What is Amiga's Purpose currently???

[flashback]

 :-(  :-(  .oh {bleep} .

not good thing for us

[artman]

I kinda hate to keep using this analogy every time this question comes up, but.....I own a 1971 Mustang Coupe, I ride a Harley Softail Classic.  Sure, I could drive a newer Mustang, ride a Crotch Rocket, and use a PeeCee with Multi-Gigahertz of speed, but it's not how fast you get to your destination, it's the quality of the ride that gets you there.  It's the sheer FUN of it.  That's what the purpose of Amiga means to me. :-D

[InTheSand]

Absolutely! The fun and the nostalgia factor is what makes it, plus the "tinkering around" factor that you get with real physical classic hardware!

I've just spent a while installing Workbench 3.1 on my "new" (to me!) A3000 [thanks Castellen!] and faffing with softkickers to get KS3.1 running from RAM. Why? Just for the hell of it! Installing from floppies is great!

As the other posters have said, I also use PCs for my actual real work, getting things done, etc, but will still return to the Amiga for "classic" stuff.

 - Ali

[mr_a500]

I was going to write a long tedious technical explanation with lots of proofs, but I'll put it very simply like this:

Amiga makes me happy :-)
Linux makes me yawn :oops:
Windows makes me annoyed, frustrated, disgusted and violently angry
:-x :evil: :pissed: :furious:

I prefer to be happy. :-D

[Dr_Righteous]

Our classic Amigas really only have one bane to their existance... that being the cost of new hardware. While I understand the cost is due to low production runs, which is due to the low demand... I think if the really good and most needed products were mass produced and sold cheaper, the market would be there to support it.

My A4000D lacks PCI due to the cost. I bet if Elbox cut the price in half, the higher demand would lead to profitability. The only thing keeping me from using my miggy more is the serious lack of screen resolution and my aging 1950 monitor. I could get a scandoubler, but that's nearly the price of a Mediator... And I have all the nifty compatable toys for it already from my various PC upgrades.

And for the sake of all things decent someone PLEASE start producing accellerators again!

Sorry, bit of a tangent there... Yes, it's a hobby platform. We're all retrocomputing geeks. Fans of the greatest computer systems ever devised... The platform that created the digital music era... The platform that changed computer graphics forever... The platform from which Babylon 5 and ST Voyager's graphics were produced.

Amiga is dead, long live Amiga!
Vivat AROS!

[Waccoon]

It's merely a novelty.  As for usability, Amiga just doesn't hold up.

I use mine to play games that don't work right on WinUAE, or I can't turn into ADFs.  Windows software can do almost anything better than Amiga if you know what to get (which includes shell replacements and scripting languages).  I still say Linux is only good for web servers and has very poor interface design.  Now that Apple is going x86, I no longer have interest in picking up a Mac mini, which means I'll have to wait for their next budget machine just to try out their OS.

I think people are just so desperate to stay away from Microsoft's fluffy code and Apple's condescending attitude.  There really isn't any serious OS competition outside the server/embedded market.

A better question is, "What is the purpose of Amiga Inc., currently???"

They have hardly and involvement or interest in OS4 or "classic" Amigas, they have outsourced their platform to a standard PC architecture with a PPC CPU, and their flagship product for PDAs and cell phones is incredibly late, underdeveloped, and unimpressive.

[Dan]

What is Amiga's Purpose currently???

Keep holding on to the trademark in the vain hope that somebody want to buy it? :lol:

[Trezzer]

I don't care why others want to use AmigaOS. For me it's very simple. It's the only operating system out there that is suitable for general desktop use, which doesn't drive me nuts. And I've been all over the place with different *nixes, Win, MacOS and so on. Sooner or later I always think "Aw man. Why can't this just work like on an Amiga" and I go back.

My A1 has nowhere near the raw processing power of my PC, but if I used that for any serious work (that is: anything but gaming) I'd lose my mind. I just can't stand if the interface doesn't respond at once. Simply put: I've seen no system that responds as fast as AmigaOS 4. Besides that it has the best app for what I do the most : IRC. I also prefer SimpleMail over anything I've seen on Windows / OS X.

I also like that the system is pretty transparent. You can dive as much into it as you want to. You don't have to, but it can be fun. Like everyone else I could use a better browser. A newer IBrowse, Aweb or a port of KHTML/Firefox certainly would be nice.

What else... Hmm. Java-support would be nice. A wider range of printer drivers. Then I'd have everything I *need*. Everything else that comes along is just a nice bonus really.

[K7HTH]

Allow me to pine... What is a Mosquito's Purpose Currently?

Answer: They both still do what they were designed to do, and quite well at that.

[Waccoon]

My A1 has nowhere near the raw processing power of my PC, but if I used that for any serious work (that is: anything but gaming) I'd lose my mind. I just can't stand if the interface doesn't respond at once. Simply put: I've seen no system that responds as fast as AmigaOS 4.

Not to get off topic, but most responsiveness and stability issues I've seen with Windows are related to badly built systems, crappy drivers, and/or lots of horrible background junk put on by OEMs like Gateway and HP.  A clean, retail version of Windows on well-matched hardware is pretty friggin' fast and stable.  The OEMs seem to ruin practially everyting, especially HP!  UGH!

I'd imagine using an AmigaOne for graphics, audio, or other "serious" work to be pretty harrowing.  Not like I own an AmigaOne, of course, but I have tried over a dozen different OSes, and Windows still rules for anything other than script programming and web servers.  :-)

[Trezzer]

@Waccoon

I recently saw a freshly installed AMD64 ~3GHz system. Yes, it booted very fast (no doubt thanks to the SATA drive and 2 GB ram), but there were still delays of *seconds* in some interface interactions. That's just not acceptable to me at all. My own 1,6GHz system (2000+) is still ridiculously slow at most standard operations. It's all brand stuff too (decent Asus board, Asus Radeon, fast ram etc). I can agree that Windows isn't as bad/slow/unstable as some make it out to be, but it's still far from something I could use on a daily basis without tearing my hair out. It would drive me nuts if I had to wait for it to respond. I guess that's why I have shortcuts to the two games I use the machine to play right on the desktop.  :-P

Some parts of Windows respond well enough assuming nothing else is running on the system, but what use is that, when you use an operating system for running programs? Regardless it's just not fast enough. As for Windows ruling... well, for games it's certainly > MacOS X, but for pretty much everything your average user needs to do MacOS X > Windows. By a friggin' huge margin.

I still like my OS4 better though  8-)

[Animagic]

Yea, sometimes I wonder too...

I can't watch movies on my 040, I can't hear clear mp3s, I can't draw on higher resolutions but I still use my amiga!

Why?

Because I can download from EVERY site I want , I can see my emails and I can share data with any machine aout there with NO worry about Dialers, Trojans, Viruses etc...

I love this Out-Dated (and well forgotten by those virus-creators idiots)! In this crazy virus-hack-rediculous situation Amiga is THE perfect cure  :-D

[mr_a500]

It's not just the speed, but the stupid low priority Windows gives to screen refreshes and user interaction. Say, you click on something and a popup window appears. The window should be drawn as fast as possible, then do whatever stuff that has to be done in the background. Instead, the window half-draws, appears to freeze for a few seconds, then finally finishes drawing. This is completely unacceptable in a 2005 operating system running on a 3-4Ghz computer with tons of RAM.

But this is just a minor annoyance compared to the much larger design flaws in Windows. Who could ever think the Registry is a good thing?? (although makers of spyware seem to like it) And what about configuration changes that mysteriously go back to MS defaults after a random amount of time? And the bugs! I started to list whenever I found a bug that I could reproduce - and I now have a list of over 500 bugs! I have to use this crap at work, but I certainly will not have a Microsoft product in my home!