The Future Of The Amiga - Where Do You Stand...

[vidarh]

Damn it!!! Where did I put my AROS flag!!! :pissed:

Seriously, for me it's AROS... Both on 68k machines (real or clones-MiniMig, replay etc) for nostalgia... and x86/ARM to get a taste of what it could have been if not for Commodore.

Same here. I want both a Replay and a Natami, though the Replay looks like it'll be most suitable under the TV where my Minimig lives, while the Natami might actually get powerful enough to get more "serious" use, and I'll keep running AROS on one of my X86 boxes too, though likely hosted or in a VM for now...

I still want an X1000 too, though, and I'll keep AmigaOS4 on that because I want to play with that too... This is an expensive hobby

My goal is to get to the stage where I return to spending a decent percentage of my time using one or more Amiga-like OS's with as many as possible of the amenities I expect from using mostly Linux for the last 12 years.

[vidarh]

This isn't that expensive a hobby for me or Golem. And when you finally get your X1000, I'll probably have a G5 Mac with a X850 XT video card that will outperform it.

When maximum performance matters to me, I have my Linux box which can easily crush any box you can MorphOS on while running several instances of AROS and UAE hosted side by side, as well as assorted other VM's if I so want.

Old PowerPC based Mac's simply have no appeal to me, regardless which OS they run. We recently threw a fully working one away at work because nobody could be bothered taking it home.

The Natami looks like a neat system as does the minimig w/ AGA, but these aren't realistic systems for everyday use.

As I said before, you keep blowing your money on old hardware or re-creations of old hardware. I'm getting more use out of what I've got and its gets better on a regular basis.

MorphOS on a G5 wouldn't be a realistic system for everyday use for me either. I don't have any animosity towards MorphOS but it just doesn't interest me - AROS appeals to me because it's open source, and AmigaOS4/X1000 appeals to me because it's new hardware specifically designed for AmigaOS. Classic AmigaOS appeals to me because, well, it's M68k and the classic chipset or derivations of it that I know and love. MorphOS has none of those.

If MorphOS does it for you, then good for you, but to me it doesn't matter at all if it's more "cost effective". Cost effective is what my Linux box is for.

I'm not "blowing my money" on anything. I'm spending money on things I enjoy to tinker with. As I said: It's a hobby.

[vidarh]

New hardware designed for AmigaOS? AOS4 and MorphOS are frightengly similar products and neither supports classic hardware w/o a PPC processor.
If you're fixated on 68K and OCS/ECS that's one thing, but then you mention interest in the X1000.

Well, I mentioned three different things that draw me to three different solutions that all appeal to me for their connections to the "Amiga feeling". Maybe I take a look at MorphOS some day too, if it gets ported to some more interesting hardware.

Personally I very much hope that cross-Amiga-like OS development will start to get easier, as I while I actually find the diversity a strength in some ways (we're pretty much guaranteed to always have hardware that can run one of our OS's directly or in emulation, for starters...), where it really sucks is in duplication of effort in porting and writing new software. That's our biggest weakness at the moment.

[vidarh]

And AROS, AOS4, and MorphOS all are backward compatible with 3.1. Porting software across all three platforms is fairly easy.

Porting across all Amiga platforms is possible. I've seen packages that run on all them.

It's doable, and not technically all that challenging for most software, but it's too much work, that's my main issue with it. It needs a major lift to make it less effort so that more people will release their software across all the platforms.

[vidarh]

I kind of half-agree and half-don't. It's silly to run around thinking that projects like NatAmi or X1000 will prove to be some kind of "Windows slayer" that will make the masses see the light;

I just want one of them to get to the stage where I can spend a reasonable chunk of my time using them for the things I like to do (programming in particular)...

Apart from that, it'd be great if we could get to a stage where the new solutions help us get *some* growth again. Getting to even, say, 50k active enthusiast users, would mean a massive difference in terms of having a vibrant community and getting more hardware or new software development / ports.

Compared to ca 5m Amiga's sold or 250m-300m PC's sold *this year alone*, getting a niche platform with the history and recognition of the Amiga to 50k users ought to still be possible, though undoubtably hard.

[vidarh]

I'm now of the firm belief that MikeJ's Replay board with AROS 68k is the future of the Amiga.

Everything else is now an "also ran".

Depends on what you're looking for, I guess. As a toy or "classic replacement" it looks great. It'll be too slow for much serious use for anyone used to more modern machines though.

Natami has a better shot there, possibly, since they're more geared for performance, but that too will likely be too slow for most people.

As I've said elsewhere, I want both of them and the X1000, but I suspect main machine will remain an x86 box, though hopefully eventually running AROS most of the time.

Then again, it doesn't really matter if it works for you.

(I'm considering picking up an A1200 too, to actually have a real classic again, and get one of the new ACA accelerators for it, but I suspect sneaking the Replay and X1000 past the wife will be hard enough)