Amiga Card PPC developing

[DrFrantic]

Hello,

there is an man, who had spoken to bplan (phase 5), to develop an new amiga ppc card. bplan says, it cost 50.000 euros and in 6 month is the card ready.

take a look to the thread.

http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=9614

i know its in german, but you can use some translat services,

have a nice day

[alexh]

You'd never make €50,000 profit on a new Amiga PPC and so never recoup your NRE

I wonder what the price per unit would have been on 1000 units?

[DrFrantic]

read the thread, no one will make profit, he will an card for os 4, for classic amiga. 50.000 Euro is only for devoloping.

reguard

doc

[Piru]

bplan won't do this unless if there's profit to be made, and quite frankly I'd be amazed if anyone would.

[Matt_H]

@ Piru

Well, if they're paid the 50,000 Euros up front I can't imagine them *not* doing it.

Unless that's a price quote for design-but-don't-build, in which case, yeah, it'll probably never get to production.

Either way, the odds of a magical investor appearing to commission that sort of work are virtually nil.

[A1260]

since there is no millionaire that have the amiga as a hobby and don't mint spending some money on it. this will never happen.

[itix]

read the thread, no one will make profit, he will an card for os 4, for classic amiga. 50.000 Euro is only for devoloping.

So, somebody, maybe you, is going to pay 50000 euros to develop new PPC card. And once that 50k is spent and design it starts raining new PPC cards from the sky? Sounds good.

[Jose]

I don't think it's that much, 50 000€ is 50€ x 1000 amiga users. Frankly going by eBay prices and Classic/ppc amiga (OS4/MOS) users on forums I'd say there would be plenty people willing to give those 50€ as even donation! The problem would be the production, how much would it be ?
And by the way, how many AOS4 for classic CD's have been sold ?

[persia]

But where's the price point?  There are 10's of people willing to drop an insane amount of money for a PPC card, but what's the price that would hook a thousand users, if it had a real PPC chip (G$/G5) at some GHz speed and not a junk 603/4?  Would a 1000 Amiga users pay €400 for a G4 or G5 card?  Assuming you want a profit as well as recouping your cost could you produce 1000 cards at €300?

If the whole project could be done in a year (from concept to sale of the final board) the developer would then have €100,000 in their pocket, a reasonable amount of money for an IT person though probably less than they could get consulting.   But my orin

[CLS2086]

Open a bounty, we will see ...

[itix]

I don't think it's that much, 50 000€ is 50€ x 1000 amiga users. Frankly going by eBay prices and Classic/ppc amiga (OS4/MOS) users on forums I'd say there would be plenty people willing to give those 50€ as even donation!

You never raise 50000€ from donations. There probably arent even one thousand Amiga users left...

And of course, when that board goes to the production you pay all expenses in advance. Which means you must get funding somewhere, maybe from a bank.

And this is just to get some PPC card for old 15 years old Amigas. It makes no sense. Spend 50k only to run OS4 or MorphOS on old Amigas... most Amiga users dont even use AGA which makes me wonder why they need real Amiga at all in these days... maybe nostalgia and retro feeling but I dont see OS4 or MorphOS in that context. They need new hardware, not some old G2 technology derivate from 1993.

And again you need 68k cpu or it is useless to most users. You cant run old games and demos in OS4 or MorphOS due to memory protection and other changes.

[cv643d]

If someone said he would develop an A500 clone all by himself on a popular Amiga forum back in 2005 he would have gotten flamed and almost kicked out by the veterans because it would not have been worth it.

With a positive mind everything is possible.

[Damion]

A G3/G4 A1200 PPC card makes absolutely no sense. It makes "slightly" better sense for a big-box Amiga, even then I highly doubt there are even 1000 A4k owners who would be interested. (Actually, it sounds like a slow, expensive, hacked-up architectural mess.)

Best option for OS4/MOS/AROS users = modern or semi-modern PPC/X86

Best option(s) for "classic" 68k Amiga users = emulation, MiniMig, "Real" HW or possibly NatAmi

The only type of card that *might* sell OK IMHO would be something like an '030 A1200 card. I'd bet there are far more people out there who would spring a buck-fifty to run WHDLoad comfortably on their old A1200s, as opposed to those willing to spend $1000 to run OS4 on their _old as hellz_ A3000, especially at the expense of games/demos/WHDLoad/etc.



 

[Jeff]

Having been only recently able to run OS4 for the first time it seems obvious to me (IMHO) that both the 4000/CSPPC and the 1200/Blizzard are really inadequate for this OS. OS4 really seems to need considerably more ram and cpu power than is available on either of these systems. To tell the truth I am amazed that the developers made OS4 run as well as it does on the old classic systems. I guess it just shows how talented they are as programmers! I really runs surprisingly well for how old these computers are.

It would run MUCH better on my old G4 Digital Audio Mac with a gig of ram. Don't get me wrong, it's fun to play with and I appreciate being able to run it a all! I just wish the hardware wasn't so old, fragile, and expensive.

-Jeff

[matthey]

All that money spent on design work would be wasted because by the time these cards would be available all the lawsuits will be settled and we will have AmigaOS4 running on every PPC machine available like the SAM, PS3, PPC Mac's, etc :crazy: .