One thing that surprises me is that no one has mentioned an indirect benefit that the support for these old cards may have. Part of Eyetech's business involves embedded systems based on old Amiga boards. Since those are now in short supply, they need something to replace them, and of course they would prefer to stay with the familiar AOS. In fact, this is clearly part of their motivation to promote the AmigaOne.
The PPC (especially the lower powered = fanless cpu) based Teron board with AOS4 is a nearly drop-in replacement for the old Amiga boards with AOS, just more modern. That means that one of the larger customers for A1G3-SE boards may be Eyetech themselves, to supply their embedded market.
Therefore, these drivers for lots of different graphics chips might be exactly what they need for their embedded device business, where they won't be using modern high-powered (=hot && need fans) graphics cards.
Right now, any companies that remain in the Amiga market are mostly supported by their NON-Amiga-desktop business: Hyperion is porting games to other platforms, Eyetech has their embedded business, Amiga Inc. is living on DE*, and Genesi is looking into STBs and Home entertainment servers.**
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*I know, I know... there are various opinions on whether they are alive, whether DE produces any cash flow, or whether they have any relevance at all. I'm just using them as another example.
**Again, there are various opinions on their relevance, but I'm just citing them as another example.
My point is that anything that helps support the outside (= profitable) business of one of these companies is a stabilizing influence on their Amiga business, which should be good for us all. Maybe (well, there is a slight chance) increasing the sales volume of MAI's boards could cause the price to drop a bit. I really don't know how the volume Eyetech does (or will do) compares with, for instance Teron sales due to the availability of Yellow Dog Linux on Teron boards.
Anyway, it seems like good news, although I'm not personally overexcited by it.
--mr-homm
