If you owned the Amiga trademark, what would you do?

[orb85750]

Given a very limited amount of capital, say $100-200K, and ownership of the Amiga trademark, what would you do with it?  (Please, no jokes, as tempting as they may be here.)

[Darrin]

Hit the market with cheap FPGA "Minimigs" and have an online shop selling additional cores, ADFs, HDFs and expansion boards.

[B00tDisk]

Hit the market with cheap FPGA "Minimigs" and have an online shop selling additional cores, ADFs, HDFs and expansion boards.

That, but offer a model with 2-3 PCI slots too as a "power user's" board.

(This assumes a PCI controller could be bodged onto the minimig board to make the slots active without too much trouble, otherwise, exactly that)

[runequester]

Just the name and nothing else?

Give the name, and any icons (boing ball, checkmark) to the AROS guys.

If I had whatever patents for hardware and software that still exists, I'd open source them in as little time as it'd take me to do so.

Set the amiga free.

[Darrin]

That, but offer a model with 2-3 PCI slots too as a "power user's" board.

(This assumes a PCI controller could be bodged onto the minimig board to make the slots active without too much trouble, otherwise, exactly that)

Yep, a PCI expansion board would be nice for those wanting to expand with board to the maximum.  As the FPGA Arcade slot allows a CPU, SD card, RAM, Ethernet and USB to be added to the system then I'd think that some sort of Zorro/PCI expansion could (in theory) also be cobbled onto a board and the core re-writen to access it.

[commodorejohn]

I would set up a fund to keep it registered and defended in perpetuity, and prevent anybody else from using it ever again, to end the whole stupid issue once and for all, and let would-be successors fend for themselves off their merits rather than their ability to fork out cash to Bill McEwen.

[JimS]

I'd license it to the folks making minimigs and PPC Amigas for a reasonable amount. I'd also look into porting it to X86 or making AROS that port.
I'm not a big fan of the PCI expansion on classic Amigas. Outside of the fact that PCI is largely obsolete by today's standard, I can't think of anything I'd want to add that couldn't be better done by custom hardware. A TV card might be an exception to that, but I think classic Amigas are going to be fast enough for that.

[dougal]

I dont know what i would do personally but i'd love to see a nice classic Amiga based motherboard that can be put in a standard ATX case.

The specs i'd like to see would be:

Basic 68030 CPU + AGA Chipset with:
Optional or standard G4 CPU (obviously compliant with OS4)

A socket for a 68040 or 68060 CPU
Can address DDR2/3 Ram as fast ram with sockets
Has built in a Picasso96 compliant graphics card which shares memory
Built in USB and Ethernet ports
Built in Sata
PCI Slots
Maybe a floppy drive port which can use normal 1.44MB PC drives as 1.76mb Amiga

[CritAnime]

In an idealist situation I would try to get hardware such as the Minimigs and PPC cheaper and more widely available. I would also look for a way to help any of the other projects such as AROS with bounties.

[commodorejohn]

Can address DDR2/3 Ram as fast ram with sockets

Really? Even DDR1 would be a massive waste of bandwidth on an 040/060 system, and none of them would be much cheaper for practical Amiga capacities than used PCxxx SDRAM.

(Though DDR1 would at least be useful for a G4 upgrade.)

[Kalvan]

Well, with just $200,000, I would probably give 1/2 that money to the Natami folks, and wish them well, and 1/2 on a bounty to port AROS to it (including the new SAGA features).
 
If you up it to $500,000, I'd try to get my hands on one of the Walker prototypes and hook it up to as many data analyzers as I could find, and then send all the data to the Natami folks.
 
Frankly, this exercise needs at least $10,000,000 for anyone to start doing some serious dreaming, or better yet $50,000,000+.

[Everblue]

I dont know what i would do personally but i'd love to see a nice classic Amiga based motherboard that can be put in a standard ATX case.

The specs i'd like to see would be:

Basic 68030 CPU + AGA Chipset with:
Optional or standard G4 CPU (obviously compliant with OS4)

A socket for a 68040 or 68060 CPU
Can address DDR2/3 Ram as fast ram with sockets
Has built in a Picasso96 compliant graphics card which shares memory
Built in USB and Ethernet ports
Built in Sata
PCI Slots
Maybe a floppy drive port which can use normal 1.44MB PC drives as 1.76mb Amiga

That is pretty much Arcade FPGA =)

68030 + AGA = Pretty much there (actually it is faster than a real one)
DDR2/3 RAM = Not really needed
Picasso96 = I read somewhere that it will eventually be included in FPGA (correct me if wrong)
USB + Network = Yes, on the addon expansion
Sata = Not needed (but if you really must, you can use a SATA HDD connected to the USB
PCI Slots = not so far
Floppy drive = no, but you can use .adf files

[dougal]

That is pretty much Arcade FPGA =)

I looked up their website and cant find much about the Amiga, just stupid rubbish like the crappy Vic20, Philips Videopac etc...

[Everblue]

I looked up their website and cant find much about the Amiga, just stupid rubbish like the crappy Vic20, Philips Videopac etc...

Heh you are looking at the wrong place. The site is very old.

If you want to know about Arcade FPGA, check out its thread. You remember when you saw Minimig running at my place? That was the equivalent of an A500. A.FPGA is the equivalent of an A1200 with a decent CPU + Indivision (DVI). And you get much more than that with the expansion board.... for 200 euro.

Dougal, the problem is that there is no way reruns of old Amigas exactly like they were (or improved upon) using the same type of custom chips and technology can be done for a variety of reasons. The main one is that the blueprints have been lost for ever. The next best thing is through FPGA. THis is happening right now, and costs much less than the real thing.

[Khephren]

Sponsor the Natami guys, and release it as an official 'Amiga classic' in a wedge and desktop config.

Create an Amiga joystick type deal (although more like the megadrive one, which had two pads and a tiny replica megadrive brick).

Pay to get a decent games creation kit made, and a web browser.

Get some CD32 compatible pads made in china.

Port AmigaOS to ARM.

....perhaps over 200k, but maybe the Amiga in a joystick would bring some funds in.