what the hell is an amiga one?

[McVenco]

Can you name a worse motherboard or other mass produced consumer product in recent history? I am curious.

Link

[spirantho]

Piru wrote:
@spirantho

By this time, however, A1s had been made without the sound chip as it was deemed useless.

No, actually the sound chip was dropped because the programmers didn't know how to initialize it properly and they thought the chip or related parts of the board didn't work properly. The sound chip was always ok.

That's what I said.... the sound chip was removed because they thought they couldn't use it and by the time they worked out how to it was too late.

@redrumloa
I think Hans has pretty well summed up how I feel w.r.t. the "freedom of speech" (a.k.a. opinionated trolling) of the earlier posting. Sure, he has a right to mouth off about stuff but claiming it as fact should always be frowned upon, even if he is free to do it.

The Peg II probably is a better board - I've never used one so I can't comment.
However, from what I recall by this time Bbrv was already advocating the Peg for MorphOS. For Eyetech to have used the same board would have ended up in their playing second fiddle to Bbrv. You don't want to be at the mercy of the competition you're trying to beat, do you?

As I recall it it was simply that the money from Eyetech wasn't enough to keep an already beleagured MAI Logic from going under. This left Eyetech up a certain creek without a paddle, and they weren't making any real money anyway so they left the market.
The option to use the Pegasos boards were down to Hyperion and Amiga Inc, not Eyetech because Hyperion refused to support it, IIRC.

@rednova:

As you've probably noticed, there used to be and there still are red vs. blue wars about who's better and who's best, and opinions still run strong. If you really want to know more you need to ask users of both platforms and ignore the diatribe, and form your own opinions. It remains, however, that the AmigaOne is the best way to run AmigaOS 4, and it runs very well indeed - no amount of forum nonsense is going to change that.

[redrumloa]

There's freedom of speech, and then there are people spewing out opinions as facts and generally deriding things other people like. Most of the "facts" here come from people who have never used an A1. Having to listen to negative BS is unappealing.

Many posting here with a negative opinion do have, or have owned an AmigaOne. Slash and Redfox are 2 examples. Others posting here have a technical backround. Now Jorkany is obviosuly bording on trolling, but afaik has not crossed the line into moderation teritory.

I don't think anyone called A1 buyers dumb, I almost bought one myself. I was an early pre-order customer of the AmigaOne SE, and only canceled my order after the 3rd delay and seeing on the preoder mailing list the few people who had already received their board get viciously blasted by Alan Redhouse.

I count my blessing I never bought that AmigaOne SE. It was 100% advertised as an "end user product" and "meets Amiga Inc quality assurance". Do you remember at the very end when Alan Redhouse announced that in fact every AmigaOne ever made, including uA1, was nothing more than a developer board? That pissed off even most of the biggest A1 fans.

[redrumloa]

McVenco wrote:

Can you name a worse motherboard or other mass produced consumer product in recent history? I am curious.

Link

touche!! :roflmao:

[Hans_]

redrumloa wrote:

I have an A1, and for "the worst consumer product of all time" and "total garbage," it actually works quite well. The bugs have a performance hit (e.g., memory access is slower than it should be), but Amiga OS4 works well on it and is fun to use.

I think you are confusing OS4 with AmigaOne. OS4 may work well and assist the hardware with workarounds, but that doesn't make the A1 any less buggy / unreliable. Even in your explaination you explain the problems.

For all its bugs, my Amigaone has been very reliable. Yes the workarounds are necessary; yes there are some pretty sizable flaws, but it's not randomly crashing, nor is it a pain to use.

Can you name a worse motherboard or other mass produced consumer product in recent history? I am curious.

Try those no-name DVD drives that work half the time. Try those $10-$20 MP3 players that are unreliable and have poorly finished UIs that just don't quite work right. What about those fancy new TVs that crash every half hour or so? What about those cheap toys/gadgets that half work?

How about baby toys containing dangerous amounts of lead? Or t-shirts with dangerous amounts of formaldehyde.

There is a whole range of really bad/ partially usable consumer products out there. Heck, the MacBook Air is supposedly semi-usable because of design flaws. It overheats (even in temperate climates) and locks up regularly. I've heard people say that it's currenty unusable as-is. At least my A1 runs for hours without locking up randomly.

Hans

[spirantho]

redrumloa wrote:
I think you are confusing OS4 with AmigaOne. OS4 may work well and assist the hardware with workarounds, but that doesn't make the A1 any less buggy / unreliable. Even in your explaination you explain the problems.

Can you name a worse motherboard or other mass produced consumer product in recent history? I am curious.

If the A1 was that bad as you said, though, it wouldn't be capable of running OS4 - which it does very nicely.
There are problems with it, it's not perfect, but right now it does its job just fine.

As for worse systems, there have been many many worse systems.  Some PC motherboards, such as budget models at the end of the last century (i.e. PC Chips etc.) were far worse.

[hooligan]

That's what you get when you buy low-volume products

Thats the lamest excuse of all-time, no offence. You BUY stuff which should be WORKING. If they are not working they should not be for sale at all.

[persia]

My Compaq isn't "licensed" to run Leopard, but it does so quite nicely.  What is it that prevents someone from buying a Sam board and an OS4 disk and ging to town?

redfox wrote:
@persia

Sam440 and Efika are not licensed to use OS4.

---
redfox

[itix]

As for worse systems, there have been many many worse systems.

Trabant is worse than Lada but Lada is still Lada.

[xeron]

redrumloa wrote:
History has proved these boards to be among the worst, if not the worst consumer product of all time. Avoid these 2nd hand boards at all costs, total garbage.

You see you say this, but my A1-XE has been in heavy daily use for the last ~5 years, and has proved to be very reliable and i've never regretted buying it for one nanosecond, even at the high price i paid.

I'm not denying the articia has bugs, but OS4 works great on it and i don't have any problems at all with it.

[xeron]

I guess my main problem with Red's post is that he is saying it is total garbage and that people should avoid buying it.

Well, if I had avoided buying my A1 i would have missed out because I have thoroughly enjoyed owning and using it all this time, so i'm VERY glad i didn't pass up on the opportunity.

[spirantho]

hooligan wrote:

That's what you get when you buy low-volume products

Thats the lamest excuse of all-time, no offence. You BUY stuff which should be WORKING. If they are not working they should not be for sale at all.

It's not an excuse, it's a reason.

You deal with low-volume products where they don't have the time to go through rigorous testing, you can expect troubles. It's always been like that, and always will be, it's just life.

The first Sinclair ZX80s overheated because they were new, minority equipment; they were still very popular because they were unique.
The Pentium-60 had the FDIV bug because it was a new architecture and very expensive (though Intel should have known better).
Some IBM mainframes' CPUs actually had an 'undocumented' HCF opcode - Halt and Catch Fire. Which is exactly what happened when you executed it. Why? Because it was very low volume equipment, so the lack of testers hadn't spotted the race condition.
More recently, the Xbox 360 - we all know about the red ring of death. If MS can't foresee such problems how the heck can MAI or Eyetech afford to?

History is littered with low-volume products having problems like this. We live in a capitalist society: if you don't like the product (including it's bugs) then don't buy it. But don't complain to the maker that they didn't test it all, because until they've sold a load of them they won't have had the cash to have done so. Hence why if you want more rugged systems never buy first generation equipment.

[Varthall]

@redrumloa

I think you are confusing OS4 with AmigaOne. OS4 may work well and assist the hardware with workarounds, but that doesn't make the A1 any less buggy / unreliable. Even in your explaination you explain the problems.

The A1 and OS4 are basically one thing. AmigaOne has been marketed in order to use OS4, and likewise OS4 has been developed to be run on that platform (and on classic PPC machines). I (and I believe most, of not all the A1 buyers) have bought it in order to run OS4, I have not bought it only as a motherboard as such.

I don't think anyone called A1 buyers dumb, I almost bought one myself.

Still, I always get that feeling when I read most of the comments here.

@jorkany

With no new PPC hardware left Hyperion was forced to revert to their original (circa 2000) idea of producing a version of OS4 that could run on the almost forgotten Blizzard and Cyberstorm PPC expansion cards.

I might be wrong, but from what I have read the Blizzard and Cyberstorm version of OS4 has being developed from the beginning together with the A1 version, and it was being shown by betatesters on various meetings. It has been released after the A1 version since it had a lower priority.

Varthall

[redrumloa]

Quote:
    I don't think anyone called A1 buyers dumb, I almost bought one myself.

Still, I always get that feeling when I read most of the comments here.

Ok, speaking for myself maybe I worded my post to harshly. It was off the cuff of what my gut feeling is, but I will go back and re-word a bit since it seems I offended a few people.

[Piru]

If MS can't foresee such problems how the heck can MAI or Eyetech afford to

Actually any serious HW business must account for such things. It's quite possible that some flaw is found and that you must replace quite a bit of equipment. Intel and m$ did. It wasn't cheap, but it didn't ruin their business because they had planned for such an event.

Obviously it's much harder to deal with these issues when you have a single product, but nevertheless you should. If you can't, you shouldn't be doing the business in the first place.

[spirantho]

Piru wrote:
Obviously it's much harder to deal with these issues when you have a single product, but nevertheless you should. If you can't, you shouldn't be doing the business in the first place.

Ideally yes. And if the problem was a big one I'd be more inclined to saying the same thing...

... but the fact is the A1 does do what it advertised, and it actually does it rather well given the financial constraints on its development cycle. I'm perfectly happy with mine and seeing how hard it is to get one second hand, I suspect most other people are too.