User wants (from "Call for Amiga Developers from A-EON Technology")

[OlafS3]

@Kremlar

I understand your position, I just don't agree with it.
I'm enjoying a reasonably modern platform with MorphOS.
And while neither MorphOS and OS4 support Flash (which is also a problem with Linux), we do have html5 (which is a much more efficient package).

But, should a legacy emulation system be produced (in HARDWARE not UAE), I too would be interested in the nostalgia exploring such a system would bring.

I'm just not sure that that course offers much of a future.
After all, I can buy a Sega genesis emulation system, but that does make Genesis games any more appealing.

And that is just one thing that NG can support that is a nice improvement (and trust me, games dedicated to an NG platform generally look better than legacy Amiga), browsers and other practical apps run better on more powerful hardware.

the big advantage (next to nostalgia and retro) is the huge software base that is beating all NG platforms combined by magnitude. And Aros 68k (with my distribution) or Amikit show what you can do with 68k. Even for a dev 68k offers advantages because much more development options including lots of optimized compilers. Free Pascal f.e. also works on 68k, of course you need lots of horsepower. There is also no reason why in future even modern software should be ported to it. Of course it is not powerful enough to run the newest Ego shooter but for that I can use my modern environment like Kremlar said, trying to compete with Windows or Linux or Mac makes no sense. MorphOS is a good and fast OS without doubt and if it runs on X64 it will be even faster but it lacks the whole software base the other platforms have. Upgrading the 68k hardware makes more sense to me than trying to upgrade the hardware and hope the devs will support it. That was what NG tried and failed years ago already.

[OlafS3]

It's very real now.  I haven't been following MiST much, but my FPGA Arcade exceeds the performance of an Amiga 1200.  I've just started really using it the past few days but love it so far.




This is the main problem with what's left of the Amiga market I think - too fragmented because everyone has different ideas of what an "Amiga" is and what they want out of it.  Sad but true.  




I love my FPGA Arcade, but I could see why others want more performance if they are used to high-end classic systems.  Hopefully performance will improve.


 

True, the market I enjoy is limited to retro/nostalgia, but honestly I don't believe the NG market has much of a future either.




Right, but for me there's my PC and other platforms for modern applications.

Perhaps I would understand the attraction better if I spent more time with MorphOS/OS4.x/AROS, but my free time is limited and nothing jumps out to attract me to those platforms...

I do not use Amiga for modern web browsing, all options like Apollo lack RAM. Even if, it would need tremendous work to port something like OWB on it (deadwood has said he would need 6 months for it, I would need 6 years then propably . So be it. I can live with it.

[OlafS3]

What 68k lacks is proper SDK. To develop for 68k you have to collect it from the pieces. Get NDK from one place, compiler from another place, then download various standard linklibs (z, png, etc.) to get started. And finally download extra header files from yet another place to get an access to bsdsocket.library and other "standard" stuff but you might still found out that there is nowhere stdint.h, there are N+1 ixemul implementations all incompatible and everything else is in abandonded state.

I'd like to port some software from MorphOS to 68k, like Snoopium, but it always takes too much time to get all pieces together and it never gets done.

In my distribution I have collected both many development environments/compilers and libraries. But you are right, there is not much support for 68k left, expecially everything newer mostly was ported either to MorphOS or AmigaOS. On 68k branch of Aros there is the chance to easily port something that is already available for other Aros branches.

[OlafS3]

Interesting. I cant understand where is the fun using Workbench on tiny 640x256 screen with 16 colours. I could invest $1000 to an accelerator and gfx card but that ship sailed long time ago.

68k is much more than unexpanded A500

[OlafS3]

Sure, I have Amiga 500 and Commodore 64 and I'd like to code something for Kickstart 1.3 again. I just think A1200 with rtg+040/060 is an old generation "NG Amiga". Many games dont run on RTG, many games dont run on 040 or 060, it is just feature crippled OS4/MOS.

On Aros Vision I have WHDLoad and many games run on it, when adding original roms from Amigaforever almost anything runs. And that when using RTG.

[OlafS3]

You mean when using UAE? :-) Because I only had an VGA monitor most games didnt work on my A1200. Even when I didnt have an RTG but had DblPal Workbench they failed miserably.

With WinUAE you of course are not stuck with those old hardware limitations anymore.

But you got me interested. I try to download WinUAE today and look if I can get AROS Vision booting in less than 30 mins. If not, I probably lose my interest

As long you do not use a 386 for it it should boot faster :-)

on http://www.aros-platform.de/ are informations. In user section I describe my config. I use plenty of RAM but it should work with less. But I have it :-)

And i would recommend last stable version of WinUAE. There are even new 64bit versions of WinUAE and FS-UAE but I have not tested that much with it. I use 3.1.0 of WinUAE mostly.

[OlafS3]

Coding. C# on PC, C on MorphOS.

In theory it could be C on/with UAE but MorphOS has spoiled me to not accept hacky patchy systems.

What hacky patchy system?

[OlafS3]

The one you get when you take Kickstart 3.1 and add tons of patches to make it usable

that one

I do not use it

[OlafS3]

Ummm - what do you want to tell me with that? Do you want me also to move on?



Of course there are better tools for the job today. And although I like the AmigaOS this is not the reason.

Back in the early ninetees I was fascinated that I could do true 3d CAD on my Amiga 500. I also had an Amiga tool to convert the 3d data of DynaCadd into an executable CNC code that could run on the CAM system at the CAD school I was visiting at the time. It was slow, but it worked.

And all this at a fraction of the costs that I would have had to pay for a comparable x86 based system. Back then e.g. DynaCadd did cost 1,500 DM, while I would have had to pay 15,000 DM for AutoCAD.

Same for the hardware:
I bought my A500 with CBM 1082 monitor and CBM MPS 1500C color matrix printer for 1,200 DM, while a brandnew, naked 386 system (just Hercules monochrome graphics card, no sound) was around 6,000 DM at that time.

Later my decision to stay with the Amiga was simply bexause I had meanwhile collected so much software that it would have costed a fortune to replace all this Amiga productivity software with x86 software.

Furthermore I did not want buy a new PC each time a new Win version came up. Do you remember? Each new Win version required new hardware...

Over the years I had no other choice than getting PCs for the serious work, but always kept my Amigas - hoping, the Amiga situation  would improve again one day.

So the Amiga still is my hobby.

Back in the mid ninetees/early 2000s I engaged with a society for the preservation of the historic Wiehltalbahn (Wiehl valley railway).  

When we had revived the line, I got the task to plan the IT infrastructure and would have loved to use Amigas for the task, but unfortunately back then no Amiga hardware with sufficient power was available.

Had the A1X1k already existed I would have tried to use. The XENA thing seemed to be very promising for this task, but so we ended up with PCs...



Why not?
I paid so much money for all my Amiga stuff - why should I just give/throw it away? It can still serve me as my hobby...



Here we seem to differ. For me it was an unexpensive tool and had to work the way I wanted. A stunning device back then (and in some aspects even today), but nevertheless just a tool. Nothing to found a "religion" on.



And despite that you nevertheless prefer the OCS over RTG? Seriously?



Well, to me it rather seems that the Amiga can only unleash its full potential with all the expansion stuff like RTG, PCI, USB and a decent accelerator...
An Amiga 4000 as it was delivered by C= (just with AGA) was simply not really usable for daily serious work.



As you "did not expand much" I guess you were happy with what these machines offered in their original state, namely their graphics?



What do you mean with "custom"?
"Custom hardware" for me were e.g. my sound digitiser and my prommer. I built both myself - there just were the schematics, the board layouts and and the part lists from an Amiga magazine. All self-made - optical transfer of the board layout to a blank PCB, etching, drilling, populating and soldering the boards. That's "custom made" from my POV.



Well, for me it actually was attractive. Both - performance- and price-wise.
Comparable Amiga parts (e.g. Zorro graphics boards) were much too expensive for what they had to offer. I always wanted to get the max out of my machines - and I only could achieve this by heavily expanding the machines. And obviously I didn't want to spend a fortune for components with Amiga label, while better and cheaper solutions from the PC world were available and could be used in an Amiga with an PCI busboard.



And - did they do so?
No.
Instead they preferred to go belly up by pumping all their money into their overpriced and underpowered x86 line of computers instead of improving the Amiga properly.
B.T.W. - what did you use to "shove it in the faces of your PC-loving friends", once you realised C= didn't develop the things you wanted, but went bust instead?



I also sort of "moved on". But I instead of seling my Amiga stuff I bought my PCs second hand and so could have both. My A4kPPC is still networked with my XP-PC via RDesktop.
Nice setup - you can easily switch between AmigaOS and Windows. If the old IBrowse doesn't display correctly - just switch over to Win and browse the web with IE, Mozilla or Chrome or the like.



Pardon?
Hardware does not have to have an heart, it just has to do for me what I want and how I want it. No heart required so far...



All I care about is that the hardware does for me what I want and how I want it.



You might be right with "inferior PowerPC motherboards" as long as you compare them with x86 PC motherboards.
 
But once you compare it with classic Amiga hardware, your "inferior PowerPC motherboards" are more a "giant leap" forward, me thinks...

Even if you ported AmigaOS to x86, you still would have to make it 64 Bit and SMP, as the harware trend in x86 world goes this way.
So - if you want to make full use of modern x86 hardware with an hypothetical x86-AmigaOS, you would also have to enhance this OS with 64 Bit and SMP.
If PowerPC architecture really will end one day, we can still make the move to x86. But why not advancing the OS on the PPC platform in the meantime?

I mean - the decision for PPC has been made long ago and neither you, nort me, will ever change that. We should be lucky that Trevor invested money in new Amiga capable  hardware and tries his best also to support software development!

One correction you do not buy new hardware to run a new version of Windows but you buy new hardware and get a new version of Windows. I have never bought a new PC because a new version of Windows would require it.

[OlafS3]

When I wrote that I was thinking of the time when people were running "Windows for 286" on their 80286 machines. And then had to buy 386 harware when they wanted to upgrade to Win 3.1. You could install the new Windows version, but in order to use all its advantages you had to add more RAM than it was possible on the old machines.

And I remember that there was something with "real mode" and "protected mode" - one of these modes was supported in the newer Win version, but to take advantage of it you needed new hw as well.
IIRC, this went on until the Pentium/WinXP era...

Yes me too but that is long today... today companies replace hardware every couple of years and private persons buy new hardware because they want to play the newest ego shooter. Windows-Versions are the last reason to buy new hardware. The only exception was recently when XP support was dropped and many companies replaced old hardware with new one and preinstalled Windows 7 (mostly).