Argo said,
Can anyone verify this?The point for AmigaOS buffs is that AmigaAnywhere 2 effectively starts up a virtual machine, boots AmigaOS and runs the code on top of that. And that makes it perfectly possible for Amiga lovers to fire it up and run the familiar Amiga GUI instead of the game. Why they'd want to is anyone's guess, and Amiga wasn't demo'ing the OS working in this mode. Can AmigaOS catch up with the user experience and the functionality of modern operating systems? Some might argue that it shouldn't try, that it should instead revel in its simplicity and very small storage requirement.
That's Tony Smith, so I think he's just channeling his understanding of everything DE/AA/5 was supposed to be, formed over long years of covering it from a distance and being harangued by scenesters. (Yours truly having been one of many...)
It wouldn't hurt to ask if that particular smoke was blown, but it could just mean UAE... and UAE is a practically satisfactory solution these days for the legacy catalog, now that hardware has scaled up to meet it.
...
Thing is, Tao's whole deal was a 'reinvention of Java' (in part predating Java itself), because, lest we forget, Java was a nice idea that still ran like a slug for most purposes in 2000 or so, when there was still an installed base of Pentium 1 machines and the average cellphone or PDA was more limited still.
In the time it took for AInc. to do the displacer-beast thing and Tao to sink, people got better at writing JVMs and hardware crept up to meet them across the board. Java's biggest problem was probably the memory footprint, and when the cost of RAM quartered that stopped being an issue.
AA still isn't a bad
idea, any more than Inferno is, but between the lack of recognizable product (How many years, and we're back to Space Invaders? They're talking up persistence and media features, but have they ever been able to demo them?) and the likelihood of onerous nickel-and-dime-and-NDA licensing models, they're going to have a hell of a time winning 'normal people' over. If something really does exist and it's still as lithe as Intent was, it could have a niche as a portability layer between, say, DS, PSP and smartphones, but that's an uphill battle because the companies involved -- Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, respectively -- would prefer all content to be exclusive. (And, to that end, observe the lack a DE/AA Player for systems without a Windows license.)
