Existentialist question

[boing]

The Mac gradually stopped being a Mac.  It started to
stop being a Mac when Apple changed from their own Apple chips to using off the shelf stuff created by others.

Jobs' adoption of BSD unix as Mach as NeXT as Mac OSX (why not just call it Mach OS?) was a silent admission that the Mac OS was fundamentally so flawed that Apple simply didn't have the resources to try to correct it's design flaws while retaining some level of compatibility that wouldn't drag it down to being an even slower OS.  You can only have so many workarounds before things slow down.  And the Mac's so-called OS was heavy on the cute, while being weak on substance.


So what is The Amiga?

The Amiga is a specific set of unique hardware features accessed by specific adddresses, supported by an OS that was specifically written to exploit the novel Amiga hardware so as to reduce the amount of cycles and code required.

Some of those features include real hardware sprites whose resolution was independent of the sreen bitmap resolution.  They also include dual playfields, genlocking, and PAL/NTSC compatibility.

There is a tape of Jeff Schindler admitting that the whole myth of "the Amiga needs to stop being proprietary and use generic chipsets" was a cover story to mask the fact that during the many years of legal wrangling and sales, that the Amiga's custom chip schemas were lost.  Someday, when the legal risks fade, that tape will be made public to the Amiga community.  

Few people this side of Jeri Ellsworth have the gravitas to reverse engineer the Amiga chipset so as to both extend the capabilities while retaining compatibility (it really only needs a custom MMU to redirect old address accesses to new audio/videographic hardware- something Bill Buck was quietly considering in the VIScorp days.

There's a middle road where basic Amiga features could be implemented in hardware designed to merge with existing AGP and PCI cards.  Not that it would be trivially easy-- since AGP and PCI et al haven't got a clue about Amiga design or timings.

Collision detection (video) would be difficult to implement, but they are very handy.  We would both have access to certain newer video cards while retaining the features that make the Amiga different from other computers.

[boing]

>The new Amigas aren't "real Amigas" per se

Glitch is correct.


And now with this devastating news from Apple, we have an opportunity to rethink the path we've been taking for some years.

Has it gotten us anywhere?

Do we have new Amigas that we can use?

Are they devastatingly advanced?  Or even just clever?

Are they impressing people enough to make them consider switching?

Are they even on par with the so-called Macs out there?


Nope.  We need to suck up to people like Richard Branson, to get a lot of cash and hire people like Jeri Ellsworth, Joe Torre, Dale Luck, Dave Needle, etc.

[boing]

>The Amiga was(and was designed as) a kick ass console, that Commodore decided to
> include a keyboard and mouse to, that ran cutting edge games for the time. The OS,
>although very cool, was secondary.

I'm sorry this is not only incorrect, it has chronology issues.  The fact is, the Amiga was always designed to be a comprehensive full-featured system.  Both OS, interfaces and keyboard were planned  for long before CBM saved Hi-Toro (later Amiga) from Atari's loan game.  

The venture capitalists (dentists and doctors) were told they were bankrolling a games console because that's what was hot at the time.  But when you flipped the whiteboard, the rest of the diagram was there.  the team always had plans that this would be a full featured system.

>We will never have cutting edge games again as we will never have the cutting edge hardware

Negative think will get you everywhere.  And win you many friends.  ;-)

>The Cell chip, is a custom component, that reminds one of the Amiga Custom chips

Not really.  The Amiga needs to get back it's cool features, and they need to be done right.