$77 Amiga one or SAM

[Crumb]

Why is it only mac which has survived with a minimal footprint of firmware? grr...

Mac's firmware is butt-ugly. SmartFirmware is not smart but it runs rings around Apple implementation in terms of user friendliness

[kolla]

But we do need something that doesn't have the bios in ugly text mode like most awardBios pc boards do, or similar.

Have you seen a SAM boot up?

[arnljot]

It's not excuses quarkx, products like Deneb, X-Surf, Sam440 and Indivision all have engineering costs and software costs which have to be covered.

The drivers to use pc pcmia nics with A1200 costs €35. Most of this cost is probably software. Send a mail to AmigaKit or the programmer if you feel that they should have provided the software for free.

I agree that it's strange that some software is still sold at full price, but it's the owner of the softwares privilege to charge what they want. As it's ours not to buy it.

Crumb, when I boot my Mac mini, all I see is a gray screen with an apple. It's there until the OS takes over. Beutifull. When I boot my PC it shows an ASUS logo, spews out loads of text, and then Win7 takes over. Butt ugly.

[arnljot]

Have you seen a SAM boot up?

No, I suspect it's a chatty bios...

[amyren]

This is a so called "Clone". Among Dreambox users this means an illegal copy of the original product. There are many of these out there now. And the build quality is ok. I did buy two DM500 a while back. Not from that website though, but another clone of the DM500 thats looks exactly like the original. But they was only USD60 each.

If you want to compare prices, look at the original boxes from Dream multimedia. The DM800 and DM8000 are far more expensive. I think the DM8000HD is more than EUR1000, and even that only have a 400Mhz CPU.

[koshman]

I personally much prefer the informative text boot on my Gentoo box to any apples or other fruit, it speaks to the geek in me

Btw, what the BIOS has to do with the way the machine presents (or not) the bootup information??

[klx300r]

No, I suspect it's a chatty bios...

boots up to Workbench in 29 seconds flat!..not much time for chatting :-)

[koshman]

Ha, my A4000 boots in 18 seconds

[kolla]

Ha, my A4000 boots in 18 seconds

My e-uae on linux with OS3.9 on it uses about 4 secs from I press my UAE icon till it's up with backdrop, amidock and all. And that includes a reboot after loading modules (havent bothered creating a dedicated kickstart yet). A reboot afterwards takes around 3 secs. Just so FYI

[Cammy]

It'd be cool if MorphOS ran on this thing, it kinda reminds me of an Efika. But MorphOS runs on 1500Mhz hardware now, so 250Mhz seems kinda slow. :|

[Crumb]

The drivers to use pc pcmia nics with A1200 costs €35. Most of this cost is probably software. Send a mail to AmigaKit or the programmer if you feel that they should have provided the software for free.

Wifi drivers are free. You can download them from Aminet. I used them succesfully with my A1200 and A600.

Crumb, when I boot my Mac mini, all I see is a gray screen with an apple. It's there until the OS takes over. Beutifull. When I boot my PC it shows an ASUS logo, spews out loads of text, and then Win7 takes over. Butt ugly.

well, I think you have never used Apple Firmware at all. Press Left_Windows+f+o+Right_Alt when you press the ON button and try to do something with your "beautiful" firmware (like browsing through the hard disk listing directories, partitions and checking which scripts does it load on boot) :-)

[Crumb]

It'd be cool if MorphOS ran on this thing, it kinda reminds me of an Efika. But MorphOS runs on 1500Mhz hardware now, so 250Mhz seems kinda slow. :|

yeah, a friend of mine got a second hand eMac G4/1.25Ghz+USB2+Radeon9200 for 50Euros a pair of days ago and he plans to run MorphOS 2.5 on it. Limited machines running at 250Mhz don't make much sense right now IMHO.

[amigadave]

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.29102


This thing is a linux dreambox with Linux proted to it. It uses a PowerPC chip.
It's just $77

Why is a Sam $500-$700???

Discuss...

Well, it is not a SAM, nor can it really compare to one, but that still does not make your question invalid.  There is no excuse for the price of the SAM boards, other than the manufacturer and distributors taking advantage of a few fanatic Amiga religious devotee's that had no other choices at the time.

[Hell Labs]

yeah, a friend of mine got a second hand eMac G4/1.25Ghz+USB2+Radeon9200 for 50Euros a pair of days ago and he plans to run MorphOS 2.5 on it. Limited machines running at 250Mhz don't make much sense right now IMHO.

He's gonna have a very nice looking doorstop for a few months then.

[save2600]

Ha, my A4000 boots in 18 seconds

Run OS3.9 and a larger HD than 4GB. Welcome to multiple resets my friend! You can now double the startup time. Maybe even triple that  

[Damion]

3.9 boots in about 5 seconds on my A1200, 3.1 even a little quicker. The A2000 is a bit slower (but not much).

Fast booting is a necessary feature though with crash-happy AmigaOS.