Ideas: The new Amiga. Yes, it's inevitable!

[DavidF215]

amigadave wrote:

>What modern programs for banking, word processing, spreadsheets, etc. that are compatible with worldwide standards (which means Microsoft Word & Excel) will AmigaOS4/5 have to compete with Mac, Windows, or Linux?

>Answer: NONE!

Bingo! If Amiga Inc would pay their Indian programmers to make an updated Office Productivity package rather than flush money on .Net programs then their other investment in AmigaOS4 would pay better ROI.

Anyhow, at this point, new or updated applications should be the number one priority of the AmigaOS community. What good is a Yacht without enough money for fuel? Likewise, what's a good AmigaOS4 without good programs to fuel its demand. And why get another yacht if you still don't have fuel for the new one--what good is AmigaOS on a new platform without applications. If modern applications are available, then porting to another platform is understandable, but until then focus on application development.

>Edit: If the Amiga community wants to move forward, each and every one of us had better become programming wizards and start coding 24/7 in ways that make programmers for all other platforms look like children in grade school in comparison. Maybe then we can inch forward on the path to catch up.

Along this line I also think, and I'm sure I'll get flamed for it, but I think AROS should stop development for now and apply all their efforts in making and updating AmigaOS applications instead. I tested Aros, and honestly I wasn't impressed. IMO, AmigaForever is a better alternative, and it's commercial. Why put forth effort duplicating something (AmigaOS) that doesn't have decent applications to emulate, especially when a commercial emulator is available that's, IMO, better anyways at this point in time.

I for one have put StormC 4 on my "to buy" list so I can port some of my games over to AmigaOS. And I hope Hyperion wins the court case so I can buy AmigaOS 4 and new PPC hardware because I can't get OS4 now due to hardware restrictions.

[Belial6]

I am of a different mind.  AInc. has shown no interest in the Amiga for years.  Even if they decided to throw everything they could at the Amiga, and did start to make headway, we would never know when they would decide to make another about face and abandon it again.  I would rather see AROS turn it's attention to the MiniMig.  Dennis freed us from the shackles of AInc hardware dependence.  Yaqube is moving us forward at a remarkable pace.  The only thing that still makes AInc even a consideration is the KickStart and Workbench.  If AROS could free us from that, we would still be a decade and a half behind, but we would at least be free from dragging the comatose corpse of AInc behind us.  I have no doubt that if the MiniMig could be sold with an OS and a few basic apps pre-installed, we would see more interest.  With that interest, we would see not only more applications, but more improvements to the OS AND improvements to the hardware.

[freqmax]

We could establish a minimal starting point by creating a kickstart/workbench that at least could get games and demos started.

[SamuraiCrow]

Regarding the PS3:

It has only 256 megs of RAM and so Linux doesn't run well on it.  MacOSX and Windows aren't even available for it either.

I have a friend named Joel with a PS3 and he's sick of running Linux distros that are designed for lightweight hardware just because of the memory footprint.  He'd like to see AROS or something small running on it so that the apps will run smoothly without constantly swapping to the hard drive.

[downix]

trekiej wrote:
Has anyone ever made a list of Hardware and software people?
Hardware: Dennis,Illuwatar,Yaqube

Jens, Jeri, myself....

[downix]

Belial6 wrote:
I am of a different mind.  AInc. has shown no interest in the Amiga for years.  Even if they decided to throw everything they could at the Amiga, and did start to make headway, we would never know when they would decide to make another about face and abandon it again.  I would rather see AROS turn it's attention to the MiniMig.  Dennis freed us from the shackles of AInc hardware dependence.  Yaqube is moving us forward at a remarkable pace.  The only thing that still makes AInc even a consideration is the KickStart and Workbench.  If AROS could free us from that, we would still be a decade and a half behind, but we would at least be free from dragging the comatose corpse of AInc behind us.  I have no doubt that if the MiniMig could be sold with an OS and a few basic apps pre-installed, we would see more interest.  With that interest, we would see not only more applications, but more improvements to the OS AND improvements to the hardware.

Hear hear!  I started such work, but then someone else said they were so I stopped else step on toes, instead worked on porting it to the SPARC, but now, no idea how the m68k port is going.  (SPARC is about 40% done tho)

[persia]

Pretty much is the point, Amiga Inc has been around since 2001 and has yet to produce a single classic Amiga compatible product.  They sell PC games, they claim to have a version of Tao Intent called Amiga Anywhere but no place to buy it and it doesn't appear to run on classic Amigas either.  My guess is that Amiga Inc has blown it's wad on lawsuits and is basically just a small consulting company in India focusing on dotNet.  

They used to be prolific producers of press releases but even those ended in February, to count on them for anything is IMHO a horrible mistake.  

We have the code for AROS, it's open source.  Finish the port to X86, built a classic mode emulator in it to emulate the classic Amigas (like Apple did with classic Mac) and move forward from there.  

Oh, and give up on world domination, it ain't gonna happen....

[downix]

persia wrote:
They sell PC games, they claim to have a version of Tao Intent called Amiga Anywhere but no place to buy it and it doesn't appear to run on classic Amigas either.

No, they don't have Tao anymore.  Tao went out of business, and AInc lost their license when that happened.

[0amigan0]

To answer to the topic: NO, it's NOT inevitable!
There are/will NOT be any new amigas; Amiga is a dead platform, get over it!
You CAN, if u wish, enjoy your old Commodore Amiga, but please don't believe false promises by companies whose sole objective is to steal money from honest enthusiasts of the platform.

[Belial6]

0amigan0 wrote:
To answer to the topic: NO, it's NOT inevitable!
There are/will NOT be any new amigas; Amiga is a dead platform, get over it!
You CAN, if u wish, enjoy your old Commodore Amiga, but please don't believe false promises by companies whose sole objective is to steal money from honest enthusiasts of the platform.

Well, that is just plain wrong.  I bought a brand spanking new Amiga just this year.  It was not only newley produced, but also a completely new design.  Of course, that is why I would like to see AROS running on it.  Because I don't want a single point of failure for moving the platform forward.

[Belial6]

Hear hear!  I started such work, but then someone else said they were so I stopped else step on toes, instead worked on porting it to the SPARC, but now, no idea how the m68k port is going.  (SPARC is about 40% done tho)

I had not realized that someone took that bounty.  That is very good news indeed.  If bheron drops the ball (which I really hope he does not) please, please reconsider doing the 68k port.  The MiniMig is on a roll, and having I believe that having it's own, open source OS would help snowball it's success.

At the point that AROS runs on the MiniMig, we have an actual 'Platform'.  It is no longer technically a 'retro' platform.

[downix]

Belial6 wrote:

Hear hear!  I started such work, but then someone else said they were so I stopped else step on toes, instead worked on porting it to the SPARC, but now, no idea how the m68k port is going.  (SPARC is about 40% done tho)

I had not realized that someone took that bounty.  That is very good news indeed.  If bheron drops the ball (which I really hope he does not) please, please reconsider doing the 68k port.  The MiniMig is on a roll, and having I believe that having it's own, open source OS would help snowball it's success.

At the point that AROS runs on the MiniMig, we have an actual 'Platform'.  It is no longer technically a 'retro' platform.

Well, doing the SPARC is helping me learn, so quite possible to do.  Incidentally, SPARC CPU's have been successfully emulating m68k's since the mid 80's, which opens up other options as well.

[Hammer]

There's a SPARC based laptop from http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/products/notebooks.asp

[downix]

been a few SPARC laptops over the years.  Sun even developed a SPARC based PDA once.  I built myself a SPARC based MP3 player.

[Hammer]

alexh wrote:

Steril707 wrote:
That's why i compared the PS3 of today to the Amiga of my childhood.

Always getting poor second rate ports of Xbox 360 titles which never use any of the PS3's custom hardware?

Just like the early Amiga days getting crappy Atari ST ports. Yeah I can see your point.

Unlike Atari ST, Xbox 360 includes a competent GPU design.

Lets hope as time goes on the programmers embrace the PS3 and actually use some of it's features.

On same token, PS3 RSX GPU is missing features from XBOX360's Xenos GPU e.g. tessellation unit, global illumination unit. These functional units reduce the work load on the available shader resource.

CELL's 6 SPUs can be brought over and fix RSX issues.
For example,
http://research.scea.com/ps3_deferred_shading.pdf
Unreal3(e.g. UT3) engine uses deferred shading btw.

Since PS3's RSX GPU is based on G7x family, refer to
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_37100.html
Refer to Page 30, Figure 22. Refer to above Sony link as a fix i.e. doing pixel shader work on 5 SPUs.

Notice the design issues with G7x GPU in relation to concurrent pixel shader and texture operations. By default, G7x’s pixel shader performance is reduced. This NVIDIA document shows the design issues with G7x GPU when compared to G8x GPU e.g. Early-Z, shader branch, vertex instancing, available vertex resource and 'etc'.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3128&p=3
Notice Geforce 7950 lost against Geforce 8600GTS in UT3.
RSX basically is an 8 ROP version G71 i.e. cut down version.

Again, 6 SPUs can be brought over and "fix" G7x's design issues e.g. vertex shader, pixel shader, tessellation, global illumination, Early-Z cull and 'etc'.  

X360's Xenos GPU doesn’t have same design issues as G7x.

It would be unwise to compare X360 vs PS3 as Amiga(GPU centric) vs Atari ST (CPU centric)

[Steril707]

On the point about Aros. It's good it exists, and it's a slow crawl to a completely working OS anyway. Imagine Hyperion and the company doing Morphos decide to stop developing for their OSes suddenly. Maybe one day all the Amiga might have left is Aros...

I know things like the AROS port to the Efika happen because there are bounties for them, but considering there is a PPC designs like the PS3, which has a couple of millions of users around the world compared to those hundreds of Efikas around, I sometimes wonder if the Amigacommunity just wants to fail.

And compared to the last few years (I started being interested in the Amiga again in 2005), there is finally an abundance of possibilities happening in the Amiga hardware scene again, like the Minimig, Morphos on Efika, Amiga Os4 on the Sam440, and for the future i see a lot of other interesting stuff, like Clone A and Natami that might happen.

The future doesn't look too dark anymore...