Will Amiga ever live again?

[itix]

What new users?

I've seen few MorphOS users who never had an Amiga. Can't say there are many but still... :-)

[itix]

To me AGA has not been beaten to this day as the finest chipset ever

There is an UAE. It supports up to 8MB chip ram. And if you prefer WinUAE chipset you have good choice of software too. You can run MSIE, Opera, Mozilla... You name it :-)

[mdwh2]

Hyperspeed wrote:
As for AGA, we're talking not just about the graphics here but the
sound and the drive controllers.

To me AGA has not been beaten to this day as the finest chipset ever
made.

Yeah, yeah bring on the ATi Radeon X800 jokes etc. etc. but back in
1992 when the Amiga 1200 came out - AGA blew even the NeoGeo out of
the water and what games console even today can you print from,
program etc.

No consoles, but why don't PCs count?

I can't see any advantage AGA has now - an advantage was had by having a standardised chipset, and there is a gap perhaps for a computer that has the benefits of standard hardware like a console, but is still a computer. But I hope they don't put AGA in there! Any modern graphics card would do.

The world desperately needs a Peoples Computer to be sold in a little
colourful box like the Deluxe Paint, Oscar, Wordworth style combos of
the early 90's.

Surely there are plenty of PC companies doing bundles of PCs with software in this sort of style?

[mikrucio]

Put it simply


NO

[DonnyEMU]

I think if the Amiga is ever to live again, as a community we have to do several things to make it happen:

1) Stop the anti microsoft/intel/Apple bias. The original Amigas had a PC emulator from day one for a reason. The original Amiga was cool because it could emulate and run software from these other machines while still running it's own multimedia software that gave it the edge. We have to welcome these people from other camps instead of saying how bad these other machines are. While the Amiga really stop improving around the birth of vga cards, the other machines were just getting going.

2) We have to co-exist with the rest of the world and see what we can do with them. We have to realize though while AmigaWriter maybe a great word processor (and it is cool). It's not Microsoft Word let alone office. Bloated as it is people use it and open office (in terms of feature sets for a reason).

3) While the G3/G4 is popular on European soil and elsewhere, x86 processors are king in the USA. Not very many people run DOS or Windows 95 and 98 anymore and most Amiga people complain about problems with windows here because they don't have very recent hardware and software. Or they are lacking in knowledge of how to use the platform. I see nothing wrong with the idea of an amiga type OS on all CPUs.. Microsoft themselves got smart with .Net and created a runtime that is CPU independent.. One CPU isn't really better than the other anymore. Things are just darn fast everywhere. Moore's law has been surpassed. We need to think about "Amiga Everywhere" if the platform has a chance of coming back in one form or another.. (AmigaDE, MorphOS, OS4, AROS).. Most all old software is run through emulation of a 68k processor anyway.

4) How can we get Amiga back in the hearts and minds? Well how did linux become so popular that now it's competitive with Windows. Think about it folks an Open Source AmigaOS isn't a bad idea. Let the community guide it where it is supposed to, not some venture capital firm that just wants a return on their money. If venture capital firms guided Disney, the way they do today Snow White would have never have gotten made.. Think about it..

5) Stop the Civil war, we have red camps now and blue camps. God if they put a single united platform together, and forgot a moment about their limited profits and worked together, they might open a market that would be big enough to support both of them. Plus they all seem after the same thing, just different approaches.

6) Make the programming information available FREELY and openly.. Stop trying to make money off of a small if not close to dead horse. The only way people will port is if the information isn't closed off to them. I used to be able to go to barnes and noble and buy a rom kernal manual. Now that information is behind a password protected website or a purchaseable cdrom. Commodore sent me hundreds of pages per year for free. Would Amiga Inc. do the same? No! When you aren't as big as Microsoft or Apple you can't charge for this stuff and actually expect new software to get written. BeOS was successful in getting software written for it because it's sdk was available for free. You could get information easily.. If you want to get an idea of how easy it is, check out bebits.com sometime..

7) Finally, stop worrying about how compatible something is with something written back in 1991. Buy it based on potential now, and write software for it yourself.

Show the stuff you find cool about your machine off to other people. If they can get one and you have showed them something unique that they want to do then you won someone over.

9) Buy software from the small guys don't pirate it. They survive, you get more new stuff, you don't have to rely on one big company for everything you do..

[DonnyEMU]

I am sorry folks AGA while cool is very close to what the original VGA standard was..

Today most graphics cards come with a GPU (A graphics CPU) and a vector processor just to do cinematic effects like you see in movies. AGA and even picasso96/Cybergraphx cards don't effectively support more than 2D acceleration and the texture mapping and effects Pixel Shaders and Vertex shaders just aren't possible today on an Amiga like they are on Nvidia and ATI cards (they need to be done through hardware not software for speed). You just have to see an Nvidia demo of an FX card to know what I am talking about.

OpenGL needs a big boost on the Amiga platform and not even OpenGL 2.0 is approaching direct X for 3d function. I have sat down and written shaders and they are very small pieces of code executed by a vector processor. They are fast and the Amiga doesn't support them and doesn't have anything like them even with the ported SDL libraries..

You guys need to examine more hardware and high end stuff and write code to be making statements about how good amigas are today, and not generalize until you have more facts in evidence.

I look forward to see how far OS 4 and MorphOS bring 3D.. We need new standardized APIs folks and better drivers and new code to compete in these areas.

[Waccoon]

The Amiga software and graphics hardware (though lacking some in resolution) was WAY ahead of it's time.

Too bad Commodore let it stagnate for as long as they did.  Given the performance of AGA, it could have easily been released a few years earlier and wiped the floor with everything else but outrageously espensive arcade CGI boards (which were basicly just daisy-chained CPUs).

For one thing the graphics are NEVER SMOOTH
you can always see directx glitches ( because they arnt programming the hardware directly they are programming directx( CRAP) no matter how fast your CPU is or graphics card.

That also infuriates me to no end.  However, the reason is because of bad drivers that cut too many corners (like perspective correction), or the fact that PC game developers NEVER use VSync.  They don't care if your monitor is running at 72Hz.  They care that their built-in benchmarks return numbers like 160+ FPS.

Sad how Dreamcast and PS2 games look pretty damn good next to PC games, even today, because the developers program for smoothness instead of detail and wicked framerates.  Anything beyond the refresh rate of your monitor wastes power and generates more heat.

I doubt PC developers will ever resolve this issue.

A good example of current day custom chip technology is sony's PS2. built from the ground up using custom chips
sony asked to be made. like the amiga.

Yeah, but they spent more than a half billion developing it, and when it was released, the dev tools sucked, so you had to buy an engine or program it in assembly to make it do anything useful.  Sory REALLY screwed up the dev tools, probably because they obsessed so much on the hardware.  Let's hope they don't repeat that mistake with PS3 (though they probably will, since PS2 still managed to demolish the competition for some dumb reason).

The ps2 like the amiga plays games very well and is flawlesly smooth.

Note the lower resolution of PS2 games.  I personally prefer to run games at 800x600 with 6x antialiasing, while my dad runs 1600x1280.  I think my games look better, and they definately run smoother.

DIRECT-X sucks my A2000 runs more stable than my AMD 2500+ and 512mb of pc3200 ram with windows XP pro!! windows sucks, Microcrap sucks even worse and that is what is going to be their downfall.

I had a 2600+ that crashed like crazy until I replaced the RAM (both sticks were bad).  Now it's rock stable.

PC3200 tends to be very, very unreliable, even from the best vendors.  I'm never buying Corsair memory again.  Even their RMA modules gave me problems with my P4.

Boy, were the laid off employees pissed off at Medhi for ruining the company in a matter of a couple of years!!!

Those engineers were the only reason the Amiga was great.  Commodore didn't do a damn thing right.

Does anyone actually ever stand up for Commodore?

They knew they had a great computer and sat on their asses.  Then, they started working on an ill-fated "cheap" Amiga, even though the A500 pummeled the PC and Mac in terms of price/performance.  Then, they ran out of time on AAA and relesed AGA in an attemt to slow losses.  I was very distressed to see the A4000 refresh Workbench windows slower than the A1200.

To me AGA has not been beaten to this day as the finest chipset ever
made.

Well, I for one was VERY disappointed with AGA.  After 7 years, the "new" chipset was pretty much a freshened OCS/ECS with roughly twice the overall OCS performance with the same color modes.  So much for Moore's law!  Even with the fast memory upgrade, I felt my 1200 was too slow to be worth the money I paid.  Of course, I bought it anyway since it is better than the A1000 it replaced, but I was still mad.

It also couldn't compete with VGA modes, and the blitter was the same speed, which made 256-color mode undesirable and HAM-8 useless.  There was also NO excuse for a multimedia computer to use the same 4-channel 8-bit sound.  8 Chanels would have been great, even in 8-bit.

Oh yeah, and don't forget the low-density floppy drives.  What's the point of 256-color graphics if you game comes on 10 floppies?  Amigas are still infamous for swapping, even under UAE.

AGA blew even the NeoGeo out of the water and what games console even today can you print from, program etc.

What are you smoking?  AGA can't handle dozens of sprites at 60Hz.  The blitter isn't near fast enough.

So what if Mehdi Ali made some mistakes

So what if they lost a quarter billion dollars in two years?

Ali is now my dad's boss, BTW, and he's just as effective at management today as he was 10 years ago!  I don't think my dad will still have a job by the end of the year.

Particularly if you wonder if Microsoft has been getting governmment contracts and subsidies.

Microsoft understood very early that you can make more money making software for multiple platforms.  Commodore didn't do **** to improve the Amiga chipset.  After all, they bought it -- they didn't even design it.

One of the reasons why Amiga will never be anything again is the users. More precisely, the inability of a number of users to evolve their ideas past what they were 15 years ago.

Well, what's left of them.  When there were 100,000 Amiga users around, things could have gone somewhere.  But, with all the talented people having gone to the PC and game machines, a community of 1,500 die-hards isn't going to do anything.

It's not hard to be ahead of the pack, and provide unique value at the edges.

Try getting "value" from an $800 AmigaOne, when you can get a much faster PC (sans OS) for around $300.

They don't want new and revolutionary. They want to return to what they had ten years ago or more.

Exactly.  I still hear people moan about pull-down screens when a task bar or dock is far, far better.

Any modern graphics card would do.

Especially since nobody hard-codes the chipsets anymore.  Developers don't care what chipset is being used.  All they care about is that the target hardware supports the 2D/3D API calls they are using.  What's the point in complaining about custom chips if all you're going to do is use a variant of OpenGL?

The original Amiga was cool because it could emulate and run software from these other machines while still running it's own multimedia software that gave it the edge.

No computer is judged by its ability to run software written for other computers.  Apple had PC emulation, too, and it didn't boost sales one bit.

Bloated as it is people use it and open office (in terms of feature sets for a reason).

In name only.  Everyone at my college submitted their student newspaper articles in Microsoft Word format (requiring us to upgrade every year just so we could read the disks).  How many people did anything more sophisticated than writing a simple WordPad-type document?  NOBODY.  You don't need a full-blown word processor to use nice fonts and margins, but still, MS Word is still the best-selling word processor, and many computers come with it pre-installed.

One CPU isn't really better than the other anymore. Things are just darn fast everywhere.

Endian order is the biggest hurdle, but many CPUs (like MIPS) can run in both modes.  When will PowerPC and X86 wise up?

Well how did linux become so popular that now it's competitive with Windows. Think about it folks an Open Source AmigaOS isn't a bad idea.

Note the type of people who use Linux, and note that Linux is just a kernel.  It's pretty much useless for ordinary people without Gnome/KDE, and both desktop systems are so backwards it boggles the mind.

Stop the Civil war, we have red camps now and blue camps.

Has anyone considered that the reason why there are reds and blues, is because NEITHER is good enough?

Commodore sent me hundreds of pages per year for free. Would Amiga Inc. do the same? No! When you aren't as big as Microsoft or Apple you can't charge for this stuff and actually expect new software to get written.

Documentation is the key to survival.  Yesteryear, computer companies were just bad at it.  Today, they don't bother.  It sickens me.

Hell, if you buy an XP-based computer these days, the revovery CD is on the hard drive.  They don't even give you an OS CD anymore!  :-x

Finally, stop worrying about how compatible something is with something written back in 1991. Buy it based on potential now, and write software for it yourself.

Amiga was in such a good situation a few years ago.  All software was 68K and emulation was the only answer.  Moving on to a new, hardware-independent platform and using emulation or compatibility would've sewn up all the legacy problems.  Instead, they decided to shackle the machine to PPC.  Once you go PowerPC, you're stuck with it.

AGA and even picasso96/Cybergraphx cards don't effectively support more than 2D acceleration and the texture mapping and effects Pixel Shaders and Vertex shaders just aren't possible today on an Amiga like they are on Nvidia and ATI cards

AGA wasn't even designed to do 2D alphas, let alone 3D.

OpenGL needs a big boost on the Amiga platform and not even OpenGL 2.0 is approaching direct X for 3d function.

Too bad good drivers cost a fortune.  Reasonable 3D on a new Amiga probably won't come around for another 4-5 years.

[BigBenAussie]

Will Amiga ever live again?

Depends what you mean by live, and based on that definition you may even find that it never died.
(Amiga = the Amiga platform.)

Will Amiga systems be successful?
That depends on how low your expectations are. I look at the new systems as life preservers, enough to keep the community afloat until........until we have a cunning plan.

Will Amiga reach its former heights?
Well, obviously no. You'd need to sell millions apon millions and Eyetech are even fretting over a measly 10 thousand units.

Will Amiga ever have the number of users it once had?
No, of course not. Lucky if you get 1% of old users back and even then out of curiosity.

Will it ever be as powerful as other systems?
No. Eyetech and Genesi will never be able to keep up with even PowerPC chips, and the PowerPC chip will be lucky to even keep up with x86 clones.

Will it ever be a cheaper alternative to other systems?
No. Unless it sits on the shelf for a couple of years.

Then why get one???
Well this all comes down to the Amigan philosophy.
IMHO Amigans consider themselves the underdog. Amigans identify strongly with the prominent computer of their youth sorta like musical taste. Amigans triumphed over the ST and the PC owners in many aspects in the early nineties and considered themselves unique. Amigans identified with the underdog and the success story that was Amiga. Some people think they can do it again, or at least have fun trying. If its a matter of being a mini-me-too, then that's just fine as well. Everything old is new again, and exciting times playing catch up can be had.

That's why I think people use Linux too, they identify with their community and are willing to put up with its shortcomings, while attempting to bridge the gap and beat Goliath. We all know Windows is good enough, but I'll be damned if I knowingly make Bill Gates richer. You can get close to Windows, on a miniscule budget, which says a lot.

Will Amiga ever have a decent browser, a decent Office Suite and decent development tools?
YES!!! Because when left to their own devices and unshackled by corporate considerations Amigans band together to make what seems impossible, possible. It wasn't Amiga that made it possible, IT WAS AMIGANS THAT MADE IT POSSIBLE!!! Its only a matter of time, and a final OS4 release combined with new uA1 hardware may just prove the catalyst.

I think that the only way to get ahead of the pack in terms of hardware, is to jump onto someone else's proprietry hardware, and build a new Amiga based on one of the next gen PowerPC consoles, like Sony's or Nintendo's. In this case the move to PPC was merely step one, ie Amiga ONE. I want Amiga TWO on kickass console hardware(with higher specced options). With a single hardware base we wouldn't be in the gfx and sound support mess we have now. I wish the companies would get out of the hardware game altogether and leverage what is already out there more. I know, x86 is out of the question, almost like conceding defeat for some, but there must be other PPC alternatives. Surely, Eyetech and Genesi can't be the only people making PPC hardware. I don't care if they're just resellers. Let others with the muscle produce the hardware and leverage it.

I think we should just support the current hardware on the A1 TO THE MAX for now and not expend too much effort on supporting everything under the sun, for instance, the uA1s built in sound and graphics, as well as 3d, and that will be fine until we can figure out what to do about producing a killer Amiga TWO in a couple of years. It'll be fun for a while just to see what can be done with the new machines, even if we can't directly hit the hardware.

If you buy a new Amiga, intend to join in on the fun, because we're in for quite a ride, bumpy or otherwise for many years to come. And in that regard THE AMIGA AIN'T DEAD!!! It really can't get any worse than it has been either.

[BigBenAussie]

Cheer up, Bill Buck. You know what they say.

Some things with Amiga are bad.
They can really make you mad.
Other things just make you swear and curse
When you're posting on a newsgroup
Don't grumble, give a whistle!
And this'll help things turn out for the best
...AND...

Always look on the bright side of Migs (whistles)
Always look on the light side of Migs (whistles)
If the Amiga scene's jolly rotten
Then there's something you've forgotten!
And that's to play a game and dance and sing
When you're OS core dumps
Don't be silly chumps
Just play a mod and whistle, that's the thing

And always look on the bright side of Migs (whistles)
Come on! ...Always look on the red side of Migs (whistles)
The Court Case is quite absurd
And DE's the final word
You must always face the curtain with a bow
Forget about your sin
Give Amigans a grin
Enjoy it-- It's your last chance anyhow!

So always look at the blue screen of death
A-just before your PC draws its terminal breath
Windows is a piece a $hit
When you look at it
Amiga's a laugh and A1's a joke, it's true
You'll see it's all a show
Keep 'em laughin' as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you

And always look on the bright side of Pegs

(C'mon Bill, cheer up!)

Always look on the bright side of Pegs (whistle)
Always look on the bright side of Pegs (whistle)

(Worse things happened at Be, you know.)

Always look on the bright side of Migs (whistle)

(I mean, what've you got to lose? You know, you come from nothin', you're going back to nothin', what you lost? Errrr...Money!)

Always look on the blue side of Migs (whistle)

(Nothing will come from nothing... you know what they say. Cheer up, ya ol' bugger! C'mon, give us a grin.)

Always look on the blue side of Migs (whistle)

(There you are. See? It's the end of the Court Case. Incidentally, this songs available at Amiga.org.)

Always look on the bright side of Migs (whistle)

(Alan: Some of us've got to live as well, you know. Who do you think pays for all this rubbish?)

Always look on the bright side of Migs (whistle)

(KMOS'll never make their money back, you know. I told him, I said to him, Garry, I said, you'll never make their money back.)

Always look on ...

[TheMagicM]

Waccoon: maybe you can get Ali to register here and answer a few questions?  

[ksk]

Live again?

It never died. It never will.

(AOS will not be back in the desktop PC mainstream like it once was, but I would predict that there will be some new activity around it for the next few years to come, after that ... who knows, most likely things continue as usual ... some try to keep on killing it but they still fail in doing it ...)

[minator]

I still hear people moan about pull-down screens when a task bar or dock is far, far better.

I completely disagree,  A task bar is fine for a few programs but once you have multiple programs and multiple windows the buttons shrink so much you can't tell which is which.

I don't like the dock at all for tracking programs, so much so I use a pager which breaks things up into different screens.  Much faster and friendly than any task bar type approach, Exposé works well if you have more than one program on a screen.  The Dock is only good for launching programs and that's all I use it for.

BeOS had multiple ways of tracking programs including both a vertical task bar which works better than a horizontal one (though you could also do that) and a pager.

The Amiga used screens, MorphOS has screens but it'll give you a list so you don't have to keep clicking between them.  Screens can also be in any depth / resolution you want which can be very useful.

[Naeem]

in answer to the question...

I think so but in a smaller more dissident, fractured, splintered way.

:-)

[Waccoon]

A task bar is fine for a few programs but once you have multiple programs and multiple windows the buttons shrink so much you can't tell which is which.

It doesn't have to work just like the Windows task bar.  I wish Linux people would stop trying to make their systems look and feel like Windows.

Screens can also be in any depth / resolution you want which can be very useful.

I wish more OSes used vector graphics.  Hard-coded resolution is such an ancient idea.  It drives me nuts when someone makes a GUI for 640x480 and doesn't let you resize the window (most GUI toolkits are very backwards, too.  I'm starting to hate XUL less these days).

[mdwh2]

The good thing about screens/workspaces is that you can arrange it so that groups of applications share the same space.

For example, you might have a shell running a compiler along with a text editor, or you might have a text editor with a web browser. It would be nice to have these together in their own space, without say, your email client or IM clients getting in the way.

This is the problem with a task bar as it is usually implemented - I can't click on one icon, and suddenly have an associated group of programs/windows spring up (I'm on Windows 2000, I don't know how improved XP is here?)

[bhoggett]

@mdwh2 wrote:

This is the problem with a task bar as it is usually implemented - I can't click on one icon, and suddenly have an associated group of programs/windows spring up (I'm on Windows 2000, I don't know how improved XP is here?)

It works with Linux, but XP doesn't add anything to this aspect that Win2k didn't have.

Personally, I've never missed draggable screens. The only use I had for them was to switch between Amiga programs that ran at different resolutions and colour depths, either because of the program's supported resolutions being hardcoded, or because of the Amiga's chip memory constraints.

After I switched to using graphics cards, I never missed draggable screens at all.