Future of the Amiga - as it could have been?

[maffoo]

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I was wondering about what could have been. Had Commodore not gone bust and continued to develop the Amiga, is it likely it would still be around in something resembling its current form today? (ie. custom hardware, possibly with backward compatiblilty.) Or would it have become like the AmigaOne, based on standardised hardware, with normal PCI/AGP graphics, only differentiated by the OS, much like the Mac?

I personally think that AAA would have been released, but eventually AmigaOS would have been ported to standard hardware in order to keep costs down. (Whether this would have been based arounnd PPC, x86 or another platform is another question - hoping this won't provoke a flame war :-) ) I would also imagine AmigaOS would have become much like OS X (ie. Unix-based, with a nice GUI, though hopefully still able to run old Amiga software) in order to compete in the modern world.

I can also see them continuing some custom chip development, possibly releasing an AmigaOS-based games console (based on Hombre, or a successor.)

What do other people think?

[AJCopland]

AAA was I think going to introduce PCI slots and for the high-end Amiga's potentially move the custom chipset out onto a seperate card.

When you think about it the modern PC is just a big CPU, ram and storage with a bunch of custom chipsets for doing the hard work like graphics and audio etc. Which is what the amiga was albeit the amiga was a single integrated unit.

With the management of Commodore it was probably always doomed regardless of the timeframe.

Andy

[murple]

I thought AAA had been more or less declared dead and things shifted to some radically new designed called something like Hombre... like right at the end. It sounded kinda neat from what I've read, too bad Gould threw in the towel before it could be produced.