So were the Morph OS folks wrong all along?

[commodorejohn]

I won't pretend to be the ultimate arbiter of what makes an Amiga an Amiga (if you want my personal opinion, I've helpfully written it down,) but I know what doesn't make an Amiga: PC clone hardware running Linux.

[commodorejohn]

So this doesn't count?

http://www.softhut.com/cgi-bin/test/Web_store/web_store.cgi?page=catalog/hardware/amiga/developerbundle.html&cart_id=8052394_12649

And this doesn't count?

http://www.amiga.com/shop/

No.

[commodorejohn]

But they've got Amiga badges. And they're authorized by the IP holder.

And that's some mighty fancy Commodore drag they're in, sure. But they're not Amigas.

[commodorejohn]

It is, true, but I guess to clarify, modded boxes with new graphics cars and gutted machines are not (in my opinion) Amigas, Ataris, etc.

I dunno...while I kind of agree that taking an Amiga and changing out everything save the OS is kind of missing the point, the Zorro bus standard(s) are just as remarkable as the rest of the machine - the Amiga had a reliable, sane auto-configuring expansion bus ten years before the other platforms adopted PCI, and you've got to respect that.

[commodorejohn]

So, riddle me this.  What is so 'custom' about the 'custom' chipsets.  It seems to me that they were more 'proprietary' than anything else.  It seems that the only reason that they were called 'custom' was because the were not general purpose cpus, but chips designed around their task.

If that is the reason for them being called 'custom', then every PC in my house has 'custom' chipsets made by nVidia, Intel, or AMD.

They're "custom" because they're specific to the Amiga system architecture. Outside of the CPU and a couple support chips like the CIAs, the Amiga chips are components of a tightly-integrated whole, found in no other computer or console architecture. Intel and other generic PC chipsets aren't like that at all - they're simply prefab conglomerations of what's come to be standard PC hardware, with occasional minor differences from each other.

I think that in considering "what is Amiga", we should consider where Commodore would have gone with the Amiga brand if they were still around today.

I think we should not. Whether you're all about custom chipsets or all about the software, Commodore quite evidently had no idea what the hell they wanted to do with the Amiga, let alone what Amiga users wanted.

[commodorejohn]

So, if Commodore had licensed them out to be graphics chips on other systems, the Amiga wouldn't have been as good?  It sounds like you value the Amiga more for what it didn't do than what it did.

Not at all. The Amiga is the Amiga is the Amiga, and if another computer had borrowed components that wouldn't have diluted it one bit. But the chipset derives its value from being so beautifully integrated one component to the other as well as from raw capability, and if another machine had borrowed, say, just the blitter, it wouldn't have been as useful in isolation. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Frankly I love the 68000.  Assembler is just so much fun on them.

Hear, hear! I've never encountered a CPU that hits such a nice balance between friendliness and power.

[commodorejohn]

Sort of. The Saturn's bigger problem was that the whole thing was ungodly complex (two main CPUs and half a dozen supporting chips/CPUs contending for various subsets of nearly a dozen different memory areas!) I gather this is because it basically came out of Sega corporate mashing up a follow-up attempt for the 32x onto an existing CD console project and making them throw in 3D acceleration at the last minute...gah!

[commodorejohn]

Saturn:
They were able to make it do things toward the end that were not originally advertised.

Oh, true, it's just that it took a lot of getting used to for them to really exploit it, since it was so complex. It really is a pretty solid piece of hardware for the time, especially where 2D gaming is concerned.

Interestingly I don't think of the Machines that  we now call Macintosh as the same machines from the past. I thought  MacOS 1 through to 9 were utter crap, with hardware that was crippled  and expensive.

Not so! System 7 was by far the best of the Mac OSes and (while it's not very well-suited for power-user tasks) it has the nicest interface of any OS I've yet encountered. New MacOS is just BSD with a pretty skin on it.

[commodorejohn]

Bigger problem with System 8/9 is that they're absolute behemoths compared to 7, and yet they got installed on basically anything post-1996 whether it had the oomph to run them or not. It's like running OS3.9 on a stock 1200.