>Amiga 6000 for example:
>AAA+ custom chips
Who will make them? How much will they cost? How poorly/favorably will they compare to current PC chips from ATI or NVidia? If Radeon/Nvidia/Audigy/etc. chips are currently failing to meet your requirements, what needs changed to make you happy?
>3D customable chip
Who will make them? How much will they cost? How poorly/favorably will they compare to current PC chips from ATI/NVidia?If Radeon/Nvidia chips are currently failing to meet your requirements, what needs changed to make you happy?
>ColdFireV4 220MHz
Already slow compared to shipping AmigaOnes or Pegasoses.
>USB 2.0 as standard
>PCI
>AGP
>SD-RAM
I thought you wanted a custom based Amiga?? What does AGP here give you that your AAA+ and custom 3d chip don't?? Considering that now, is there a real need for the AAA+/3d custom chips??
>New 92 keys Amiga keyboard
How much will it cost? Is this really better than just getting Amiga keycaps printed for an existing PC keyboard?
At this point, I'm not really interested in such a custom thing. Why? it'll be a lot more expensive than even AmigaOne or Pegasos are, which already cost more than a PC where the only real difference to you are me is the type of processor being PowerPC instead of x86.
Now, the AmigaOne and Pegasos can both be bought and shipped right now, right? Considering how long we've all waited for a new Amiga, do you really think I'm willing to wait for your custom machine, with a friend of mine being an AmigaOne dealer, and able to sell me one of those a few months ago??
My job is designing programmable system-on-chip microchips, and others with desks nearby here do ASIC chip design for a variety of customers. Having an AAA+ chipset or custom 3d chipset is EXPENSIVE. ATI, NVidia, SIS/VIA/Intel/etc. do it because they sell zillions of the things. If you would limit your chipset to Amiga users, perhaps currently a few thousand, perhaps even 10 thousand, but I'm not sure there are significantly more than that if even that many, selling your motherboard would be outrageously expensive and you'd only sell maybe one or two to only the most wealthy and royally obsessed weirdos here. Commodore got a deal for a while because they owned the chip fab, and they still went bust.
You say people are jumping over to Mac because of their difference. How truely different are they? They have a PowerPC CPU, sure. They have PCI slots, and an AGP slot. They take standard memory sticks. They have ATI Radeon cards, and perhaps some have NVidia cards. They have USB ports, and perhaps Firewire. They don't have custom sound or video chips, they don't require weird non-standard SVGA monitors anymore, so other than the CPU not being x86, where is the special custom difference??
You know, this special different Mac that everyone is jumping for sounds an awful lot like what the AmigaOne and Pegasos offer right now...
It's just hardware at this point. There's no significant difference in what the Macs, AmigaOnes and Pegasos offer in hardware right now. Some have Firewire on board, some would need a PCI card. Some have network on board, some might not. Some take DDR, some take SDR memory, some take G3 or G4, some take G5 CPU. But these differences are small, and the only common special difference from PC hardware is PowerPC compared to x86 CPU.
Now, think about why people might want to change to Mac, is it because they want to escape x86? I don't think many people care about that, as that doesn't really matter for the user experience. What they experience is the software. The OS. The apps. The games. Will AAA+ or custom 3d chip improve this for them compared to the same experience using Radeon or Nvidia chips, or Audigy2 sound? Not without waiting a few years for chip development and some extremely serious price differences.
It's the OS that makes a difference. In the good old days, no one else made hardware that AmigaOS would shine on, and the price situation allowed it to happen for the number of units Commodore shipped at the time. After a while, other chips caught up, and the custom jobs were no longer "special". They allowed the OS to do what it did when nothing else did, but then got very old and pale in comparison to PC chips. The PC chipsets are now quite able to let AmigaOS shine, and let AmigaOS do things better than the now ancient custom chips ever could. And there's no way that a custom chipset only available for Amiga users will even begin to hope to catch up to the current big chip guys like ATI, NVidia, Creative Labs, etc. let alone surpass them. You don't have the hundreds of millions of dollars that they do for development, or the hundreds of millions of customers that they do to pay for it.
At this point, I consider ATI to be the supplier of my "custom" graphics chip. Either Creative Labs or whoever makes the chip on hte M-Audio Revolution card is the supplier for my "custom" sound chip. MAI and Via are the suppliers for my "custom" Gary/Agnus/Buster/etc. chipset. I'm currently content with that, because you can't do much better. Some will argue the MAI one has been done better by Marvell or whatever they're called, and they're fine to do that. But it's already been done... These companies will improve their products much faster than you can start from scratch, catch up and surpass them, and they can do it far far cheaper because they aren't limiting themselves to Amiga users and no one else.
Give me my AmigaOS. I don't much care what the hardware looks like anymore, or who else it may be available to. As long as it can compare to current standards and doesn't cost 10 times a smuch like stuff for my 4000T does, I'll be happy with it. I don't need "custom" chips, nor do you. The software experience is the only difference you'll notice compared to running Windows or Linux or MacOS or AmigaOS, and you don't need any special hardware for these software differences to happen. That's why Mac dumped Nubus and has PCI and AGP now. That's why Dave Haynie was dumping Zorro for PCI. That's why I don't care that my chipsets are available to Mac/PC/embedded systems users. AmigaOS/MorphOS can have already have been made to run on these things, the software experience is pretty much ready for me. Why should I need something much more expensive just to be more different, where the software experience really wouldn't change anyway??
