Hi-End Amigas from Amiga Inc. True or fake?

[murple]

Far as I'm concerned, there haven't been any Amigas made since Escom went under. Any new "Amiga" will probably be an Amiga in name only... though if they can run AmigaOS that should count for something, I suppose, unlike the name-pirates selling PC gaming systems under the Commodore brand.

[murple]

I'd say an Amiga is a computer with a hardware design developed from the original Amiga and running (or at least capable of running) an OS developed from the original Amiga OS, and which is capable of running most software (allowing for differences in OCS/ECS/AGA) written for the classic Amigas without having to run an Amiga emulator. So, as far as I'm concerned that means only the machines made by Commodore and Escom, and of course the pre-Commodore development systems (Joe Pillow) built by Amiga.

The OS part of it is a bit fuzzy... a real Amiga needs to have the hardware part of the OS (KickStart ROMs), but while they generally run the Amiga OS (Workbench) they can run other OSes like Amiga Unix, Linux, or even the various custom "OSes" that some NDOS: game/demo floppies use.

If some company were to go back and try to develop a new system by updating/extending the old hardware design which was backwards compatible with Amiga software including the OS, that would kick ass. I doubt it will ever happen though.

The companies calling themselves Amiga post-Escom are just people buying and exploiting a name, selling products with almost no connection to the original. Say you have a good friend named Joe. You really like Joe, he's a reliable and interesting guy. Joe gets drunk and jumps off a 20 storey building to his death. Bob is walking down the street and sees the remains of Joe's body bleeding on the sidewalk. Bob whips out a hunting knife and skins Joe, removing his skin and leaving the bloody rotting carcass on the sidewalk. Bob then makes a suit out of Joe's skin and shows up at your house saying "Hi, I'm Joe. Let me come in and hang out with you." That's pretty much what Amiga Inc. is today.

[murple]

Waccoon wrote:

2 - It has multiple interface choices, with an elegant balance between the CLI and GUI.  Linux totally fails at this.

I'd have to strongly disagree there. A well designed Linux system has a very elegant CLI/GUI balance/interaction. In many ways it surpasses AmigaOS in that regard. However, a poorly designed Linux system can ruin this. Someone who is very familiar with unix can set up a fantastic balanced system, and for people who arent gurus, these days there are a good number of distributions which are set up nicely in this sense... Fedora, Ubuntu, and others do a good job of setting things up for newbies. You may need to look at a few distros to find one you like.

For what its worth, as configurable as Linux and X are, I suspect someone could set up a Linux system that does an excellent imitation of AmigaOS as far as the UI look and feel. You're not likely to be able to do that with Windows or Mac, since those systems both pretty much force you into a narrow interface design with only limited customizability.

[murple]

unite wrote:
A modern PC will not run software of 10years ago but this isn't seen as a problem as the hardware and software have both progressed together.

Not exactly true. You can run plenty of very old PC programs on a modern Windows PC. In the case of some old DOS games/apps where timing is essential, modern CPUs may run far too fast, but you can run a program to slow the CPU... similar to the Degrader you could use on Amiga 1200/4000 systems to run old A1000/500 games.

I think there is to much of a technology gap now for the Amiga to come back rocking the world again.  Just gotta wonder how many years it will be before the last Amiga mobo finally dies.

Sadly, I agree. Say somebody with the rights to Amiga picked up the development of the Amiga where it left off, with the AGAs in production and the AAAs in early testing. Someone could probably finish off a functional AAA motherboard, and then have a system that would've been cutting edge 15 years ago. Someone probably could go from there, or even from the AGA design, incorporate the advancements made by add on hardware (accelerators, PCI busses, USB cards, etc) and make something cool which some retrogeeks would buy. Probably not enough to justify the expense. A company with tons of money and a large R&D team could probably try and rapidly evolve this into a modern system. But I dont think enough market share exists to make that reasonable. With Macs now running on PC hardware and with high end server systems being replaced by powerful Linux clusters, we're rapidly heading into a world of a single computer architecture centered around Intel and Intel clones.

[murple]

Sucks, dont it? I wonder what it'd take to get some company to start making replacement parts for vintage machines. Seeing what they sell for on ebay, there's gotta be enough money in it for a small cottage industry. Itd have to do lots of things and not get too specialized to one machine... but itd kick ass if someone could make and sell stuff like new flicker fixes for Amigas, replacement chips for custom Amiga ICs, replacement Commodore 64 SID, VID, PLA and other chips (some guy in Canada is already making new PLA chips), and parts for like old Atari 2600s, etc. That way at least we could count on keeping our OLD Amigas working for many more years, and not have to worry about when parts just arent available anymore because the last SID or Denise chip just went up in smoke.

I think the hardest part would be getting the legal rights to sell them... stupid patent laws.

[murple]

Darwin is a derivative of NetBSD or FreeBSD, I think. Forget which. There are a few free BSD flavors for PC hardware, and they're generally pretty sturdy, fast, secure and work great for servers. Kinda suck from a desktop user perspective, in my opinion, but lots of people like them. I dont know how the modified Mac version runs with all the extra crap they piled on it.

I can say Linux works damn fast at multitasking, though. Perhaps the poster who claimed otherwise was trying to run KDE and Firefox and a few Java apps while running Linux on a 486... but on a normal modern machine running typical software, it multitasks spectacularly.