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Author Topic: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?  (Read 4172 times)

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Offline DFergATLTopic starter

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Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« on: April 22, 2004, 08:12:50 PM »
Well it has been over a week sence I ordered my copy and it it is still "backordered".  No shipping date is known.  Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to cancel the order.  How can a company "release" a product that can't be shipped?  So far I am not a very happy customrer of Clonto.
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Offline bloodline

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #1 on: April 22, 2004, 08:20:40 PM »
Quote

DFergATL wrote:
Well it has been over a week sence I ordered my copy and it it is still "backordered".  No shipping date is known.  Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to cancel the order.  How can a company "release" a product that can't be shipped?  So far I am not a very happy customrer of Clonto.


Don't worry, Clonto are a respectable company, I fully expect them to sort this out.

Offline cecilia

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #2 on: April 22, 2004, 08:26:30 PM »
it's possible they become overwhelmed with orders. this is just a guess on my part.
anyway, a week isn't that long.
they should be communicating, however. maybe there just aren't enough people?

don't get pissed off. wait a couple of days and see if there is any news.

good luck!
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Offline DFergATLTopic starter

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #3 on: April 22, 2004, 08:30:03 PM »
Ok, it is nice to know that Clonto has good rep with the Amiga community.  This is my first time dealing with them.  However they should be communitating better.  I would not mind waiting if they had said somehting like "avaliable for purchase now...shipping expected to start on or around...." but that isn't the case.  They made it seem as if it was ready to roll, and now we find that that isn't happening but still nothing from Clonto.  Now that is frustrating.  I might be a little "gun shy" because of a bad experence with Yellow Tab that turned into a very expensive and very bad product.
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Offline bloodline

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #4 on: April 22, 2004, 08:33:27 PM »
Quote

DFergATL wrote:
Ok, it is nice to know that Clonto has good rep with the Amiga community.  This is my first time dealing with them.  However they should be communitating better.  I would not mind waiting if they had said somehting like "avaliable for purchase now...shipping expected to start on or around...." but that isn't the case.  They made it seem as if it was ready to roll, and now we find that that isn't happening but still nothing from Clonto.  Now that is frustrating.  I might be a little "gun shy" because of a bad experence with Yellow Tab that turned into a very expensive and very bad product.


Had it been any other company, I would have told you to be screeming blue murder!!! But I honestly think you should give it a few more days.

Offline Lo

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #5 on: April 22, 2004, 08:40:18 PM »
I received this email:

Hello,

First of all, I wanted to express a big and humble Thank You for
your support.

In response to some questions we received:

- All orders received or will receive a full CD Edition (no
  previous version required for installation, even if the
  order procedure was referred to as an "Upgrade")

- All CDs are version 6.0.1.0

- There will be, as always, future free upgrades as version 6.X
  evolves

The subject line of this email additionally reflects the status
of your order as follows:

- "Boing (Early Bird)" means that you ordered before the
  completion of the April 12th upgrade offer mailing (when we
  started "counting", so that it would be the same for everyone),
  finding the new site and offer yourself, or because you were
  among the first to receive the upgrade offer emails. The supply
  of Boing ball stickers for all such orders will be honored by
  using an extra stock (on top of the 50), meaning that now we are
  really, really out of them. All of these orders were unexpected,
  thank you very much.

- "Boing (X/50)" where X is a number in the 1 to 50 range
  (unique numbers, but in non-sequential order) indicates that you
  ordered among the first 50 after the mailing was completely sent
  out. As such, it includes a Boing ball sticker as promised.
  Thank you for the quick response, and for your support.

- "Thank You (>50)" indicates that we gratefully received more
  than 50 orders after the upgrade mailing offer, and we
  unfortunately ran out of stock for the Boing ball stickers. A
  few of these orders have a Boing ball sticker added at random
  (we really only had a handful left). An overwhelming thank you,
  to you all.

The special offer ended as announced (yesterday morning, for
most time zones). We started shipping these orders last week,
and some of you probably already received their CD by Priority
Mail. However, I have to admit that the response was more than
we had expected, and as of Friday we had run out of CDs. We are
expecting a new lot tomorrow to complete the shipments. These
should be delivered within 1-2 days in Europe, about 5 days to
North America, and just a little bit longer elsewhere. An
exception to this is Italy, where we have the special
requirement of local "SIAE" registration, which is not yet
complete (we did the deposit, but did not yet receive their
serialized labels). Our mailing did not yet go out to customers
in Italy, pending this procedure. Nevertheless, a handful of you
managed to order from Italy in spite of not having received an
upgrade offer. To try to compensate for this, all customers in
Italy will receive an extra Boing sticker.

Because of your positive response, we are now able to do
something which we hadn't done since version 2.0, and that is
to update the external packaging of Amiga Forever. (As you will
notice, the text on the back of the CD is old, which reflected
the limited resources this project has available.) Thank you for
making this possible.

Given the encouraging feedback on this specific front, we will
also continue our effort to digitize and preserve old Amiga
videos. As a customer who already received his CD just wrote at
ann.lu, "[it] brought a tear to my eye seeing the Amiga 1985
Introduction at Lincoln Center." We are working to bring more of
these feelings back...

Thank you.




 :-)
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Offline Aegis

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #6 on: April 27, 2004, 12:03:03 AM »
Not vaporware :-D



Check out the serial no. sticker and the CD label...

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Offline graffias79

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #7 on: April 27, 2004, 12:26:51 AM »
To me it seems Cloanto is one of the most professional companies still supporting the Amiga.  I ordered mine from Software Hut in Pennsylvania, USA and I received mine within the week and they also threw in a CD of Amiga fonts :-)  I cannot believe how fast the emulation is under windows, I can play mp3s at full quality with AmigaAMP even!
 

Offline Gryfon

Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #8 on: April 27, 2004, 10:15:11 AM »
My copy of AF 6 arrived yesterday - only a few days after Michael of Cloanto personally e-mailed (see above post)  everyone to aplogise for being overwhelmed with orders for it.

Not everyone in the Amiga community is so paranoid!  I've been bitten a few times by late Amiga-related orders / problems with repairs, I'm sure we've all had the odd problem....

But the reason I stick with my Amiga, emulated and real, is because the machine and community have given me faith.  That there is a choice - a viable, fun and useful alternative.

For even the memory of that ideal, I'd have been willing to wait longer for AF 6 to land on my mat!
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Offline bhoggett

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #9 on: April 27, 2004, 07:31:54 PM »
My copy arrived today too. I don't think the time it took to get here was all that bad: approx 10 days including two weekends.

I had a chance to play around with it a bit and I have to say first impressions are quite disappointing, particularly when you consider the advertising hype.

The worst culprit is KX-Lite. Quite awful. It failed to display at all on my new laptop (which incidentally cost less than an AmigaOne board would), even though Knoppix and every other "live" Linux CD I've tried works fine. On the desktop system it did boot, but failed to recognise my cordless optical USB mouse. Again, Knoppix and all the other "live" distros work fine. When I stuck a PS/2 mouse on that worked, but when I tried changing screen resolution to 1280x1024 it changed the WB screen size without changing the actual resolution, so I was left staring at an area somewhere in the middle of WB and no way to redress the situation. All this inside the first 5 minutes of trying it on both systems. Bad first impressions tend to last!

More minor, but still significant is the lack of work on the aspect of the WB you are booting into, be it through KX-lite or a standard install of AF6. A horrible gray background (familiar to AF users), standard system topaz font unsuitable for such resolutions and the horrid distorted standard AmigaOS gadgets. Not to mention the default 8-bit colour resolution. Why?  If you "forget" your CD in your friend's machine, most likely that friend will be looking at a horrid gray display and be unable to do anything because their mouse won't work. They'll be really impressed. Not.

Did I mention that starting DOpus Magellan replaces the newly introduced Glow-icons on the Workbench with some truly apalling 4-colour monstosities?

What am I saying? I'm saying it's a missed opportunity. It could, and should, have been so much better with more time spent on taking care of the details. Where are the PowerIcons? Where's VisualPrefs? Why aren't the fonts configured to match the resolution? Where's the nice clean stylish background and colour scheme? Where's the developer configuration to allow people to boot into a pre-configured developer environment? Why is KX-Lite crippled? Why does it still look awful compared to the Amiga-In-A-Box setup of years ago?

I said two weeks ago that I felt the upgrade price was steep. One of the reasons I was given was that "it represents two years of hard work". If so, it's a shame those two years didn't include two weeks spent paying attention to detail. I'd rather have had that than the audio and video filler material that's supposed to be so exciting.

I like Michael personally and respect the way he has stayed clear of the muck that's been flying around the Amiga scene for the past few years, but I think AF6 is a big let-down, and it need not have been.
Bill Hoggett
 

Offline Lo

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #10 on: April 29, 2004, 02:36:50 AM »
I hate to admit it, but I'm with BH on his points.

Sheesh,  2 years of hard work and our blind date is dressed so shabby?  

On the one hand, as the above pics show, the packaging was almost beautiful.  I received the plastic 3D boing sticker (Yes for my A4K! :)) A nice silver-ink signature from, um Mike? Michal?  An invitation to Amiga Alpe Adria 2004 at UDine???  (I better figure out what this means and ready my largest canoe).   I made a rather large mistake by not backing up old data files and letting the installer try to handle it, but no money gone  :-) .

All is not lost, of course, we will put our minds together and fine tune this beast, right?? :-D
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Offline sarkis

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #11 on: May 02, 2004, 02:28:14 AM »
hAS ANY got af6.0 to boot off the cd?

Have a laptop barebones 32 meg ram and no hard drive is this enougth to work?

tia
sarkis :-D
 

Offline jjans

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #12 on: May 03, 2004, 09:27:08 PM »
I just recieved my copy of Amiga Forever Online 6.0 and it seems OK.

I am browsing amiga.org using the included AWEB, (I have never tried it before).

I was pretty impressed by the fact that I did not have to configure anything.
I am also impressed by the speed of AWEB. It seems faster than
Opera 7.

The only thing about AWEB that is annoying is the flicker of the
screen as it is downloading a webpage. Is there a way to stop this?
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Offline lofstudio

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #13 on: May 12, 2004, 09:59:48 PM »
I'm a bit frustrated with Cloanto right now about Amiga Forever. I bought AF 5.0 from Software Hut on April 2 and received & registered it on the 8th. 4 days later, I got an email from Cloanto telling me about Amiga Forever 6.0.

I wrote and asked if there would be a certain time period that upgrades would be free. Michael from Cloanto told me in both a direct letter and a mass email that:

...ALL customers who purchased Amiga Forever 5.X
in March or April 2004 have already been sent the new version at
no cost. (my caps)

Nothing has shown up. I wrote to Cloanto and received an email from Michael stating that only customers who bought from Cloanto would receive the free upgrade. At no time previously was that ever stated.

I don't have a problem paying for an upgrade, but I would think that Cloanto would have previously qualified the "all customers" criterion.
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Offline bhoggett

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Re: Amiga Forevery 6, Real or Vaporware?
« Reply #14 on: May 12, 2004, 11:39:45 PM »
Yes, it seems a bit of a mess, doesn't it?

I think the problem you have is partly due to the distribution model (AFAIK distributors BUY their copies from Cloanto, then re-sell them, often months and even years later) coupled with Cloanto clearly not formulating a contingency measure to deal with old copies of AmigaForever 5 being sold by their approved distributors during March and April.

It's a lack of attention to detail, which seems symptomatic of the AmigaForever 6 package overall.
Bill Hoggett