HEY JENS!!! Clone-A Progress Report?

[bloodline]

Maybe Jens is the new owner and has just played an awsome double bluff

[takemehomegrandma]

Back to topic:

I dont see what is the issue with licensing, Jens can sell his product under Clone-A name and put empty sockets for kickstart rom/s, or even a flash solutions that somehow allows Amiga Forever owners to move their legal rom file to flash media. In that way he doesnt require any licence, and he is not doing anything illegal stuff.
Of course, this means the user will have to purchase a legally valid rom.
If what he wanted was the "Amiga" name, really that isnt important. If he really cares that much about names, then it maybe easier for him to contact actual Commodore brandname owners and cut a deal with them. But i fail to see the licensing issue.

Yeah OK, what I was referring to came from a video recording from the Clone-A presentation at Breakpoint 2007, and it turned out I didn't recall it quite correctly. While Jens had tried to get an official license, he also mentioned two possible options he had for kickstart substitution (of which none would be able to boot WB however). He obviously had great problems in getting a license, and he wasn't even entirely sure who was the legitimate IP owner. But there were indeed ways around it.

Anyway, if anyone haven't seen the presentation, here it is:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7945941150233337270#

All in all a very interesting presentation, and here are a few highlights:
At 25:30 min he mentions the kind of device he plans for Clone-A
At 29:30 and 36:00 he talks about turning the FPGA VHDL program into a single ASIC chip for mass volume production at really low costs.
At 37:00 he talks about the financial obstacles and the requirement of investors
At 42:30 he mentions the IP situation, licensing problems, and the replacement options.

He was obviously estimating an end user release at the end of 2007, and since I am fairly sure that this time estimation was from a technological point of view (things had progressed quite far and was kind of ready, as seen from demonstrations), I guess what *really* stopped the show, was a lack of investors and/or commercial soundness for a low cost, mass volume ASIC based Clone-A.

[cv643d]

Yeah OK, what I was referring to came from a video recording from the Clone-A presentation at Breakpoint 2007, and it turned out I didn't recall it quite correctly.

Wow... that video was from 2007? Time marches ahead, maybe I should leave too lol. Who got use for Amiga systems when you are 85 years old

[takemehomegrandma]

Wow... that video was from 2007?

Time flies! :-)

[Gulliver]

@takemehomegrandma

Thank you for the information.
So at the end, the problem is most probably, the lack of funding to build an ASIC and/or the size of the potential market size required for such a product.

It is a pitty though!
Isnt low volume production (of course, not using an ASIC) of the Clone-A still viable comercially speaking?

[JC]

Maybe I'm missing something but I thought discreetfx was a software company that sold some amiga products, if that's right it makes sense for them to want Amiga.org right? And if we know the name of the company that owns the site then it's no secret right? And we should be pleased that an Amiga company owns Amiga.org right? And who cares who owns it as long as we have a place to go and ask questions on how to fix our ailing A500s etc... right?

Ok, I just went to their site and well they may not exactly be an amiga company because I didn't see any amiga software for sale but by looking at the community section of the page they certainly do seem to be Amiga supporters.
So that's a positive thing right?

[Radfoo]

Yeah OK, what I was referring to came from a video recording from the Clone-A presentation at Breakpoint 2007, and it turned out I didn't recall it quite correctly. While Jens had tried to get an official license, he also mentioned two possible options he had for kickstart substitution (of which none would be able to boot WB however). He obviously had great problems in getting a license, and he wasn't even entirely sure who was the legitimate IP owner. But there were indeed ways around it.

Anyway, if anyone haven't seen the presentation, here it is:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7945941150233337270#

All in all a very interesting presentation, and here are a few highlights:
At 25:30 min he mentions the kind of device he plans for Clone-A
At 29:30 and 36:00 he talks about turning the FPGA VHDL program into a single ASIC chip for mass volume production at really low costs.
At 37:00 he talks about the financial obstacles and the requirement of investors
At 42:30 he mentions the IP situation, licensing problems, and the replacement options.

He was obviously estimating an end user release at the end of 2007, and since I am fairly sure that this time estimation was from a technological point of view (things had progressed quite far and was kind of ready, as seen from demonstrations), I guess what *really* stopped the show, was a lack of investors and/or commercial soundness for a low cost, mass volume ASIC based Clone-A.

Just watched the vid, pity it did not happen.  Still hope it appears one day.

[takemehomegrandma]

@takemehomegrandma

Thank you for the information.
So at the end, the problem is most probably, the lack of funding to build an ASIC and/or the size of the potential market size required for such a product.

It is a pitty though!
Isnt low volume production (of course, not using an ASIC) of the Clone-A still viable comercially speaking?

I don't think low volume FPGA stuff ever matched his ambitions and goals, that stuff was merely the prototyping path towards a real product, and it would definitely not make *commercial sense* (at least IMHO).

Could a high volume ASIC thing still be done today? Who knows. Maybe?

For the kind of product he had in mind back then, I would today like to see a truly working HDMI output connector, to be used in some generally acceptable modern TV resolution, and some way to handle the 16:9 aspect in a plasma friendly way (pixel shifting or whatever they call it, as well as an *option* for grey/light bars on the sides instead of black bars).

And we should reflect over the fact that *a prerequisite* for this product is that it will be a *mass market, high volume* thing, and as such it would *live or die* by the "Amiga" trademark (unlike some NG clone OS's, where the trademark is kind of pointless). It won't be some general STB or a HTPC (or some other general "Multi Media" thing), it won't have the specs, no, this will specifically be a ultra cheap **AMIGA gaming device** (at least primarily, although one probably could think up quite a few more areas of use) for the "retro/nostalgia crowd" that once knew and still recognize the Amiga and its games...

[NovaCoder]

They only ways I can think of selling it are:

1) Something like the MiniMig but packaged in a cute 'mini' 1200 case (and maybe mini 4000T cases) with the Amiga brand name, running loads of pre-installed WHDLOAD games.  I think loads of people (ex-Amigans + some existing classic users) would buy into this but only if it was idiot-proof and cheap (<$200).

2) Replacement classic motherboards for classic cases (I can see only limited sales).

3) Replacement classic motherboards (with cases?) and some modern updates (think Natami), again I think they would sell but only in limited amounts.

Basically any classic upgade (OS3.9) will start to compete with SAM and the X1000 (OS4.x) if it's too expensive.

[takemehomegrandma]

They only ways I can think of selling it are:

1) Something like the MiniMig but packaged in a cute 'mini' 1200 case (and maybe mini 4000T cases) with the Amiga brand name, running loads of pre-installed WHDLOAD games.  I think loads of people (ex-Amigans + some existing classic users) would buy into this but only if it was idiot-proof and cheap (<$200).

2) Replacement classic motherboards for classic cases (I can see only limited sales).

3) Replacement classic motherboards (with cases?) and some modern updates (think Natami), again I think they would sell but only in limited amounts.

Basically any classic upgade (OS3.9) will start to compete with SAM and the X1000 (OS4.x) if it's too expensive.

I think a $39 "joystick" with some built in games and a SD memory card reader for the option of playing additional games from ADF images would sell.

:-)

[Jope]

If it would support AGA (which it currently doesn't, as they focused on ECS), this would be the opportunity for everyone to get excited over having 8MB chip RAM in your A4000s.

[Crom00]

think a $39 "joystick" with some built in games and a SD memory card reader for the option of playing additional games from ADF images would sell.


I've had experiecne in the Toy industry, first off. A mass retailer is going to have a problem with a TV game unit that has an SD card interface. First off, sega, Nintendo MS, Sony will raise a stink becuase the whole purpose of an SD slot would be to play games that folks can obviously download for free. They will strong arm whatever retailer wants to carry this device. (of coruse this is the sort of thing you won't read about on Slashdot or game magazines becuase everyone does this monkey business on the down low)

An SD slot will undermid, XboxLive, Sony playstation store and all the classic game bundles arcade games these companies release.

Also lets face it. The Amiga gaming brand is more popular in Europe than the USA. So right off the bat this will be a hard sell to Walmart and Target. Their response will be. We already have Atari, SEGA, Colecovision, REAL ARCADE TV games. Why should we carry this one?

In the USA the Amiga was associated with failure (for those that even remember the brand name). Commodre also to this day has a bad rep for screwing with retailers, and is known as the company that went out of business because they couldn't sell that Amiga computer...

This is an impulse buy item,
So for a mass market item you don;t just release one TV GAME item. First you create a TV game Bundle that targets acade, another with sprots, and cater to specifice genres. You have to release them a few months apart from each other. Then like Jakks Pacific you use the FPGA platform to develop games based on licences for "evergreen" licenses like disney and the like.

I've done reasearch into the ASIC costs, The only way this would ever be released is as an FPGA version. I got costs of something like 200K upfront money for getting chips started. Then theres the issue of Non recoverable engineering. Then there's the issue of Amiga Inc and dealing with the legal costs of licensing whatever parts of the OS you have to. When you get two licensing legal teams talking to each other it gets expensive.

So you take the Angel investor route... or partner with a toy manufacturer..by the very act of approaching investors you're spliing the beans so to speak, now they can take you core idea and hire a low cost dev team in China who will do the cheapest solution (nowhere near as optimzed as Jens)

My point with this rant is that if it were simple it would have been done. As proven before in the Amiga scene. The folks who get things done these days are the expert hobbyist who release projects as opensource. I think EVENTUALLY someone will be able to reverse engineer the AGA chipset.

[Crom00]

With all that said I hope it can be done and that the developers and whoever owns the IP can come to some sort of agreement and release product.

[Methuselas]

Jens should just make the Clone-A out of broccoli. That way, everyone's happy.

[Tension]

I think EVENTUALLY someone will be able to reverse engineer the AGA chipset.

I thought it could already be done, but no one want to do it because it`s a more complex system without many benefits apart from graphics.

[Nlandas]

Maybe Jens is the new owner and has just played an awsome double bluff

LOL!!! Thanks for that Bloodline, only you could come up with a good one like that.