The only real asset AMIGA INC has left - Worth $2500.00

[Amiga_Nut]

What the hell does Android mean?  Oh, it's from Google.  Yeah, I recognize that.

Seriously, brand names are becoming played out.  People don't give two shytes about whether it runs Windows, Windows Mobile, Android, Ubuntu, Safari, Symbian, Palm, whatever, just so long as the damned thing works.

On this I would wager a portion of my reproductive system: you produce a smart phone that works, has usable, important, and friendly features, and crashes less than once a day, built on the AmigaOS and even branded as Amiga, and people will buy it.  My only lament is that I do not have the money to wager on such an endeavor.

Dealing with mobile devices day-in and day-out as I do, I have a pretty hard list of features and functions users want.  I have a semi-keen idea of what developers want (really, general but a GOOD SDK.)  And so on.  It is possible.

OS4.1 for ARM?  Too bad the XScale is pretty much dead, my Palm LifeDrive is pretty peppy with its apps (especially for the numerous reboots,) -- or is that reborn as a mobile Atom?  (hrmmm, come to think of it, OS4.1 or MorphOS or AROS on an Atom-based netbook would be pretty sweet.)

Anyway, I tire quickly of the pessimistic views which immediately decry anything new with the Amiga branding as commercially DOA.  Sorry if I sound like a fanboi.

The Amiga was only ever a computer, and one of the best at the time (although sadly technically got it's ass kicked by the Sharp X68000 series.....which was also constantly improved unlike Commodore peddling the same 16bit chipset for years and years in new casings)

So IF someone made a phone and branded it Amiga so what..it is nothing to do with Amiga....ditto a Netbook with standard Acer/Asus motherboard with Amiga logo and Linux skins on the GUI to make it look OS4.

Amiga initially was this....

A kick ass computer, superior to Apple AND IBM's finest by using completely alien technology not seen in an IBM or Apple Mac. Mac had no Copper/Blitter...IBM didn't even have 4mb contigious memory or a proper GUI.

BUT

Also this computer happened to be better at playing games than  the best consoles of the time for not much more.

So...in 2006...an Amiga would have been OS4 running on a PS3 motherboard with Blu-Ray a proprietory Commodore format superior to DVD (just like HAM images shat all over IBM EGA however much PC loving idiots wasted on their PCs in 1985). Games as good or better than xbox360, less cheap and tacky build than a 360 or dirt cheap PC and massively more powerful in raw CPU rendering power than a Dual Core or whatever.

But...those days are gone...and we will never see 'Amiga' rise again because even Sony almost bankrupt themselves getting such esoteric and OTT hardware as PS3 to market....and that's before people bothered to port 360 games properly to the PS3....shades of 'ST port' crap of 1986 with Amiga games....hmmmm it's the same thing all over again.

The best we can hope for is someone makes a portable Amiga for $50 in a Gameboy Advance form factor...and even that won't happen as nobody will spend money on  developing the required miniaturisation of the ECS/AGA chipsets or to achieve the economies of scale required.

So yeh....those yellowed old computers on ebay you see...when they're all dead and no longer work Amiga is over...sad but true.

funny thing is though now more than ever you don't need a specific Intel/AMD CPU or a Mac/Windows OS to do 99% of what people do on their computers.

OS4 with Torrent client + Yahoo/MSN + Google Chrome + email client+MP3 playback + MP4/AVI playback + Open Office + Quality paint program = viable platform for use.

Only a handful of people play (or can play) PC games anyway...and Mac's don't get any games ever anyway. So there you have it...had Amiga wanted to make a dent in the market  they could have....they failed.  

[amigakid]

Amiga could have comeback if it wasn't run by a bunch of boneheads.  Sad to look at its past and the bright future it had in front of it and now its only a fond memory to most people.   Bill and Fleecy bought a gold mine but was way to stupid to actually do anything with it besides make a couple of games for cell phones nobody wants why pay good money for that crap they were trying to sell when you could download a better game for cheaper for your phone.  And this Amiga is a software company crap they tried pulling off and all those promises that amounted to ... nothing like remember the new computer that was supposed to come out by some one person company nobody ever heard of and where the hell are the t-shirts lol.  If they can't even deliver a lousy $2.00 T-shirt what hope did the "New" Amiga have???  To bad Amiga is run (into the gorund) by a bunch of dumb asses.

[amigadave]

Whats really sad is when you think about how amiga was once in head to head competition with microsoft and apple, go look at what those dot coms are worth now. There are free font sites of all things worth more than amiga.com now.
 
Only Amiga makes this possible?
 
BTW, everyone will be happy to see that www.amiga.org is worth almost twice what www.amiga.com is worth - Lots more page views
per day too! = http://thenetinfo.com/stats/www.amiga.org
 
Steven

Hate to break this to you, but Amiga was NEVER head-to-head in competition with Microsoft or Apple.  (at least in sales, promotion and users) They wanted to be, and should have been, as the Amiga hardware and software were SOOOOOO far ahead of Microsoft and Apple at one time, they should have been able to wipe the floor with them, but the incompetence of Commodore and their lack of action and vision about what they had and what the Amiga was, killed any chances the Amiga ever had.  The window of opportunity closed rather quickly and I would say that it roughly was over by the time the A2000 was released, as Commodore had made virtually no progress on the Amiga's original brilliance and Microsoft/Intel and Apple were catching up FAST.

This was more true in the USA than in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and other EU countries where the Amiga probably did compete on an almost equal footing for a couple of early years, but the Amiga never made any serious inroads into the corporate world of business computing where all the money was being made and which eventually doomed the Amiga to "that weird game computer that was not good for anything serious".  The NewTek Video Toaster almost turned things around and made the Amiga respectable in a commercial setting, but even that could not last when Commodore failed to keep pace with the rest of the computing world and the release of AmigaOS3.0 and AGA Amigas was too little too late.

As for Bill McEwen and his merry band of followers, I actually believe his intentions were honest and that he tried very hard to make something happen and work out in "HIS" vision of where the Amiga trademark should go, but a series of bad choices and failed deals quickly put him back on his heels and struggling.  Unfortunately he abandoned the core value of the Amiga, which was it's users and developers when he screwed up the deals to get AmigaOS4.x written in a timely manner, but the blame is not all his, as I think we all have seen the sordid history of what happened and can see the fault on both sides and the greed that has done so much damage to what the Amiga was and is.  That greed is still with us and I assert that it has kept the Amiga back, crippling it on old outdated and grossly expensive hardware for years.

I am glad the lawsuits are over and I am actually glad that Hyperion has won the right to continue developing AmigaOS.  Now they only have to earn my respect and money by producing an even better OS than they already have and allow it to run on reasonably priced hardware that is easily available and has enough power to do all the computing things we all enjoy doing with other OSes.  It does not have to need quad core technology and 3.0+GHz speed CPU's to impress me, but it does need to respond like my old A1000 did in 1987 running AmigaOS1.3 on a 4 color Workbench screen, and it needs to do it at a 1920x1080, 24bit resolution.

[LoadWB]

The Amiga was only ever a computer, and one of the best at the time

*snip*

So yeh....those yellowed old computers on ebay you see...when they're all dead and no longer work Amiga is over...sad but true.

And thus dies the philosophy.  Grand.

Amiga was more than just a computer.  It was an operating environment, hardware and software working in harmony, designed from the ground-up.  Yeah?  So would a mobile phone designed with an AmigaOS in mind, and an AmigaOS worked with the hardware in mind be any less Amiga?

*sigh*

[Bezzen]

While I have no doubt that Amiga Inc's coffers are utterly empty, that $2500 price tag is based on aggregated web data and computerized conjecture, so let's not read too much into it...

Yup, and anything that uses Alexa as a base is basically just nonsense anyway.

[mcostanza]

Actually, the patent for the Amiga OCS/ECS has already expired. The Patent for the AGA chipset is set to expire in two years. So, since a decision has been made on who owns the rights to the Amiga OS and with chipset patents already expiring or about to expire, Amiga Inc is going to become even less relevant. Amiga Inc won't even been needed.

There are already projects out there that use the FPGA chips to duplicate the OCS/ECS chipsets.

Regards,
MC

so who owns the intellectual property rights to the Amiga chipsets then if not Amiga Inc.

And well if a company sells nothing for a decade...why would people visit that companies website. They have failed even more miserably than the new owners of Commodore who went for it big time with the C64 DTV....why didn't they even commission a similar Amiga in a joystick or Amiga on a chip design to even try and sell something tangible.

They took forever making an OS update that ran on hardware nobody could buy to use...good riddance. However if the new owners do not post details of something useful like OS4 for PS3 or OS4 on some readily available PPC Mac hardware then they can go to hell too as far as I care.

I want an Amiga product, not a CD with some code you can't run on anything you can buy or pick up for next to nothing second hand blah blah.

[recidivist]

So some enterprising Chinese(since there just aren't amny chip facilities in the U.S. anymore)or Pacific Rim chip maker could now legally build an Amiga 500/1000/2000/3000 clone ?

[persia]

THere is a difference between IP and copyright.  The Amiga chipset is old technology, there's simply no IP, no idea that is protectable by patenting laws.  It's really old stuff and largely irrelevant to the 21st century.  But the actual programming still has a copyright which could be enforced.

Given Amiga Inc's capitulation in their lawsuit agains Hyperion I sincerely doubt that there's any fight left.  Still it's a difficult process to copy the chips. Reverse engineering them is the easiest way and that takes time.  Once they are completely reverse engineered they could be made without legal problems.

Minimig seems to be doing fine and doesn't seem to be under legal threat from Amiga Inc....

So some enterprising Chinese(since there just aren't amny chip facilities in the U.S. anymore)or Pacific Rim chip maker could now legally build an Amiga 500/1000/2000/3000 clone ?

[hooligan]

The "Amiga" trademark is not a valuable asset as well?

It sure is, another $3.42

[cv643d]

You could make quite a bit more than $3.42 a day on amiga.com with the right kind of Amiga site.

Remember that you have "Amiga"-name in the top domain .com

So you could make a domain name "amiga500.amiga.com" and very easely be nr 1 with unique content.

But you would have to need a lot of material (lets say 20.000 unique articles) covering various nisches in the Amiga world and somehow come up with a way of letting the users write content for you, sort of a Amiga community that is the center of Amiga on the internet.

I would love to work on such a hot domain name.

[RobertB]

They have failed even more miserably than the new owners of Commodore who went for it big time with the C64 DTV...

The C64 DTV was produced by a coalition of companies, of which Yeahronimo (later renamed Commodore, Inc.) was one of them.

...why didn't they even commission a similar Amiga in a joystick...

Amiga, Inc was contacted about having Amiga OS on a chip for use in a joystick-style game device.  No response from Amiga, Inc..

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug
The Other Group of Amigoids
http://www.calweb.com/~rabel1/
Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network
http://www.sccaners.org

[kinshi]

Someone is still making money off the C=64..its an iPhone app now (been following the fuss over it because Apple did not llike the fact you could get into 'BASIC' ..they think you will hack the iPhone using BASIC or some darn thing, maybe some how start issuing POKE commands to it).
 
That would be something, a spambot coded in Commodore 64 BASIC running from an iPhone lol.

[impactor]

@ amigadave

Excellent comment, you are spot on.