Amiga games machine

[BillHarrison]

This is honestly the ONLY logical way I could see the Amiga making a comeback.  We have PC's, which is market maxed out, commodity hardware elcheapo land.  

We have game consoles, which are subsidized, and sold below cost to make up money later on hardware and accessories.

Make an "Amiga" kickass games console (Granted, the logisitics of such a thing is well beyond anyone associated with amiga right now), then also let on that its a "Sweet" office / home computer as well.

Really what made the Amiga the first time around.  Selling it purely as a pc replacement wont fly these days.  It has to have that "Special" niche, and for the amiga it always was graphics and sound.  Why not make it those again, except TOP notch Gaming graphics and sound!  

[guru-666]

wow...that's exacly what Commodore used to do back when they sold the amiga.... see it worked for them!

thing is back then the amiga was more advanced that other sulutions, nowadasy the amiga is weak at games, sound and such....

BTW the wii is not subsidized.

[Merax]

Amigas used to be on top in terms of bang for buck, multimedia performance, OS stability, and nice form factor.

Since then, Amiga's competitors have invested billions in these areas, making it extremely hard for any company without similar means to beat them at their own game.

I still think there's room for a 3rd party in the PC market, though.  Some areas of innovation that are in the Amiga spirit and might work for a smaller company could be a ray-tracing GPU, tightly integrated and easy to use OS/Apps (like iPhone), interesting user input devices like a touch-screen keyboard or wacom tablet, and built-in tools for easy graphical application development.

Edit:  Condensed for the modern reader.

[guru-666]

dude just write a book why not?

[JimS]

Merax wrote:
I still think there's room for a 3rd party in the PC market, though.  Some areas of innovation that are in the Amiga spirit and might work for a smaller company could be a ray-tracing GPU,

Apparently nVidia is going that very thing.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html
500 gigaflops on the desktop... sheesh!

[Rebel-CD32]

If you want to play a new game that takes advantage of the newest hardware, then there's never going to be an alternative to the PC or big consoles (Sony,MS,Nintendo). By the time Amiga can come up with anything these days, it's already been superceded years ago by all the big companies.

I think Amiga people should stop trying to out-do the PC and consoles at what they're built for, and focus on making the Amiga do what it's best at. What makes people like 3D games so much anyway, I preferred playing games back when they were 2D and that's what Amigas did best.

And Amigas always encouraged creativity. When you use an Amiga, it's fun, there are lots of things to do and things to make. Market to the creativity market perhaps, not the games market.

[joemango]

Let's look at Nintendo, shall we?  They tried to play the hardware game (N64, GameCube) for ten years, and lost.  Then they came out with...

Wii.  Not a great machine by the paper specs, but it changes the way you think about games by immersing you on a different level.  I have only played it a couple of times and the most banal of games (Bowling, tennis, etc.) seemed like new experiences.  This is the kind of thing that changes markets.  That is what Amiga needs.  A change in market focus.

If Amiga can make some shift in gameplay happen, great!  But they also need good developers.  The coolest OS and the slickest hardware are nothing without developers.  Developers like SDK's.  They don't like banging the hardware from the get-go because it's HARD.  There is no SDK for Amiga, at least not an easily accessible one.

I agree with the idea of going for the creative market.  Build the media features of the OS; make it physically able to connect to ANYTHING multimedia related; make it sort of a god box for media creation.  The chips to do this are not so expensive anymore.

Oh, and make it able to boot windows and OSX.  (in other words, to whomever wins the suit, PORT THE FRIGGIN OS TO x86 already!!!) If people can  boot the Amiga side quicker than the Windows or Mac side, they will want to use that instead, for simple tasks like checking e-mail and google mapping.  People don't think about how powerful the OS is, they just want to get working quicker.  As a help desk tech I constantly heard people ask "when are we gonna get faster computers?  This one takes ten minutes to boot in the morning!"  AmigaOS can shine here, giving people faster access to the tools they need.