The Future Of The Amiga - Where Do You Stand...

[Franko]

I've been reading through a lot of the old threads here from the early noughties and not even having bothered with the internet until this year I was left feeling a bit dismayed and sad about what seems to have been a huge split and infighting in the Amiga community a number of years ago, mostly with the introduction of OS4 but also MorphOS & Aros Vs so called Classic OS.

I had no idea this had gone on, as when the last of the Amiga magazines rolled of the press and I lost touch with what was happening in the Amiga community. I was left in my own happy little world thinking that all Amiga users were still out their like me doing their best to keep the old machines running. It appears this was not the case and instead of helping one another some sort of silly war broke out and the community split into different factions.

Although this is obviously old news to most of you it's left me wondering for the first time in almost 25 years of being an Amiga user if their is such a thing as the Amiga community anymore and is it worth all the time, money & effort spent on this amazing machine or is it indeed time to move on to pastures new and remember fondly just what a great machine the Amiga was/is.

Given all that, personally I see the Natami as the way forward for the Amiga, as to me it appears it's going to be basically an Amiga that runs 68K code, is fully backward compatible but will run at much faster speeds and can use modern peripherals more easily. This seems to me to be closer to a real Amiga than using MorphOS or Aros running on a processor that is totally alien to the Amiga. I suppose though this will all depend upon the Natami actually making it to production or is it time to truly consider Aros or MorphOS or dare I say it move to pastures new.

Don't get me wrong, I have quite an interest now in Aros & MorphOS and am not putting them down in any way. It just seems to me looking at what I have learned so far about the aforementioned that the Natami would be the best way forward for the Amiga in my humble opinion.

Just wondering now where does everyone else stand with their views on the future of the Amiga and why you truly believe that your personal choice would be the right path for the Amiga to take...

[Franko]

Actually Franko is pretty lucky to have missed the holy wars...

Actually I've read through quite a bit of them, reckon if I'd been around here at the time I would have ended up with a lifetime ban... :lol:

I agree with what has been said so far but I'm really interested to hear peoples opinions on where they think the Amiga's future should lye & why...

[Franko]

Reckon I have to agree a lot with what Mechy has to say as I seem to have travelled much the same Amiga path as him although I don't quite agree with his dismal outlook on the Amigas future. As for running the Amiga under emulation on a PC or MAC just to benefit from easy access to readily available peripherals then that to me is not what the Amiga is about.

I have to disagree with Iggy's viewpoint on the Amiga, ie:- wanting to play BluRay discs, to me that's why you'd buy a BluRay Recorder/Player. I don't mind what it costs me money wise to keep my Amigas going and will most likely end up purchasing a MiniMigAGA, Natami & X1000 if/when they become available. I've said elsewhere before that for all my computing needs the Amiga covers it all except for the internet, thats what I use the Mac for, the net & for nothing else.

While I sincerely hope that all the various options continue to flourish and that diversity is good up to a point, Mechy makes a very good point though about all this diversity eroding away the custom base of the few hardware developers & retailers who still strive to bring us genuine Amiga hardware.

While we can all hope that various methods we choose as individuals to remain an Amiga user continues to flourish I can't help but wonder why some are willing to spend money on a PC or MAC and run an Amiga under emulation and not invest some of that cash in purchasing genuine Amiga hardware (old or New) and help keep alive the few hardware developers & retailers who still strive to support the Amiga.

[Franko]

Reason why most people have opted for x86 (or shortly ARM) is UAE (in whatever flavor) plays the Amiga games and that is what it was all about, play games.  Some of us would not buy classic hardware nor PPC because there is no benefit to do so.  I look at the AROS/MOS/OS4 groups and shake my head because none of them are true Next Generation OSs that I need to run today.  Once one of them can do true SMP with MP, give me a call when it can run on portables of my choosing.

Man have you missed out if you think the Amiga is only a games console, I aint knocking anyone who just uses the Amiga (in whatever form) for just playing games but there's a whole lot more interesting & productive things the Amiga can do. Give it a try sometime you might just be pleasantly surprised...

[Franko]

@ dammy

From your first post here it came across to me that all you had used the Amiga for was playing games, nice to hear that you used it for something a bit more worthwhile like your BBS. Myself and my friends had already grown tired of just using a computer to just play games (coming from the era of the VIC 20 & C64) by the time I got my first A1000 at the start of 86. By the end of 87 I had two A500 and a couple of Star dot matrix printers and was running my own DTP/Design business from home.

Although I bought almost every game ever released for the Amiga, in this neck of the woods we did play them but most of our time was spent cracking them, creating demo's, writing mods, programming and creating VHS music/gfx videos using the likes of Digi-View & Digi-Paint. The actual playing of games was never very big around these parts. I do agree that probably for most users games were the number 1 purpose for buying an Amiga but the circles I moved in and probably because of the age range we belonged to we had kinda outgrown games and were more interested in seeing just what we could push the Amiga to do.

Strangly enough the only console I've ever owned is the SNES and it's the only thing I really still use these days for playing games. My Amiga collection very rarely gets used for games at all anymore as I still prefer to tinker and program on them more than anything thing else...

[Franko]

@ skilgannon

ahh... the good auld days up at ra Barras, spent many a Saturday and Sunday their buying and trading all the latest games, and running like hell when someone shouted 'it's ra polis'... :lol:

I even remember once spotting a A500 for sale lying in a manky puddle at Paddies Market...

[Franko]

LOL Aren't we all a bunch of cynical bastards these days!  :lol:

Excellent!

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I reckon there were subliminal messages in the old guru meditations that turned us all into cynical bastards... :roflmao:

[Franko]

I just know what I need for a daily use system (and I have it).

Reckon that's what really matters at the end of the day...

I think we all just still like to try and convince each other that our own personal choice is the best way to go as it passes the time as we all sit here getting older and waiting for something to happen, kinda like old age pensioners comparing ailments & diseases with each other...

[Franko]

Apple sales people are a bunch of toffee nosed twats (well the one's in the official Apple store in Edinburgh are anyway) plus half of the dunderheids who work there talk with a grating half Scottish half American accents, get right up my nose so they do, hope at the next students strike they pan in their windows and loot the bloody place... :madashell:

RANT OVER... Apologies to all... (except if you work in that ruddy shop..)

(Mind you I'm from Glasgow & we don't like Edinburgh folk anyways, east & west don't mix... )

[Franko]

I think one of the big problems is that some people believe their idea about an amiga is the only true way of thinking about an amiga e.g. like you guys think it is the m68k hardware with coprocessors. My - probably Utopian - wish is that all people could consider people running some form of Amiga 'system' like UAE, OS3.x, OS4.x, MOS, AROS be part of the amiga community and not part of the betrayals to the Amiga cause.

I have an A2000, A1200, A3000, A4000 and A1 at home but hey are hardly used. I like programming and I am an open source proponent (not a FSF believer though). That's why I am an AROS programmer. Eventually I would like to make a PPC AROS versions compatible with the other PPC amiga OSes: e.g. one with an ABI for OS4.x and one for MOS.
I also would like a dev environment that would make is very easy to make Amiga programs that run on all amiga systems (OS3.x, OS4.x, MOS and of course AROS).
Am I a betrayal to the Amiga cause ?

greets,
Staf.

@ Fats

Who mentioned betrayal ? :confused:

The Amiga to me is a combination of both the hardware & OS, for me it's all about finding ways to make the Amiga work with whatever hardware we can get to run on it. It's also still an alternative to the world of PC's & Macs, it has a totally different feel to it in user terms than anything the Mac of PC has to offer.

If folk want to run Aros or MorphOS or even an emulator that's all find and dandy by me, the more folk that have an interest in the Amiga on whichever platform they choose to run it can only be to certain degree a good thing. At the same time though if more and more folk choose this path and the users of genuine Amiga hardware dwindle to next to nothing then the few Amiga hardware developers & retailers left will soon be no more and those ingenious (if few) new pieces of kit that they bring out will cease forever.

I just don't see the point in running a different OS on different hardware unless it's almost 100% backwards compatible with all the old Amiga software (hopefully the Natami will be the answer to this) and having the same feel as the classic Amiga Workbench environment .

At the end of the day if I wanted an easy life when it comes to computers I could simply use this Mac I'm typing on right now to do whatever I want/need but I choose not to as I prefer my trusty old Amiga's and the pleasure that they bring to me.

When you reduce the Amiga to nothing more than an OS then for me it takes away one of the biggest parts of being an Amiga user and that is the ability to tinker & problem solve with the original Amiga hardware. That's when it no longer becomes an Amiga to me, but this is just my own personal viewpoint and noone has to agree or take any notice of it.

[Franko]

Can't speak for The Edinburgh Apple Store, but the ones in London are lovely... it;s the only technologic store you can walk into where all the products are easy to access, set up and and running... and where the staff leave me alone... no asking me if I'm ¨alright¨, if I ¨need help¨ or have I seen the latest xyz... and if/when I finally do decide to enquire or buy something they do exactly what I ask... and don't try and sell me anything more or do anything out side of my request... that's exactly the service I want, and It was because of that I was able to try out a Mac in 2005 which had all the software I wanted to test (already set up there on the bench), that allowed me to decide to get one...

@ bloodline

When I got my first G4 during the summer, I popped into that ruddy shop in Edinburgh to ask what I needed to buy for it to get it up and running properly. I was greeted by a fat little smurfette of a female who droned on in this gawd awful half Scottish Half American accent who basically told me (with a look of on her face that she'd just stood in a pile of dog crap) I had bought a white elephant and there was nothing I could do to upgrade it from OSX 10.2, she then waddled off and that was that.

Oddly enough though as I was standing there with my sister and trying to put away in my suit pocket the list of questions I had to ask, I asked my sister if she could hold on to some of the cash I had in my pockets till I organised them a bit. I handed my sister 6 grand in cash and was just starting to organise my pockets when little chubby checker suddenly appeared again all smiles and directed me to a seat where now all of a sudden she could offer me a consultancy for £25 per half hour and she could probably sort out my problems for me.

Suffice to say as I stuffed my cash back in my pockets I told tubby thanks but no thanks and I would take my business elsewhere, talk about having a face like an auld grannie sucking on her wallies, hers was a picture...

[Franko]

I think they should cut the BS and just accept their fate as a great classic computer, instead of trying to revive everything with a bunch of stupid gimmick hardware.

They succeeded at a time when there wasn't a definite OS in power, but now, Windows, OSX, and Linux have taken over pretty severely.  Why bother anymore.  Just play Amiga games and move on....

If you're happy just doing everyday computing on an Amiga, do it.  Don't wait around for the M$ Killer hardware and software to show up.  You're wasting your time.

@ Arkhan

Who They

Nice to see you back, I was beginning to think that they had caught up with you and sent you to the chair... or worse sent you to Amigaworld.net...

[Franko]

@ commodorejohn

I would never have thought seriously that either the developers of the Natami or your typical Amiga user would have thought for one moment that the Natami was going to be some sort of "Windows slayer". Kinda weird way of thinking and looking at it in my opinion.

I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of PC users have never even heard the word Natami let alone what it actually is. In fact most PC users I know only have the silly things to browse the net, do a bit of shopping and pay some bills. I can honestly say that I don't personally know of one PC user who actually uses their machine to do anything creative. So for your average PC user the Natami will most likely pass them by unnoticed...

[Franko]

Yeah, I'd have to agree with that.

Nah... your both completely wrong... so I have to disagree with that...

[Franko]

Well, then you would be wrong... it really is that simple...

Yeah but on the other hand I could be right as well as simple... :p