Successor to the CD32 in the console market

[matthey]

After the Commodore Amiga 4000T the System evolved in to a new generation with the release of the AmigaOne X1000 in the Computer market. After the Commodore Amiga CD32 the Console evolved in to a new generation with the release of the xxxxxxxx in the Console Market. We need the 'Amiga HD64' or whatever you want to call it purely focused on gaming with a new controller resemblant of the CD32 one. A new console awaits.

Introducing the AmigaOne EliteOne %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!8364;1000 console using a PPC processor without an FPU or SIMD. A single PCIe slot is provided for expandable graphics (graphics card and drivers not included). The console is provided as a motherboard only to further save costs keeping the price down to %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!8364;1000. The money saved will go into paying old Amiga developers to develop old Amiga software. Compatible with many Amiga games (Amiga classic games which use the Amiga hardware and AmigaOne games which use an FPU or SIMD excluded). You can be one of the few Amiga Elite by buying AmigaOne EliteOne %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!8364;1000 directly from us today (shipping not included). Only the Amiga elite would pay four times the price for one fourth the performance of a modern console to keep the Amiga alive. Are you Amiga elite enough?

[matthey]

After the Commodore Amiga 4000T the System evolved in to a new generation with the release of the AmigaOne X1000 in the Computer market. After the Commodore Amiga CD32 the Console evolved in to a new generation with the release of the xxxxxxxx in the Console Market. We need the 'Amiga HD64' or whatever you want to call it purely focused on gaming with a new controller resemblant of the CD32 one. A new console awaits.

Introducing the AmigaOne EliteOne €1000 console using a PPC processor without an FPU or SIMD. A single PCIe slot is provided for expandable graphics (graphics card and drivers not included). The console is provided as a motherboard only to further save costs keeping the price down to €1000. The money saved will go into paying old Amiga developers to develop old Amiga software. Compatible with many Amiga games (Amiga classic games which use the Amiga hardware and AmigaOne games which use an FPU or SIMD excluded). You can be one of the few Amiga Elite by buying AmigaOne EliteOne €1000 directly from us today (shipping not included). Only the Amiga elite would pay four times the price for one fourth the performance of a modern console to keep the Amiga alive. Are you Amiga elite enough?

[matthey]

I dont think that an Amiga version would sell well at all now.

The Raspberry Pi is coming up on 6 million units sold. An Amiga would sell if the price was right.

Its not the hardware, its the games.  I bought an Amiga because of the graphics and software available for it that were not as good or were not available at the time for other systems.

The Raspberry Pi didn't start with a single game where a low priced Amiga could start with thousands of Amiga retro games. This assumes 68k CPU plus custom chip compatibility with the old hardware. The PPC AmigaOne has almost nothing to offer for games except some PC ports which a cheap (maybe even free) PC can do.

[matthey]

The RaspberryPi actually started with a huge software library: It runs Linux and its applications. Download sources and compile, just like on other Linux systems, too.

It wasn't that simple. There were "special" versions of Linuxes for the low end and uncommonly used for Linux ARM processor in the Pi 1. Code had to be downloaded and compiled. Executables were nearly non-existent. Depending on perspective, there were many games if a Linux and programming guru or no games for the more common case of kids expecting the ease of a console (the situation changed as sales numbered induced OS support and easy to use OS flavors created communities many times larger than the Amiga elite community). Linux games can be compiled for the Amiga with ixemul so we can say we have the same "huge software library", right?

I could imagine though a pimped Amiga (AGA+Apollo core) in a joystick (with a few connectors to expand it to a full system) could sell quite a few copies - given the price would kept sane. Similar to C64DTV, but a bit more pimped.

A good portion of the work is already done but the Amiga Elites would rather beat their dead PPC horse.

[matthey]

Nothing "special" about Linux on RPi, it is the same old, not as if it was the first ARM system around running Linux. I suggest people stop repeating false claims about things they have marginal to no knowledge about.

Some bloated OS flavors still don't work on the 256MB low end Raspberry Pi 1 instead supporting only the Raspberry Pi 2. There was initially problems with the ARM1176JZF-S CPU target as it was not the most popular and there are so many ARM variations that compiler support is difficult and confusing. Ever wonder why vbcc doesn't support ARM despite being a compiler designed for embedded systems and even supporting the Pi's Videocore IV GPU with OpenCL? There is nothing "special" about ARM support other that supporting all the modes and CPU variations. Maybe you are the Linux and ARM guru we need to add the non-special support?

[matthey]

@RPi thread
It doesn't matter, Raspberry Pi was not attempting to enter the games console market. They were entering a DIY market which already had much of the tool chain and community in place.

They also targeted a low end educational market. The Amiga has a rag tag general community and a tiny elitist community already in place. The Raspberry Pi was subsidized as an Amiga Pi could be with Kickstarter and/or private financing.

Like others have pointed out, and others like OUYA, and Commodore have learnt: Consoles are appliances and they should Just Work and there should be content for it. An item without use is a useless item.

General purpose computing should be nearly as easy as using a console.

An Amiga console concept is not a slam dunk. Sure, you could put a RPi style board into a nice looking case, include a wireless controller, brand it Amiga and then what? What games is this relatively inexpensive device going to play?
On the other hand if you covet the existing library of classic games then you will quickly find that you need more than a $30 DIY board as your base. And even if you somehow manage to get it all working with a relatively low hardware cost, how will you market it? As a retro console? Retro consoles have almost no staying power. Nostalgic users buy them, play a few minutes or hours of their favourite titles and then they gather dust.

...

As good a concept as the Amiga in a joystick is, it limits you to only the simple joystick games. What about games that bring up a map when you press M on the keyboard? Or mouse based games like Lemmings?

I would make an expandable computer with the base of Amiga software as a selling point (retro Amiga compatibility). I would use USB and bluetooth keyboards and controllers and allow existing console's controllers to work. I would have a couple of SATA ports for HD and CD if wanted. Jay Miner had the right idea when he snuck in an expandable general purpose computer into his Amiga video game system.

About the only thing possible would be to work with Cloanto to build an Amiga Player dedicated box based on something like the Intel NUC barebones system. The final product would cost around US$600-$800. Call it the Amiga Playbench. How many of us would buy something like that?

The NUC has the right idea as far as size and expandability. It is just a reduced PC which is not unique and the Intel graphics are uninspiring. The NUC cost is cheap enough it would sell to Amiga users at least (not so well at US$600-$800 though).

What would you do make players buy your console ? What would you do that Ouya didn't?

Current consoles are not open in the least. This is annoying. It should be possible to connect a keyboard and mouse and browse the internet for example. They have standard hardware which is nice but it is unaccessible. Of course an Amiga could not compete in performance with the newest consoles but a retro system doesn't have to. I do think the hardware should be good enough to encourage creating new software and allow semi-modern porting of software.

Ouya wasted too much money on creating custom cases and controllers (kickstarter generated $8.5 million for them to spend!). I would use existing ones and maybe a sticker for the case. Ouya is ARM with nothing unique while a 68k Amiga would be unique, cool and retro. I would keep an FPGA at least for the custom chips to simulate an Amiga, CD32, AtariST, NeoGeo, Sega Genesis, X68000, 68k based standup video games, etc. Think Natami or FPGA Arcade on steroids.

[matthey]

True. And any ARM-based machine would be more than enough.

...

People don't care about the hardware. And the cheaper it is, the better it may sell. Choosing ARM means you may lower the costs a lot on these chips. So you may spend it elsewhere.

ARM is cheap but weak at single core performance. Older games and many new games need good single core performance. Yes, the 68k has the potential to have single core performance as good as the x86 (a design like the Apollo core as an SoC ASIC would probably end up like the early Atom processors in performance which is better than most ARM processors). I believe there is embedded market potential for a higher performance 68k (with some ColdFire compatibility) which could offset the cost if a kickstarter couldn't raise $8.5 million like the Ouya.

Why would you add an expensive FPGA when UAE is more than enough for 99.9% of the games ever released for the Amiga ?

Even the 30$ Pi 2 can emulate it correctly using UAE.

A Pi 2 can't emulate 68020+AGA accurately, at least with the one core which UAE is using. Even 68020+ECS is challenging on a single ARM core. An FPGA for the custom chips does not have to be too big and they are affordable in this size. Look at how cheap Majsta's Vampire II accelerator with an FPGA is and he isn't getting large quantity pricing. An FPGA for customization and a low price makes the board more appealing for embedded applications as well as for hobbyists and educational purposes.

The Raspberry Pi can run AROS already and there is no reason that AmigaOS4 or MorphOS couldn't also be ported. If you want PPC then to carve out market share it would need to be cheaper and faster than the Raspberry Pi, which I don't believe is possible (*). However it would need to be able to run Linux etc as well, because most people aren't interested in "Amiga".

I am talking about the 68k which is a resource miser. Yes, it would be good to standardize and document the hardware so other OSs (or no OS in the case of embedded) could use it.

AROS on the Pi has the potential to be one of the most successful Amiga branches but I doubt it will ever crack the top 5 most used OSs on the Pi. The biggest obstacle is probably lack of binary and hardware compatibility with the Amiga.

[matthey]

I currently have somewhere between 14 and 20 ARM systems, all running Linux, typically my own flavour of gentoo. Some of them only have 8 or 16MB of RAM. You want pictures or what?

uClinux can support as low as 1 MB of memory (ColdFire embedded board without an MMU). This Linux embedded variation was created by ex-Amiga users who probably got tired of being blocked by the Amiga Elites and the legal issues. It should have been the AmigaOS. It could be used on even low end Amiga hardware. That doesn't mean it is easy. There are no compiled binaries, bigger programs won't have enough memory, variations in hardware have to be dealt with, etc. Getting it to run on new hardware might not be "special" to you but it would be for most people.

All iOS devices are ARM. Most Android devices are also ARM. There is Mali. There are far more games running on ARM already than there ever was on 68k. Why is this not obvious for certain people?

There are many incompatible ARM hardware variations. Binaries will not work from one ARM hardware device to another. Most of those games have hand held cell phone controls which may not work well for a console. The 68k had Amiga, CD32, AtariST, NeoGeo, Sega Genesis, X68000, 68k based standup video games, etc. with professional retro games that used a standard controller like a console. The binaries and hardware vary for each but at least the CPU ISA is the same.

[matthey]

The m68k ISA is the same because it was an architecture with relatively short lifespan. Or one can easily say Coldfire is the same arch and that m68k hence struggle with same issues. The many incarnations of ARM is a result of evolution and what keeps it relevant. In context of Linux, this variation is not much of a problem, it is something we are used to, something we deal with all the time regardless of architecture. There is no "win32" for Linux, we use sources.

Well, x86/x86_64 primarily had one standard upgrade path. ARM branches out with 4 modes and hundreds of CPU variations. ColdFire is a different architecture than the 68k although there are many similarities in the ISA and hardware designs. They are incompatible which was really a dumb move or deliberately done to kill the 68k and force the users to the PPC. ColdFire is a cut down 68k which lost a significant amount of performance. Some of the ColdFire ISA changes make sense while others looks like bolt-ons with little forethought. IMO, there are too many ColdFire variations also although the base integer CPU has a standard upgrade path (ISA_A -> ISA_B -> ISA_C).

And yeah, I know what goes on with Linux on m68k, been on that boat since 1994. I believe my Minimig has a uCLinux disk image that I built some years ago. Those people you speak of, they all left because of limitations in Amiga OS, both technically and legally. Amiga OS can never replace uCLinux either, sadly.

AmigaOS would not fully replace uCLinux but Linux cut down and without an MMU is much closer to AmigaOS. I bet these guys would have loved to work with AmigaOS instead. You have all these Amiga guys who went off into different influential development directions while the Amiga has wasted away locked up by its "protectors" for a few rich elitists. I hope Jay Miner can't see what has become of his dream.

Btw, you should check out the Steam Machine, a Linux based gaming console.
http://store.steampowered.com/universe/machines/

The Steam Machine and SteamOS have some good ideas and some things I don't like. I would like more of a full fledged computer with the standard target for games. It is a little higher spec and thus price than I would think necessary. I can comfortably play games like Path of Exile and Dungeons and Dragons Online with a Core 2 Duo, 2GB of memory and a low end Radeon R7 250 with 1 GB GDDR5. Much more than that and a big loud fan in a big case with a big costly power supply (One Steam Box had something like a 450W power supply) that sucks juice like no tomorrow is necessary. My setup only costs about $150 total by the way. Let's not compare the performance to any of the next (last) generation "elite" Amigas either.

[matthey]

uCLinux has strength over Amiga OS in that it is open source and hence customizable, mostly posix compliant and with subsets of the well known interfaces found on "full" Linux, including modern IP stack. Amiga OS falls short very quickly.

Customizable becomes important at the low level of embedded systems. POSIX compliance is less important but makes porting code easier. A modern IP stack is a benefit of being a relevant OS which the held prisoner AmigaOS is not anymore. The AmigaOS was probably in the top 5 of personal computer OSs at one time and now it wouldn't break the top 20. Tech savvy kids today have probably never even heard of it .

Who cares about CPU performance ? The GPU is the thing that's important today. Any CPU is fast enough for gaming today and that's what is important.

Have you seen how weak the CPU found in PS4/XboxOne is ? And it's fast enough to emulate correctly a 3-core Xenon from the Xbox 360...

GPU performance is likely more important than CPU performance for games but CPU performance still matters. Most ARM processors would create a bottleneck for better games today. Exceptions may be ARMv8 (AArch64) but it is a completely different ISA than Thumb 2 which more closely resembles PPC (and will probably be the end of PPC as another high end RISC architecture is attempted). The PS4 and Xbox 360 CPUs are not weak just not clocked very high (1.6GHz and 1.75GHz respectively) as consoles have to find a compromise between performance, power consumption, cooling in a small case and cost. They opted for GPU performance and CPU efficiency with parallelism. Each core is actually pretty strong being CISC which is why emulating a much higher clocked PPC is no problem .

"Has the potential" ? Via reimplementation on a FPGA ? Seriously ?

The 68k is dead. You seem to be driven by your nostalgy of the eighties. Gamers want games... they don't care about the CPU/GPU you may be using.

The 68k would eventually need to become an ASIC to surpass higher clocked Thumb 2 and ColdFire processors in performance. Processors are developed in FPGA and the Apollo core has shown very good performance considering (outperforming several hard processors in performance/MHz). FPGA CPU performance requires high parallelism and a significant amount of pipelining which is needed by higher clocked hard CPUs also. Several people involved with the Apollo project have worked for IBM in Germany so they have some CPU development experience. I modified a code analyzer for the Apollo project and looked at a lot of code. The 68k has several advantages over the x86 and the bottlenecks can mostly be worked around.

The 68k and Amiga are dead but so what? The Ouya raised $8.5 million with kickstarter which would be more than enough to make an Amiga SoC ASIC. The Amiga would not become instantly relevant again but maybe tens of thousands of new Amiga motherboards sold for <$200 U.S. would breath some life into the dead Amiga. Otherwise the Amiga disappears as an old has been and no one remembers the significant technology and contributions.

Some may be interested in Amiga games, but it's far from the majority, and UAE is more than enough for these people.

UAE may be helping to keep the Amiga memory from fading but it is not a sustainable path or viable development target.

Sony chose MIPS because it had a meaning, changed to Power with the PS3, and made another change to x86 with the PS4. And people are still buying Sony consoles.

Sony has made a lot of mistakes and has a huge debt as a result.

If CBM was alive, they likely would have switched architectures too, and hopefully would have rewrote the OS to be ready for such changes.. Which hasn't been done yet on the Amiga.

C= may not have had a choice on whether to switch architectures. Changing architectures is a lot of software work and creates incompatibilities. It may be possible for a larger company but it could spell the end for smaller companies like A-EON/Hyperion. Developing a 68k Amiga SoC would be going back to the Amiga user base (and roots) gaining users instead of away from it where it would lose more of its already small user base. Being vertically integrated owning the hardware intellectual property allows to control your own destiny (no more forced ISA changes). It would be a good idea to partner with a knowledgeable ASIC producing company and try to produce products which could also be sold into the embedded market. I was talking to some people before Gunnar (Apollo core designer) decided to be all high and mighty about his project. One company was thinking about how they could use a high performance 68k in their embedded products instead of ARM. The Amiga seems to be about protecting intellectual property instead of developing, marketing and selling products though.

[matthey]

Matthey, the only thing I see Amiga has that is of any value currently in modern computing, is the user interface, Intuition along with ASL etc. You can easily make a lot of former Amiga users happy just by recreating that on *ix using for example Qt. The so called "most users" apparently shun CLI and scripting anyways.

I would not be satisfied with the Amiga over a Unix derived OS. It would just create incompatibility, inefficiency and bring in warts from another old OS (a QNX kernal was less distasteful but I would still rather see organic R&D). The AmigaOS design is efficient and compact even though the C= developers did not achieve its full potential. The problem is that most people want a leading desktop OS where the AmigaOS is not very competitive. The current Amiga ownership keeps trying this path despite falling farther and farther behind (the slow demise of PPC is not helping). I still see value in the AmigaOS and believe there is a market for it under the right leadership. You must see something special about the Amiga or you wouldn't be here .