Ahhhh... Took too long to write this...but here it is....
You've been away from the Amiga scene for a while I take it, so I guess you don't know about the current situation.
There have been many takeovers of the Amiga brand and IP, by Gateway for instance....then a company called Amino, which became AmigaInc as it is known today.
There are currently 2 camps of new PowerPC Amiga owners, with different hardware and software combinations. The Pegasus made by Genesi which runs MorphOS known as the blue camp, and the AmigaOne made by Eyetech that runs AmigaOS4 known as the red camp. The red camp has the offical Amiga branding, and the blue does not, and some would argue that is the defining difference between the two.
MorphOS was built by reverse engineering the Amiga APIs as was AROS. AROS(the Amiga Research Operating System) is open source, and available for x86 and shortly for PPC is another option. The MorphOS workebench replacement called Ambient(which is really nice) was recently open sourced, but nobody knows how useful that will be without MorphOS underneath. You probably know about Amiga emulators like Win-UAE which emulate the original Amiga chipsets used primarily for games. And of course if you've got the original Amiga hardware you are known as a true Amigan.
Neither MorphOS or AmigaOS(and I guess you'll all correct me if I am wrong) nor AROS, are at final release stage although its generally accepted that MorphOS is further along having started earlier. There are currently more apps for MorphOS but I would guess that the gap is narrowing.
The MorphOS devs had some disagreement over payment from Genesi, and at least one left recently, and now the ownership and the future of the OS is in question. So this is something that you have to be aware of. Genesi has seeminly shifted from its Amiga focus, with a deal with Freescale(formerly Motorola) to supply motherboards, which are going to run PPC Linux rather than MorphOS.
AmigaOS was bought from AmigaInc outright, by a newcomer called KMOS, who have grand plans but no website. (Shrugs) This was exposed when Genesi took AmigaInc to court over a year ago, because they believed they had the rights to a port of AmigaDE. Genesi eventually lost(I guess), but its a matter of conjecture what they really wanted or what was promised, AmigaOS or AmigaDE.
Before all this happened AmigaInc pissed a lot of people off when they announced AmigaDE, as it is a completely separate system to the AmigaOS we know, and no hardware at that stage was in the works. AmigaDE(DE=Digital Environment) is akin to Java in that it is potentially platform agnostic. AmigaDE is based on Tao Group's Intent which is really more well suited to palm top and set-top devices and a few Amiga game packs have been released using the technology. AmigaDE could be a simple rebadging of Intent, or it could one day turn out to be a whole suite of services. It was released a couple of years back to little fanfare and sufferred an agonising death. It is hoped that a suped up version will be released shortly and there will be renewed interest. Well, at least I'm interested.
Now, AmigaInc was in financial difficulty so KMOS bought them out, and now own AmigaDE as well, but it remains to be seen what this will bring. Little is known about KMOS and its bank account, although they did acknowledge the aquisition of Capacity Networks, which is purported to have tech that speeds up downloads of media and is able to securely share content over a network when HD space is low. This will most likely lead to an Amiga based set-top box delivering media content and some sort of wifi built in.
But the real hero group of the moment, in my eyes at least, is Hyperion Entertainment, that having begged AmigaInc, got them to allow them to produce a successor to the Amiga OS, called AmigaOS4. They had the source code of earlier versions so they got further faster, but it needed a lot of work to port from 68k to PPC, and they are improving its features. All questions regarding a release date get the response, "when it's done". It's been like this for a couple of years now, and AmigaInc copped a lot of flak for unrealistic delivery schedules. Hyperion Entertainment, who used to port games for alternative platforms, never made such claims to my knowledge. They are run on a shoestring budget. If the owners of AmigaInc go bust, which is the norm with Amiga companies, Hyperion retain the rights to the AmigaOS. For AmigaOS to be ported to another platform a license is required to be purchased so it can't just be ported to a Mac for instance....And no, there is no x86 port in the works for too many reasons to reiterate here. PPC cards for classic Amigas will be supported though.
AmigaInc were in financial strife for a long time, and made some outrageous product claims. Of course the T-shirt promise, they renegged on a couple of years ago didn't help either, but thankfully KMOS finally sent them a month back, although they were a little too big. Oh well.
AmigaOnes, which are being sold in a tiny mini-ITX form factor nowadays, are not actually manufactured by Eyetech, but produced in partnership with a company called MAI Logic, and are, quite frankly, rebadged Teron boards to my knowledge. MAI had to be convinced to turn their chipset into a motherboard apparently. It is claimed that there are ongoing problems with the Northbridge chip called the ArticiaS, which was the subject of much debate. But the majority would agree that these problems, if they haven't been solved, have not hindered the project significantly. Or if they have no-one is talking. Eyetech is another hero company, but we've heard even less from them lately too. It is hoped that sales of the A1 to the embedded market could offset AmigaOne costs. But you need Linux for that and its not too will supported on the A1.
Sure I've left a lot out but I've typed too much already....Anyone care to fill in the gaps?
Ok. Going back to my happy place now.
