@RPi thread
It doesn't matter, Raspberry Pi was not attempting to enter the games console market. They were entering a DIY market which already had much of the tool chain and community in place.
They also targeted a low end educational market. The Amiga has a rag tag general community and a tiny elitist community already in place. The Raspberry Pi was subsidized as an Amiga Pi could be with Kickstarter and/or private financing.
Like others have pointed out, and others like OUYA, and Commodore have learnt: Consoles are appliances and they should Just Work and there should be content for it. An item without use is a useless item.
General purpose computing should be nearly as easy as using a console.
An Amiga console concept is not a slam dunk. Sure, you could put a RPi style board into a nice looking case, include a wireless controller, brand it Amiga and then what? What games is this relatively inexpensive device going to play?
On the other hand if you covet the existing library of classic games then you will quickly find that you need more than a $30 DIY board as your base. And even if you somehow manage to get it all working with a relatively low hardware cost, how will you market it? As a retro console? Retro consoles have almost no staying power. Nostalgic users buy them, play a few minutes or hours of their favourite titles and then they gather dust.
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As good a concept as the Amiga in a joystick is, it limits you to only the simple joystick games. What about games that bring up a map when you press M on the keyboard? Or mouse based games like Lemmings?
I would make an expandable computer with the base of Amiga software as a selling point (retro Amiga compatibility). I would use USB and bluetooth keyboards and controllers and allow existing console's controllers to work. I would have a couple of SATA ports for HD and CD if wanted. Jay Miner had the right idea when he snuck in an expandable general purpose computer into his Amiga video game system.
About the only thing possible would be to work with Cloanto to build an Amiga Player dedicated box based on something like the Intel NUC barebones system. The final product would cost around US$600-$800. Call it the Amiga Playbench. How many of us would buy something like that?
The NUC has the right idea as far as size and expandability. It is just a reduced PC which is not unique and the Intel graphics are uninspiring. The NUC cost is cheap enough it would sell to Amiga users at least (not so well at US$600-$800 though).
What would you do make players buy your console ? What would you do that Ouya didn't?
Current consoles are not open in the least. This is annoying. It should be possible to connect a keyboard and mouse and browse the internet for example. They have standard hardware which is nice but it is unaccessible. Of course an Amiga could not compete in performance with the newest consoles but a retro system doesn't have to. I do think the hardware should be good enough to encourage creating new software and allow semi-modern porting of software.
Ouya wasted too much money on creating custom cases and controllers (kickstarter generated $8.5 million for them to spend!). I would use existing ones and maybe a sticker for the case. Ouya is ARM with nothing unique while a 68k Amiga would be unique, cool and retro. I would keep an FPGA at least for the custom chips to simulate an Amiga, CD32, AtariST, NeoGeo, Sega Genesis, X68000, 68k based standup video games, etc. Think Natami or FPGA Arcade on steroids.
