Very hard to understand

[matthey]

Come on pal. I am happy with my X1000 and I know what I was getting into and have no regrets. This all starts with people like me and others spending money and maybe just maybe if there is enough of us things will grow. After 2 years Acube is selling another batch of the sam460 and there was a big demand. Others like me are still buying the X1000 and more will buy the X5000 and X3500. That = more users and this is good thing. With the new developer kit and debugging software and LibreOffice and all the other software and hardware stuff A-Eon is working on I think things are looking better that they have in a long time. That is why I jumped in with both feet!!

Was that before or after the Hyperion bankrupsy announcement? You also forgot to mention Timberwolf, based on Firefox v4, which should be out soon after Firefox v40. Sorry, I couldn't resist. I wouldn't go much by announcements or dates in the perpetual Amiga time warp world of "just two more weeks" .

[matthey]

O yes I know what you mean for sure. One of the reasons I jumped in was that A-Eon has delivered on everything that said they would do. Life is a big chance and I am betting on them and some others. If I am wrong so be it.

I agree that A-Eon has been better at delivering on promises than Hyperion and most other Amiga businesses. They seem to have more (financial) resources than most which helps get things done. You are at least one new Amiga user which is a positive. We need more than the few hundred new Amiga users which expensive hardware will bring, a less divided Amiga community and stable professional parent companies to attract outside users and development. All of these are problems. You must be a real optimist to have looked at the current Amiga situation from the outside  and think it looks good .

[matthey]

A-Eon delivered on their promises? Talk about selective memory.
The thing was supposed to come out in July of 2010 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Amiga 1000 release. Instead it arrives 18 months late and only partially functional with a moniker of First Contact.

Meanwhile, no Xorro add-ons and still not fully functional. Just sayin' is all.

A-Eon didn't give up and they came through at least. It's not easy to build high quality hardware (or produce good software), especially before becoming experienced. It's important to choose good business partners and it looks like Hyperion let them down. I wonder if Hyperion had financial problems slowing them up even back then.

Hyperion Entertainment Cvba in Sint-Agatha-Berchem (Brussel) was declared bankrupt by the court in Brussel on 27-01-2015. The appointed curator is Bert Dehandschutter. The company number is 466380552.

If A-EON hasn't bought OS4 yet I'm sure they will so I doubt if this is any concern, more likely just a way of bill dodging.

I think the bankruptcy question was due to my spelling and not not knowing about THE bankruptcy. It's odd that the Linux Mint spell checker doesn't always work.

I don't think Hyperion will disappear if the Amiga Inc. contract depends on their existence. Of course, A-Eon could now be a majority shareholder in Hyperion making Hyperion a software house for A-Eon.

Do you think there would be a Haiku if BeOS was still around?  I don't expect any 'Amiga' OS to be on top.  I expect us to be better than we currently are. If you don't have a radical technology you need an innovative solution.  You want Amiga back in the home?  With the right operating system and a single-board computer running an ARM processor (think Raspberry Pi only better), you could create a multimedia set-top-box that could function as both a game console and a video streaming device and that could even be built by the user or sold for less than $100.

We have experienced 68k programmers and enthusiasts not ARM programmers. The 68k is better. Look at RiscOS which has major ARM incompatibility problems due to 26 bit to 32 bit PC on the ARM, at least 3 modes of operation (original, Thumb 1, Thumb 2, and now ARMv8) and hundreds of different variations and configurations of ARM processors. 68000 programs which are 32 bit clean (minus M$ AmigaBasic and a handful of other programs) still work everywhere because the 68k had 32 bit address registers, a 32 bit PC and 32 bit capable addressing modes from the beginning. We have less baggage, much better code density (RiscOS ROMs are 4MB vs the largest 1MB Roms for a 68k Amiga which holds a lot) and the 68k is strong in single core and memory performance. The RiscOS has splits also with the original Acorn, RISCOS Ltd. and RISC OS OPEN. Only RISC OS OPEN has been able to advance far enough to run on the Rasberry Pi. They are struggling to add preemptive multitasking in a compatible way let alone multi-threading or SMP support. The AmigaOS is in much better shape than the RiscOS but they have tons of new cheap harware which means they probably will add more users than the AmigaOS despite the AmigaOS being significantly superior, even in 68k form. All we need is more modern cheap 68k hardware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS

[matthey]

Linux, Raspbmc, RetroPie, Firefox OS, and even Plan 9 can run on Raspberry Pi.  Raspbian is probably the most advanced though.

I'm aware of the multitude of OSs which are available for the Rasberry Pi due to the oppurtunites created by 5 million units and growing of cheap hardware. AROS ARM Pi could even grab a slice of the pie and become the most used AmigaOS if it can be improved quickly enough and packaged in a convenient way. AROS is probably one of the most efficient and leanest OSs available which is good but SMP support in AROS, like most of the other Pi OSs, would be the real winner where multiple cores are available. AROS Pi has more potential than the original RiscOS Pi but neither are likely to crack the top 5 most used Pi OSs even though this could mean tens of thousands of new users for them.

As for 68k, it would have to be emulated through software as it would be too expensive to design a system using hardware emulation. Someone has already made a Full Speed Amiga 500 Emulator with DispmanX for the Raspberry Pi and even Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton has said he'd like to see Amiga emulation on the Raspberry Pi 2:

The Amiga emulation on the Pi is relatively weak because even the Pi 2 has lackluster single core and memory performance (due to the low electrical power RISC CPU design). The Pi and Pi 2 are pretty efficient for web browsing and other tasks where multiple cores can be used but an old Pentium III CPU is likely to outperform it with a quick compile of older single core games. Games and programs can sometimes be optimized and fixed up but this takes a lot of time. It would be possible to make a Pi like 68k CPU based board with competive performance and more convenience features (wi-fi, SATA, FPGA, RTC?) but costing probably in the $75-$150 U.S. price range. An enhanced 68k would have strong single core and memory performance like the x86/x86_64 but could have a much smaller memory footprint, even smaller than the Pi's Thumb2. The 2nd generation of FPGA Amiga hardware is already faster than most 68k original Amiga hardware. A 3rd generation could be clocked up and the cost reduced if produced in quantity. I believe it could become competitive in performance to hardware like the Pi. IMO, the AmigaOS would have a much better chance trying to sell in quantity on 68k hardware than trying to play catchup with OSs where developers have years of experience optimizing for the host CPU.

[matthey]

Matthey has a weird idea that about 10% of all raspberry pi sales would have been m68k if an equivalent had existed, because for some reason he believes 10% of the pi buyers really only want to run old AmigaOS on them. I find this idea ... crazy. I own a raspberry pi and I have not even bothered running anything amigoid on it, I just used it to play with RISCOS. When I get home, I want to boot strap it bigendian Linux and build AROS hosted with DOpus Magellan.

That's not what I said but rather this:

I bet at least 10% of Pi sales have gone to people that would prefer to have an Amiga computer or 68k CPU but only Raspberry Pi was offered instead of Cherry Pi. Let's say only 3% would have payed up for the Amiga or 68k which would be 150,000 potential Amiga users.

If someone wanted to play games and browse the internet, they could buy a 5 year old PC for twice the cost of the Pi which would offer more performance and play more games. The numbers I used assume that most Raspberry Pi owners want something different, open, more efficient, and/or cheap. Do you think the Pi market is mostly hobbyists? Do you think that maybe these users are not content with current computer offerings? Do you think that Pi purchasers might be more likely to like alternative OSs and CPUs like the AmigaOS and 68k?

Unless a new m68k provides a proper MMU which makes it possible to also use modern operating systems, a Cheery Pi has extremely limited use, as there are already plenty of FPGA systems around that can run AmigaOS. Oh btw, AROS will be the most widely used amigoid system around anyways.

ThoR said it should be possible to make a compatibility layer for a 68040/68060 MMU to a newer 68k MMU. I expect he would not only help design the new MMU but even write and extend the software support in the MuLibs and write the compatibility layer if we had a real project with a real plan. I want 68k compatibility and a more advanced MMU, so if it was up to me, this area would be researched with a high likely hood of adding it.

I agree that AROS is the most likely AmigaOS to succeed (and survive) unless current Amiga businesses change their strategies and get their act together (not likely). Although AROS is behind most of the other Amiga OSs in many ways, AROS advances and source code have been very beneficial to the other Amiga OSs and would be even more important if trying to support another CPU. AROS can stand on it's own but is at a deficit as far as software, except for on 68k hardware where Amiga executables run but AROS 68k needs more optimization and/or faster 68k hardware. Using UAE for games isn't bad but it's limiting for apps where ARexx, the clipboard, resources, etc. can't be shared.

[matthey]

Did I mention that the bullets pierced light armor?

Shhh! Someone might hear and ban the bullets. I mean, you can't stick these and .50 cal rounds in a pistol or an assault rifle and ambush someone so they aren't as dangerous as them little ones with the green tips .