Phase 5 Digital Products comeback?

[Heiroglyph]

It makes sense if someone can actually build them at reasonable prices.

The only reason their old cards go for $1000+ is scarcity.

We're still buying 030's just because they are available for purchase.

They don't strictly have to source enough 060s because even bare cards that can use your own 040 or 060 would still be huge sellers.

There are a ton of crippled A3640 systems out there that would get a big boost from the RAM and SCSI, not to mention the potential to use a GRex and maybe PPC.

I wish them all the luck in the world. If they ever come to market I'll be very interested in what they have to offer and at what price.

[Heiroglyph]

What do you think A-Eon and Hyperion is doing?

Working on a platform I have no emotional attachment to.

The PPC systems are neither current nor retro, so there's not much interest from people like myself.

To me it's much more interesting to tweak old systems with some sort of nostalgia.

For those who want a PPC system, more power to them, I just wish that the people with the license to the OS cared about the same market I do, which is 68k.

[Heiroglyph]

@kreciu
Obviously a Phase5 PPC board would be retro, and if you (and 'people like you') don't want to move to something better, hey, good luck with that.
But that was the direction things evolved in.

Personally, IF these guys really have the talent to pull this off, eventually I'd like to see a better PPC board with something like a 1.4 GHz cpu.
It would require a lot of rework of the software though.
I'm not sure they are up to it.

You misunderstood. My comment was in reply to "What do you think A-Eon and Hyperion is doing?". Those companies aren't doing anything I'm interested in.

I think a new production of even the original PPC boards would be great since many people never had access to them and they make great additions to Classic systems.

Better is a relative term. Lately I don't even really use my 2GHz MorphOS machine I picked up for next to nothing. It's technically better in every way compared to my A2000 and A4000, but it gathers dust while my A2000 gets daily use just because it's fun to me.

Each to their own, that was just my answer to "What do you think A-Eon and Hyperion is doing?".

[Heiroglyph]

Sorry for the misunderstanding.
You know, instead of a new A1200 from Jens, I'd rather have a PCIe X1 plug in Amiga card for the AmigaOne or G5 PCIe Mac. Then we could really incorporate legacy software into the NG base.

The problems there are cost, availability of chips or replacement FPGA cores and software support.

At that point a software emulation starts to look more viable and has no hardware cost attached and it really makes the decision harder to justify, especially for a commercial application.

With something like what P5 are hopefully proposing I really don't see a downside. It seems like a good small business venture.

There is clearly a market for the cards at any remotely sane price.

They are proven in the field. (assuming a decent run of cards)

And the market was never saturated with them, so there is demand.

The only remotely viable rival is the Vampire and those are not made for most desirable systems, the A1200 and A4000. Plus production on the v600 and v500 hasn't ramped up to meet demand yet.

I'm not saying the guy can pull it off, but I'm amazed someone hasn't revived and revised these cards already. It makes too much sense.

[Heiroglyph]

Where on earth will they source 060 chips from?

As I said before, it doesn't really matter from a business perspective.

If they can get 060's all the better, but there's also market for better 040 boards and those cards are jumperable for either CPU so they have options.

They could still sell a lot of CPU-less boards and leave that up to the user. Either dig up a used 060 or 040 somewhere or move it from their older CPU card if they have one.

A Cyberstorm PPC for example would be a great upgrade over even a Cyberstorm Mk2 060 with the SCSI module, not to mention the benefits of moving your 040 from an A3640 to it.

We haven't even mentioned the A2000 boards, but that would be a very worthwhile upgrade for most A2000 owners even if they had to source a CPU.

[Heiroglyph]

I really respect that position. Personally I am more interested in AOS4.x and its hardware. However if the new Phase5 could make a new batch of PPCcards for the classic I would be very interested.

Agreed. I can respect your interest without sharing it as well.

We should just be glad there is a potential overlap so that some advances can help us both.

[Heiroglyph]

that's exactly the sort of sentiment that, if it catches on, will make the online amiga community a much more enjoyable place in which to participate.

-- eliyahu

Now lets all hold hands and sing Kumbaya... :angel:

We would all get a lot more done if we would just focus on sharing advances rather than acting like one "camp" somehow hurts the other.

[Heiroglyph]

The boxes appear to be for the connectors and not the accelerators; We've ordered DIN41612 connectors from DigiKey that came packaged in similar boxes

I'm pretty sure you're exactly right. it does say RoHS parts in the caption after all.

I can only assume that the darkening was trying to be a marketing tease and maybe an attempt to make the part numbers a bit less visible.

I understand trying to not get our hopes up, but the outright disdain some people have for this guy is amazing.

Let him prove himself or not.

[Heiroglyph]

I still haven't seen any indication that he's not for real.

I'm pretty excited to think I might be able to buy a brand new Cyberstorm with UW SCSI for my 4000 without taking out a second mortgage. Thinking that I could replace my Mediator with a GRex would be too amazing.

Hopefully he'll make enough money to do some updates to the design, but if not it would still be nice to have more units of the old design available.

I'm not even thinking of big updates like SATA, but maybe hardware that is more tolerant of overclocking, maybe includes a bit more and faster RAM directly on the board, faster PPC, etc. Just things that weren't available at the time but are now relatively cheap.

[Heiroglyph]

That's an even worse scenario.  If Phase 5 is releasing bare boards as a product, how many Amiga users actually have the skills and equipment needed to finish their boards let alone have the components and CPUs to get them running?

I'm 99% sure he meant boards without the CPU plugged in, not a PCB with no components.

[Heiroglyph]

Until they have something to sell, who really cares?

If I was making an Amiga product, I would keep it secret until it was physically shipped to resellers or I was ready to ship to end users at that very moment.

The only thing you get for pre-announcements in this community is sh!t on.

Why they opened their mouth is a mystery to me, it leads to nothing but angry forum threads.

[Heiroglyph]

I'd rather they worked on the product myself.

We have to face it, we don't have business people running these companies anymore. They will make PR blunders and bad decisions like these.

He was probably just a guy like one of us, excited to tell the community what he's working on, but not that good at running the marketing side of a business.

Most people with business sense know not to be in this market at all.

[Heiroglyph]

keeping secret isnt necessary. honest communication will be enough, even some exaggeration will go through. it has been proven lately. but publicity stunts will make people rather cautious. except for die hard cheerlanders, of course.

I disagree. You could have the most perfect widget in the world and some of this community would scream and yell about how horrible it is and compare the creator to Hitler.

You pretty much have to come out complete with hardware and software to back it up to avoid as much speculation as possible.

[Heiroglyph]

no. despite the degenerated image the community will likely not react reasonably to a reasonable offer. might sound like a conspiracy theory, while such an offer has usually been surpressed, invoking an expectation that i will be met with resistance, distrust and badmouthing anyway, by so called "usual suspects" (representing simply many if not everybody who either way doesnt care or dare not speak out anymore).

however some not very promissing iniatives went out under the radar so far, till it was too late. apollo/vampire sounds like an  example. am i right?

I'm not sure I understood your reply exactly.

Vampire is one that I would hold up as a good example of not saying a word until completion. Every great step they make is rewarded with about 50/50 congratulations and complaints of sill missing features. Well, duh, it's not finished.

I'd also say that there were a lot of mistakes due to it being represented publicly by engineer enthusiasts rather than business people. Their hearts were in the right place, but mistakes were made.

Our community overall is hard on anyone so IMHO, it's better to not engage us until you absolutely can't help it.

[Heiroglyph]

really??? i must be missing something in your logic. maybe our resemblance is different..

lets review, the natami approach, majsta going around asking for guidance, first vampire version, work in progress, kind of. tg68 core adoptation, 030/25 speeds. cheap. many bought only to find it discontinued in support after some time and arguably for a good reason. as much as none really complained. at least almost none of the customers.

okay, igor had survived some hard times but if from anyone then from other developers. then apollo team joined in or vice versa.

in my book it is nothing like a closed, behind the scenes apporach. on the contrary. you can simply chip in on irc and be invited to contribute. and it is in my book the right spirit.

I was speaking more to the Apollo/v2 versions.

The outright hatred shown because the work-in-progress core doesn't have an FPU yet gets pretty bad, not to mention the MMU.

As for the business side, Igor did everything humanly possible to lower the cost per unit but they finally realized that even making no profit and doing all the the labor themselves for "free", they couldn't hit the price they had put on the developer v500 boards and meet demand.

Once one of the dev boards (that were sold at or below cost so encourage development help BTW) went on ebay for big bucks, they started doing that themselves and stopped the loose flow of developer boards.

They also finally made the decision to do what they should have done in the first place and actually price the boards realistically and pay to have them produced so that they could meet demand.

Unfortunately the PR mistake was already made. Had they priced higher to begin with (both dev boards and projected final price) there would have been less flack thrown back at them as people probably wouldn't have balked at the new price considering what you get in comparison to other somewhat comparable CPU cards.

I'm not sure if you've been following those types of threads (some of which get quickly closed or deleted) but it's not pretty. Especially when you consider they were doing their best to help the community and simply weren't good with business and marketing.

Full disclosure, I'm helping them finish their SD card driver for free and it will be open source. I bought my v500 like anyone else just before the price change.