When I finally admitted that my C128 was pretty well obsolete, I needed a new machine to get things done. By this time I had a list of features that I wanted added to GEOS for the 128 that would have revitalized that machine. When I looked for a new machine the Amiga had everything on that list and then some.
It had sprites in hardware, it had a list of raster interrupts with a means of maintaining them in the operating system (aka Copper lists), it had everything except support for character-mapped graphics in the hardware (which would have only made sense on a C128 anyway) but didn't need it because of the
ScrollingTrick in software.
Most PC hardware now has fragment shaders but has to use them really well to imitate the features of the Amiga. Unfortunately when Doom and Wolfenstein3D came out, the Amiga dream was left out in the cold and my time switched to campaigning for a new Amiga chipset when Commodore went under and Amiga was bought out time and time again.
Next stop, NatAmi! I have high (though tempered) hopes for the NatAmi coming out with a new Amiga chipset in an FPGA and CPLD. It does what the Classic Amigas did and does that in the same ways that the Amiga did them. Unlike the MiniMig, this actually uses some of the techniques that have been available on the PC since the days of Doom and offers the best of both worlds.
