How about creating a Open AMIGA Consortium?

[persia]

I don't thing NatAmi or Clone-A will be open source.  Thy appear to be in competition with on another.  Also the fols at KMOS still have an excusive lease on the name Amiga, at least in computer usage, they certain don't have control over Spanish speaking love lives...

[persia]

صديق
朋友
친구

or

?

[persia]

Probably would run into trouble with the latin equivalent of Amica and the latin plural Amicae, perhaps some variation of Amare "to love", of course that was tried by the evil Amino... :pissed:

[persia]

Why hold back an operating system because you have to run 20 year old games that violate every good sense of programming?  All AROS needs is a classic emulator, like Mac did when they changed over.  UAE is the perfect candidate.   UAE will run the classic Amiga software and developers will have a less limited system to develop for outside the classic window.

[persia]

Custom chips in 2008 are a profoundly stupid idea.  I can go on the internet and buy high end graphics or sound and be far, far better off.

[persia]

That's the problem with custom chips, you can possibly design a wideo chip that will come close to the Nvidia chips of today, let alone those of 2010, wo12 etc.  A custom chip is in you machine forever, if I want to upgrade to the latest Nvidia card it takes 2 minutes to open the case, pop out one card and pop in a new one.  Plus Nvidia has thousands of employees working on these cards.  There's just no way a few hundred Amiga fans can outdo Nvidia, Custom chips just create headache because some joker thinks they can write directly to them and then you can't upgrade because your software breaks.

There's really two roads here, a modern Amiga inspired by Classic Amigas or a reimplimented retro machine with a tweek here and there.  There's a fundamental choice.  You need to choice, abandon state of the art or abandon classic except as UAE.

There is no way to make classic modern, we are at the same fork in the road Apple was at in 1997.  I'm not saying we need to make the same choice, Apple pretty much owns "state of the art" and the competition is hard, maybe a retro games box has a better chance, retro-gaming with the some retro-computing on the side may be a good niche for Amiga. The Amiga has been state of the art in a decade and a half.

The sad thing is, no matter what the choice the community will grow smaller, and neither way offers a guarantee of success.

[persia]

Maybe you are right, cutting edge is expensive and in the end you will never catch Apple or MS.  So abandon the cutting edge and go for the video game market with a machine that you can essentially reprogram the video and audio at will.  Price it competitively with Wii, PSP3 and X-Box.

But you have some serious problems, NTSC and Pal are of limited duration, ATSC will be the standard in the US next year with DVB replacing PAL faily quickly.  You need to write the OS to handle these.  Plus you need to read and play Blu-Ray disks and older DVD movies.  There's a lot of technology changes in the pipeline.  

[persia]

1) Kickstart roms in 2008 are nothing more than a dongle.  It serves no practical purpose in an open machine.

2) Designing scalable anything is hard, I seriously doubt anyone here has that talent.  So we are really going back to the cross roads, an Amiga that works in the corporate culture would require so many changes to the OS that it would break everything that currently works on the Amiga.  Even if we went that way do we have the necessary skillset within the community.  Remember this is a community that has yet to get OS4 to run on an old style Mac Mini, that's child's play compared to writing a fully functioning OS.

3) The reprogrammable FPGs are a nice idea but again the skill set necessary seems to be in the hands of 2 or 3 community members.  It would be far easier to use off the shelf components and limit the choices to say one companies video or audio card and then write drivers for them.  Maybe use the FPGs for a classic mode and a real video card for future development.  

4) Mobile phones require a lot of software to do the phone work, none of that exists in the Amiga world.

The skilled programmers are largely in the Linux world, how many hours went into making Linux into what it is today?  Realistically we are a small shrinking community that are mostly collectors or retro computing enthusiasts.

[persia]

You know I'm starting to change my mind on this whole thing.  Chasing state-of-the-art isn't really preactical, how long much effort to write code to take advantage of multiple cores?  How much to link machine to combine cpu power like xGrid?  Memory protection and all the other issues AmigaDos has are too hard to address.  

The Amiga is retro-computing at it's best.  I spend all day working on state of the art equipment.  When I come home and turn on my 2000 it takes me back to a simpler time.  Low end graphics, simple games and OS that really doesn't do anything but load programs.  It pulls me out of the 21st Century and back to my youth.  That's the Amiga magic.  Going state-of-the-art would ruin that.  The Amiga is like Amish furniture, nobody asks why the Amish don't use naugahyde!

[persia]

Ok, let's get a state of the art machine, an eight core Penryn, 1 TB hard disk, 8 GB Ram, 512 MB graphics card with a RW Blu-ray drive.  Do AmigaDos hand the multi-cores?  No.  Can it use the video card? No.  Can it access the entire hard disk?  No.  Can it burn a Blu-Ray disk? No.  

What am I going to switch my picture editing from Photoshop, Lightroom & Aperture?  Deluxe Paint? Not bloody likely!  Video Editing from Final Cut to what?  Word Processing colaberation?  Nope.  Spreadsheet with mathematical routines?  Un-un.  Host a PHP website like WordPress or a Java Exo? Sorry mate, no can do.

There's no killer app out there for the Amiga and frankly why would someone bother to write one when it would probably crash the OS, the OS lacks the basic functionality of a modern OS and they could make several orders of magnitude more money with a PC or Mac version.

What would need to be done is that the entire OS would need to be rewritten on top of a Posix OS such as Linux, that is a GUI that approximated Workbench. Who's going to do that?

Realistically the best chance for Amiga is Retro-computing.  where it's dead simple looking graphics and OS and sound give that good retro feeling.

[persia]

So are we agreed that it is too late to pursue the "state of the art" dream?  Had CBM survived they would have made the changes necessary over time and yes AmigaDos 2008 would have looked nothing like AmigaDos 4.  

So what we are after is a hobbyist machine, maybe a change to learn FPG programming, a chance to play the old games and maybe play with old stuff like Basic/AMOS.  Maybe a chance to learn about networking since a modern OS does so much behind the scenes.  A sort of training computer where instead of ticking a box you install three pieces of unrelated software and make them work together and have to learn what it means when that box is ticked.  How to get by with barebones programming and not letting the operating system do it all for you.

I like it, it's very much like amateur radio, except you don't need a license!

:elvis:

[persia]

Oh, and Elvis as the symbol.  A little bit fat, a little bit dated, but still the king!


:elvis: :elvis: :elvis: :elvis: :elvis: :elvis: :elvis: :elvis: :elvis: :elvis: :elvis: :elvis:

[persia]

But what advantage does an Amiga running on state of the art hardware offer?  There's no software to take advantage of the hardware.  There's no applications to take advantage of it.  Put a 512 MB video card in a box, install AROS and you still have a cute 90's look, you might as well have only 16 MB of video ram.

We're dealing with technology that requires some real technical programmers to program for.  It's a really big ask.

Forget state of the art, this isn't 1989 anymore (the last year Amiga was state of the art).  The CLI is clunky and awkward compared to the Bash terminal on my Mac.  The Amiga file system is slow and not journaled.  

There are dozens of personal operating systems out there, what does a modern AmigaDos offer over Haiku, Syllable or SkyOS?  Why would somebody say "I'm going to load AROS on my new Quad core Penryn?"

[persia]

Cool, Natami still looks retro but has a it better resolution, put it in a cool retro box, maybe something that looks like it fits a WW1 theme.  Or maybe there's something in an old Buck Rogers show that would fit the retro-future look.

Natami - Retro for the masses?

[persia]

The retro-future version is more do-able.  The Amiga belongs in the last century, leave it there but allow use to use modern parts, USB keybords, mice and joysticks.  Improve the graphics so they are a little less retro.  A hobby machine that you can tinker with.  Maybe one you can plug a USB camera into and play with video capture.  Part of the charm of Amiga is that it's pre-turn of the century technology.

The hobbyist really has nothing to play with these days, even Amateur radio is being overwhelmed with technology. you used to be able to build your own transceiver and throw an antenna in the tree, now it's digital controlled hi-tech stuff.

All the homebuild gee-whiz kits are gone.  Remember Heathkit?  It's a market that whilst small is wide open.  No competition.

The Amiga, the ultimate Luddite's PC!

:pint: