ECS, AGA, Workbench? No I don't hate them.

[commodorejohn]

I'm not sure I understand. If you want a more modern system and backwards-compatibility with oldschool Amigas doesn't matter, why would you bother with an 040/060-based system at all? Switch to Coldfire and you've got a mostly 68k-compatible architecture at higher speeds, or scrap the whole thing and get a $150 ARM SBC, or an Atom board if you want to run AROS. It doesn't really make sense to drop crucial components of backwards compatibility and then try to claim it's the same thing.

[commodorejohn]

I think AmigaNG nailed it in that it all comes down to the "what makes an Amiga an Amiga" question. Personally, I fall closer to the opposite end of the spectrum: to me, the Amiga is about an elegant hardware architecture that was designed alongside and tightly integrated with an elegant system-software architecture, running on a very nice, assembler-friendly CPU. While I don't disagree that AmigaOS is a fine piece of software (though I haven't used 4+ and can't really speak for that,) it's just one of the components - removing any of them significantly diminishes the appeal for me. That's why Linux/Amix on the Amiga is more of a "oh, look at that" novelty, PPC accelerators hold no interest for me, and stuff like AROS on a PC is kind of boring.

That's not to say that I begrudge devotees of any of the above their own little triumphs, but it does make me wonder, if the software is so plainly what matters, why bother retaining any hardware compatibility, especially going to all the bother of designing a new system around an old processor?

Heres a prediction, no matter how strong your personal attachment to your legacy hardware is and no matter how deeply your feelings run, soon we will be fully capable of running all your software and a host of BETTER software on modern platforms that are truly competitive. Then your arguements for Amiga forever will look as valid as Apple II fiorever. Life evolves. Get with the program.

And this is what I really don't understand. If you feel like this about legacy hardware, why are you essentially proposing to build what amounts to a different kind of legacy hardware? The oldschool 68k processors are out of production, stop at 32-bit data bus width, and don't go above 100MHz. If your attitude towards legacy hardware is "get over it and move on," why go to all this trouble? Why not just go with an existing board for a modern architecture and save yourself time, money, and trouble?

(And no, I won't "get with the program," thanks. Some of us value the full Amiga architecture more than being "truly competitive.")

[commodorejohn]

What a moron.

What a charmer.

[commodorejohn]

I think it becomes such a source of contention because there's a stigma attached to emulation, like it's "not punk enough" or something - it's like the inaccuracy of early emulators was codified as being the nature of emulators in general. I mean, I'm an "original hardware" guy myself, but come on. Strictly speaking, though, FPGAs aren't the same thing as software emulators - they are hardware, even if they have to be soft-configured, and aren't quite as efficient as a dedicated ASIC.

[commodorejohn]

Hey, that sounds just like Amiga (including OS4.1!)

Not quite, though. The Amiga had preemptive multitasking from the get-go, while Windows and Mac took upwards of a decade (ten and seventeen years, respectively) to get that far. Amiga crashes are more due to a lack of memory protection (which, again, neither competitor had for a good while, though they did achieve it sooner than preemptive multitasking.) That can be fixed with any Amiga accelerator that includes an MMU, whether on the board or on-chip in the CPU.

Also, the NT kernel has existed since the early '90s, but it didn't become commonplace outside the business world until Windows XP, in 2003.

[commodorejohn]

Oh, retro PCs are perfectly fun - just so long as you eschew Windows. Get it loaded up with FreeDOS, grab some old shareware titles, and you can kill hours on an old PC.

And I had way more BSODs than I've ever had Guru Meditation errors, and most of those were just due to faulty disks. Honestly, I think that's the biggest pain with the Amiga: the sheer number of games that insist on being played directly from aging floppies, often with some proprietary filesystem so you can't even kludge up your own hard drive install. It's no wonder WHDLoad had to be written.

[commodorejohn]

I'm actually quite impressed with how bulletproof the last few versions have gotten. They can even rebuild some missing or damaged OS components. And no more BSOD (heck I don't get many crashes of any kind).

I'm no expert, but I'd chalk it up to a combination of Linux gaining popularity with the techies (once it became accessible for mere mortal nerds in the early 2000s) and Apple saying "Unix? Yeah, we'll take some of that," and going from a pretty, user-friendly OS buried under 17 years of cruft and kludge to a pretty, user-friendly OS completely re-tooled around a full-featured, time-tested architecture (after some, uh, initial issues, I'm told.) It takes a lot to make a behemoth like Microsoft rethink their game, but suddenly having two credible competitors, one for each end of the market, going up against a pile of feces like Windows ME and a company reputation for developing software as solid as a Soviet-bloc compact car will do it.

[commodorejohn]

All versions of OSX prior to 10.5 were absolute dog faeces tbh.

I was out of the Mac game by then, so I'll leave judgement to those who've actually used it, but: as bad as Windows ME?