Will Amiga ever live again?

[DonnyEMU]

Your facts are all just messed up..

In 1994-1996) I was doing software for the company that produced one of the first full screen animation products for windows. At the time we were doing the software with WinG, because Direct X was not a reality and most vga cards (remember the 486sx was popular then). Windows machines and PCs barely had linear memory frame buffers in their vga cards and most cards barely done 256 colors (8 bit, at 640x480). Most didn't have a Blitter function (much less the Amiga's BIMMER or sprites) and this was a serious problem for anyone trying to do double buffering or off-screen writes under windows at the time. Microsoft developed a "Hack" called winG for win 3.1 (which worked on a limited amount of VGA cards and drivers) and windows 95 was late to the market so no one had that, much less windows 95 compliant display drivers..

The Amiga software and graphics hardware (though lacking some in resolution) was WAY ahead of it's time. We hadn't heard of ATI much, nVidia at all or 3dFX back at that time. It wasn't till 96 that ATI even introduced 3d with it's rage 3d cards.

Back in those days we were talking about Tseng Chipsets (ET4000), Oak VGA, Cirrus Logic, etc.. with very limited capabilities. I never heard anything about Commodore adopting windows nt even on it's pc line of machines.

Even the regular Amiga's capabilities were still very much ahead of the game even though it lacked some color depth..

[DonnyEMU]

I think if the Amiga is ever to live again, as a community we have to do several things to make it happen:

1) Stop the anti microsoft/intel/Apple bias. The original Amigas had a PC emulator from day one for a reason. The original Amiga was cool because it could emulate and run software from these other machines while still running it's own multimedia software that gave it the edge. We have to welcome these people from other camps instead of saying how bad these other machines are. While the Amiga really stop improving around the birth of vga cards, the other machines were just getting going.

2) We have to co-exist with the rest of the world and see what we can do with them. We have to realize though while AmigaWriter maybe a great word processor (and it is cool). It's not Microsoft Word let alone office. Bloated as it is people use it and open office (in terms of feature sets for a reason).

3) While the G3/G4 is popular on European soil and elsewhere, x86 processors are king in the USA. Not very many people run DOS or Windows 95 and 98 anymore and most Amiga people complain about problems with windows here because they don't have very recent hardware and software. Or they are lacking in knowledge of how to use the platform. I see nothing wrong with the idea of an amiga type OS on all CPUs.. Microsoft themselves got smart with .Net and created a runtime that is CPU independent.. One CPU isn't really better than the other anymore. Things are just darn fast everywhere. Moore's law has been surpassed. We need to think about "Amiga Everywhere" if the platform has a chance of coming back in one form or another.. (AmigaDE, MorphOS, OS4, AROS).. Most all old software is run through emulation of a 68k processor anyway.

4) How can we get Amiga back in the hearts and minds? Well how did linux become so popular that now it's competitive with Windows. Think about it folks an Open Source AmigaOS isn't a bad idea. Let the community guide it where it is supposed to, not some venture capital firm that just wants a return on their money. If venture capital firms guided Disney, the way they do today Snow White would have never have gotten made.. Think about it..

5) Stop the Civil war, we have red camps now and blue camps. God if they put a single united platform together, and forgot a moment about their limited profits and worked together, they might open a market that would be big enough to support both of them. Plus they all seem after the same thing, just different approaches.

6) Make the programming information available FREELY and openly.. Stop trying to make money off of a small if not close to dead horse. The only way people will port is if the information isn't closed off to them. I used to be able to go to barnes and noble and buy a rom kernal manual. Now that information is behind a password protected website or a purchaseable cdrom. Commodore sent me hundreds of pages per year for free. Would Amiga Inc. do the same? No! When you aren't as big as Microsoft or Apple you can't charge for this stuff and actually expect new software to get written. BeOS was successful in getting software written for it because it's sdk was available for free. You could get information easily.. If you want to get an idea of how easy it is, check out bebits.com sometime..

7) Finally, stop worrying about how compatible something is with something written back in 1991. Buy it based on potential now, and write software for it yourself.

Show the stuff you find cool about your machine off to other people. If they can get one and you have showed them something unique that they want to do then you won someone over.

9) Buy software from the small guys don't pirate it. They survive, you get more new stuff, you don't have to rely on one big company for everything you do..

[DonnyEMU]

I am sorry folks AGA while cool is very close to what the original VGA standard was..

Today most graphics cards come with a GPU (A graphics CPU) and a vector processor just to do cinematic effects like you see in movies. AGA and even picasso96/Cybergraphx cards don't effectively support more than 2D acceleration and the texture mapping and effects Pixel Shaders and Vertex shaders just aren't possible today on an Amiga like they are on Nvidia and ATI cards (they need to be done through hardware not software for speed). You just have to see an Nvidia demo of an FX card to know what I am talking about.

OpenGL needs a big boost on the Amiga platform and not even OpenGL 2.0 is approaching direct X for 3d function. I have sat down and written shaders and they are very small pieces of code executed by a vector processor. They are fast and the Amiga doesn't support them and doesn't have anything like them even with the ported SDL libraries..

You guys need to examine more hardware and high end stuff and write code to be making statements about how good amigas are today, and not generalize until you have more facts in evidence.

I look forward to see how far OS 4 and MorphOS bring 3D.. We need new standardized APIs folks and better drivers and new code to compete in these areas.

[DonnyEMU]

This is just my personal view which I have never been shy about before but why now..  Has anyone seen the hardware scaling and 3d mapping in demos of the new Windows "Longhorn" UI..

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/longhorn_4015.asp

There are more than a few sites with the demo video of this.. It will further differentiate Windows from the Mac and Linux. It uses Direct X and it's use of the GPU to create a 3D user interface of course it will require a new generation of graphics cards for most users.

I really hope that Amiga folks take notice and are thinking about a 3d future for the Amiga platform..