What Amiga Inc. and Hyperion NEED TO DO (IMHO)

[TheMagicM]

AI should liquidate whatever "assets" they have and let the bleeding stop.  The current AI managment/ownership/"future plans" is worse then Commodore + Medhi Ali.

[Hans_]

@all

koaftder wrote:
ROFL ROFL

I'm getting a little concerned about all the abuse directed at dead horses here. What did those dead horses ever do to you? :-P

Hans

[hamtronix]

Hans_ wrote:
@all

koaftder wrote:
ROFL ROFL

I'm getting a little concerned about all the abuse directed at dead horses here. What did those dead horses ever do to you? :-P

Hans

As a horse I am concerned. And I assume as a bird, a kiwi or some kind, I appreciate your concern.

girls. feck. arse.

[guest3217]

Regardless of whatever A INC does...

I like that thought a lot. Frankly, as I have said before, I have always thought of the "Amiga~Clan" as a group of self-supporting, self-maintaining folks...

The only thing Amiga, Inc. ever did for me was over~charge me for technology they never helped me with or supported.

 Throughout my "previous~life" with my Amiga, while Amiga, Inc. was still alive, I spent well over $10,000  on machines which were suppossed to be "competitively priced." For a teenager working two jobs, trying to start his own business at night after his"day-jobs," paying the bank loans bunches of buck$$ he owed for his "office equipment," Amiga's crash was my own crash too.  I dreaded seeing those two newly appointed Middle -Easterners (can't rememebr what country they were from...) make out like bandits...not giving a sh*T for the docens of  "little folks" I knew who, like myself, were pennies away from bankruptcy and without wind in their sails.

I recovered, slowly, but recovered... I saw great people loose they jobs because they had banked on Amiga's technology; school systems with computer labs filled with obsolete computers which students had to use, even though nothing they learned could be or would be applied in real day working scenerios; massive NASA/DOE budgets being spent on systems which would end up in the dumpster just a year later...or on Ebay 15 years later...

I'm not going to spend $1,500 on a wanna be clone which is already years too late...or $50 for a mouse adapter to get access to an Amiga port which might fry in a day or two....to play a $2 video game written 20 years ago... Or sit around waiting for the Big~Great~White~Amiga~Father to come strolling back in to heal my wounds...

I've got Micro$$hit and an awesome program called WinUAE, and faith in a group working on AROS (Love! isn't it appropriate!!) ...and and internet browser which hooks me up with independently minded invididuals who have managed all these years with out Amiga, Inc. (quite well I must add!)

So what should Amiga, Inc. do? They should lick my fuc**ng ASS...and everyone elses too, while they are at it! ...specially those two ***....what were they?

Wizardo
 :rtfm:  PS Sorry for the implied profanity...I think I just managed to let 18 years of pent-up anger burst like a....you know what I mean!

[amiga92570]

Wow, it looks like someone keeps beating a dead horse.  :-D

[Waccoon]

rbsfou:  Agree, but they own the brand name, and could convince those who do have the rights to let them be used (i've covered this in my first post), and as regards CPU emulation, we have UAE which could be made into something like WHDLoad to do it transparently (see my first post again!)

If the rights to the software do not belong to Amiga Inc., how will they, or the Amiga community, benefit from ports to game consoles?

rbsfou:  My point was that they could use this as a way of sneaking ppc-OS4 onto people's consoles and it would provide incentive to give us the emulation layer.

Why would any consoles use OS4 when they have their own OSes?  Why do you need OS4 to run old Amiga games?

rbsfou:  It has a task / thread scheduler, several widget APIs all based on boopsi, portected memory (FINALLY!), truetype font support and a built in tcp/ip stack. What else could be needed?

There we have it, folks.  If you have BOOPSI, you have a full-blown GUI toolkit that makes porting Windows software a snap.

Can't say I've ever heard of portected memory.

rbsfou:  No - i LIKE AmigaOS for not copping out and being another Unix clone.

The point is that you're asking that software that employs UNIX standards should be ported to a non-UNIX OS.  That either takes a LOT of work, or you basicly have to make an entire UNIX layer run on top of AmigaOS, which is anything but efficient.

I think AmigaOS can do without an XWindow Server and all that other crap, so long as it has its own tools.

rbsfou:  Fair enough - personally i don't like x86 though, but as i said before, each to their own

All you said before is that you think x86 has too few registers.  That's hardly a good reason to dislike any CPU architecture, given that assembly is almost obsolete these days.

Even SIMD acceleration is usually accessed through APIs, rather than hard-coded assembly.  In fact, using assembly for most applications is quite bad.  Refer to problems where Apple software runs slower on a G5 than it does on a G3.

rbsfou:  Fine so let me run it on a PPC Mac (now/soon) or some x86 thing (later)!

How?  Switching architectures is not an easy thing if you design an OS the way you describe.  You have to plan for CPU abstraction ahead of time, not tack it on at the last minute.  Once you introduce Altivec/VMX, even emulation is pretty much impossible, let alone practical.

There are reasons why things exist the way that they do.

If anyone wants to make suggestions on how AmigaOS should be developed, they really should, at a bare minimum, have real experience with 10 different OSes.  Have you ever tried OS/2, VMS, RISC OS, and Inferno?  Your priorities and suggestions might be very different once you see how other "alternative" OSes have been developed in the past, and why they have failed to penetrate the mainstream market.

[LoadWB]

All you said before is that you think x86 has too few registers. That's hardly a good reason to dislike any CPU architecture, given that assembly is almost obsolete these days.

Funny this should be brought up as a point.  According to "On The Edge," Bill Gates did not take BASIC on the 6502 seriously because he felt the CPU had too few registers to make it useful.

[Floid]

rbsfou wrote:

If you people hate the idea of a dongle so much, how about the "real chipset reused from the non-existant joystick device" idea i mentioned before? Yes i know the chipset integration was tried before, but i've proposed a ways it could be done in a way that would seem ideal to a business (which unfortunately is what Amiga Inc. are)

So we've gone from "the keyboard is the computer" to "the keyboard is required to unlock the computer?"

[Dr_Righteous]

Waccoon wrote:

koaftder:  Different processors, different operating systems, different libs, etc and the processor is of little concern to me. So, as a developer, if the processor means almost nothing to me, why the hell should an end user care?

Because assembly is, like, all of solid awesome and stuff!  Everyone wants to write PPC assembler!

BINGO! That's my goal anyway. x86 has far too many instructions IMHO. Way too much overhead, way too many wasted transistors.

OOP lanugages have gotten SOOOOO out of control, and are the primary cause of OS/Application bloat (seconded only by pure programming laziness).

On a side note, I also think it's inherently wrong to have any OS written in a high level language. Maybe the GUI, but certainly not the core functions or drivers... The parts that speak to the hardware should be written in assembler.

[koaftder]

Dr_Righteous wrote:

Waccoon wrote:

koaftder:  Different processors, different operating systems, different libs, etc and the processor is of little concern to me. So, as a developer, if the processor means almost nothing to me, why the hell should an end user care?

Because assembly is, like, all of solid awesome and stuff!  Everyone wants to write PPC assembler!

BINGO! That's my goal anyway. x86 has far too many instructions IMHO. Way too much overhead, way too many wasted transistors.

OOP lanugages have gotten SOOOOO out of control, and are the primary cause of OS/Application bloat (seconded only by pure programming laziness).

On a side note, I also think it's inherently wrong to have any OS written in a high level language. Maybe the GUI, but certainly not the core functions or drivers... The parts that speak to the hardware should be written in assembler.

Contrasting the instruction sets between PPC and Intel Architecture is essentially worthless these days as modern chips no longer have a 1-1 coorespondence between their instruction sets and whats actually going on in the die, unlike older microprocessors.

[shillard]

Real soon now!

Just two more weeks!!!!

[coldfish]

OS4 requiring a PPC CPU acts as a form of hardware dongle by default.  

So that "feature" is already in place.  :-P

I'll leave OS4 to the "dongle" owners and stick with AROS and WinUAE on my humble yet abundant x86 hardware.

[Dr_Righteous]

koaftder wrote:
Contrasting the instruction sets between PPC and Intel Architecture is essentially worthless these days as modern chips no longer have a 1-1 coorespondence between their instruction sets and whats actually going on in the die, unlike older microprocessors.

Actually, that's precisely what I'm talking about. The x86 instruction set is microcode emulated on RISC processors now. In effect, RISC86. I'd much rather see the microcode disappear, and the transistors on the die along with it. Things would all be SOOOO much faster.

[lavo]

Who is left that is going to pirate OS 4 anyway??  The pirates have their hands full in cracking Vista and DRM........  :-D

[Waccoon]

Dr_Righteous:  OOP lanugages have gotten SOOOOO out of control, and are the primary cause of OS/Application bloat (seconded only by pure programming laziness).

It's the over-use and abuse of OOP that causes bloat.  A good programmer knows when and when NOT to use OO.

As usual, the computers just follow instructions and don't make mistakes, but people do.

Dr_Righteous:  I'd much rather see the microcode disappear, and the transistors on the die along with it. Things would all be SOOOO much faster.

Well, so long as Core2 Duo blows away everything else in terms of performance (and it runs pretty cool, too), that comment holds no water.

Also, x86 is a winner in terms of overall performance.  Other ISAs can beat x86 in certain areas, but usually flop on general-purpose runs.  There's a reason Apple always used Photoshop benchmarks to prove the speed of PPC, although the performance could be wildly inconsistent between CPU generations.

[Amiga_Nut]

My 0.02$ worth..

The Amiga OS has always run on certain reference hardware unlike Macs and PCs which are quite variable in their makeup of components, this is where it's strength comes from and it's major advantage IMO. Just like PC games need a LOT more power to achieve the same results as an xbox360 OS4 on a standard hardware platform with optimisation will outperform anything on similar spec of PC/Mac.

What we really need is a company with some forward thinking, like it or lump it but a spiritual successor to the A1000 is OS4+PS3 (picked this machine as it was the first machine out to compare with the PC/Mac/ST at the time and hence show people what really was the best and most powerful way to do it) Think about how powerful the sum total of the hardware is in the PS3, imagine a fully bespoke and optimized version of OS4 running on there, custom chips a plenty, different CPU to the competition, plays games better than any Mac and almost any PC money can buy and yet has already got a Linux distro on it which proves it can do anything a normal PC can if you add a mouse and keyboard.

Whether you like Sony or not is not really the issue, the point is there will never be new hardware manufactured for a real new Amiga you could buy in a shop. Given that Microsoft would never allow this on its 360 hardware and Wii is a pile of crap as far as its capabilities go that leaves just one console which already happens to have an OS aswell as being a kick-ass hardware console.

The Amiga was king because it was nicer to use than Windows 1/2/3 or classic Mac OS ONTOP of the fact it had hardware that could give the megadrive a run for its money in the games arena 3 years before the megadrive was even released. This is the combination that made the Amiga special, lovely OS + Kickass games + incredible multimedia powers that PC/Mac of the time (1985) couldn't even get close to let alone beat :-)