Do you approve of PPC (in some form) as the future of Amiga?

[commodorejohn]

I don't really care for the move towards homogenization in the computer market, and that goes double for computers I like because of their hardware, so x86 is right out. But I'm not really fond of the PowerPC move, either. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad processor, but why does everything 68k-based have to move to it? The 68000 architecture is a fundamental part of what the Amiga is, and taking that away makes it less of an Amiga.

Besides, the 68k is about the most assembler-friendly architecture you'll ever find. Don't want to give that up.

[commodorejohn]

Wrong! A medium sized and priced fpga should allow an enhanced 68k processor to achieve around 150MHz. That is what the Natami team is expecting and that is what similar complexity and sized processors are running in fpga.

Well now I'm really going to have to get one

It is a pity, though, that Motorola has given up on the line (microcontrollers and ColdFire excepted.) It'd be nice to be able to purchase a much faster 68k CPU, especially with modern execution features. It really is a beautiful architecture, with a lot of the nice features of RISC (a large array of general-purpose registers and sweet, sweet instruction-set orthogonality) but enough CISC features to keep things eminently usable for the assembly programmer. I wish I'd been using it back when I was first trying to understand assembly language; would've saved me a lot of time and trouble...

[commodorejohn]

Our games catalogue fits on 4 DVDs which run on WinUAE on P3 PCs, no streaming video format of our own we use Mac/PC, broken browser and TCP/IP stack.

If you're just going to do Amiga stuff in emulation, what's the point of even having an Amiga? Just get a PC and stop fooling yourself.

[commodorejohn]

Amiga is a retro hobby, treat it as such - see Minimig for how to do it right.

The whole AmigaNG thing is 10 years or more past being a realistic possibility and for everyone involved it's time to set it down as such.

What are you talking about? Ten years ago it wouldn't even have been a possibility, let alone a realistic one; now, we're finally starting to see some progress towards a more powerful Amiga-compatible (note the emphasis on "compatible," as in "not just a generic PPC/x86 system that's adopting the Amiga name?") The market doesn't have to be split binarily between "direct recreations of original hardware with no extra power or features" and "bog-standard x86 clone system running software that's somewhat modelled on an older OS people liked."

Assuming that the people behind projects like NatAmi do see them through to completion, and transition them to a business sanely (where "sane" is defined as "not charging $2300 for a 2GHz computer,") it can work. We live in a world where $50 will buy you a clone of a game console that used to cost $200-300; producing an affordable boosted-but-not-bleeding-edge clone of the Amiga is perfectly within the realm of possibility.