I think.........

[commodorejohn]

Until the resurrection of something akin to revolutionary A1000 in 1985 ie combination of OS AND Hardware 5x better than best PC or Mac alternative money can buy at 33% of their cost.......then Amiga is dead. At least A1200 had some advantage (eg 14mhz A1200 = 133mhz Pentium to run Super Stardust AGA). SAM/X1000/NATAI/MINIMIG......nothing revolutionary or even partially superior like A1000 or A1200 respictively.

This, this constant obsession with having a "new Amiga" that must be just so powerful and cheap and powerful that the unwashed masses can't not see the light, this is exactly the attitude we do not need. That's not going to happen any time soon, if ever. It's just not, not unless you take a PC and slap a boing-ball sticker on it and go "IT IS RISEN, AND ASCENDETH INTO HEAVEN TO SIT AT THE RIGHT HAND OF JAY THE FATHER!"

Nor is it necessary. What made the Amiga special wasn't its position in the market/specs-wars of the era - the fact that it was a hell of a deal was just pure gravy. What made the Amiga special was that it was a clever, flexible design that people could sit down, read the docs, and really understand, and come away with the knowledge to really exploit the machine to their own ends, something that showed ever more fruit as time drew on.

That's what the Amiga had that no PC, Mac, or even ARM SoC board can touch. That's what a "new Amiga" needs, not this perennial one-sided dick-measuring contest.

"And that's what the Amiga is all about, Charlie Brown."

[commodorejohn]

SO WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT USING PC TECHNOLOGY IN A MORE EFFICIENT INTELLIGENT WAY AS AMIGA WOULD HAVE HAD TO ADAPT TO DO THEN ANY NEW AMIGA SHOULD USE IBM XENON CPU/SUPERIOR MEMORY BUS ARCHITECTURE TO MAC OR PC/TOP END GRAPHICS CHIP.

You sound like Barry.

[commodorejohn]

Tools are just tools, though - I'd imagine the big difference is your classmates spent their time Googling "kewl photoshop tr1ckz!!1" while you actually focused on making something.

[commodorejohn]

Quite so.

[commodorejohn]

Well I can explain this. A lot of us over there all are like you guys. As former users we want a new Amiga so badly we are happy to cut off our right arm for one. =)) But we also realise the limitations of the legacy systems (which we call Classic Amiga) and want to make improvements to it using what tech is available now (and in abundance today) to make a PC-based Amiga a real alternative to a Dell or Mac.

I just don't understand this. Obviously there are people there with a lot of real feeling for CBM/Amiga systems - so why are you following a delusional narcissist who's said outright that he doesn't care about the CBM/Amiga community?

Barry has said back in September he is planning on a totally BRAND NEW A500 in the coming months based on the design of RJ Marrett's Amiga concept.

Barry says a lot of things.

[commodorejohn]

(notice how theyre only using other peoples work that costs them nothing?)

How can you say that, fishy!? Don't you realize, they made a whole custom skin? Where "custom skin" is defined as "tweaking GNOME settings to be kind of blue-ish and OSX-ey?" That must've taken them whole man-years to develop!

Hypothetical, but I also disagree that current limitations in amiga based oses mean it needs to be disregarded and started again for it to advance. Funny enough these "words of wisdom" seem to usually come from people who have never developed for the system, and dont really know what's required.
Look at where Windows has ended up, on a core with disadvantages vs amiga os, or how far linux has come along. Yes it's quite some work, but there's no reason AmigaOS based systems cant advance similarly.

I do wonder about that. 68k doesn't have anything like the handy virtual 8086 mode that Win32 uses to run Win16 programs safely, but I still don't see why it couldn't be done in theory.

[commodorejohn]

CommodoreJohn, I know how you feel and it 'seems' that way 'that he doesn't care'. But to be fair he DOES. Otherwise he wouldn't be spending so much money and so much of his time to 'resurrect' the Commodore brand with new products and new ideas. After all, it's real money and time invested into a business we're talking about here....not some giant faceless corporation with loads of money to splash away. If he fails the whole thing collapses...that's the reality. He hasn't got the luxury to think how things should be

He's not resurrecting anything. He's putting bog-standard PC boards in a moderately spiffy case, loading them with a free OS that CUSA in no way contributed to the development of, tweaking the default theme to look vaguely like an electric-blue OSX, charging obscene amounts of money, and expecting to be hailed as the second coming of Jack Tramiel.

And if you think he's putting himself on the line here, you haven't looked up the definition of "limited-liability company."
 

TBH Barry's not that bad...he's more of a 'actions speak louder than words' kinda guy and he's just probably annoyed sometimes that whenever he's on A.org it's like as if a rugby ball has just been handed to him and everyone in the room decides to have a scrum... :lol:

o_O If his actions speak louder than his words, and his words have spoken "I'm not asking how often you have sex, or if you have trouble performing. We already know that because we looked. I am asking what is your wife's favorite position, and does she really enjoy it?" then...wow.

[commodorejohn]

And honestly, is what he/CUSA is doing really that bad? TBH they're no different to Dell or HP bashing a computer together from spare parts today much like Apple is doing with the Intel range of Mac Pros.

Except that Dell and HP aren't running around pretending to be the resurrection of something they have absolutely nothing to do with, they're just selling PCs. (And I haven't had a kind word for Apple since the Intel switch, I just don't bring it up because Steve Jobs didn't come over to amiga.org and yammer at people.)

Well let's be fair here..... What I am trying to say by 'actions speak louder than words' is he IS trying to resurrect Commodore/Amiga and he HAS done this with the new Commodore range and in particular, the new C64x.

Again I ask, how is dropping a prefab, unrelated product in a reproduction case "resurrecting?" If that's resurrection, people in the modding community have beaten him to the punch by years.

Ask yourself, apart from the OS did Hyperion or Amiga Inc did anyone for that matter actually create physical hardware for Commodore or the Amiga brands (which are absolutely crucial to reviving the brands)?

I have little interest in OS4 myself, but it takes me all of one minute to go to Wikipedia and see ten post-Commodore "Amiga" machines capable of running OS4 in their "Amiga hardware" category, going all the way back to 2002. There's also the Efika, which won't run OS4 but will run MorphOS. So...evidence suggests that's a "yes, yes they did."

And, in the Amiga community at least right now this is the problem I see....what Spirantho said earlier was absolutely true. That there is so much 'in-fighting' going on with the various Amiga brands right now. Why? Because none of us are willing to compromise.

No, the reason there's infighting is because people made it a holy war. It has nothing to do with meeting in the middle.

And what is this compromise? Compatibility (with other platforms that most people use, which CUSA is actually doing right now by going Intel + Linux) and coming together as a group. If we want Amiga to really come back (to appeal to its relevant markets) this is what it really needs to do.

No. You can take a Linux PC and slap a sticker on it if you like, but it will not change the fundamental nature of the thing. It will not make it an Amiga, because it has derived nothing at all from the Amiga. That's what Barry, Amiga Inc., and many others refuse to understand, that these names are not just all-purpose labels to stick on things to make them more salable.

But no they're not like that. They keep AmigaOS closed source. For Aros they refuse to recognise their individual contributions and bring them into the fold

I'm not defending Hyperion. Not at all. I'm just objecting to the idea that one can take two completely un-Amiga-related technologies, combine them, and then label them "Amiga!"

Believe it or not, Linux is perfect for a new Amiga. I say this because in my mind.

No. No, it's not. I've just spent way too much time trying to get into Linux, myself. And I've come away with one conclusion: I don't want anything to do with it. Let it run the servers of the world, it seems to do a fine job at that, but as a desktop OS it's horrible. UI is schizophrenic at best, configuration's lovely until it's suddenly a nightmare, drivers are only ever written for the popular hardware, and nobody in the community is much help. I don't need that. I don't want it. And I sure as hell don't want it being marketed as "Amiga."

If the new Amiga can't do that (and match or even exceed the speed/spec of current systems) then it isn't worthy of the Amiga name...it isn't worthy of being revived as a brand. I don't know about any one elses view, but that's my opinion...

This is what we don't need, this crippling inferiority complex. So many Amigans are unable to see the good in a project because it doesn't bench what their i7 box does. We don't need powerful, we need good.

[commodorejohn]

Yes I know, there was also the Walker. Fair enough....but the point I was trying to make was they didn't 'buy' the Commodore and Amiga brands like CUSA have and formally bring them back together and create 'real hardware' under those names. Don't you see it's important from a marketing perspective?

No, I don't. I find the question of actual substance to be vastly more important than whether a particular system's creator has shelled out to Bill McEwen for the rights to put a particular sticker on the case - and even a thing like the PPC boards that's really only Amiga-like in software is still infinitely closer to being "Amiga" than a bog-standard PC board running Linux.
 

Why oh why can't AmigaOS use x86 as a basis for a new machine now? What is the problem?

I never said it can't. I just said that unrelated hardware + unrelated software does not equal "Amiga." Unrelated hardware + Amiga-related software has a lot stronger case to be made for it.

Look what's happened with Apple now when they've moved over to Intel...they are thriving! Why can't Amiga do the same?

Apple's re-emergence has a lot less to do with switching its computers to Intel (Macs are still at about the same general portion of the market they've always been) and a lot more to do with its shift in focus towards consumer electronics. And frankly, I have even less interest in Amiga-like OSes on a phone than I do in Amiga-like OSes on PCs.
 

I understand where you're coming from. But you also gotta understand where I'm coming from. By doing what you're saying you've also restricting yourself in saying what a future Amiga 'could be'. That it 'cannot be Linux' is really a restrictive viewpoint in my opinion.

And? Any definitive categorization is restrictive by nature. If we know what "Amiga" as a concept is, then we also know everything that it isn't. A Linux PC has nothing, in terms of hardware, software, or even more than basic superficial similarity of user interface, in common with any flavor of Amiga/Amiga-like. Saying that we should agree to call it "Amiga" means that "Amiga" is essentially a meaningless term; since it has no real definition, it can therefore be affixed to anything. Why not take that all the way? Have Amiga kitchen appliances, Amiga hardwood flooring, Amiga tampons! Does it mean anything, or doesn't it?

Why cannot we have a 'modern Amiga' which moves along with the times with these features? Why restrict ourselves to past architecture?

I never said anything of the kind. I'm all for advancement, just not at the cost of sacrificing every single thing at all unique about a system.

Has not the PC market shown to you that 'being technically superior' is what sells systems and OSes?

No. It's shown me that being cheap, open, freely manufacturable, and backed by industry titans is what sells systems.
 

Then what do you suggest should Amiga as a brand, system and fan-base do? We know the market is ripe for the return of an Amiga and something truly worthy for gamers and such....but £1800 I feel is just too much for a machine based on old technology (X1000).

Excellent question. Myself, I favor what I see happening with the NatAmi project, and I'd love for it to be inexpensively available to a large audience. If I had any means to help that happen, I would do so. But I don't, so it's going to depend on what the existing NatAmi team can manage.
 

Well I don't think so. Mac OSX is 'essentially' Linux (albeit BSD-based) but look where after much polishing, it has gotten Apple.

And I hate it less, but I still don't much care for it, for a host of different reasons. And in any case, I'm not aware of a Linux distro that uses OSX-like underpinnings - FreeBSD, maybe, but even that's stuck with the clusterfun that is X11 and eight quadzillion interface toolkits with their own different UI guidelines that developers ignore or heed utterly at random.

It is one of the top sellers now!

...? OSX's market share is somewhere in the 6-10% range.

Yes, that I agree on principle, but good doesn't sell help machines or OSes unfortunately.

I don't care. Good is good, bad is bad, and I've had well and truly enough of pretending otherwise.

you can't do that using the current hardware (unless you want them to recreate retro 16-bit games - but who's willing to do that in this day and age?)

*raises hand*

[commodorejohn]

And if you venture out to try and modernize that ancient amiga-related software(and if the history of the platform is any judge, you'll be smart not to try), you'll end up with something, that again, doesn't have anything to do with how classic AmigaOS does things because you'll have to break pretty much everything, include alien APIs, File systems, new modules...

I don't buy that. I don't see any reason why a new, Amiga-like but fundamentally updated OS with a protected environment for original Amiga software couldn't be written. Hell, that's basically what Win32 did for Win16. The choices aren't limited to "never progress" or "throw out all semblance of inspiration."

But if you object, just use AROS on x86, done deal.

Quite. A hell of a lot more convincing as an "Amiga" substitute than using completely unrelated software like Linux.

[commodorejohn]

Well, go than and code one. Or better, tell Apple they should have stayed Mac OS classic and just "update it". Or tell Microsoft that Windows Millenium was their best effort :lol:.

Millenium wasn't their best effort. 98se was ;P

In all seriousness, though, I'm not saying "try to endlessly tweak the existing codebase and API to sort of work with architectural updates." What I'm saying is, you can do something like NTVDM or OSX's Classic environment and provide a compatibility layer for older software without pulling an OSX by ditching the design entirely and switching to Unix.

You could have a new OS design based on the Amiga API, but not tied strictly to it to the point of impairing modern improvements; new software could be written to run natively on it, and original Amiga software could run in something akin to OSX's Classic environment. Unix isn't the only possible solution (or, in my opinion, the best.)

[commodorejohn]

Well, you're advocating exactly the same thing as I am. A new OS with emulation for old apps. Though, since the vast majority of commercial Amiga software dates from 80s and 90s which any hardware today will run easily, a simple emulation would do.

Emulation will do fine for games, but for other software it'd be nice to have a more integrated solution.

It's the most suitable solution, code portability wise. You go in a different direction, unless it's significantly superior to what already exists, you'll make it less appealing to devs and far less likely to get ports/versions of popular apps from other OSes.

That's not necessarily true. Haiku is nothing like Unix internally, but it has POSIX compatibility (and GTK and Qt ports) and thus can get a lot of Linux software as a simple recompile. There's no reason a new Amiga-like OS couldn't do the same. Even if it was more work than that, it'd still be preferable to redefining "Amiga" into meaninglessness.

Today, only 2 families of OSes are successful on personal (or mobile) computers... UNIXoids and Windows. I can't see that changing anytime soon.

News flash: The Amiga is not "successful." It's not even the teensiest blip on the map of OS market share these days, it hasn't been for nigh-on two decades now, not since Windows was a 16-bit, unprotected, cooperative-multitasking DOS shell and Linux was just a quirky Finn playing with a 386 and sharing his experiments on Usenet.

It's not going to be "successful" any time soon, because the only people who are still interested in it these days are nutters like you or I on the lunatic fringe of computing. Even if one were to hire a wizard to magically reverse its decline as if time were running backwards, by the time the Amiga got back to representing any significant fraction of the market, who knows where the mainstream would be?

There's no point in trying to reinvent yourself by simply copycatting the big players. All you're going to do is turn into another wannabe. (Google managed it, but that's because A. they're farkin' Google and B. they actually had points of comparison with iOS like "actually kind of open." But mostly A.) Maybe you'll be up-to-date techologically, but you'll still be "playing catch-up" in terms of actually getting anybody to ever use it.

And given that, why bother? Why not spend that effort on making something new?

[commodorejohn]

I've seen the term been misused before on other things, but at least with a Linux-based PC it is still relevant (as its computing). But God forbid the day we get Amiga tampons! That'll really be the end of the world....

But what's the difference, really? If anything computing-related counts as "Amiga," then the name is still watered-down to the point of uselessness. By that logic, you could have "Amiga" Macintoshes, "Amiga" programmable calculators, or "Amiga" software-as-a-service web platforms. If that's how it work, is it really such a great difference between "Amiga = computer thing" and "Amiga = thing?" You might as well have branded hygiene products.

Well if you're talking about sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice had already been made when Commodore International had gone bankrupt. Most of the loyal fanbase had lost everything when the parent company went under - we lost everything then. Talent, money, knowledge - everything that was C=. What we're trying to do now (in CUSA's case) is not 'resurrect' the old 16-bit platform per se, but to start off with a completely new sheet. Since everything's been so convuluted anyways, we might as well start off with a clean-sheet right (as Wolf To The Moon says)?

But what's the point? CUSA employs nobody that made CBM or Amiga what they were, nobody even remotely comparable in knowledge or vision, has no interest in doing any of the things Commodore did, and to any outside observer seems basically to be in the biz to sell overpriced same-old to desperate retro-obsessives. If you're going to "start off with a clean sheet," you could at least have the decency to not pretend you're following up on something entirely different.

In this sense (in CUSA's case - I'm not talking about anyone else) it is 'doing things in the spirit of Commodore and Amiga' which was doing it creatively, imaginatively and powerfully.

But they're not. They're not creative - they haven't created anything. They've reproduced a case, bulk-purchased existing boards, slapped the two together, and stuck a re-paletted Linux Mint on it. The only thing differentiating a C64x from any other ITX board in a C64 case running Linux is that it shows a chickenhead on boot, which is just a tweak on a feature a lot of BIOSes already have.

They're not imaginative, either - Barry's "vision" as stated thus far consists solely of riding the "overpriced retro-packaged Linux box" horse until its legs fall off. The real Commodore went from calculators to PET to VIC to C64 to Amiga in under a decade - Barry's line of two PC clones and plans for a third doesn't come within a light-year of comparison.

And they're not all that powerful, either - certainly not for that kind of money. So they've got an i7 board in it now - big freakin' deal, you can put together your own i7 system for a lot less, and put it in a better-cooled case while you're at it. Hell, you can buy i7 laptops now.

as former Amiga users we are tired of Windows and tired of OSX/Macs/Apple revisionism. We just want something else 'different' on the market, something that will still give us that nostalgic feeling but still allow us to run the latest and greatest stuff, primarily games and creative stuff.

There's nothing nostalgic about Mint. There just isn't. I mean, if it shipped with a stripped-down System-V-clone distro that displayed amber text on a terminal emulator and didn't know what X even was, that wouldn't be good, but it could at least conceivably be claimed to be "nostalgic."

It's still performance driven and modern, but with a unique character that is 'Amiga'.

But it isn't. It doesn't work like an Amiga, it doesn't play like an Amiga, it doesn't feel like an Amiga, it doesn't have anything Amiga-like under the hood, it doesn't have anything Amiga-like in the bare metal, it has nothing at all in common with anything that forms any part of any basic consensus of what "Amiga" is. Even if you feel that there's some undefinable "character" that makes the Amiga, Linux does. Not. Have. It. It is its own separate thing, with its own separate merits, but it is not Amiga.

EXACTLY....backed by industry titans. And you can't do with without a powerful, affordable and adaptable architecture. At the moment it seems, nothing can touch x86 right now in terms of bang for buck or platform support. Just look at how many copies of Battlefield 3 got shifted recently.....8 million copies!

Uh...Battlefield 3 is not x86-exclusive, it runs on the 360 and PS3. In any case, x86 was established long before it actually got good, back in the bad old days of 640KB conventional memory, labyrinthine ISA configuration, and segment registers. I'm not saying it doesn't have its merits now, I'm saying that it didn't get where it was by being the best.

Perhaps then FreeBSD should re-evaluate their position? But I certainly know NetBSD could be a contender because it can read AmigaOS files natively. POSIX support is important for a better OS for Amiga I agree...

Any Linux distro can read Amiga files natively, it's right there in the kernel build options and easily done through FUSE even if it's not compiled in. Hell, Windows can read Amiga filesystems with some finagling. And what would you mean by FreeBSD "re-evaluating their position?" They could ship some non-X environment, but all that would mean is a lot of work building an X compatibility layer. X apps would still be poorly designed by people who know nothing about good UI. Unix technology isn't (most of) the problem, it's Unix culture.

Yes, but not when you include iOS as part of the make-up. The potential for Apple to utilise this as an underpinning is huge...just look at how the new iOS5 update has 'freed' people from their computers when updating their phones/iPads.

I thought we weren't counting phones/tablets? I certainly wouldn't, they're even less of an either/or proposition than computers. Lots of people have a Windows machine and an iPhone or iPad.

I think there's a lot more potential for Amiga to develop even further now as a new system than ever before. Just look at Aros' latest posting. They are now supporting Nvidia's Fermi cards right out of the box! Now that's what we need to revitalise the brand and userbase....

Yeah, no argument there. But that's kind of exactly my point - projects like AROS and MorphOS are actively developed, support newer, more powerful, more available hardware, and are still infinitely closer to being "Amiga" than a PC running Linux with a sticker on the box.

[commodorejohn]

Call it daft

Okay: it's daft. Tablets are a marketing-department fad toy, designed to make futurists think they're living in the future and nerds think they're living in Star Trek: The Next Generation. They're a shoddy compromise between the smartphone and the laptop that inherits the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. Feh.

[commodorejohn]

Now this is where I would have to disagree with you. When tablets first came out I would have agreed that they were gimicky and appealed to the "Oh look how futuristic I look" geeks. They were clunky, awkward to use and weren't all that powerful. Now though, as both the technology and software behind them is starting mature they are having more of an impact. I know they wouldn't replace a full desktop computer. But I can see their appeal growing more and more.

Nope. They've improved, but considering the stunted baseline they started from, that's not saying much. You can pile on the improvements as much as you like, but they're still going to be a laptop someone's chopped the keyboard off of.