BigBenAussie wrote:
The Amiga was(and was designed as) a kick ass console, that Commodore decided to include a keyboard and mouse to, that ran cutting edge games for the time. The OS, although very cool, was secondary. When most people think of the Amiga they think of the cool games they played, and dabbling with cool creative graphical and musical software which often hardly touched the OS.
You also have to remember that most Amiga owners never saw a beefed up Amiga, seeing Amigas mostly as A500s, and only got as far as floppies, thus they may not have had that high an impression of the OS. We seem to have forgotten that as we've kept the faith all these years. It was mostly the incredible games and demos people remember that made computing exciting. Computing has not been exciting since.
Agreed, my "Amiga"-test would be a couple of favorite games, DPaint, Protracker and Say. Because thats what everybody remmebers.
IMHO the appreciation for the OS came much later when the hardware didn't advance, and the PC took over, yet you could surprisingly still do cool stuff on the AmigaOS.
MacOS X does it better, so did BeOS.
And with XP there finally is a stable Windows.
Linux-distros and BSD-variants are gratis and free.
We will never have cutting edge games again as we will never have the cutting edge hardware ever again or for that matter, backing from major games companies. That is unless there is a special deal with Sony or something.
Never is a long time.....
But whats needed is cash and nobody seems to be able to bring that home. Not since Petro retired.
Retro is in so why isn´t there an A500 DTV?
And why not do the same with the Amiga brand that Sony did with the Walkman-brand? Where is the Amiga-phone?(Preferably something better than Ngage or Gizmondo, maybe a Samsung)
I'm still excited though.
Whatever for???
The mA1 hardware is adequate,
G3? 800Mhz? Today? To be adequate today atleast a 1Ghz+ G4 is needed not to mention that 256MB Ram is minimum today... Look at Apple, are they selling any G3s today...
but something like CELL on it will give it the potential to be what the Amiga was before. Kick Ass. A PPC Cell chip even on an mA1, would get the Amiga hardware into the ball park of its competitors, instead of woefully behind. The Cell chip, is a custom component, that reminds one of the Amiga Custom chips. Surely, with all the add-ons in the classic Amiga market someone could figure out a way to pop one on an A1. A stack of mA1s could become a rendering farmer's dream. With the PS3 coming out in 2006, we can't hope to have an A1 equipped with one, sooner than that. But then, I doubt OS4 will be ready by then anyway.
Amiga is very much about its community of braggarts. ;-)
We need something to brag about with religous zeal, and the A1 hardware as it stands now gives us nothing, except to say.... "see how good our OS is even though it runs on out of date hardware". Well, it's gotta be better than running Win95 on a P4.
Cell? Maybe...
IF we get several of them!( So what if it´s multicore, so are both Intel, AMD and Freescale CPUs gonna be in the future)
A500(custom chips), Atari Falcon(DSP) and BeBox(multi-cpu) has been the truly cool computers the last years. So what makes a computer cool(in both ways) apparently is offloading the CPU as much as possible.
One crazy idea I have had since I got my first amiga is to turn the idea of custom chips around and use the same processor for both CPU and "custom chips". Maybe thats possible with Cell?
But the way I see it the target is kids. Why are we here?
Because most of use played games and played around with Dpaint when we where between 5-16 years old.
So target the kids, our main enemy is Nintendo with Gameboy DS and the cellphones.
The second target is schools and team up with TI(they are only do worlds best calculator after all.)
So the first product should be "My first Amiga"-educational game console/computer, rugged e-book, rugged tablet, in-car enertainment system, handheld game/pda, and "My first Amiga-phone". Low-end single Cell-cpu or ARM+DSP based.
The important thing is getting the kids hooked on the Amiga-GUI and name.
What the Amiga isn't, is AROS or UAE. It's a combination of Amiga(Tm) hardware and Amiga(Tm) software that makes an Amiga.
Funny one has the goal to imitate Amiga-hardware and the other to imitate the software(OS). It must be the (Tm);-)
The Amiga is a computer in the same way a Macintosh is.
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You mean a 3,6Ghz P4?If AmigaOS was an 'also ran' on PCs it would die immediately, probably through piracy. Ironically, Amiga was practically synonymous with piracy in it's heyday.
Piracy isn´t what killed Amiga, outdated hardware was.Remmeber Commodore sold hardware not software(ok, Amigavision but what else?). Has piracy killed the pc? Hell no, besides piracy is a sign of success.
We need to change that this time around and support the devs, because the Amiga is really just clinging on for dear life right now.
"We" can´t really finance development of a kick-ass computer, looking at it from realstic p.o.v other sources of income and captial must be found.
(A totally optimist calculation: Say 5000 buyers and 1000€ in profit per board/computer thats five million Euro. Less than the large players marketing budgets..., not to mention that you start with much less to get those first 5000 buyers.)
Ok. Going back to my happy place now. 
Sure, happy is good.
