potential PPC Amiga REAL CHEAP

[koaftder]

JLF65 wrote:
Yes, you can occasionally get older iMacs off eBay for under $200. I've seen the original 233MHz iMac for as low as $75. That is certainly the way to go if you just want a plain PPC system. I've got linux and AROS running on my iMac DV+, and do plan to work on native AROS for the iMac.

But $150 for a 486MHz G3 with 24M of fast SRAM is still very cheap. It's also easier to find a GC system for that price than an iMac for less than $200. Most used iMacs go for $300 to $400 depending on the amount of memory and size of the harddrive. It's rare to see better than the original 233MHz iMac with 32M of 66MHz SDRAM for less than $200.

If you are looking to run linux or OSX, go with the best iMac you can find on eBay. If you are looking to play games, go with the GC. It's just a matter of how you intend to use the system beyond any Amiga-ish usage. I've already got an iMac and was more interested in something that also played games. The A500 and A1200 were game machines that also ran AmigaOS programs. Using a GC to run AROS would continue that tradition nicely. While there are Mac games you could use on an iMac, there aren't nearly as many, nor are they as good as the games on the GC (with a few exceptions).

Ive been pretty happy with my gamecube. Only have two games worth playing though, the 2 metroid games. The GC controller is nice. Ive always bought my consoles 2nd hand and one generation behind. It seems theres less than a dozen games worth playing during the life of a console, might as well get it when the games are under 20 bucks a pop.

It funny, on GC metroid prime never seems to drop a frame even when the scenes get complex, it's always rock solid. On other games like Super Mario Sunshine, sometimes simple scenes made the machine bog down to almost unplayable.

If you guys manage to hack a usb host controller onto the GC, you'll be able to drive a usb->VGA video card. Writing the drivers wouldnt be fun, but it would be doable.

[xaccrocheur]

JLF65 wrote:
(...) I've got linux and AROS running on my iMac DV+, and do plan to work on native AROS for the iMac.

That is just great new. AROS needs heroes. I'm just wondering, will you have the time to achieve anything before Lou got OS4 fully ported to NGC (NFS and all) ?  :-P

[MskoDestny]

JLF65 wrote:
Yes, you can occasionally get older iMacs off eBay for under $200. I've seen the original 233MHz iMac for as low as $75. That is certainly the way to go if you just want a plain PPC system. I've got linux and AROS running on my iMac DV+, and do plan to work on native AROS for the iMac.

But $150 for a 486MHz G3 with 24M of fast SRAM is still very cheap. It's also easier to find a GC system for that price than an iMac for less than $200. Most used iMacs go for $300 to $400 depending on the amount of memory and size of the harddrive. It's rare to see better than the original 233MHz iMac with 32M of 66MHz SDRAM for less than $200.

If you are looking to run linux or OSX, go with the best iMac you can find on eBay.

Powermac G3s go for less than $100 on eBay. No need to look at an iMac. The Powermac has more expansion possibilities and will likely cost less to ship. No need to wait around either, there are plenty that are under $100 in auctions that are about to end within hours. Old iMacs might be hard to find on the cheap but old Powermacs are not.

As for the game machine part, certainly the Gamecube is a better games machine than the Mac, but I would argue that the Amiga was more readily equiped as a computer for it's time than the Gamecube. Not that I'm trying to dissuade you from doing the port. I like to see funky operating systems running on funky game consoles myself.

[koaftder]

In about a month and a half, this thread will be 1 year old! It's first birthday! A celebration is in order for sure.

We need a poll here, how do you intend to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the Nintendamiga thread?

1) Get drunk and paint red and white checker patterns on the game cube

2) March through the streets dressed up as a gamecube console and inform everybody that amiga os 4 will be released for gamecube *any day now!*

3) Print out a screen shot from AOS 4 beta you found on the web, and tape it on the front of your television set and invite your friends over to witness amiga os on the gamecube.

4) Dress up as aros the cat logo and yiff & skritch every body at your local star trek convention and tell everybody that game cube makes you purr.

5) Goto your local glue sniffers anonymous meeting, and inform everybody that you do not sniff glue, "But you just saved a bundle by switching to gamecube as your main computing platform" ( you can dooooo iiiiit )

6) Spend your time pursuing the opposite sex.

[adolescent]

MskoDestny wrote:

Powermac G3s go for less than $100 on eBay. No need to look at an iMac. The Powermac has more expansion possibilities and will likely cost less to ship. No need to wait around either, there are plenty that are under $100 in auctions that are about to end within hours. Old iMacs might be hard to find on the cheap but old Powermacs are not.

I agree.  iMacs are a bit overpriced and underpowered, but probably good for kids or students that need something small.

My old Mac is just a Beige G3 MT which I got for $45 a year ago (I've got about $200 into it now).  These days you can get a Sawtooth for under $200.

[Louis Dias]

koaftder wrote:
In about a month and a half, this thread will be 1 year old! It's first birthday! A celebration is in order for sure.

We need a poll here, how do you intend to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the Nintendamiga thread?

1) Get drunk and paint red and white checker patterns on the game cube

2) March through the streets dressed up as a gamecube console and inform everybody that amiga os 4 will be released for gamecube *any day now!*

3) Print out a screen shot from AOS 4 beta you found on the web, and tape it on the front of your television set and invite your friends over to witness amiga os on the gamecube.

4) Dress up as aros the cat logo and yiff & skritch every body at your local star trek convention and tell everybody that game cube makes you purr.

5) Goto your local glue sniffers anonymous meeting, and inform everybody that you do not sniff glue, "But you just saved a bundle by switching to gamecube as your main computing platform" ( you can dooooo iiiiit )

6) Spend your time pursuing the opposite sex.

I think I will just ponder how much effort was wasted trolling instead of petitioning or coding.

Personally, I think you all are quite bitter about the fact that Revolution is shaping up to be a clear and easy upgrade path for any work that could have went into Amicube.  At $199 or less NEW at launch with an 800-900Mhz processor, 104 MB of ram and built-in USB 2.0 ports, SD adapter ports, wi-fi capabilities and a DVD drive that it is quite an ideal platform for a capable future Amiga.

Being able to send apps to a Ninendo DS such as Jabberwacky wouldn't be too bad either.  So many possibilities...

[koaftder]

lou_dias wrote:

koaftder wrote:
In about a month and a half, this thread will be 1 year old! It's first birthday! A celebration is in order for sure.

We need a poll here, how do you intend to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the Nintendamiga thread?

1) Get drunk and paint red and white checker patterns on the game cube

2) March through the streets dressed up as a gamecube console and inform everybody that amiga os 4 will be released for gamecube *any day now!*

3) Print out a screen shot from AOS 4 beta you found on the web, and tape it on the front of your television set and invite your friends over to witness amiga os on the gamecube.

4) Dress up as aros the cat logo and yiff & skritch every body at your local star trek convention and tell everybody that game cube makes you purr.

5) Goto your local glue sniffers anonymous meeting, and inform everybody that you do not sniff glue, "But you just saved a bundle by switching to gamecube as your main computing platform" ( you can dooooo iiiiit )

6) Spend your time pursuing the opposite sex.

I think I will just ponder how much effort was wasted trolling instead of petitioning or coding.

Personally, I think you all are quite bitter about the fact that Revolution is shaping up to be a clear and easy upgrade path for any work that could have went into Amicube.  At $199 or less NEW at launch with an 800-900Mhz processor, 104 MB of ram and built-in USB 2.0 ports, SD adapter ports, wi-fi capabilities and a DVD drive that it is quite an ideal platform for a capable future Amiga.

Being able to send apps to a Ninendo DS such as Jabberwacky wouldn't be too bad either.  So many possibilities...

800-900MHz and 104mb ram. Wow, i had a much more capable system back in 2001. One can find a PC with specs like that for less than 100 dollars. ( with vga interface and at least 2x the memory and a 20 gig harddrive, ethernet, etc )

Yea, i'm bitter about that. How will i sleep at night, knowing that i didnt jump on the nintendamiga bandwagon. Why i could be runnin aros on a 900Mhz machine hooked up to my TV and surfing porn in ascii mode with an ssh session to my mac using lynx. Someday if i just pray hard enough i will come to my senses and beg for forgiveness and buy 300 dollars worth of nintendo crap just to impress my friends of how leet i am to be running a sub par OS on my sub par video game console.

My friends will probably beat me senseless and steal my machine and use it to play video games, oh the shame i will have felt. Bitter feelings indeed.

 :crazy:

On a side note, people doing cool things with hardware is ok in my book. Hackin is all about doing wierd things on wierd stuff and having a good time. Aros on game cube will get some attention to the platform and provide a few people with some kicks. Its always going to be a toy though and nothing more. At that, a half developed, slightly unusuable toy that few will bother with. Theres a lot linux nuts out there, how many of them are actually doing anything with linux on the gamecube? not many, probably cause it's not very usefull.

[Darklight]

Well, I haven't entered this thread yet, I've been laughing at a lot of the trolling, etc though.  I guess I can see what lou_dias is saying, at $200 US at launch, a 900mhz Rev is getting awfully close to an AmigaOne solution, and blows any classic Amy out of the water.  The original Commodore machines made sense as consoles with a business-capable OS on them, and there's really no reason somebody couldn't do something like that now.  I would guarantee that if somebody created a user-friendly stable OS on $200 hardware, thousands of companies worldwide would switch immediately.  Now, I'm not saying that the GC or the Rev is that answer at all, it's likely not suitable for that at all.  But, if people are prepared to try to make progress like this, then all the power to them.  Just think of sitting in your couch and surfing the net with the Rev controller  :-D

[Louis Dias]

@koaftder

I stopped comparing Amiga value to PC value around 1997.  I own an Athlon XP 3200 with 1GB of 400MHz DDR ram and a 300GB HD, does that mean that any Amiga machine that doesn't hold up against those specs is worthless to me?  If you can leave garbage like the first 2/3 of your message off this thread, maybe we wouldn't have scared away more people like Darklight for so long.

You can piss and moan about Linux on the GC not being useful, but Linux is only useful for whatever a user decides to compile for their installation.  That's why Linux is useless to me and 99% of all PC users.

Here's the bottomline.  You, Waccoon and adolescent all own GC's.  Yet you are the biggest "critics" (being nice) here.  Infact, I'd venture to say there are more people who frequent this site that own GC's than real Amigas or use them daily.

If Hyperion released an OS4 "lite" to try out on the GC, alot of people would scoop it up.  They could then release a Revolution "patch" to take advantage of the extra capabilities.

I don't expect AOS on GC/Rev/360/PS3/XBOX/DC to ever replace my PC, but it sure would be cool and fun to try out.  That alone could help the platform grow
if done properly.

@Darklight
Yes, it is all about the controller!

[JLF65]

MskoDestny wrote:
Powermac G3s go for less than $100 on eBay. No need to look at an iMac. The Powermac has more expansion possibilities and will likely cost less to ship. No need to wait around either, there are plenty that are under $100 in auctions that are about to end within hours. Old iMacs might be hard to find on the cheap but old Powermacs are not.

Ah, right. Sorry, I was stuck in iMac mode. :-D  Yes, the PowerMacs were a nice line and are pretty cheap. Those cases are also pretty classy. Apple always made nice looking stuff at least. I wasn't thinking about them because you can't exactly fit the motherboard into an A1200 shell... which was what I've been looking to do - stick SOMETHING in an A1200 shell that gave me an "updated" A1200. That's where the suggestion to use an iBook came from, to which I mentioned that would be nice, but was too expensive which led to all these posts on which Macs sell cheap on eBay. :lol:

As for the game machine part, certainly the Gamecube is a better games machine than the Mac, but I would argue that the Amiga was more readily equiped as a computer for it's time than the Gamecube. Not that I'm trying to dissuade you from doing the port. I like to see funky operating systems running on funky game consoles myself.

Yes, consoles usually require more to make them into general purpose computers. For example, I had to get the broadband adapter and a keyboard adapter to go with the GC. That adds to the cost. I think there are two ideas behind putting regular OSes on consoles: 1) as you said, seeing a funky OS on a funky console interests quite a few people; and 2) having an OS on the console makes it easier to do programs for the console. For example, look at what you can run on the PS2 in linux compared to what straight homebrew on the PS2 offers.

Mind you, I feel programming straight on the console is more fun, but a little beyond many folks. It's like comparing demo programmers who took over the Amiga to folks who wrote programs which didn't take over the Amiga. Putting some kind of Amiga-like OS on the GC would certainly make it easier to do certain games, like DOOM, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Descent, Abuse, etc... open source games which have already been ported to the Amiga. While there is a working linux for GC, AmigaOS is quite a bit more lean, so certain programs have the possiblity of running better.

[coldfish]

by lou_dias

I don't expect AOS on GC/Rev/360/PS3/XBOX/DC to ever replace my PC, but it sure would be cool and fun to try out.

I ask, why limit yourself to AOS?  I'd prefer to see something a little more innovative.  

I've no doubt Nintendo could produce their own OS, that would be more fun to use than some obscure desktop-derived OS.

I see the next gen' consoles as a testing ground for new (and FUN!) ways to interact with computer tech.  I for one would be quite dissapointed if they presented us with boring, more-of-the-same-2D-windows-like interfaces.

[Louis Dias]

coldfish wrote:

I see the next gen' consoles as a testing ground for new (and FUN!) ways to interact with computer tech.  I for one would be quite dissapointed if they presented us with boring, more-of-the-same-2D-windows-like interfaces.

That's why it's going to be all about the Revolution controller.   You'll be able to drag "icons" in 3d space...

[koaftder]

lou_dias wrote:
@koaftder

I stopped comparing Amiga value to PC value around 1997.  I own an Athlon XP 3200 with 1GB of 400MHz DDR ram and a 300GB HD, does that mean that any Amiga machine that doesn't hold up against those specs is worthless to me?  If you can leave garbage like the first 2/3 of your message off this thread, maybe we wouldn't have scared away more people like Darklight for so long.

Now your saying you arent comparing the hardware to generally avaiable pc/mac hardware. Strange, because  thats the opposite of half your posts in the past. Which one is it?

You can piss and moan about Linux on the GC not being useful, but Linux is only useful for whatever a user decides to compile for their installation.  That's why Linux is useless to me and 99% of all PC users.

Most linux users out there arent compiling anything from their perspective. They just click on the app manager, select a program they want and click install.

Here's the bottomline.  You, Waccoon and adolescent all own GC's.  Yet you are the biggest "critics" (being nice) here.  Infact, I'd venture to say there are more people who frequent this site that own GC's than real Amigas or use them daily.

Yea, i own a GC, so what? I use it to play video games.

If Hyperion released an OS4 "lite" to try out on the GC, alot of people would scoop it up.  They could then release a Revolution "patch" to take advantage of the extra capabilities.

I don't expect AOS on GC/Rev/360/PS3/XBOX/DC to ever replace my PC, but it sure would be cool and fun to try out.  That alone could help the platform grow
if done properly.

blah blah blah whatever. Now your saying that it would be cool and fun toy, earlier you were pimping it as the next potential amiga, a vehicle for keeping the platform alive.

Anyway, you'll get your chance to schlick your ideas to the AmigaOS developers on IRC next week. Maybe you can discuss how hard it is to use a threading library, or debate on the best way to use the 16MB aram chunk.

[Glaucus]

This has got to be the longest thread full of crap I've ever seen!!!   :roll:

  - Mike

[Louis Dias]

koaftder wrote:

lou_dias wrote:
@koaftder

I stopped comparing Amiga value to PC value around 1997.  I own an Athlon XP 3200 with 1GB of 400MHz DDR ram and a 300GB HD, does that mean that any Amiga machine that doesn't hold up against those specs is worthless to me?  If you can leave garbage like the first 2/3 of your message off this thread, maybe we wouldn't have scared away more people like Darklight for so long.

Now your saying you arent comparing the hardware to generally avaiable pc/mac hardware. Strange, because  thats the opposite of half your posts in the past. Which one is it?

I know it's been a while...I was comparing it to the A1 on a performance/price basis.  It's everybody else that shot it down for not being as good as a Mac or whatever other more useful platform that isn't getting a port either.

You can piss and moan about Linux on the GC not being useful, but Linux is only useful for whatever a user decides to compile for their installation.  That's why Linux is useless to me and 99% of all PC users.

Most linux users out there arent compiling anything from their perspective. They just click on the app manager, select a program they want and click install.

good for them :roll:

If Hyperion released an OS4 "lite" to try out on the GC, alot of people would scoop it up.  They could then release a Revolution "patch" to take advantage of the extra capabilities.

I don't expect AOS on GC/Rev/360/PS3/XBOX/DC to ever replace my PC, but it sure would be cool and fun to try out.  That alone could help the platform grow
if done properly.

blah blah blah whatever. Now your saying that it would be cool and fun toy, earlier you were pimping it as the next potential amiga, a vehicle for keeping the platform alive.

Anyway, you'll get your chance to schlick your ideas to the AmigaOS developers on IRC next week. Maybe you can discuss how hard it is to use a threading library, or debate on the best way to use the 16MB aram chunk.

[/quote]

blah blah blah...
My idea came from every other Amiga user and their mother whining about not having an affordable PPC OS4 solution.

My first question would be how much longer before their contract with Hyperion and Amiga, Inc. expires so they can rebrand the OS and dump the curse that is backward compatibility and actually get the OS in users' hands.

[coldfish]

by lou_dias

That's why it's going to be all about the Revolution controller. You'll be able to drag "icons" in 3d space...

Doesnt this sound a bit beyond the scope of AOS?