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

[commodorejohn]

I'm personally uninterested in anybody's turf wars over what the "true" Amiga future is. For me, it's the 68k and the OCS/ECS hardware and the elegant OS design that make the Amiga the Amiga, and that's always going to be the case, but I'm not going to begrudge PPC fans their own accomplishments. Not sure what I think of AROS as a whole yet, but I am at least grateful that they're working towards an open-source Kickstart, as that's going to be especially useful for NatAmi. As for NatAmi, I'm not holding my breath for it to be ready in the immediate future, but I am hopeful - I'd very much like to see new 68k Amiga hardware in production. That's my two cents.

[commodorejohn]

They succeeded at a time when there wasn't a definite OS in power, but now, Windows, OSX, and Linux have taken over pretty severely.  Why bother anymore.  Just play Amiga games and move on....

If you're happy just doing everyday computing on an Amiga, do it.  Don't wait around for the M$ Killer hardware and software to show up.  You're wasting your time.

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; they'd have to do way more than they even aim to in order to cause average PC users to jump ship, and they'd most likely get far too expensive in the process (or more far too expensive, in X1000's case :/) Amiga die-hards have been able to make the existing hardware work for them for a long time now, and it's long since reached the saturation point of being behind the curve.

On the other hand, I think there is a place for an upgraded Amiga platform for the enthusiasts. Something like NatAmi isn't going to seriously challenge the Wintel hegemony, but it can make life easier for anybody trying to do day-to-day computing on the Amiga (particularily web browsing or other CPU-intensive tasks.) Saying "don't bother improving the hardware, just use it for games" is rather depressing. I'm not going to suggest that if people just have enough faith the entire landscape of modern computing is going to change in the Amiga's favor, but there's a big difference between staying grounded and giving up altogether on any improvement ever.

[commodorejohn]

improvements to do what?

Anything you damn well please!

[commodorejohn]

What software exclusive to the Amiga are people really wanting to run on newer, more reliable hardware?   Im actually curious.  Because if its just to run internet crap, play mp3s, and fight the M$POWER, I don't see the point still.

I dunno, for me web browsing/etc. isn't so much about fighting the power (because yeah, that would be pretty pointless) as it is about it being cool to pull those kinds of things off on an old machine (or even an upgraded reproduction.) It's the same reason I'm working on getting my 286 box set up with an Ethernet adapter and mTCP, just to have done it.

As for Amiga-exclusive software, I think it'd be fun to have a reasonably-inexpensive higher-power Amiga solution (like NatAmi seems to be aiming for) so that we could write slightly higher-power Amiga games (something on the level of Descent, for instance) and casual retro hobbyists could have something to run it on without having to track down an AGA Amiga, 30MHz+ 030-040 accelerator, SCSI controller and hard disk, and RAM expansion just to run it. As it stands right now, some of us just couldn't afford all that even if we wanted it.