CommodoreUSA CEO Interview Answers

[Darrin]

Barry:  "Hello boys and girls!  I'm your Uncle Bazza and I'm the host of the C-USA Smoke & Mirrors show.  Now I know I've been a bad boy in the past, but thanks to Prozac I'm a new man and I just want to be your friend.  Talking of friends, I've brought two with me.  Meet Middleman and Wildstar.  Say hello to the children guys."
Middleman:  "Hello boys and girls!"
Wildstar:  "Hello boys and girls!"
Barry:  "Why don't you guys tell everyone how nice I am?"
Middleman:  "Oooh!  Uncle Barry is really, really, really nice."
Wildstar:  "He's even nicer than that!  He's like a double helping of nice with a big dollop of icecream on top!"
Middleman:  "I love icecream!"
Wildstar:  "And Uncle Barry loves the Amiga!"
Barry:  "Well there you have it boys and girls, I love you all and I'm a really, really nice guy."
Middleman:  "With icecream!"
Wildstar:  "Yes Uncle Barry, don't forget the icecream!"
Barry:  "OK, that's all until next week.  Remember to come to my website and pre-order a computer with excessive RAM, a sub-standard graphics card, no expandability and an underpowered PSU"
Middleman and Wildstar:  "And icecream!"
Barry:  "You guys are so funny.   Hey, where's Dammy with my meds?  I feel the need to insult someone."

[Duce]

Thing I find so passively odd is the fact the old regulars of A.org are just sitting back, reading this completely unrelated talking head BS from C-USA (nothing related to the Amiga in the least other than a licensing agreement) and not saying a word, while the site is losing any Amiga content in favor of this troll crap that's got nothing to do with the platform we love.

These people are guys that could be giving advice to some kid having problems with a floppy drive on an A500 he dragged out from a boot sale.  These are guys that could be giving coding tips to some guy fighting with his first coding project.  These dudes are guys that could be helping some guy that's got a bad display on an old A2000 he put away 15 years ago, but I fear (and in some cases I outright know) people are avoiding the place like the plague due to the propaganda machine.

Instead, I get the feeling the regulars see threads like all this BS spam and just say "screw it, this place isn't worth it" and go elsewhere.  They see the front page and "news" posts, and it's mostly garbage having nothing to do with the Amiga.  Linux x86 machines that do not even come with an emulator have NOTHING to do with the Amiga - nothing.  The fact that the people spamming it are grossly abusive is 10x worse yet, but man - I get a chuckle out of seeing guys like Franko get banned for having a weird sense of humor while this clown show still goes on...

Am I proposing censorship?  Never.  Am I suggesting that the place shouldn't be a dumping zone for people with personal agendas, trying to make us "see the light"?  I sure am.  There is a balance, and right now it's horribly out of whack.  Amiga.org ain't much of an Amiga site lately.

Right now, some kid is digging an old Amiga out of a relatives closet, having no clue how the thing works, but he's damned curious about it, and he'll need community help to get it going.  Right now, someone is having a cold beer, reflecting fondly about a computer they used 20 years ago, and he's looking around on the web, checking out AROS, MOS, OS4 and the FPGA solutions.

All will eventually stumble upon A.org - I hope.  Unfortunately, all the "hot button" topics here are essentially free press of a commodity PC vendor selling Linux PC's.

That is a shame.

Wildstar, if you are trying to gauge "success" in sales in a niche market, a market that has been thriving for 20 years off grassroots businesses and inventive people.  The Jens S's, the AmigaKit/Vesalia/etc guys, the FPGA guys, the MOS guys, the AROS guys, etc.

NONE will ever get rich off selling what they sell to us.  It is a hobby market.  They know this.  I know this.  Everyone knows this.  It's not about "progress" and "the buck", it's about having a hobby you enjoy.  If you quantify "success" with millions of dollars in sales a year in a hobby community, you are a fool.

We come to Amiga.org to spend time with like minded people that enjoy their hobby - whether it be legacy, PPC, AROS.  Everyone has their own definition of what the Amiga is, and far be it from me to force my opinions of that on anyone, and I use all the Amiga platforms anyways.

No one comes to A.org to get spammed by zealots pushing Linux powered x86 product on them in an insulting fashion.  No one.  No one is here to listen to people drone on incessantly that the x86 platform won 20 years ago.  We knew that 20 years ago.

We are here to lend support and good conversation to other people using Amiga variants, and other than a licensing agreement and a sticker/etching, there's nothing Amiga about the C-USA Amiga platform.  Not a thing, not even an emulator.  If you want to make it into some issue that people here have some sort of witch hunt towards C-USA, go nuts.  The day they put out anything Amiga related that goes past case badging is the day they have relevance to the community here.

Their offerings simply have zero relevance at all at this time here, in my books.

People are leaving due to the lack of topical content here, I guess if people want to watch it happen to A.org, there's other Amiga friendly portals on the web that don't pander to entirely unrelated products/companies.  Page views won't keep this ship afloat in the long run (A.org).

Wildstar, not sure what your deal is.  One minute you seem perfectly capable of having a civil discussion, the next minute it's personal insults like:

 "I am not under his control. So please stop spreading such false accusations. That is the problem with you guys. Either you never completed 3rd grade or you guys have some serioius psychological issues. Did you dose too much drugs, lsd, etc. During the 80s and that is why you are so screwed up."

It's reprehensible and childish - either be productive or don't post, before even more people leave this place due to this tripe.  Your perceived freedom of speech here doesn't give you the right to make personal insults and grade school slurs.

[Wildstar128]

Assembly is cheaper in bulk.  The Minimig doesn't need a big expensive FPGA.  aCube have already made some.  I have one.

Ok, no one outside the Amiga community would be interested in spending more then $50 on computers of 1992 amiga specs. Darrin, the FPGA manufacturers don't give much saving in bulk volume order. The chip is a $200 chip. If Jeri kept the C64DTV on FPGA, it would have cost $99 instead of like $9.99 to produce. There basically is no bulk savings. Also, you can't get the level of bulk volume. It is not supplied.

Neither Altera or Xillinx will have the price of the FPGA down to $9.99 and the rest of the board components costing $10 in bulk volume of 100,000-200,000. It needs to be able to be produced and sold at price compable to the new atari 2600 reproduction or the C64DTV with simple keyboard and mouse with a Vic-slim like case. Amiga lettering.

ASIC would be the process needed to be done from FPGA to ASIC.

We would need to get the complete package down to 1/10th the price for actual cost and then double the price for profit and overhead cost.

That bein a max spec'd hw.

[Pyromania]

Why does every CommodoreUSA fan say they don't work for them???

because barry is trying to convince everyone its not him.

The shill accounts are ridiculous. Someone should track his ip and nail him on those lies too.

wildstar is a great example. 26 posts, all of them pro CUSA.
Na, its not a shill account. Yeah right.

I checked and confirmed he is using a ton of different IP addresses but none of them match up with Barry's.

[Duce]

The community is more than used to paying higher prices for niche hardware - I'm not sure where you get the impression peoples' main driving factor is money.

People gladly paid good money for the PPC OS4 boards.  They were not cheap.
People gladly still register MorphOS, despite the fact it is similarly priced to an OEM copy of Windows.

People still gladly pay thru the nose for legacy Amiga systems, for accels and gfx cards for said systems.  Things like the Indivision and the USB addons for classic Amiga systems are in high, high demand and they are grossly overpriced if one was to foolishly compare them to commodity PC counterparts.

A hobby is never cheap, whether it be computing or classic cars - money is rarely a deciding factor.  Enjoyment is.

[Darrin]

Ok, no one outside the Amiga community would be interested in spending more then $50 on computers of 1992 amiga specs. Darrin, the FPGA manufacturers don't give much saving in bulk volume order. The chip is a $200 chip. If Jeri kept the C64DTV on FPGA, it would have cost $99 instead of like $9.99 to produce. There basically is no bulk savings. Also, you can't get the level of bulk volume. It is not supplied.

Neither Altera or Xillinx will have the price of the FPGA down to $9.99 and the rest of the board components costing $10 in bulk volume of 100,000-200,000. It needs to be able to be produced and sold at price compable to the new atari 2600 reproduction or the C64DTV with simple keyboard and mouse with a Vic-slim like case. Amiga lettering.

ASIC would be the process needed to be done from FPGA to ASIC.

We would need to get the complete package down to 1/10th the price for actual cost and then double the price for profit and overhead cost.

That bein a max spec'd hw.

It can be a computer, or it can be a retro games console, or a dev board, or an advanced alternative to the Raspberry Pi.  The market is endless if the price is right.  Ask Nintendo.

[Tripitaka]

That's what they want.  If they can bore us to death then they can make lots of new threads, fill them with positive "Barry approved" content from sponsored accounts and hope that they'll show up at the top of any Google search.

It is like World War One, they're hoping that we run out of troops before they run out of bullets.  

IMHO it's time CUSA threads got removed from A.org. They have forums of their own and it is an abuse to use A.org in such a way. We should just have one locked sticky to say they are not here and the address of CUSAs forum for anyone wishing to talk CUSA. Job done.

[persia]

@Middleman

The Amiga brand was sold to Barry the Cable Guy, he's producing a generic line of PCs that bear the Amiga name, why in Zeus' name should I even consider that an Amiga?  Let's say Harley Davidson went out of business and Honda bought the name and brought out a line of mopeds with the Harley Davidson name, would you thing they'd attract old Harley owners?

[Wildstar128]

Thing I find so passively odd is the fact the old regulars of A.org are just sitting back, reading this completely unrelated talking head BS from C-USA (nothing related to the Amiga in the least other than a licensing agreement) and not saying a word, while the site is losing any Amiga content in favor of this troll crap that's got nothing to do with the platform we love.

These people are guys that could be giving advice to some kid having problems with a floppy drive on an A500 he dragged out from a boot sale.  These are guys that could be giving coding tips to some guy fighting with his first coding project.  These dudes are guys that could be helping some guy that's got a bad display on an old A2000 he put away 15 years ago, but I fear (and in some cases I outright know) people are avoiding the place like the plague due to the propaganda machine.

Instead, I get the feeling the regulars see threads like all this BS spam and just say "screw it, this place isn't worth it" and go elsewhere.  They see the front page and "news" posts, and it's mostly garbage having nothing to do with the Amiga.  Linux x86 machines that do not even come with an emulator have NOTHING to do with the Amiga - nothing.  The fact that the people spamming it are grossly abusive is 10x worse yet, but man - I get a chuckle out of seeing guys like Franko get banned for having a weird sense of humor while this clown show still goes on...

Am I proposing censorship?  Never.  Am I suggesting that the place shouldn't be a dumping zone for people with personal agendas, trying to make us "see the light"?  I sure am.  There is a balance, and right now it's horribly out of whack.  Amiga.org ain't much of an Amiga site lately.

Right now, some kid is digging an old Amiga out of a relatives closet, having no clue how the thing works, but he's damned curious about it, and he'll need community help to get it going.  Right now, someone is having a cold beer, reflecting fondly about a computer they used 20 years ago, and he's looking around on the web, checking out AROS, MOS, OS4 and the FPGA solutions.

All will eventually stumble upon A.org - I hope.  Unfortunately, all the "hot button" topics here are essentially free press of a commodity PC vendor selling Linux PC's.

That is a shame.

Wildstar, if you are trying to gauge "success" in sales in a niche market, a market that has been thriving for 20 years off grassroots businesses and inventive people.  The Jens S's, the AmigaKit/Vesalia/etc guys, the FPGA guys, the MOS guys, the AROS guys, etc.

NONE will ever get rich off selling what they sell to us.  It is a hobby market.  They know this.  I know this.  Everyone knows this.  It's not about "progress" and "the buck", it's about having a hobby you enjoy.  If you quantify "success" with millions of dollars in sales a year in a hobby community, you are a fool.

We come to Amiga.org to spend time with like minded people that enjoy their hobby - whether it be legacy, PPC, AROS.  Everyone has their own definition of what the Amiga is, and far be it from me to force my opinions of that on anyone, and I use all the Amiga platforms anyways.

No one comes to A.org to get spammed by zealots pushing Linux powered x86 product on them in an insulting fashion.  No one.  No one is here to listen to people drone on incessantly that the x86 platform won 20 years ago.  We knew that 20 years ago.

We are here to lend support and good conversation to other people using Amiga variants, and other than a licensing agreement and a sticker/etching, there's nothing Amiga about the C-USA Amiga platform.  Not a thing, not even an emulator.  If you want to make it into some issue that people here have some sort of witch hunt towards C-USA, go nuts.  The day they put out anything Amiga related that goes past case badging is the day they have relevance to the community here.

Their offerings simply have zero relevance at all at this time here, in my books.

People are leaving due to the lack of topical content here, I guess if people want to watch it happen to A.org, there's other Amiga friendly portals on the web that don't pander to entirely unrelated products/companies.  Page views won't keep this ship afloat in the long run (A.org).

Wildstar, not sure what your deal is.  One minute you seem perfectly capable of having a civil discussion, the next minute it's personal insults like:

 "I am not under his control. So please stop spreading such false accusations. That is the problem with you guys. Either you never completed 3rd grade or you guys have some serioius psychological issues. Did you dose too much drugs, lsd, etc. During the 80s and that is why you are so screwed up."

It's reprehensible and childish - either be productive or don't post, before even more people leave this place due to this tripe.  Your perceived freedom of speech here doesn't give you the right to make personal insults and grade school slurs.

Um, it does have an emulator. It is already in CommodoreOS Vision.

Fair enough as we so far have been kind of at each others throat, metaphorically speaking.

Lets make some ground base here. What can Commodore USA and classic Amiga/PPC amiga community can do to be gain a more civil relationship while allowing Commodore USA to sell their products. Can we add a forum section specifically for CommodoreUSA products discussions that may occur. There are people who might happen to be working with a classic Amiga and maybe buy one of these CommodoreUSA computers.

This way correct and factual knowledge of those systems and the emulators within the CommodoreOS Vision package would be understood coherent without the emotional diatribe and aggressive attacking. Other aspects directly or indirectly between CommodoreUSA and Amiga classic platforms could be options. Software, you name it. Who knows. The point is, can we be civil from start to finish.

First off, if I recall, the OP of the original interview thread started the interview.

It might be about Amiga community learning about what is happening with the Commodore thread.

Lets take a second to think about this, every other Commodore IP holder CEO never even talked to the Commodore members. At least Barry has been remotely communicating with any of you. I give him credit for that. Most would just have sued and shut sites like this down, and so on. Barry is better then the other clowns.

http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_OS_Vision.aspx

Read in Classic Commodore.

"Feeling nostalgic? A goal of Commodore OS Vision is to simplify classic Commodore compatibility, with integrated features to launch classic 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit era software via emulation. As Commodore OS Vision continues to develop, we will continue to improve this feature through updates, that further allow PET, VIC-20, CBM-II, C16, C64, C128 and Commodore AMIGA software to be launched effortlessly. The is no need to bother with floppy disks these days, as many games can be legally puchased and downloaded from the internet directly on to your computer. Commodore OS Vision even has an option to boot directly into full screen C64 emulation with the READY prompt. (ROM files and classic games are provided with our machines and purchased media only)"

You just need to dl the workbench and ROMs. So yes, emulation of Amiga classic is already there. There might be an issue with direct distributing because of that poorly written sentence in that Hyperion-Amiga Inc. Lawsuit.

So does that answer at least one Amiga related aspect?

[Wildstar128]

It can be a computer, or it can be a retro games console, or a dev board, or an advanced alternative to the Raspberry Pi.  The market is endless if the price is right.  Ask Nintendo.

$50... Get it down to that price and you got something.

[Duce]

Last we heard the Amiga Mini does not come with Amiga Forever or another similar, legal, all in one, installed by default emulator with ROM's and images.

By that I mean one that includes ROM's and KS/disk images.

Please correct me if I am wrong - just a couple days ago Leo was claiming they were still debating licensing AF, but said atm it was not included.

I am referring to the C-USA Amiga line only, this being A.org and all I don't really care a hell of a lot about the C64 offerings C-USA have.

[Kesa]

Barry:  "Hello boys and girls!  I'm your Uncle Bazza and I'm the host of the C-USA Smoke & Mirrors show.  Now I know I've been a bad boy in the past, but thanks to Prozac I'm a new man and I just want to be your friend.  Talking of friends, I've brought two with me.  Meet Middleman and Wildstar.  Say hello to the children guys."
Middleman:  "Hello boys and girls!"
Wildstar:  "Hello boys and girls!"
Barry:  "Why don't you guys tell everyone how nice I am?"
Middleman:  "Oooh!  Uncle Barry is really, really, really nice."
Wildstar:  "He's even nicer than that!  He's like a double helping of nice with a big dollop of icecream on top!"
Middleman:  "I love icecream!"
Wildstar:  "And Uncle Barry loves the Amiga!"
Barry:  "Well there you have it boys and girls, I love you all and I'm a really, really nice guy."
Middleman:  "With icecream!"
Wildstar:  "Yes Uncle Barry, don't forget the icecream!"
Barry:  "OK, that's all until next week.  Remember to come to my website and pre-order a computer with excessive RAM, a sub-standard graphics card, no expandability and an underpowered PSU"
Middleman and Wildstar:  "And icecream!"
Barry:  "You guys are so funny.   Hey, where's Dammy with my meds?  I feel the need to insult someone."

WTF!

I think darrin needs a holiday...

[Wildstar128]

The community is more than used to paying higher prices for niche hardware - I'm not sure where you get the impression peoples' main driving factor is money.

People gladly paid good money for the PPC OS4 boards.  They were not cheap.
People gladly still register MorphOS, despite the fact it is similarly priced to an OEM copy of Windows.

People still gladly pay thru the nose for legacy Amiga systems, for accels and gfx cards for said systems.  Things like the Indivision and the USB addons for classic Amiga systems are in high, high demand and they are grossly overpriced if one was to foolishly compare them to commodity PC counterparts.

A hobby is never cheap, whether it be computing or classic cars - money is rarely a deciding factor.  Enjoyment is.

Show me 1,000,000 Amigans actively using Amiga. Considering you need to expect a 1% of them might purchase a given year. R&D for a hardware developer is easily $100/hr. For labor of time. You need to have account for at least a year to get someone to bring price cost to something a million might buy but expecting only 1% success rate.  It has to be inexpensive enough that it can be bundled without adverse impact on sales price like a CARD bundled and plugs into the Amiga Mini's PCIe slot. Can that be achieved.

You can't R&D what would amount to a loss of a $100/hr. For someone to micronize it and get the cost down. Hardware engineers needs to eat too. They have a family and bills to pay. That is something that is going to cost a deal of money. So, how will the cost be distributed effectively for only a 100 purchasers?

[CSixx]

IMHO it's time CUSA threads got removed from A.org. They have forums of their own and it is an abuse to use A.org in such a way. We should just have one locked sticky to say they are not here and the address of CUSAs forum for anyone wishing to talk CUSA. Job done.

Too late, this is now the official CUSA forum.
See for yourself: http://www.cusaforums.com

[Darrin]

$50... Get it down to that price and you got something.

I could say the same thing for C-USA's existing product(s).

[Wildstar128]

Last we heard the Amiga Mini does not come with Amiga Forever or another similar, legal, all in one, installed by default emulator with ROM's and images.

By that I mean one that includes ROM's and KS/disk images.

Please correct me if I am wrong - just a couple days ago Leo was claiming they were still debating licensing AF, but said atm it was not included.

I am referring to the C-USA Amiga line only, this being A.org and all I don't really care a hell of a lot about the C64 offerings C-USA have.

There is a working emulator without the workbench and Rom which you can just copy over at your own legal peril. Lol...

As far as getting a fully licensed AmigaForever is the ideal. I believe there is UAE?

http://www.amigaemulator.org/files/binaries/

Easy if you need to. There should be ways to deal with that. I believe that is on it or would run in an intance.

Regardless, COS-V is updatable and once the licensing agreement stuff is addressed... Then you will have AmigaForever and I would suspect a downloadable update would get it on the computer. So, once that is solved and resolved, it won't be an issue. There has already been working Amiga emulation proven to work so if you already have AF then you probably don't have to wait.

I quoted the text as is. I wasn't quoting it for the c64 stuff. Ok.

In any case, there is plenty of Linux based Amiga emulators if it isn't yet installed in Beta 8 of COS-V. That is because COS-V would be aimed to have most if not all the Commodore 8 bit and Amiga line with emulation in the common configuration.

It also is aimed to be the main OS environment for the day to day work and then you can use the emulation for running the software. FYI, if you have equivalent hardware specs then COS-V should work and you can test run it.

By know mean am I suggesting that you give up using your classics. We both can agree you probably don't use it for the serious stuff.