What Amiga Inc. and Hyperion NEED TO DO (IMHO)

[rbsfou]

I can't buy an AmigaONE any more, the SharkPPC may not come out (and my a1200 is quite overburdened as it is and what if rare parts of the steup go pop), i have several PPC macs, and loads of people out there loved amiga mes, SO:


0. Get something like UAE / WHDLoad that is under the LGPL and integrate it into the OS to allow running of metal banging games (from images) and apps (from executables). Petunia as i understand would not work with metal banging apps, but could easily provide the CPU emulation. Make sure it allows multitasking.

1. Release an "Amiga Classics" title for the Wii, Playstation, and XBox 360 (all ppc i think) to milk funds from those who loved the Amiga in their youth, but treated it as a console. Such compilations (e.g. Atari, Midway) have done well before, as Retro-Gaming is quite chic. Give a percentage of the royalties to Team 17, Bitmap Brothers et al.

Provide the user with an OS4 desktop and hard drive / flash persistance if a USB keyboard and Mouse is attached, else display a nice menu. All these systems have copy lockouts of some sort, so piracy probably isn't a concern. If it is, only allow use of the desktop with a USB dongle attached.

If needs be, don't bother with this step until later to get some cash roll in (just make sure to identify the desktop enabled version clearly on the packaging, and maybe jack the price accordingly).

2. Release OS 4 for the "new-world" G3/G4 Macs (especially for laptops!). Provide a (small!) USB encryption lockout dongle (which could be sent back when the user wants to upgrade to future major releases), a protected OS CD-R (tied into the specific dongle in the package). Do similar for Pegasos, Efika etc.

Provide well printed packaging, install notes, and some stickers in the package. Sell it for 150 GBP (i'd DEFINITELY buy it!)

Sell image conscious geeks custom lids with a (glowing) Boing logo for their iBooks / Powerbooks (free advertising for them for people like me on trains etc)

3. Do a deal with Opera to supply the browser (to keep Nintendo happy if this is a concern). Also do a deal with nintendo to allow sale of Amiga Games for the virtual console.

4. Make sure the geeks get their X11 server, VNC client and server, SSH client and VPN client to keep them happy.
Don't bother with multi-user extensions to be more UNIXy; pretty sure most people would be happy with the idea of a Personal OS. Add a JVM with native GUI hooks (like in OSX) if possible. Other software such as a widely compatible media file player (sell it as a PVR?) would be highly desirable.

5. Continue to supply support to the "faithful" users of Blizzards, AmigaONE and Shark PPC's (give them a Cheaper OS, especially for AmigaONE owners who have the encryption hardware built in i think).

6. Don't bother with X86, too much work has been done on PPC, and most of the target market would have the hardware (be it a console, a possibly-now-spare-PPC-Mac as they've gone intel, or a specialized amiga system).

7. Once your "brand" is back to where it should be and you have loads of $$$, quit messing around with those lame phone and wince games!!



Anyone else have anything to add / pooh-pooh / flame about?

[rbsfou]

Wow a sensible post at last! Thanks Tomas! Hope someone from Amiga Inc scrolls past all the crap above

Tomas wrote:
Here i must say that i totally disagree with you. There is no affordable and modern PPC hardware available. If we continue in the ppc, we will most certainly see another amigaone tragedy with hardware both being full of bugs, underpowered, expensive and then eventually be out of production.
You could lock OS4 to just one certain specs in the x86 world as well. The difference would be that the hardware is more available, cheaper, more horsepower and mature which means more stability.

My point was that there are a lot of Amiga fans out there who went to the Mac, and even if they didn't, there's plenty of G4 Macs out there on ebay. In this case, there are no worries in the short term about hardware supply, and usb dongles could reduce piracy.

x86 could become the long term plan (not ideal in my mind, but hey, each to their own!), however my point was that all the work has been done on PPC so far, and there is a lot of PPC hardware available in other forms. The console thing seems like a good way of getting Amiga Inc to get off their arse and sanction a port.

I do take your point about x86 being widely available, but i kind of always liked the fact that my iBook was a machine i couldn't choose to run windows on. Apple have just shattered that one of course, so running AmigaOS would be a kind of nice way of flipping them the bird - plus ever since i bought the iBook i kept thinking "if only commodore had made something like this"...

Emulation is fine, but yes it needs to be embedded in the OS if amiga inc do pursue some kind of console compilation idea, we need them to remember there is an OS too, else the whole thing would be a bit pointless (apart from a being a nasty money grabbing exercise)

[rbsfou]

GreggBz wrote:
Rather then doing all of these little things, I think they just need to deliver the complete package. You know, good hardware tied to OS4 in a reasonably affordable package, with a little strategic marketing and some style. A unique and sexy case would be nice. Just uhh.. FINISH and deliver!

I agree - just looked at the Troika Amy 05 and it looks nice, but was a bit horrified to not see an AGP slot, or even any mention of onboard graphics!

Dunno about the unique case bit, everything seems to have been done in the PC world (partly thanks to the original iMac's influence, sadly apple seems to have gone the other way in this regard).

Given the fact everything has been done on PPC, i think allowing the use of Macs or Pegasos etc would allow a l

The resuts might be surprising, or they might sell 15,000 of them and that's all, but I don't think there are going to get anywhere with these half hearted deliveries.

My point was that the idea of porting to compilations would accomplish two things:

1. Spread the word amongst former Amiga gamers that the platform is returning

2. Allow Amiga Inc. to raise some cash to invest wisely (in AmigaOS of course, not the crappy phone games)

That's my opinion, and you know what they say. Everyone has one.

We can talk about all of this until we are  :-(

I try not to invest to much emotion or interest into these threads. Amiga endeavors will have at least some of my support always, but I tend not to get to exited anymore.

Me too sadly - childish reactions like the one from @koaftder@ above seem to prove that their are too many people thinking what they want to see or do with AmigaOS is the only way.

Amiga Inc. are in a position to change all that - just make peace with Genesi, get some money in, and let the os bounce on...

[rbsfou]

Tomas wrote:
Again i agree.. Either that or they should launch something similar to the c64 in a joystic.

Fanatastic idea - how about this:

1. Amiga Inc. sanctions the construction of a chip containing a full classic 000/020 OCS/ECS/AGA KS 1.3/2.0/3.1 Amiga needing only flash rom chips with ADF images and some kind of "profile" to run the games.

2. Said chip could be made into the Joystick and sold abundantly.

3. Said chip could be sold to TV (etc) manufacturers as a nice gimmick to include in their equipment - i guess moving from traditional video standards to DV / VGA resolutions would be a plus here.

I dont agree so much about this one though.. I think it is about time we move ahead from the classic. Though we need a stable and modern platform to be able to do that and also like you said we need some built in hardware banging emulation, so that we can still play the good old classics.

Fair enough - i just feel a bit guilty about not being able to support the platform by buying a Blizzard PPC and expanding more a few years ago - think these guys deserve to get the PPC port - after all, the work seems to have been done.

Here i must say that i totally disagree with you. There is no affordable and modern PPC hardware available. If we continue in the ppc, we will most certainly see another amigaone tragedy with hardware both being full of bugs, underpowered, expensive and then eventually be out of production.
You could lock OS4 to just one certain specs in the x86 world as well. The difference would be that the hardware is more available, cheaper, more horsepower and mature which means more stability.

Ok, well how about this? The chip that i mentioned before could be made into a PCI / Express card, and made to do overlay video with the AGP card. If you buy AmigaOS to run on Generic PPC (Mac,Pegasos) or x86 hardware, the fact you have this card present means you have a licensed copy. This would remove the need to jump through hoops regarding emulation (such as rewriting Petunia for x86) and remove the need for the dongle that @koaftder@ seems to hate so much. Perhaps it would make running semi-system legal apps like Deluxe Paint 5 easier too.

This of course wouldn't work on my PPC iBook, and x86 laptops though. For this maybe the USB dongle thinggy would be needed, or perhaps a cardbus or mini pci version could be made.

For 'true' PPC and/or x86 amigas, the chip could be embedded on the board (much like the extra crap that makes an intel mac more than a generic PC).

I don't pretend to know the technology that would make all this achievable, just think this would be quite an awesome idea

[rbsfou]

It doesn't matter. Amiga Inc doesn't want to sell computers. They would rather give Wayne a hard time for selling mousepads .

Sad but true. I also hate the crappy software they seem to churn out - the name means far more than some two-bit java midlet outfit.

And on the topic of dongles.... What the F is wrong with yall? In a world full of people fed up with DRM only the deluded people in the amiga camp beg for it in their wet dreams.

Yes DRM annoys me too, but it's a sad fact that piracy will kill the platform. I still don't mind ripping off redmond or cupertino (they have enough enslaved masses in between them), but now i'm a bit older and wiser, i would like to buy a decent OS from a decent outfit. Open Source is a great idea, but there aren't enough fans of the OS out there to achieve anything like what i have proposed or hyperion have done with OS4.

All i was initially proposing was having a dongle match a copy of the OS. You wouldn't even need to register it. If anyone starts piping up about that being unrealistic, the disc you get shipped could be tied to the dongle you get with it by being burnt onto a CD-R. After all, the kind of quantities it's going to sell would probably make this viable.

And what the F is wrong with you posting multiple copies of the same lame GIF animation, potentially removing all possibility of anyone from Amiga Inc or Hyperion possibly listening in and appearing to give a damn about their userbase by following some of these suggestions?

I guess maybe i'm not l33t enough to be allowed to post here or something

[rbsfou]

koaftder wrote:
AMIGA IN JOYSTIQ, PERHAPS ONE COULD SIT ON IT?

The C64, Atari 2600, and Megadrive joysticks have obviously have done well enough for someone to consider making them in first place. By taking this route, Emulation headaches could be solved as the cost of do a production run of the chips (also targeted to real amigas) could be justified by the sale of the thing as a novely.

Ding ding ding. I present you with this fine animated gif. You are teh winner. You have managed to post crap that gets posted every single day for the past 3-4 years. What the hell to do with amiga inc, joysticks and of course dongles. mmmmmm dongles. have fun with your sock puppets.

Been out of the world for a spell, am trying to get back into it - just trying to say what i would like to see done, and proposing semi-realistic business strategies to spread the word and get people buying. Sadly, we aren't going to have the luxury of having professional geeks writing quality software that runs on dirt-cheap slave-labour produced hardware

[rbsfou]

Dr_Righteous wrote:
Again with the dead horses...

Look, to everyone screaming about OS4 on X86 hardware... WE ALREADY HAVE IT!!!!!! It's called AROS. Look into it.

AmigaOS 4 and higher will, and should, remain on PPC processors untill the EOL of the architecture. Period.

I've always hated x86 ever since my first glimpse of Windows 3.0 running in EGA, so i'm with you there.

What I don't understand is why it seems to be so hard to get OS4 running. Hardware for it has existed for YEARS. There are numerous manufacturers of PPC motherboards out there. Pick one. Pick several. In fact, pick them all! Forget this product licensing BS. We don't need dongles or any other anti-piracy crap. Anyone who would even consider buying a PPC board for the purpose of running OS4 would buy it legitimately. But if that's a major concern, force registration. That'll solve most of it. Anyone else who wants to run it bad enough WILL circumvent ANY form of anti-piracy scheme. There is nothing that cannot be cracked.

Personally (and of course this is a personal opinion), i would like it to be open for all and sundry, but this can't happen under the circumstances. I would rather the dongle-plus-disc or card method than registration....I choose to give my personal details out, NOT my computer system.

If you people hate the idea of a dongle so much, how about the "real chipset reused from the non-existant joystick device" idea i mentioned before? Yes i know the chipset integration was tried before, but i've proposed a ways it could be done in a way that would seem ideal to a business (which unfortunately is what Amiga Inc. are)

The long and short of it is, OS4 is not meant for joe user. It's meant for US, the Amiga community. It should be opened up to what WE want to run it on... Like the cheap and sexy Efika.

Agree. So let me run it on one of my old macs, rather than force me to buy yet another machine...I'll be happy with a dongle or similar for that purpose (but i agree with you that not if i had bought a PPC board specifically for Amiga OS). This is what i understand the position is on the AmigaONE

[rbsfou]

Your business ideas are not good. You have not given us any new ideas. You managed to post the same stuff thats been posted eveyr other day for years. In any case, A INC isn't listening. Thats the problem. People have been foaming at the mouth for 5 years *begging* amiga inc for a product and they never deliver.

There are a million obvious ways Amiga Inc could make a buck, and its all been hashed out before many times and they never do anything.

Ok, i'm not a business man, and i don't want to be - so in this case what ARE good business ideas? Have you thought of anything better? If you are that determined, why don't you show me the posts?

This is my first thread on this site, do you REALLY expect to trawl through years worth of postings to see whether someone else has thought of them?? I'm not expecting to OWN them or anything. They are just ideas. Try finding ANY *truly* original idea nowadays. Most people don't get them.

I can understand being bitter about the whole thing, especially all the hype that Amiga Inc. where dishing out after they were formed, but at least the OS has been developed to the point where it is usable and sellable.

I'm  just trying to prod them in the right direction - games compilations are popular, novelty joysticks are popular. Would spread the word amongst the masses. Would raise some cash and potentially get OS 4 ported to lots of other PPC machines.

Gah, people like you make me not want to bother returning - why the hell does everyone always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always always seem to be pulling in different directions on this?

[rbsfou]

InTheSand wrote:
Since all these "ifs" are just "ifs", and given Amiga Inc's previous track record, the best bet IMHO would be for Amiga Inc to call it quits, and open source the Amiga IP (both software and hardware), therefore giving it to a group that cares, e.g. the community, to do something that's actually useful.

Otherwise, there will just be more announcements about yet more overpriced and underspecced motherboards running an old fashioned overpriced OS that just happens to have an "Amiga" name on it.

As for the dead horses, well, this subject has been discussed just a few times!

Realistically, A.Inc will do nothing, as before, and AROS will be the only hope.

Just my 2c!

 - Ali

Tried AROS on VMWare and looked quite nice - i've now got a spare PIII 600 lying around i'm going to try it for real on. It would be nice for this to be the solution, but there's a few problems for me:

1. No 68k emulation (although i've seen it mentioned it's being worked on - don't think this was on the AROS site though, so this could just be rumour)

2. No bang-the-metal apps solution - see the (i daren't say MY!) ideas presented above

3. Lots of improvements in OS4 that don't seem to be (again, i could be wrong!) in AROS like memory protection etc.

4. I don't like X86, and the OS would be ready to go on my mac in it's current form if someone wrote the necessary bits (which i guess mean Apple Partition Support and an Open Firmware bootloader).

I really didn't think i'd be opening such a can of worms with this thread, just wish i had a decent news source.

I think i'll bury my head in AROS and UAE for a while before daring to post again!

[rbsfou]

I'm sorry if my frustration and rants make you feel unwelcome, it is not my intention. You just happened to post something that gets my "goat" and I'm sorry.

Ok, but i just got the feeling that i wasn't L33T enough or something. I've never written a 4k intro and i've never programmed intuition. I used Octamed and Blitz a bit, but that was all...

I hate business and love Open Source, but unfortunately it took $$$ to persuade Hyperion to do what they have done.

The thing is, apart from any politics / not giving a {bleep} about the users / false announcements that is going on, there is now something out there. The people who run the company don't have an appreciation of how much what they would refer to as "the brand" (yeeuch) means to us. Just like any business they need to be saved from their own stupidity, and there are plenty of ways this could be done.

In some ways maybe they are worried that people are going to use AROS or MorphOS instead (as they are 'competitors' to their business), but don't know how to go about sorting it out (they cannot "walk a mile in our shoes")

So, what IS the best source for SOLID Amiga news nowadays? A site where i could filter in / out demos / new releases would be good (don't particularly care if there's a new point release of some MUI custom class used by 2 apps), especially one where i can find info on the hardware. I've got frustrated just trying to find out where the hell the platform stands nowadays - it sucks that the OS4 release didn't even make slashdot (seems even the larger geek world is cynical about the OS now).

[rbsfou]

LoadWB wrote:
To leave that subject for a moment and tangent over to one of my personal Amiga pet-peeves, I am really tired of reading about how OS4 should work on PPC Macs since there are so many of the old machines out there.  If you spend resources developing for old machines, you become old -- especially when it takes five years to finish the product.  Five years?!  That is a millennium in technology terms.  So to ask the question and digress to the original discussion, what do we have now that we have had for almost two decades and will surely be around for another decade or better?

x86

(ahem, I prefer x64, though :-))

My point was that it's ready for PPC, and there are lots of macs out there. As i understand it there are Radeon drivers in OS4 (dunno about GeForce), - most macs use ATI.

All that would need to be written is the boot loader, Apple Partition Support, and support for the PCI/AGP bridge, plus the necessary lockdown hardware. Compared to the entire OS, this reallly isn't a lot to do. Perhaps they could turn it over to a third-party or some enthusiastic users?

Users like me get the OS of their dreams and don't have to buy expensive underpowered PPC hardware which we bought from cupertino once anyway

Amiga Inc. does that for me and they will get 150gbp from me.

There must be more people on this board with a PPC mac lying around surely?

[rbsfou]

Waccoon wrote:

Because assembly is, like, all of solid awesome and stuff!  Everyone wants to write PPC assembler!

Not tried it - but i agree, as far as i can tell the x86 has too few registers.

The problem is that Amiga Inc. doesn't have the rights to such games.  Also, the PPC CPUs are irrelevant if the original games are 68K.  Remember that Amiga titles that utilize PPC are simply using it as a coprocessor.  A 68K CPU is still required.

Agree, but they own the brand name, and could convince those who do have the rights to let them be used (i've covered this in my first post), and as regards CPU emulation, we have UAE which could be made into something like WHDLoad to do it transparently (see my first post again!)

No-one who is going to end up using this compilation thing is going to remember PPC specfic games anyway, so who cares?

My point was that they could use this as a way of sneaking ppc-OS4 onto people's consoles and it would provide incentive to give us the emulation layer.
[/quote]

First, you need decent programming APIs.  OS4 is hardly sophisticated enough to drive Opera.

It has a task / thread scheduler, several widget APIs all based on boopsi, portected memory (FINALLY!), truetype font support and a built in tcp/ip stack. What else could be needed?

Might be difficult given that AmigaOS is not POSIX compliant.  ;-)

The reason why these apps and tools run on so many OSes these days, is becuase most OSes follow UNIX standards.  It's not easy being an alternative OS.

Now, if Hyperion had the sense to start with a good UNIX-like OS, like QNX, and simply write a new Amiga-like interface on top, that would've been truly awesome.  That's what Apple did, and look where they are today.

Amiga could've learned a lot from Apple.  Such a shame.

No - i LIKE AmigaOS for not copping out and being another Unix clone. In many ways (and this really brings me out in a rash to say this!) it's like NT in that respect. Don't get me wrong, i use FreeBSD and Linux lots, but OSX just took the idea too far.

OS3.x had ixemul library, and most of what i mentioned before (aprt from the VPN client??) seems to be available on Aminet, so it seems to be a case of just bundling it in (to attract geeks).

Frankly, I don't think Amigans really know what they want their brand to do.  Hence, there are still so many people that insist that they should have a custom PPC machine.  I don't care what hardware it uses, so long as it's a good value and does what I want.

Fair enough - personally i don't like x86 though, but as i said before, each to their own

I'll gladly rebuild a custom x86 system to get OS4, but I'm not going to pay an ungodly amount of money for a custom PPC that, if it breaks, will take months to fix and require me to ship it to another country.  Note that the AmigaOne wasn't a very well-designed board and was full of bugs, too.  That tends to be the problem with low-volume hardware (and even that was a "generic" evaluation board!)

Fine so let me run it on a PPC Mac (now/soon) or some x86 thing (later)! Macs have decent build quality, and even the crappest x86 stuff is easily replaced.

IMNSHO, of course.

Won't help  - you'll still get childishly flamed it seems :madashell:

[rbsfou]

Waccoon wrote:

If the rights to the software do not belong to Amiga Inc., how will they, or the Amiga community, benefit from ports to game consoles?

Helps them "Grow the brand" like, and i'm sure they'll work the books to take a portion of the proceeds

Why would any consoles use OS4 when they have their own OSes?  Why do you need OS4 to run old Amiga games?

Because it'd be a cool thing to do i guess...It might just provide the stimulus for getting game compatibility sorted in a unified way for OS4 on PPC processors...

The point is that you're asking that software that employs UNIX standards should be ported to a non-UNIX OS.  That either takes a LOT of work, or you basicly have to make an entire UNIX layer run on top of AmigaOS, which is anything but efficient.

I think AmigaOS can do without an XWindow Server and all that other crap, so long as it has its own tools.

Quite a lot of C stuff is written in a platform-neutral way, the libraries and headers are what need to be ported - we do after all have an OpenSSH port (not that i've tried it mind - maybe it doesn't depend on ixemul.library). These tools (plus a JVM) would provide some incentive for the geeks to get back on board. I'd at least want a VNC client / server.

How?  Switching architectures is not an easy thing if you design an OS the way you describe.  You have to plan for CPU abstraction ahead of time, not tack it on at the last minute.  Once you introduce Altivec/VMX, even emulation is pretty much impossible, let alone practical.

My point was that hyperion have done all the work on PPC so far, and i read in some interview that there seems to be some kind of plan for "OS 5" (whatever that turns out to be, probably vaporware) to run on x86 - hence the "later" bit...

Back on to laptops - why doesn't someone buy up the remaining stock of iBooks (assuming there is any!) seeing as apple decided to switch, and fit them with glowing boing-ball lids and some unique hardware to get them to run OS4? I'd rather use my existing machine of course, but i'd still be tempted by such a thing...