So were the Morph OS folks wrong all along?

[thedocbwarren]

You know what, that's sad.  Coming from the Atari perspective, what makes these machine so much to love is what they are.  To me ( a new Amiga owner) I believe you are not an Amiga unless it's a classic system.  I've written assembler on 68K for years on old ST systems and frankly the 68060 or PPC systems running something that can run the software is an emulator.

I beleive these machines have their place in history.  The Amiga is the greatest 16-bit machine ever made.  32-bit, well, debatable.  The custom chips is what makes these system the cat's meow.  They beat the odds, and blasted limits.  That's the Amiga.  MorphOS is nothing more than an alternative OS.  I can run it on my Mac G4.  That not an Amiga make.

[thedocbwarren]

Hm, what? The 68060 is a 68k.

What 16bit Amiga?

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.

Um, 16-bit Amiga as is 1000, 500, 600.  Those are ground breaking.  1000 was the created 68000-based system ever.  500 changed it again.

I'd argue high-end, Apple is better (maybe when you talk price for performance I suppose.)  I'd argue Atari has some power past the orginal 520/1040s somewhat.  But who cares.

[thedocbwarren]

Not joking.  The 1000 was cool as hell, and the 500 made it affordable.  ground-breaking.  3000 was cool, but sorry Mac IIfx came out before it (widly expensive though) and so did the Atari TT030.  Lots of cool stuff came out in 1990.  So I credit the Amiga as the BEST 16-bit machine out there.  

SO I don't understand your logic with the 060 faster at emulating a machine hardware similar to an slow processor.  I can 'emulate' a 68000 Mac faster on my 68000 Atari ST since the processor is the same and faster... so... odd comparison.

Look the Amiga started too expensive bust was superior to the market in 1995.  The Mac had a better GUI, sorry it does.  The Atari ST was cheaper.  Then 500 came out and kicked it's butt and changed everything.  The Mac obviously won out, and I think the Mac II is a better system than the Amiga over-all though.  I have a IIfx that is a similar idea with custom chips in the idea of a workstation and is just way better in a bunch of ways.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm in love with my Amiga.  I love all the retros like the lovely birds they are.  I respect and love everything that makes them unique.  I also love the Speccy for similar reasons.

Oh and expanding the systems, hell of lot of fun.  I'm AMAZED!!!  AMAZED!!!  Again, AMAZED on how expanable these Amigas are!  I'm impressed on how much you can expand even today.  It's incredible! They are so well built and so thought out.  But then I'm a Jay Minor fan (Atari 800 rocks!)

Look, PCs sucked back then (and still do) so the 68K machines were a million times better.

Are you joking? the 1000 was groundbreaking, the 500 was not much different than the 1000( rom and a little more ram in some cases),the 600 was crap(sorry guys,but looking at when it came out, what its intentions were and lack of expandability etc).. the A3000 was groundbreaking. The 3000 was the first machine to be fully 32bit everything, Zorro3 etc.life was starting to get good with the 3000.68000 was ok initially but 030+ was way better. A3000/4000 were intended to be expanded, that's why they had a proper 32bit bus.gfx cards don't disable the custom chips or anything i would say its more a extension in some ways.Back in the day some of us used the amiga for everything daily,and a gfx card helped with alot of apps and such. Not everyone just plays games all the time.
Besides,expanding the hardware with addons was all part of the fun!

I'm not sure what apple you are talking about,but the 060 amiga could emulate a 040 apple faster than a real apple of the day could.

[thedocbwarren]

That may be, but the Amiga OS has nothing special over OSX or Linux in a technicle stancec.  Everything the Amiga did was just so far ahead in 1985 to 1990.  But other stuff caught up.  I only argue what IS the Amiga, is the breaking of boundaries.  Other than that a new one is a PC with an alternative OS.

I'm not flaming, I just want to place the original Amiga in the pedestal it deserves.  It was ground breaking, but now days things are just different.  I feel the same way about the Atari folks who run TOS 4ish on at PC-like clone with a 68060 or whatever.  To me (only me perhaps) it's just a shadow of the beast (to use a pun.)

OCS was awesome compared to 16-colours in a shifter.  It was more clever than the B&W Mac or anything else for that matter.

ECS, not so much so it seams, and AGA, unfortunately seems more catch-up.  A shame, I think Amiga could have won.

-Cheers!

I can't think of a single hardware feature of the original Amigas I would retain outside of the OS.
Everything used to build NG based systems today is so much more capable that arguing for custom chipsets is pointless.
Everything evolves. Well almost everything. The Amiga chipset barely changed as the models progressed. What started out as a remarkable symphony of a very capable processor and well matched chipset became a mess with processors many times more capable and a chipset that was only slightly better than the first model.

[thedocbwarren]

Very likely.  Too bad it didn't.  I think I'd prefer running one.  Seems very clever people were designing this amazing system.

Rest in Peace Jay.

Had Amiga survived it would have likely followed the Mac route, first to PPC retaining a classic environment for a time until software caught up and then moving to X86 with a Rosetta layer that would eventually be abandoned as software caught up.  Unfortunately it didn't and so you have the Coelacanth OS you have today....

[thedocbwarren]

You know, the only thing I wish the Amiga did in the beginning that I do like about the Atari ST;  I like the idea you can use a timer to get your code synced up vs under-clocking the processor to make everything sync up.  But, later systems seemed to solve that real well with faster CPUS better than ATari people did.  A lot of asm stuff didn't run on later systems without dropping the clock to 8Mhz.

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

[thedocbwarren]

I always thought the whole 'custom chips' thing on the Amiga was strange anyway.  The Amiga was unique for the co-processor design.  It's a great idea that worked real well for Jay's other system Atari 8-bit.  The opposite for the Mac and Atari ST.  That being a CPU and not much else.

That being said, this is why I have a hard time with the idea that a PC with some Amiga-like OS on it seems like an alternative OS and not an Amiga.  I guess it's all lost in ambiguity since most machines these days are not 'systems' but collections of similar parts with some OS on it.  I guess that's where it gets hard to classify.  That's even true for consoles.