Will Amiga ever live again?

[NightShade737]

Yeah sorry, I didn't notice the word "Cost".

[Hammer]

Also, I think Amiga sound can almost hold its own nowadays: the standard Paula chip was still a standard feature, which PCs still don't enjoy nowadays.

Not against MCP-T(APU) Sound Storm (e.g. X-BOX-I and NForce I/II). ALC650 chip (majority** of nForceII boards e.g. ASUS, Gigabyte) has 6 channels @20bit output and EAX1 acceleration. This particular AC97 chip murders Paula anyday.

**Statistics claimed from nForcershq.com’s survey (e.g. ASUS brand is the dominant).  

I think that AGA was better than VGA as well.

AGA was proven less desirable in the long run e.g. with arrival of ID's Doom (1992) and Origin(now EA)'s Wing Commander. This is turn spurn other X86 PC games of similar era e.g. Rise of Triad, Indy Car, Mech Warriors 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Dark Forces 1, X-Wing, Decent, Tie-Fighter, DOOM2 and clones of DOOM. During falling prices of I386 clone boxes, Linux and Windows NT was born.    

[NightShade737]

I thought AGA was a graphics chipset where as VGA is a graphics standard...

[Hammer]

@NightShade737

VGA was a graphic chipset (e.g. found in IBM’s PS/2 boxes) and a graphic standard (for the cloners).

[Van_M]

Anywayz, if Commodore hadn't gone to the heavens, AmigaOS 7.5 would easily give MacOs X (10.3) a run for its money in responsiveness, boot up speed and ease of use. Windows? Did someone say Windows?!? As for the hardware, Commodore would sell 1400/G4 for 289 quid with: G4 processor at 1400+ MHz, Radeon 9000 graphics chip (with TV-OUT), Turtle Beach sound chip, ATA/133 bus, 6 USB ports on the back of the case, one or two PCI ports, no legacy ports, internal DVD-Rom/CD-R combo, AmigaOS 7 or 7.5, all the necessary applications for free (basic office suite, image processing, browser, Java). Wouldn't that be a winner?

--EDIT--
Forgot to mention... all this in a nice 1200-like case... The PCI ports would have a small profile riser. The desktop cases would be for the high-end models.      

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Hammer wrote:

I think that AGA was better than VGA as well.

AGA was proven less desirable in the long run e.g. with arrival of ID's Doom (1992) and Origin(now EA)'s Wing Commander. This is turn spurn other X86 PC games of similar era e.g. Rise of Triad, Indy Car, Mech Warriors 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Dark Forces 1, X-Wing, Decent, Tie-Fighter, DOOM2 and clones of DOOM.

I thought the Akiko chip with it's chunky->planar conversion should be able to deal with this. Alas, I haven't seen much games supporting it.

[Van_M]

I think the mistake of Commodore in the long run was the design and implementation of the so-loved custom chips, themselves. OK, they were a hell of cool and impressive in the beginning but in the long run, the competition passed ahead of them. Atari could build computers for cheap using off-the-shelf components while commodore kept on spending millions on design, even in '92, when chips like VGA's and Sound Blasters were mainstream.

[pegasuce]

Will Amiga ever live again?

short answer: no!

[TeeOneKay]

[color=0000FF]I got my PegII today! :][/color][/b] [color=FF0000](Off topic.....or is it? )[/color][/b]

[Waccoon]

In name, only.  As far as I'm concerned, the A1000 was the only "true" Amiga.  The 500 was similar, but slower.  It's funny to see DuneII run noticably faster on the 1000 than the 500.  :-)

The 1200 was a HUGE disappointment for me.  I mean, after seven years (!) the blitter wasn't made any faster, and the CPU roughly doubled in speed?  I bought one, anyway, but boy, was I mad at Commodore.  I was really surprised to see the release of the CD32; I thought the 1200 would be the last Amiga ever.  Eventually, I deemed OS 3.0 to be the only nice thing about the 1200, and I still insist that the operating system, not the hardware, is what made the Amiga special.

The only future for the Amiga is the OS, but I'm not sure OS4 will live up to that.  I won't get into why until I can confirm that OS4 works just like how I think it will work.

If I didn't have such shakey faith in other OS projects (such as AROS, SkyOS, NuOS, QNX, Linux...), I probably wouldn't still be watching what happens to Amiga.  It's a morbid curiosity, I guess.

Gaddar:  Regarding the A1200, I think it's a shame they didn't consider making the box a little bigger (preferably with a separate keyboard, and a small main box like some old Macs)

Commodore was cheap.  Why do you think they put the "brick" on the 1200, and it doesn't even have a battery clock?  IDE performance is disgusting, too.

[Hammer]

I thought the Akiko chip with it's chunky->planar conversion should be able to deal with this. Alas, I haven't seen much games supporting it.

The standard 'AGA'(e.g. A1200/A4000) doesn’t include such a chip i.e. only in CD32 console and a rare A1200<>CD32 add-on kit.  

[bloodline]

Akiko was never that useful for C2P anyway. A far better solution would to have given AGA a real Chunky mode. Even a single lowres, 8bit Chunky graphics mode would have been bearable... a 16bit mode (like the Falcon's) would have been a dream come true.


I always remember the ST's being really lame... then Atari built the Falcon, which in terms of hardware, rocked (That DSP had us all dreaming...), but had a crappy OS and no decent games... I remember thinking that at the time.

[Jiffy]

Maybe in name and even then only as a curiosity, but nothing more.

Amigacomputers were nice machines and I still like to fiddle around with them (A1200 & A2000), but they are now part of history. Any new machines will be nothing more than interesting for hobbyists...

[Zero]

I would say it's not really dead, just look at the amount of stuff that still exists on the net for it, and the amount of Amiga stuff that sells via ebay etc.

I have a Amiga A1200 PowerTower, that is used all the time.

I think the question should be does the Amiga have a future...  :-)

[TheMagicM]

to me, the REAL Amiga was the old model Amiga's... I run UAE under MOS & Winders whenever I want to use something thats closest to the real thing..  I dont have patience to run a old unaccelerated machine :/ so emulating is the next best thing.    

[drwho]

I have to agree with something Jettah said a few posts back, I think that the Amiga is more than the sum of its parts alone.

Like many folks, I started with the Amiga very early. I had owned many systems and also worked on larger systems professionally (PDP-8, PDP 11/23, VAX, Sun, SGI, etc), but none of them ever seemed to compare to the Amiga.

When people talk to me about the Amiga, they ask what it is that still drives me with the machine after all these years. I can't explain it to them. I don't know why tinkering with my StartupSequence is so much fun, I am not exactly sure what the attraction is to writing ARexx scripts for interprocess communications between my applications is. I don't exactly know why I get such satisfaction when I am goofing with C on the Amiga and I can make a new window that doesn't do anything. I am not sure why I think that it's important to mention to people that Datastorm is written in 100% assembly language. I am not sure why DPaint is still a great graphics application. I am happy that I know what blitter and copper means and that non-Amigans don't. It's unclear to me why, even though I think WinUAE is a wonderful emulator, I believe that nothing beats the experience of working on a real Amiga.

Maybe it's just that I don't want to be another regular guy, running Windows because it's what everyone else does or a Mac or Linux because it's the "next best thing".

Just my 2 cents,
Mike