mihcael wrote:
Was the OS4 and ppc hardware a negative or a positve move for amiga?
Are they moving towards the evil x86 or away, as i see this as the only direction they could take that would actually increase the amigas use.
The amigaone sounded very exiting when i recently came back to amiga, but then you see how long its been going on for and still waiting.
I think its the OS addiction that keeps poeple coming back!
I think if they'd got the OS released back in 2001 when it was supposed to, along with a cheap full PPC computer (as opposed to just a motherboard) designed by experts who knew the Amiga inside out (such as Dave Haynie or the ex-Phase 5 guys) like the Mac Mini, easily identifiable as an Amiga, and got it into stores at a decent price (£299 / $449 including the OS) it would have sold in decent numbers (I'm thinking well into the hundreds of thousands here) and it would have been a base to move on from.
But instead Amiga refused to negotiate with the people who could have helped them, made unreasonable demands, and spent the next four years trying to shove the AmigaDE down our throats while allowing Eyetech to import and rebadge Terons while taking $100 per board for the right to have an Amiga sticker on it.
Today, almost in 2006, I don't see any future for the Amiga beyond a cult hobbyist machine, something like what the C64 has become.
I also suggested back in 2001 in emails to Amiga (which were ignored) a handheld Amiga with the AGA chipset on FPGA, which would have ran rings around the GBA. A 320 x 256 LCD screen, capable of running old Amiga games, maybe give it a video-out port so you could hook it up to a TV.
I still think this would have sold a lot of units, and the development costs wouldn't have been prohibitive - we've got guys now recreating the Amiga on FPGA's in their bedrooms single-handedly, we've got people creating their own handheld NES consoles from Casio Pocket TV's and old Nintendos as hobby projects.
Today, of course, against the Nintendo DS, and PSP, it wouldn't stand a chance, but back in 2001 when the handheld console market was still largely untapped by anyone except Nintendo, it could have made it.
The guys at Amiga Inc were simply clueless, as far as I'm concerned.
