Anyway the point is that about 11 years ago that we had a long talk about something very similar to you idea. Particularly regarding the blurring of hardware and software boundaries. It was all just theory and "this is the direction I would like to see things going" kind of chat but I've never quite looked at hardware the same way since.

I heartily agree that a true Amiga revival will not ever be an Amiga revival as such but rather a revival of innovation, the Amiga spirit if you will. Your "from the ground upwards" kind of thinking is just what we need.

The big question of course is not so much if it can be done, it is more to do with if it can be done at the right price but please, don't let that put you off trying. I guess you'll work that out as you go along.

Good luck, I hope something comes from this.

[Tripitaka]

The big question is "what problem does it solve"... In engineering almost anything is possible, but few things are actually useful :-/

Well in your case you could finish that music your doing on your super duper sound processing computer and then play a game that uses those same sound processing chips for 3D graphics (as they have just been re-written to be graphics processors). Your point is quite valid of course, it is exactly what I would expect a possible financial backer to say. Sometimes however, you can't see how useful something is until you try it. Arthur C Clarke was mocked for suggesting the radio satellite after all.

[Tripitaka]

@Tripitaka
Thank you for your words of support, I'm glad you see the benefits of blurring the boundaries between hardware and software.

Regarding the price, I don't have much control over this, but FPGAs are clearly improving fast when it comes to their price/performance ratio, plus concentrating the processing and storage in a single chip should help decrease costs. To be honest, I say single chip, but there's no reason you have to limit this design to a single chip, it would scale well to multiple chips too, enhancing upgradability no end. Want a bit more processing power? Stick in another memristor FPGA. You still keep the processing power you had before, but now nearly seamlessly enhanced with the capacity you just added.

I hope you will feel free to post any more ideas and feedback you have, and I'd be interested to hear from your software engineer friend too.

Thanks again. :-)

I'll email my friend your post and see what he says.

I remember what started the conversation off now I think about it. At the time we both worked for a DVD Authoring house (I was an Author/Graphic Designer, he was an Author/Sys Admin). We had been using a hardware based MPEG encoder that encoded in about twice realtime, so 3 hours for an average movie. Back then the software based encoders were way too slow. Soon however the software encoders won out over the hardware as CPUs got so damn quick. It only took a couple of years. We thought it was a terrible waste as the hardware encoder was now redundant and had cost a whopping amount of cash. Anyway, we got into talking about what a shame it was that we couldn't re-write the damn chip to do something more useful. It still horrifies me that a full DVD authoring setup back in the early days of DVD cost nearly £200K. sic. That was less than 15 years ago.