Hmm. I was going to dive into this thread, but I didn't... Now I guess I will. Amiga was never open-source, but between the once 'advanced' hardware and software and Commodore's willingness to document it, it was considered a very "open" system for its time.
This explains both the mindblowing demos/games, and their tendency to require somewhat specific hardware to run them. (And it still blows my mind just how much software existed and still exists on Aminet, versus what's left for Mac software if you can't be forced to move to 10... but that's a personal optimism. ;-))
Solodric wrote:
My real question is more about modern Amiga than it is about amiga's history. How does Amiga stack up against other modern OS's?
The memory protection and lack of multiuser aspects are issues for some, though OS4 paves a foundation for getting those sorted out. Those can be seen as things that 'slow down' gaming anyway, though it's never really that simple (and certainly isn't in this case, either). Gaming APIs should be good, when they're done and out, but this sort of amounts to reimplementing the equivalent of DirectX first, so it's hard to say how much you'll be wowed. (The magic comes later, if coders come to prefer what Hyperion's done, and start writing killer stuff targeting it.)
Meanwhile, the present options for hardware are fairly equivalent to an overclocked Gamecube in a number of ways -- similar CPUs, the option of faster GPUs, and with bottlenecks in slightly different spots (Gamecube, for instance, uses Rambus to a presumably good effect, while the current AmigaOnes are designed around good old SDRAM)... So you can certainly use that as a baseline for 'capability' when it comes to modern games. The problem is, we have to wait for developers to target or port to 4 to actually
have modern games -- you'll have to wait and see what happens when the OS is actually 'released.'
I'm a hardcore gamer and I need the best multitasking available. I was thinking running Windows on Linux (Since it runs better on Linux than it does normally) via ghost-drive to optimize performance, because I honestly cant go out and buy crudloads of RAM to cram into my system, I'd much prefer a system that makes the most of it's resources (Which need to be considerable for a gamer)
I'm not entirely sure this sentence makes sense. WINE seems to have gotten pretty good, Transgaming (and whatever other companies have entered that space) offer a reasonable solution, but supported titles are still limited, and the current mess of GPU support is likely to obliterate your chances of a better experience even if you hit a corner case that works. (For instance, I hear you might be able to squeeze a better framerate out of DOOM3 under straight WINE in some circumstances, but only if the planets have aligned to give you the right graphics card/driver combo, and DOOM3 is one of the few performance-bound titles likely to be completely happy under that setup.) By all means, give it a shot, it's getting better every day, but I think it's a little early to call it a generalized solution, especially to the upgrade cycles Windows gaming demands.
Maybe I've missed something, because I'm also not sure what this usage of "ghost-drive" means -- Norton Ghost is a fine drive-cloning tool, but it's not an emulation solution, and it's not going to configure WINE for you. Is there something else by that name?
(Also, these solutions require Linux on x86, or the 64-bit equivalent, so I hope you weren't expecting that to be a magic portability bullet.)
but I'd heard good things about Amiga, and if it's better I'll use it instead of linux, or maybe go really crazy and have Amiga>Linux>Windows running 
Since Amiga has decided to carry on with PPC, this is probably always going to suck until/unless Windows suddenly jumps off Intel and onto that platform, or PowerPC practically doubles in straight performance (Cell vector magic probably doesn't apply) versus x86-land. It won't suck worse than VirtualPC on Mac, but that's a form of emulation that requires actual 'emulation,' which has overhead. (...and you might be able to sweep some of that overhead out of the way with bytecode translation beforehand, but let's say that enters the realm of 'complicated stuff that would be common already if it were easy.')
However, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have an Amiga alongside your PC, if/when there's something about it that makes it interesting to you. The world doesn't explode if you own hardware from multiple vendors, honest!
