So the "custom" chips in the original amiga weren't a good thing?
It was an excellent idea at the time when tech market was the wild wild west era, and a creative individuals could carve out an empire from the beginnings of a house garage. Eye popping gaming capabilities had to be created that was affordable. Hence, the Amiga was born. Today, if you want to revisit the wild wild west, you can either take a flight to your favorite watering hole or take the Interstate Highway. If you think you can get there by horse and wagon, be prepared to meet certain traffic laws, enviromental laws and certain death from a auto accident. Until you can create a time machine, live for today, not the past.
In my oppinion custom is a good thing, as long it's not a cause for being a pain in the arse to program for. If you join the x86 side, you'll be running along-side the "big boys" Microsoft, Apple, and Linux in the eyes of the public.
In other words, no one is going to be able to rip off folks for common hardware. How sad, only making 10 or so buck from a sale of a mobo. /sniffles. As for the eye of the public, it's even worse when they find it's over priced and way under preforming. Remember, Amiga was CHEAPER then those ghastly 286 boxes and was far better at games with stereo sound, no less. That is the reason it's so near and dear to us, best bang for the buck.
Is it any wonder that a generic miniATX series mobo that happen to sport a slow PPC that was seriously over priced and buggy went over like a lead balloon in sales with the public? Wake up an smell the coffee! Reality says you have to be competitive in the real world. Just ask Eyetech.
At this moment in time funds are limited and large leaps in technology are not really on the horizon, so i think Amiga would fair much better creating it's own section of the market, and gain it's own fan base like that then trying to catch up with the large companies and essentially becoming a "PC" in the process.
Sadly, Eyetech already did that with the A1 which was a generic (third party no less) mobo that happen to sport a PPC CPU (plus buggy chipset) and a boingball logo. The only difference between a A1 and x86 mobo, the x86 was a franction of the price, the chipsets worked with common obtained additions (aka RAM) and warranties are usually honored. So why don't you call old Allen up, tell him you got the perfect business model for him. He'll love it!
Dammy