So what happened to these new Amigas?

[billt]

Forgive me if I'm being stupid here, but where are they?

Exactly where most of us expected by the time that announcment was made. They're in some fantasy universe imagined by some guy, of which the rest of us have no access to.

[billt]

Bill McEwen should start getting up on his lazy behind and get the company to start making Consumer Amiga Desktops instead of fight court battles.

He has no motivation to do that right now. Such hardware would run an OS that he claims ownership of but does not have. He's surely not going to do something which benefits his "enemy", as he surely sees them.

Unfortunately, even if he wins the legal war, he still will not approve or make or encourage anything on the hardware side. I seriously believe that McEwen and friends specifically do not want to be in the business of doing anything whatsoever that we the people consider Amiga related. If he wins OS4, he will kill it. And then we will have nothing at all happening again.

[HopperJF]

Yeah, AInc are just as bad as Gateway before them, killing Amiga by simply doing nothing.

[NovaCoder]

billt wrote:

He has no motivation to do that right now. Such hardware would run an OS that he claims ownership of but does not have. He's surely not going to do something which benefits his "enemy", as he surely sees them.

I have a different perspective to most of you guys because I’ve only recently starting getting into the whole Amiga thing again.  Reading up on what’s been going on since Commodore went bankrupt is quite ‘interesting’ to say the least.

I find it amazing that you cannot find anything about Classic Amiga’s on Amiga.com.  If I were them I’d be plugging the whole retro thing as much as I could.  There’s no reason why they still couldn’t make some money from the classic market, you only have to look at the eBay prices of old accelerator cards etc.

Why not commission a ‘modernised’ 1200 & 4000T….nothing  too revolutionary, just something with built in DVD drive, easily expandable memory, and a processor that will run OS4.  It can’t be that hard can it :-?

If you've got the HW available to buy, a regularly updated OS, and some official software development going on (think WiiWare) then you’ve got a nice healthy retro platform and everyone is happy (well, almost everyone :lol:).

[mike-]

Thats what happens when a guy with about as much business sense as a senile old monkey gets behind the wheel of your "Ferrari". If he had a boss, he'd be fired long ago. Thats my opinion anyway.

However, a great new Amiga that runs on PC hardware, and a great new version of Amiga Os could be a hit!

Sorry I just dont see it happening, its basically a emulator.. Emulators are free these days. Thats probably why they tried stopping cloanto, since they probably have a better product then they have.

I just wish someday I will find my local Best Buy or Circuit City carry real Amiga Desktops with OS 4. They should really start producing machines or at least an Amiga game console similar to CD32, but better than PS3 and Xbox 360.

Yes they should, shouldnt they? But the fact is that they are so blatantly ignorant of the direction the community wants to go that it must actually hurt to get up in the morning being ainc. I'd be outright so ashamed of myself if I was billmc that i'd remove my name from anything that had to do with Ainc.

And I dont _think_ there is much to worry about when it comes to ainc getting the OS, name and everything, mcewen basically took a wee in his own beer drawing up and signing that contract then going bankrupt.

The fact is, the only company currently supporting “the direction of the amiga community” is bbrv. And acube. Billmc probably doesnt even know where to find us.

 Yeah, AInc are just as bad as Gateway before them, killing Amiga by simply doing nothing.

Please dont forget that billmc was ceo of the amiga operations of gateway until he got fired in 1999
http://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1999/990901-cucug.html

[Terse]

amigakidd wrote:
I just wish someday I will find my local Best Buy or Circuit City carry real Amiga Desktops with OS 4. They should really start producing machines or at least an Amiga game console similar to CD32, but better than PS3 and Xbox 360.

Yeah, I'm sure whatever Amiga Inc could come up with would blow RJ Mical's little Pee-OS 3 out of the toilet.

And don't get me started with the Xbox 3iffy.  That thing needs 3 3.2Ghz PPC G4 cores and a half-gig of DDR3 ram just to boot!  Imagine what an Amiga game console could do if it 'kept it real' and stayed with a nice 900Mhz G3 and outsourced the hardware, OS, and game development to India.

 :roll:

[Atheist]

HopperJF wrote:

Yeah, AInc are just as bad as Gateway before them, killing Amiga by simply doing nothing.

Yes. Amiga Inc. think that everything could be outsourced and they'll sit back and make billions....

That's _exactly_ what they did in 2001. BUT, they thought they could OWN all that was outsourced as well.

So, outsource at a minuscule $ amount, then own, but NOT produce anything, and rake in wads of cashola?!?


Now there's a business plan!


(Yeah, I vote for them money laundering too.)

[mike-]

Ditto, who owns that law firm anyway?

[hsv5000]

Apple figured it out why can't Amiga? use the hardware that everyone else is using!
Focus on the OS...... Its that simple enough? :idea:

[bloodline]

hsv5000 wrote:
Apple figured it out why can't Amiga? use the hardware that everyone else is using!
Focus on the OS...... Its that simple enough? :idea:

Amiga do use the same hardware as everyone else... their DE was specially designed for that purpose... and other than the use of a PPC CPU... an A1 is just a regular PC...

[yorgle]

monami wrote:
there is a running joke in the film "the money pit" starring shelly long and tom hanks. which is about how long it will take for the builders to get their house finished. i don't know how many years it ended up being... "Just two more weeks" it always makes me laugh when i hear that said.

You're not going to die, I'm holding the ladder.

[amigakidd]

The minimig or some FPGA on a chip is the closest thing to emerge in a Amiga Consumer Market.

Amiga or some developer in the community should market a Kit called Build-Your-Own-Amiga, just like Lego NXT that you can build a A1000, A500, A500+, A600, A2000, CD32, A3000, A4000 from sold-separately parts or buy a complete kit, but you must assemble it. All should come with an SD Card as standard and modern off the shelf PC components.
Plus, a Wifi component to connect to a modern BBS.
And, Morph OS, OS 4 compatible and can connect to Standard RCA. Open Source components.

Amiga Forever Compatible with ROMS. The Games and OS can just be used interchangably with UAE and connect via Amiga Explorer as well.

I can see $199 for a Entry Geek Kit (Basic A500),
$299 for Premium Geek Kit (A500-A4000)
But both versions can be upgraded to your specs, $199 is much easier and for the casual hobbyist.

Who ever invents this should also sell the extra addons at Radioshack, Best Buy, Frys, Circuit City, and other small electronics.

We all have to dream.

[Terse]

amigakidd wrote:
... you can build a A1000, A500, A500+, A600, A2000, CD32, A3000, A4000 from sold-separately parts or buy a complete kit,...

That is a description of eBay.

[Andeda]

@Amigakidd

Is it you Starke?

[GreggBz]

1999 called. They want their thread back.

I'm going to go cry now.

[mike-]

"In 1997, prospects brightened when the PC manufacturer Gateway bought Amiga and promised to bring out a new, more powerful computer. Mr. McEwen said Gateway had mostly been interested in Amiga's 40 or so valuable patents, for video and sound card technologies.

Gateway hired Mr. McEwen, a large, lumbering man who went into computer sales after leaving his family's trucking business in the mid-1980's, as its chief evangelist for the Amiga. Mr. McEwen had not owned an Amiga before but was immediately smitten and soon came to consider himself one of the clan.

But after two years and a series of false starts, a new Amiga failed to materialize.

Last August, it looked as though the end had finally come. That's when Mr. McEwen and most members of Gateway's small Amiga team lost their jobs and plans for resurrecting the computer were scrapped yet again.

Mr. McEwen put a finer point on it. "Amiga was baggage to Gateway's main business," he said. "It wasn't an asset in their minds."

So passionate had Mr. McEwen become about the computer that he quickly proposed to Gateway that he buy what remained of Amiga's assets. It took him a month to raise the money to buy the rights to the Amiga name; the remaining Amiga inventory, which consisted of some 17,000 machines in Germany; and a worldwide distribution channel already in place. Gateway kept the patents and licensed them to Mr. McEwen. The price for everything, Mr. McEwen said, was "in the millions."

Mr. McEwen now has a staff of 20 in an office in Snoqualmie, Wash., east of Seattle. All but two employees got their start in computers with Amigas, he said proudly."
http://www.cucug.org/sr/sr0007.html

So what happened?