Successor to the CD32 in the console market

[warpdesign]

The Raspberry Pi didn't start with a single game where a low priced Amiga could start with thousands of Amiga retro games.

The Raspberry isn't a game console, people do not buy it to play games (other than retro). And actually it started with one game: Minecraft Pi edition.

Ouya already tried to release a console that was quite cheap and with ok performance but still, it failed.

What your "Amiga" console have that would make millions (btw that's more than what Commodore sold Amigas in its entire lifetime) people buy ?

You have to bring more to the table than retro Amiga games...

- Nintendo have several huge software licences and great designers that make them survive despite technological gap.

- Sony & Microsoft are throwing millions of dollars to buy exclusivities.

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

[warpdesign]

Current consoles are not open in the least. This is annoying.

To you, maybe. It doesn't seem to annoy the hundred of millions that are buying Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft consoles.

It should be possible to connect a keyboard and mouse and browse the internet for example.

You have a point: browsing the web sucks with current consoles. But plugging a keyboard on my console ? no...

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.

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

Ouya is ARM with nothing unique while a 68k Amiga would be unique, cool and retro.

Sure, it would be unique: so what ? Do you think people bought their PS4 because of the AMD x86 processor inside ?
Do you think a people bought the Wii because of the PowerPC chip inside or in order to play nice games with the wii mote and... have fun ? (Remember when computing was fun ?)

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 elswhere.

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.

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.

[warpdesign]

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

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...

Yes, the 68k has the potential to have single core performance as good as the x86

"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.

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

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.

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.

[warpdesign]

No no and no. They are re-compiling binaries in-house, hence why you are required to download the game after inserting a disc (if all would be emulated why would you have to download the game after inserting disc instead of just copying from disc?) and it's why they release new titles over time and not large amounts instant since they gotta compile and optimize the binaries for another architecture one game at a time.

Why do you think you're getting 33% frame drops depending on games if apps are recompiled ?

The x86-64 Jaguar can NOT emulate the 3 core PPC in the 360.

Of course it does... The PPC found inside the 360 is more than 12 years old (if you consider R&D).

Any modern ARM CPU like Apple 9x is already a lot faster than Xenon's CPU, even though it needs a lot more power and runs without a fan... No wonder modern x86 CPU may emulate it with proper JIT.

Why so many people belive the Xbone binary translates the 360 CPU is beyond me, it's not doing that, some parts of the 360 hardware is emulated but not the CPU.

The CPU is the only thing that can be emulated: everything else can be wrapped to host chips.

The Jaguar in the xbone is way to weak to do that.

It is weak, in todays standard, but certainly not weak compared to 25 years old computers: that was my point.

Also you underestimate the need of raw CPU power in todays games. Using the CPU in PS4/Xbox one in a PC setup with high-end graphics cards and the CPU would be a bottleneck and hold the GPU back.

And you surestimate the power needed in most games.

Oh, and not to mention that most GPU packed with current ARM SoC are designed to perform correctly with current ARM, or do you mean most ARM GPUs need a faster CPU than they currently got ?