To high of prices on new boards

[wawrzon]

You are wrong, Morphos users are in the best of situations: hardware is abundant, it is reasonably inexpensive, and there are more skilled repair shops for them than several times what the 68k and AmigaOne users have together.

in fact i know few addresses where you can dependably send in and repair your genuine amiga hardware. besides i dont see the general shortage of it, you will actually always be able to find whatever you need for close to reasonable prices. and please dont tell me now about the ppc accels, who needs them? on the contrary i have seen a number of people walking away because they couldnt get their os4 hardware repaired and they couldnt afford or justify a replacement. and i dont talk about those leaving silently through the back door.

[Gulliver]

in fact i know few addresses where you can dependably send in and repair your genuine amiga hardware. besides i dont see the general shortage of it, you will actually always be able to find whatever you need for close to reasonable prices. and please dont tell me now about the ppc accels, who needs them? on the contrary i have seen a number of people walking away because they couldnt get their os4 hardware repaired and they couldnt afford or justify a replacement. and i dont talk about those leaving silently through the back door.

I have to agree with you, I ´ve witnessed many OS4 users leaving for the reasons you mentioned.

On the other hand, giving a second thought, we, 68k users are not so bad either. There are plenty new hardware developments, and if we find price is steep for vintage systems, then we can always use a FPGA clone or use our enviroment in an emulator (and these options are not possible for both MOS and OS4).

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

look at Amiga.org, doesn't it seem to be getting smaller, I mean less people, more people are giving up and going away.

I'm sure each person has their own reasons.  Personally I have no intention of leaving amiga.org, but I do get a little frustrated when every day the front page is dominated by "us vs. them" "red vs. blue" "OS4 or whoever sucks" "wish we had an FPGA such-and-such" "these prices are terrible" threads all day long.  For me, personally, I like working on the old hardware.  I couldn't care less about any of the bickering or daydreaming, and I understand that low volume = high cost.  I just wish there were more threads here where people could share ideas how to repair old hardware and keep it running well.  But I'm never going to leave my old hobby computer, haha!  

[JimDrew]

If I could be guaranteed to sell a million boards, I would offer them for $295.  The reality is that millions upon millions of PCs are sold every single month.  Even at $100 per board, you could not sell 10,000 boards to the limited retro market.

So, to try to recoup developer costs and due to the extremely low production runs that dramatic increase production costs, you have to charge a lot for these boards to even break even.  It's simple economics.

For a real FPGA solution, take a look at the FPGA Arcade project.  I am involved with that project (but not the owner), and it offers a really good shot at making an Amiga emulation that is vastly superior to Minimig based cores.

[ElPolloDiabl]

There are a lot of people who use one of the classic emulators, but don't write any software (or buy any software I guess). The users are still there, they are just not as active anymore.

What you need is more advertising first. Just lowering the price will not attract users. Get an advertising campaign going.

[spirantho]

There are the classic Amiga emuator users there - but I reckon they're mostly just in it for the nostalgia. The real difficulty, though, is getting money from them - there's a general attitude that "if it's old, it's free" - so although a lot of people are willing to use what they consider an old machine, it'd be incredibly difficult to get a worthwhile amount of income from it. Hardware you can do (look at the C64-in-a-joystick for instance), but software is a very different matter, especially as it's all downloadable.

[Fats]

So no, I am not trolling, I am just stating facts.

Do you have a realistic plan to develop cheap(er) boards? Where the devs are paid normal wages for their work and not have to do it out of love ?
Didn't you notice that also the number of hardware developers has decreased a lot together with the number of amiga shops. This is not because they make tons of cash.

[Gulliver]

Do you have a realistic plan to develop cheap(er) boards? Where the devs are paid normal wages for their work and not have to do it out of love ?
Didn't you notice that also the number of hardware developers has decreased a lot together with the number of amiga shops. This is not because they make tons of cash.

Are you kidding? Just ask the few people that know how much Acube sells their PPC motherboards in the embedded market (and I am saying this is not in high volumes), and you will no doubt see that just changing firmware and adding OS4 adds many hundreds of euros alone.

So OS4 hardware could be cheaper, if ambition was just a bit lower.

Anyway, sooner or later OS4/AmigaOne/SAM will be out of the current Amigaish offerings if they dont change their selling/advertising policy. It is a niche within a niche that will eventualy dry up.

[nicholas]

All you need is someone working full-time writing drivers for all the new cards that come out.
When you compare PC prices you might also be comparing to discounted prices.

The SAM price is okay... if the CPU speed was double what you get. 1066mhz instead of 533mhz for the entry model.

It is seriously time to go ARM for a long term upgrade path. That might also avoid having a lot of the x86 expansion kludge that you have put up with.

People keep saying this but there is no desktop ARM hardware to port the OS to. Just tablets, phones and small RPi style machines with no CPU power comparable to even the lowest specced MorphOS/OS4 machine.

Then there is the problem of hardware documentation. It doesn't exist for most of the above devices so how are the devs supposed to port to undocumented and usually locked down hardware?  By the time they could reverse engineer the hardware and stabilize a port worth releasing said hardware will already be several generations behind and out of production.

AMD64 is the only sensible architecture, much as I like ARM personally.

[Ami_GFX]

I've been into Amigas since before Commodore went bust. It's always been an expensive hobby.  Back in the 90s, I subsribed to Amiga World and drooled over all the hardware I couldn't afford. I pretty much have all of it these days for, given the general high prices for prime used Amiga gear, much less than I would have paid in the 90s. Of course, it's outdated technology but it still has it's charm and I find it kind of funny that there is still so much interest in it. Nothing comparable in the Mac and PC world.


Back in the day, the Mac was an even more expensive platform but the used Mac Quadras aren't worth anything like an what an A4000 is. The Amiga actually had the low end 500s, 600s and 1200s for the masses. Apple wasn't interested in low end products and all the kids who played with low end Amigas became the adults who fueled the ongoing passion for the Amiga.

Producing new hardware for an old platform is a labor of love more than anything else. The tools to make the hardware are much cheaper these days but it's still a lot of investment for a small return. Specialized electronics with small production runs is always an expensive proposition. It's not just Amigas. There is actually quite a bit of it out there in the world. One of my jobs is maintaining an electronic card control system that is a very specialized piece of hardware with several hundred in existance at most. Original price was around $15,000. Two spare modules were purchased last year for around $1500 because the company no longer produces or supports this product.

[smerf]

Hi,
I understand most of what you all are saying, but I still think that if someone would lower their price so that they could sell quantity this might draw more people back into the Amiga scene, I have looked at the fpga board and sort of like what I see. What I am thinking is get a bunch of people to buy whatever, and then get programmers together to make programs, and then get a rag going to accent our new device. Commodore did this in the C64, and the Amiga. They had to give software support, and then magazine support until the click became the bomb. With the Amiga they had the world by the basketballs and let it slip away to the winblows scene. Bill Gates saw what he wanted in the Amiga, and slowly moved the PC from what it was to the Amiga and then above it. If you ever seen pictures of his office, there is an Amiga 1000 sitting on one of his book shelves in the background, rumor had it that he was very jealous of what the Amiga could do, and made plans to build something better, which as we know became the modern day PC which today is a true entertainment system that can replace game consoles, movie theaters, TV, stereo, calculators, and rendering farms.
Well just hoping that something breaks us back in the forefront soon.

smerf

[James2002]

The price has gone down some. It was about 863.16 before shipping.  I wish they would be able to market it well.  Amigaos comes with it. It don’t have a case.  I guess  in a way if person had a 3d printer they could make themselves all in one keyboard case.  

If Hyperion Entertainment owned all trademark and patents it might have a better chance than Amiga INC in Delware. Who knows.

[psxphill]

People keep saying this but there is no desktop ARM hardware to port the OS to. Just tablets, phones and small RPi style machines with no CPU power comparable to even the lowest specced MorphOS/OS4 machine.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/Exynos/platform_partners_platform.html
 
this looks good http://hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G135235611947

[NovaCoder]

It's not simply a case of how much the hardware costs, you have to factor in what you get for your money (OS, software and hardware).

If OS4 was making real progress and was heading in a direction that interest me then it would justify a high entry price.   As it currently stands I wouldn't even pay $100 for a NG OS4 motherboard because I'm no longer interested in the platform.

[Thorham]

some of the programming programs for a PC cost as much as a new minimig, that is why I don't program on a PC

Are you serious? You don't program on the pc because some of the development software is expensive? That's crazy! It's like saying: 'I don't own a car, because some cars cost $200000.', or 'I don't wear shoes, because some shoes cost $3000'. Really, that's just nuts!

[wawrzon]

if you look at this site latest threads:
http://www.amigacoding.de/index.php?board=5.0
the proposal is to define neo amiga approach as (as far possible) hardware independant fpga implementation and leave the hardware to the dedicated fpga hardware vendors, currently sockit board is beinng meant as price/performance most justifable platform, no custom low volume hardware can beat.

somewhat linked to that there is appraoch of a single developer trying to provide amiga fpga accelerators at very moderated prices:
http://www.majsta.com/
in intention to ignite a community based project.
i think there are welcome developments.