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Amiga

The "New" Amiga Finally Releases Something 150

Posted by Hemos from the honest-we're-not-just-vaporware dept.
It appears that the new Amiga has actually released something - yes, in a press release put out on the 3rd, they announced the Developers' Kit has been put out for Linux, Amiga and Java Developers. Yes, at only $99, you too can be a new Amiga Developer.
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The "New" Amiga Finally Releases Something More

The "New" Amiga Finally Releases Something

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  • >AmiNET is the worlds' largest collection of software for any platform,
    >so I'm told. Remember, Amiga has been around a lot longer than this
    >linux thing you kids use :)

    At least half of AmiNET consits of junk files for the Amiga like mods and the like. Most the other collections like Simtel don't tend to bother with this kind of stuff
  • > While I'm a long time Amiga-user and love(d) the
    > system, I can't really get excited about the
    > resurrection of the platform.

    I think the point that some people seem to skirt around is that Amiga are trying to resurrect the old Amiga in as much as Linus tried to resurrect Unix by writing Linux.

    I'm sure that if Amiga had called themselves [insert cool name here] instead then they'd have an easier time of it (especially on slashdot) because people wouldn't be saying "Well it used to be good, but..."

    Cheers,

    oojah
  • Both 68k and PPC Linux versions do run on Amigas. The new OS is being developed for PPC powered Amigas as well.
  • LOL How many different types of programs can you imagine to program for a pre-1985 DOS?

    No Games, Graphical Programs, GUI Programs, etc that`s the type of stuff for the creative mind and potential PD and Shareware developer. That`s why it took of the way it did. With some marketing it would have been a breakthrough not only on the technical side.
  • Cheers mate.... I must have scrolled through that list a dozen times without spotting that option. Doh!

    Alan.
  • I meant killer business applications, not killer niche applications :-)

    The Amiga needed a Lotus 1-2-3 equivalent, a WordPerfect equivalent, a decent database system, and a lot more besides. They never appeared, or they were severely underpowered or didn't take advantage of the Amiga in any way. Without these basic core programs, the Amiga never had a real chance in the business market, where all the money is.

    Commodore in 1985 should have paid Lotus or even some of the 8-bit software writers to write this software so that it would have been available a few months after launch.

    Shame about Workbench 1.3's default Orange on Blue colour scheme as well - it wasn't pretty. Then WOrkbench 2's colour scheme was too dull and grey. A better colour scheme would have been a nice colour in the background, with grey widgets etc, but Commodore never wanted to use more than 4 colours on screen at the same time! It took a long time for VisualPrefs and Birdie to arrive.

  • Maybe interesting for you to know is that Sony is one of the major funders of this new RTOS.
  • Well I imagine that wouldn`t have been much fun for you at all. BECAUSE it would have been SLOW AS HELL!

    Now imagine that these Quake and Doom versions runned code identical at similar speeds on x86 Windows, PPC iMac, PPC Classic Amiga, MJAC philips cell phone, etc :)

    Imagine what this will mean to coders! Code once run anywhere!!
  • Don't worry, I'm surprised too.
    8 years or so since anything happenned, I thought it was dead. As in not just as a mainstream machine, but even as a trademark or product.
  • It's pronounced ah-mee-gah. Since the Amiga has existed since 1985, and I have one right beside me, I can assure you: It's not va-por-ware.
  • The big deal is mostly that Quake and Doom where first ported to java and the demos on the developer-machine showing several versions of Doom and Quake at once were a nice demonstration of the speed at which the new systems execute java-code. Remember... It will be even faster (35-50%) when Linux is being stripped and ONLY native Elate is running on the system ;)
  • Yes, QNX is great. But they were dumped by the last Amiga team, who slowly inbred to became dribbling fools. (Just who WAS Tom Schmidt?)
    But this stuff is all, presumably, platform and OS independent, so QNX is just as much in there (it's supported already) as Linux, Windows et al are.

    As far as I know.

    And I'm only an Amiga-liker (not fan).
  • "I can't believe many people are getting caught up in this total marketing scam. The only thing they are taking from the old Amiga is the name."

    It's the "Amiga philosophy". That's how it's linked.
    The first Amiga (A1000) was cheap, powerful, innovative, and created new standards, such as mulitmedia and stuff.

    This is how New Amiga is linked to Old Amiga.

    (Or something. As long as it's cheap and good and clever, and does something new, it's of the Miggy spirit.)
  • "Don't forget: the new 'Amiga' isn't based on AmigaOS or Amiga hardware. Or any hardware."

    Are you saying this is bad or good?
    The reason PC's have faults is that it's still based on very crap 1970's architecture.
    A new PC will be able to encompass all the staggering changes in technology since then more directly.

    Well, you'd think so, at least.
  • Perhaps I will stop
    Then again I may go on
    Both are good choices
  • There once was Anonymous Coward
    Thought Five Seven Five dumb as a mallard
    He replied with a smile
    "I rhyme once in a while!
    Free haikus, you want more? Show me dollars!"
  • It`s a totally new OS which happens to be made by people loving the Classic Amigas. Just as MacOS X will be a totally new OS compared to the orginal MacOS. So will this be! I think it`s great that it will also run on Classic Amigas as well.

    Amigans are excellent developers and many of leading figures of them have been hired by Amiga Inc.
  • If I could get an Amiga with up-to-date HW, up-to-date SW and up-to-date pricetag, I'd throw this crappy wintelbox out the window the very next moment...

    We can always dream, can't we?
  • Go to the Prefs, Advanced, and uncheck "Enable folder view for FTP sites." It's still going to freeze though -- no fixing that.

    --

  • Yes I know *that*.

    I am comparing it to say bootign Workbench off a floppy, which loads a full GUI as well. I am talking user-friendly GUI OS off one disk. SHow me that on GNU/linux.
  • from the press release:
    "Amiga is Back..."

    hmm. I've heard this a few times. Perhaps this gives us an insight into what AMIGA might stand for, in the good 'ol GNU style:

    "AMiga Is Going, Again"

    :>

  • Looks like other Amigans are active as well.
    Rebol/view is out and from what I`ve seen it kicks ass. Scriptable
    gui creator for Internet.
    This Amiga SDK for multiple CPU might be interesting as well, this sounds like
    Transmeta concept but other way around.
    There are some real innovations coming out from AMIGA community.
    maybe this will lead to some kind of convergence between Amiga and Linux communities
    God knows Linux needs elegance of AMIGA software like YAM.

  • Their Java engine is already available for QNX though! Look here [qnx.com]. :)
  • "My" Fortune 50 company uses open source and free tools left and right, running on an OS (Unix) that runs the world *BECAUSE* of the vast quantity of free tools involved in it.

    Name me one succesful computer platform that has tried to discourage development of free software.

    There's not one; they die off if they try that.

    Again, you seem to be laboring under some horrible misapprehension that Amiga makes less money if some guy off the street writes a program for their hardware.

    By charging a measily 100 bucks for its SDK, it weeds out those that are only interested in developing free software.

    Exactly; and that is a horribly stupid thing to do when trying to build a new platform.

    I suspect that you are simply a troll spending too much time typing, so I'm going to go let you be an idiot now; the general public has long ago stopped reading this thread.

    Oh, one last thing: "my" Fortune 50 company doesn't charge for it's software. The software is free, because it encourages people to use our services more, which means we make more money.

    If we charged for the software, fewer people would use it, and we'd make less money.

    Actually, we did make a piece of software once upon a time that we charged for. I can see a running count of every single time it's used, anywhere in the world; it's about a dozen total times a day.

    Our free offering is used hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of times a day. Our web-based program is used tens of thousands of times a day.

    We make more money in an hour than you will in your entire life. I think we're right and you're wrong.

    Our revenue is nearly double Microsoft's.

    --
  • > What is it about modern OSs that you dislike so much?

    They are bigger while they can do less. Size is very important it does not only save you harddrive space but also make things work much faster. That`s why an 50 mhz 68060 powered Amiga running AmigaOS feels faster than a 600 mhz PIII running Windows.

    Amiga software was often written in pure assembler code allowing amazing speeds! I don`t mind people developing games purely in C code but the OS has to be booted each and every time so it should be as fast as possible!

    Also Amiga will be targetting very small mobile appliances which don`t have much memory and super fast processors. Imagine playing games like online multiplayer quake at full speed on your mobile phone.
  • Whoohoo, at last. If anyone can finally drag ol' Miggy back up from the depths of obscurity it'll be Fleecy and co'.

  • The whole os fits in a rom of 512 kB. (256 on pre 2.0 machines.

    So when you want to upgrade to the latest OS, you buy a new machine?

  • Well, PC 2D hardware isn't as featureful, but that's because most of those features simply aren't necessary for good 2D graphics today. With CPU and bus speeds so fast, there's no need for a Copper. I assume the hardware blitters in today's graphics cards are way more advanced--especially when you can blit 24 bit graphics etc. Also, there's no need for hardware sprites anymore. As far as AAA goes, I never understood why it was never released. I remember reading at the time that Commodore actually lost the designs to the ECS/OCS chipset and AGA was the result. I dunno. My all time favorite Commodore blunder has to be when the Fat Buster (I think?) chip was found to be faulty like 3 years after it was released in the A3000. Nobody knew because nobody actually released a 32-bit Zorro III card until the A4000 came out in '92. And that's when the flaw was discovered. Ah the memories. I kinda miss my A4000/030.
  • I'd say the Video toaster and Lightwave [www.newtek.com] were killer applications. No matter how much CBM screwed up marketing, they still sold amigas simply because inside every video toaster was an amiga 2000 (and later 3000, 4000, until Newtek finally (as in, in the past year) managed a custom PC hardware solution sans amiga (earlier "PC" and "mac" video toasters actually had an entire amiga in them...)

    What sank commodre was incompetent managment, and a bungled entry into the IBM-compatible PC market. Believe it or not, their Amiga division was still making profit right until the end (especially the european division - the amiga was incredibly popular all over europe) - It was just all bled off into the black hole of the rest of the company.

  • Nothing good to say
    But I will post anyway
    there goes my karma.

  • There is still a demand for the Amiga platform. At the recent St. Louis show three Disney animators created a series of concept designs for free. The Amiga has retained its image as a multimedia machine even after years of neglect. The new Amiga Corp. are hoping to tap into this to create something new.

    There is however, the problem that developers of the innovative kind (people bound to try something new, create something staggering) really starve for low-threshold developer information for any product. Give them a free toy and they'll play with it, with the odd chance of something wonderful coming out of it.

    The $99, however, is probably only payable by credit-card, which alone will rule out a fair amount of potential developers. In Europe, credit card payment is still not that commonplace as it is in the US. Even for people who may think the $99 is worth it, there is the matter of hassle. It's just not as convenient as downloading sdk.tar.gz and starting to hack.

    Using this logic, Sony must be really be desperate. Look at the price of their DevKits! Why should they give it away for free?

    Ah, but the Gaming Console is a totally different ballgame. The hardware there is usually sold at a loss. Money is made from the software, either through direct sales (Nintendo) or through royalties (Playstation). The Development Kits for such beasts usually include special-purpose hardware, which on its own makes giving it away to anyone but people who are serious about generating money out of their products a silly venture.

    Sony made a semi-elegant knee-jerk to the not-so-serious coding geeks by releasing the Net Yaroze, by the way. For something around $400-$500, you could buy this special issue PSX1 complete with a linkcable, a convenient runtime library and the software to transfer code and data from the PC to the playstation. Software created for this platform couldn't run on an unmodded PSX, which meant that to release an 'official' playstation game you still needed the full devkit.

    Nintentdo's position, if I understood it correctly, has been one of even more direct control over the developers. Again, as far as I have been told, you just couldn't release software unless if they really really liked you. And your software. Which meant that there had to be a Mario in there somewhere. That's S-NES lore, though, I have no idea if they got a better act together for N64. Most probably not, considering again the high density of Mario lameness surrounding the product.


    Cheers,
    Pi
  • ya, right, now I know you're about as much BS as a stockyard can handle.

    Ok, I admit it, it's not double; it's about 9/5th of theirs.

    That's Fortune Magazine's figures, not internal figures.
    --
  • The press release claims Amiga started multi-media. While they may have pioneered what we consider multimedia, almost any computer of any time could communicate through multiple media: screen and hard drive activity. Not the most sophisticated, perhaps, but I've diagnosed problems by differences in the sound of a hard drive.

    -----------------------

  • NO!

    You buy a new ROM of course!
  • i don't know :/ although i am stronlgy convinced that the AmigaOS is the very best ever written
    coz it kept on going even if you deleted every single file on your disk, i'm wondering if it's a good idea to let a sunken ship float again...
    if they can make it happen, i'll be their first customer... IF
    mvg,
    Kris "dJOEK" Vandecruys
  • Is this really something important? How many people will actually start developing for something that is just on the stage "we-will-make-it-we-really-will" and stated in the press release as the best thing since sliced bread?

  • The claim, however, bears a great deal more resemblence to fact than, say, Steve Jobs' claim he invented the GUI, or Microsoft's mny claimed "innovations".

  • Re:Multi-media (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The press release claims Amiga started multi-media. While they may have pioneered what we consider multimedia, almost any computer of any time could communicate through multiple media: screen and hard drive activity. Not the most sophisticated, perhaps, but I've diagnosed problems by differences in the sound of a hard drive.

    You must be a lot of fun at parties.

  • from the article:

    "Tao has been talking for some time now about our developments to create Digital Heaven(TM) and we see Amiga and its community as a fundamental part of the new order that can make it happen and take an industry lead. With the sheer tenacity and the many qualities of McEwen and his Amiga team, the world is going to see Amiga as a Premier Brand for connected digital appliances," said Francis Charig Chairman of the Tao-Group.

    Clearly, the Amiga is going to Do It But Good (tm) this time - they're parterning with someone capable of delivering Digital Heaven!(tm) Oh, but Tao - be careful! Your Trademarked Phrase Of Goodness (tm) seems to have been taken from you by an evil Cybersquatter!:

    Registrant:

    Digital Heaven (DIGITALHEAVEN2-DOM)

    725 Winslow St.

    Crockett, CA 94525

    US

    Domain Name: digitalheaven.com

    Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:

    Petty, Rob (PR117-ORG)

    10g1cb0mb@VALUE.NET

    Digital Heaven

    725 WInslow St.

    Crockett, CA 94525

    US

    510.787.1268

    Technical Contact, Zone Contact:

    DNS Admin (DA817-ORG) dns@VALUE.NET,

    Value Net

    2855 Mitchell Dr. Suite #105

    Walnut Creek, CA 94598

    US

    (925) 943-5769

    Record last updated on 25-Aug-1997.

    Record expires on 26-Aug-2000.

    Record created on 25-Aug-1997.

    Database last updated on 2-Jun-2000 13:41:57 EDT.

  • I can't believe many people are getting caught up in this total marketing scam. The only thing they are taking from the old Amiga is the name. I mean, it's great that they are trying to build a new platform and all, but why call it the Amiga? What does the old Amiga of 1984 have to do with this thing at all?

    I don't know; maybe they'll come out with something and it'll be cool. But why do I have the feeling it's going to be a Caddyshack II? (or name your own bad sequel where some genius producer decides to make a movie whose only purpose is tack onto the success of the first movie)


    --

  • I agree. It's ridiculous charging for the development kits. This is eliminating a very large number of potential developers of free software. Amigas were made popular by amateurs (even most professional games developers started of pcoding their Amigas as a hobby), not by large corporations. How many do they expect to sell anyway? It can't possibly match the development cost.

    Okay. Rant over.
  • Amiga Inc. released the SPECS for the developer box back in April. That's what they promised, and that's what they delivered. As far as actually releasing the software tools for the new AmigaOS development environment, they specificially didn't make any promises as to a delivery date.

    The Amiga market (or what remains of it) has been plagued for years by empty promises. Bill McEwen and Fleecy Moss emphatically stated that they would not be giving "teaser announcements" with estimated due dates because Amiga users have been jerked around enough as it is. From here on in, they make announcements when they've got something to SHOW for it.

  • Nice idea (OS held in a socketed ROM). Very nice.
  • Why is this -1 Troll???? It is a perfectly true statement and is completely relevant.
  • Thats not necessarily true - Amiga DOS and Amiga Exec are written in Green Hill C...

    Not to mention I have yet to see a pure assembler routine that is useful (for like an OS) that is really faster/smaller then a well written C program.

  • The Amiga 1000 custom chipset (OCS) can only do 4096 colours in HAM (hold and modify) at a max rez of 320x240...

    And actually auto-config wasn't a term until Kickstart 1.3 - which the A1000 didn't ship with originally. You used to have to use Addmem commands to get it to recognize more then 512k of ram.

    However when you see an ancient A2000 (originally 1024k of ram, no hd, 68000-8MHz processor) running with a GVP/040-50, SCSI (on the CPU upgrade board, and additional controllers on the Zorro2 bus), and over 96 megs of ram spaned accross maybe three memory upgrade cards (this describes my old machine) really shows you how cool Auto-Config really is. And mind you it all worked the FIRST time :).

  • Anyone that visited the 1986 Expo (Worlds Fair) Amiga pavilion in Vancouver BC would have decribed the presentation as what you described in the above paragraph - except that it wasn't humans controlling all the media - it was an Amiga 1000.

    And I have to say that I've never seen another multimedia presentation (from any company other then Commodore/Amiga) that was as impressive.

  • BeOS runs in it's own space even if you install it in windows. It just kicks out windows and boots up, the same way the used to boot BeOS on the mac.

    ---------------------------------
  • Anyone who has lived with computer thru 80's and90's must admit that Amiga was next great breakthru after c64. It REALLY introduced something that we now call "multimedia" and it's unique way to handle programs is state of art even today... Yes no memory protecting, that was really a pitfall, but it bringed up speed... LONG live the amiga... i'm still using linux ;)

  • Actually, much as I hate to admit it, PnP does have one advantage over autoconfig; it enumerates the entire resource list before allocating resources. Autoconfig allocated resources on a FIFO basis. The fact that autoconfig usually worked properly the first time says more about the hardware vendors than anything else.

    And before anyone wonders, I am an Amiga advocate; in fact, if my A4000 still worked, I would be using it even over Linux ...

  • Okay, I admit it was a bit of a rant. To put my feelings more calmly, I do feel that it would benefit the Amiga more to make this free. At $99 there won't be nearly enough demand to get a decent return on the development costs. It also has the unfortunate side effect of eliminating hobbyists.

    Its also worth remembering that SAS/C was released purely as a commercial product rather than to encourage development for the platform. The include and library files on their own were available for a lot less.
  • "as much as Linus tried to resurrect Unix by writing Linux"

    Hrm. That's funny.. My Solaris and Digital UNIX boxes seemed to be running just fine without the Linux explosion.

    I hate to break it to you, but Linux did not resurrect UNIX. UNIX was never dead.

    Linux originally was authored out of frustration for the lack of a good UNIX-like system for the PC. UNIX had been running on larger machines "forever" at that point.

    -Jeff

  • They are bigger while they can do less. Size is very important it does not only save you harddrive space but also make things work much faster. That`s why an 50 mhz 68060 powered Amiga running AmigaOS feels faster than a 600 mhz PIII running Windows.

    Besides the fact that that's a huge exaggeration, so what? Again, how does the average user even know the difference? The applications are almost instantaneous as it is.

    And you say "do less". What exactly "less" are modern operating systems doing exactly?

    Also Amiga will be targetting very small mobile appliances which don`t have much memory and super fast processors. Imagine playing games like online multiplayer quake at full speed on your mobile phone.

    That all sounds well and good, but there is a distinct lack of specifics here. What is this Amiga OS going to do that Palm or PocketPC won't? It's easy to say something will be the "ultimate OS" when it doesn't even exist.

    And what does the speed of Quake have to do with the operating system? [answer: very little]. The smallest OS in the world is not going to make 3D mathematics run faster.

    The one area you have a point is in boot speed, but most people including me leave their computers on all the time anyway.

    You obviously have a lot of nostalgia for the Amiga. There is no question is was very advanced -- in its day. But you don't seem to be able to define exactly what this new platform is going to do for the average user. Computers are already fast. They do everything the Amiga did, and far, far more (let's not even talk about protected or virtual memory). No one except engineers care about what's under the hood (and even then, most engineers don't even care).

    This is the problem I have. No one seems to be able to define "how is it going to be better". One thing I will guarantee you is the days of writing an OS completely in assembly are over (although, parts are certainly still assembly).


    --

  • My personal beef isn't with the above statement, it's with Amiga Inc.'s use of it. They insinuate that they are the same group who were responsible for the revolutionary computing concepts of the Amiga 1000 and it's descendants. As anyone who has been paying attention (intentionally or otherwise) to the Amiga saga knows, Amiga has changed hands more times than a baton in a relay.

    I think Amiga Inc. is trying a little too hard to take credit for the innovative concepts introduced by others. At the very least, though, I have to give them credit for doing what they can to remind the world that the Amiga as we know/knew it was truly a remarkable machine. Whether the new products inspire the same kind of devotion remains to be seen.

    I had a point. Where'd it go? :^)

  • Amiga means girlfriend in spanish.

    Like an old girlfriend we'd like to see her come back but she never dose....

    Even if we see an Amiga again it won't be the old girl we once knew but a totally new Amiga...

    But the technology that made the Amiga soo attractive can be found many places today.
    The Amigas great selling point was co-processors. The load wasn't on the Amiga CPU.
    Today 3D rendering is so intense it is now left to a 3D graphics chip not the computer to take the load.
    The music cards today still don't take the full load for the music but then there isn't much speed lose due to it.

    Macs and PCs are more and more including Amiga like technology.
    The Amiga is a name now...

    And a word... that means Girlfriend
  • That's the problem. The "classic" line of Amigas is only being supported by third party efforts. Amiga Inc. isn't doing jack with them... and since the market is so washed out, hardware developers have rapidly lost the impetus to produce seriously kick-ass -- or at least, up to date -- hardware for the Amiga.

    While I applaud Amiga Inc.'s efforts in firing up a new Amiga paradigm, I still think they need to think about the machines that are already out there. They HAVE a wonderful OS which needs support NOW. Yeah, they released OS3.5, but that was really 3.1 with a whole lot of patches. They need to take some of that money of theirs and push some seriously smoking hardware.

    The 68060/50MHz + PPC603e+/200MHz in my machine now is nice, and works fast with the current AmigaOS (which barely touches that PPC chip), but faster chips won't appear unless the OS is designed to take advantage of them. Chicken and egg, Bill and Fleecy, chicken and egg.

  • You're probably jumping the gun a little with regards to just how cozy Amiga Inc. and Corel were getting. The announcement was one of a "strategic partnership," but that announcement seemed to be printed all over Amiga's side of the fence, with little mention of it on Corel's end.

    It looks like their "partnership" with Corel boiled down to the fact that the AmigaOS SDK would work with Corel's linux distro... with possible future Corel development being aimed at interoperability with the AmigaOS environment - but likely only once Amiga demonstrated a working product and a userbase for Cowpland to hawk his wares too.

    In other words, I don't think Amiga Inc. would be too adversely affected if Corel botches it's merger prospects.

  • And besides that, what marketing genius came up with the idea of CHARGING for the damn thing?

    "Oh, I know; we'll cut our developer base by a few orders of magnitude, but we could make a couple of bucks profit apiece off each of the fifteen people who'll go ahead and buy one!"

    That's assuming they're even making a profit; I expect that at $99 they're taking a loss anyway, so why cripple their product before it's even hatched?

    Stupid bastards.

    --
  • The decision to charge anything at all for the developers' kit suggests that the new Amiga folk either:

    1) know something we don't know about the demand for their platform,
    2) think the kit is the only product they'll ever sell, or
    3) are making a colossal mistake.

    I suspect the latter.

    They should be bending over to get developers and so should be giving the kit away.
  • Yes, at only $99, you too can be a new Amiga Developer.

    How much is it to be an old one?
  • I can't believe many people are getting caught up in this total marketing scam. The only thing they are taking from the old Amiga is the name. I mean, it's great that they are trying to build a new platform and all, but why call it the Amiga? What does the old Amiga of 1984 have to do with this thing at all?

    No Kidding. The original Amiga was designed around specialized custom hardware (Denise, etc.), so that it could blow away other platforms in applications and games that were heavy on graphics and sound.

    The thrust of the "New Amiga" it seems is the exact opposite. General hardware? Why not just call it JavaOS or something like that?

    In my heart and mind, a "New Amiga" for today's marketplace would be built around something like the (newly-opened) Sony Emotion Engine (perhaps even as a coprocessor to a PPC core in a sort of non-symmetric multiprocessing arrangement), with NVidia graphics and a 16 audio channels worth of high-caliber TI DSP's right on the Mobo. Give it RGB, SV, NTSC, and PAL video outs.

    Make it expandible but keep it in a small box (no towers full of empty space). Don't waste money on making it too expandible; solder where it will save a buck. Chances are when a component of your machine goes obsolete, so does the whole system. (Look at patterns of upgrades today. It's very common to buy a new system, since incremental upgrading will always run into incompatiobilities eventually.)

    Allow it to boot without a keyboard, for crying out loud. The machine should be as comfortable in the role of a gaming machine as music or video studio. Put it together and whaddaya got? A relatively cheap (in bang for the buck) machine that produces the same kid-at-Christmas feeling we all got from our original Amigas.

    You can say that it would never fly today because of blah blah blah, but at least it would deserve the Amiga name.

    Bingo Foo

    ----

  • > > so, it is pronounced ah-may-gah or ah-mee-gah?

    > It is pronounced ah-mee-gah.

    You mean it's not "am-I-gay?"



    ----

  • Name me one succesful computer platform that has tried to discourage development of free software.

    Apple computer. :)

    Now, that's either proves your point or disproves it, depending on how you look at it. Nobody abused their developers like Apple, yet they have miraculously managed to survive.

    I'm with you, by the way, but I had to throw that out.


    --

  • I was sitting there waiting for the bus actually thinking about this in the morning - your right - if you make every scanline a different pallent (kinda like dragging screens half way between each other) you can do some amazing high rez 4096 colour pictures :) - don't they call that HAM-E? ViewTek/ADPRO will view those style pictures actualy.
  • hehe... although you must admit, the way he phrased it does have a certain humorous effect...

    --
    It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
    - Sean
  • coward...mallard.... dollars

    stick with the haiku...
    limericks ain't yo thang
  • Why post a reply to every message I write and say it`s bullshit? You are truly a pathetic anonymous coward. At least try to respond with an insightful statement or opinion. :(
  • AMIGA

    A Marketing Image Gone Awry
  • Whoops. My bad.

    I misinterpretted the post I was replying to.

    I guess the one I was replying to was actually the same point.

    D'oh.

    -Jeff
  • Amiga is the undead man. Evil juju powers trying to raise the dead.

  • No amgia means friend (femine) in spanish, I believe the "girlfriend" your talking about is novia.
  • Ah, but you will immediately hear from the Amiga camp that the Classic Amigas can be booted from a mere floppy with full GUI, CLI, multi-tasking and the lot. Comparing it to a non-X implementation of Linux on a floppy doesn't really hold water.

    (of course, the fact that a good chunk of the Amiga kernel resides in the hardware Kickstart chip rarely gets factored into the equation, so I leave it to you to duke out the kernel-to-kernel faceoff silliness)

    And 50 megs for an OS? Not bad, I guess, if you're going to use something fairly stripped down. I always loved the fact that I could install the complete Amiga OS (on what, 3-5 non-HD floppies) in the time it took just to BOOT my friend's WinNT monstrosity...

  • One of the things that eventually killed Commodore was the lack of apps for Amiga.
    Commodore pushed the Amiga as a gamming platform (at least in the United States) and pushed game develupers to port games.
    Word Perfict was one of the few apps that made it and the Amiga user base laffed it off (It wasn't much more than a Dos port and it showed.)

    People who look at the age of Linux vs the age of the Amiga and use that as the only mesure of software available are fools.

    Amiga software develupment dropped off after Commodore died (for a good reason) whats left was writen by Amiga fanatics.
    Linux has been around a bit longer than Amiga was "Alive" and the Amiga software base is probably now totally post death software. Dead systems don't attract develupers...

    Linux however has a larg base of pre-birth software. Unix software to be exact. Linux addopted much of it's software from it's *nix legacy.

    Also Linux attracts develupers much more than most living platforms. The community is coder friendly and if you wish you may code for many *nix systems at once. BSD and Solarus come to mind.
    Also much work is made to make it posable to write crossplatform code for Windows and MacOs as well...
    A very attractive prospect... one code base... many kick butt *nix systems a few non-*nix systems and a great deal of community support.

    The shear number of Linux apps do in fact eclyps Amiga.
    This isn't importent... Amiga is a cool system and I suspect the reason many develupers continue to write code for the dead Amiga is simply to code on such a kick butt system. For a dead system Amiga has a pritty alive dev community.

    I'm sure the new Amiga company is just drolling over the chance to move the Amiga dev community over to the new Amiga platform.
    They are also probably looking to the Linux community becouse it also has a very strong dev community and if they can get both Amiga and Linux dev communitys working on code for the new Amiga...
    The new Amiga could have more apps than even Windows in a very short span of time....
    That really would kick....
  • For that money you'd get beos pro with dev. tools included.
    No offense but there's no way in hell (a.k.a. when hell freezes over) that I would pay $100 to get a dev kit for something unexisting which *might* become available, but for which noone will develop since they charge for for the kit . :)
    Seriously, they should pay attention to the os2 vs windows 3.1 war: ibm charged for their sdk, M$ gave theirs away...

    ...
    Yes, I know I ramble and my spelling isn't quite up to scratch. If you wish to complain,

  • I don't think I've seen Caddyshack II, but the movie reference has got me thinking this way: it's going to be like Halloween III. If you've ever seen the Halloween movies, #3 sticks out as being total unrelated to the plots of the others. It's just Halloween in name only. That's what we have here.

    Halloween III was a pretty bad movie too. But I dunno if Amiga II is going to be bad or good. Everything they've said about it has struck me as rather vague. It looks like it's going to be some very high-level APIs, and who knows, it might actully be useful. So I've ordered the SDK, just in case there's something here.

    It's so important to break up the homogeneity in personal computers, that I'm willing to try out just about everything that comes by. I've already got an x86 Linux box, so this SDK is just another hundred bucks. Big deal. I'm also likely to buy a Mac when MacOS X comes out, and I'm damn well going to try out the QNX Neutrino release when it comes out this summer. Somewhere in all this noise, there's got to be a signal.


    ---
  • Be was (still is?) doing the same thing for their developer's kit/access to their developer's resources. It seems to me absurd for a tiny operating system company to think that developers are customers instead of partners, or in a way, employees. Users will not use an operating system without applications, and it takes more than one company to write enough applications to coerce new users into buying their OS.

    Josh Woodward
    www.fruhead.com

  • 1) know something we don't know about the demand for their platform,

    There is still a demand for the Amiga platform. At the recent St. Louis show three Disney animators created a series of concept designs for free. The Amiga has retained its image as a multimedia machine even after years of neglect. The new Amiga Corp. are hoping to tap into this to create something new.

    2) think the kit is the only product they'll ever sell,

    Using this logic, Sony must be really be desperate. Look at the price of their DevKits! Why should they give it away for free?

    Gax
    Amiga Interactive Guide
    http://amiga.emugaming.com
  • Squid-chompin' Fleecy was most certainly one of the ol' guys. But stating that is quite difference from the insinuation of "we created Multi-Media computing" that seems to be inherent in their statement. You could easily get into a bizarrly existential debate over the difference between one we and the other we, and where the line between one we and the other we lies, and that a horse is a horse, of course, of course... but that would hurt my brain at this hour.

    Now, if the majority of the "we" that DID bring up the Classic Amiga line back in the 80s were to get involved in the current project, wooh... that would really get a whole lot of people excited.

    I still have one of the original Amiga 4000 posters on my wall (over my A4K, natch). The slogan on it is "The most powerful multimedia computer ever built by Commodore. Or anyone else."

    *sigh*

  • You're missing the point completely. If they had a real platform they were trying to promote, it would make sense to give away their development tools, so that they can make more profit in the long run - especially when they seem to be the underdog here, and they're trying to capture an enthusiast user base. As it is, it sounds more like a scam than anything else.

  • It's ah-MEE-ga.
  • The original Amiga was innovative. Hopefully this one will be too. At one time, the original Amiga was new and alien itself. The technological landscape today is vastly different to then; obviously any sort of innovation today must be different too.

    It's not a shell. It can run hosted by another OS or, at some time in the future it is planned, natively.

  • > That still doesn't explain why they want to call it the Amiga!

    The company is called Amiga Inc. the product will most likely be called something like Amie or Amiverse.

    The Amiga community is supporting the classic Amiga because there was no viable elegant non bloated alternative available. Now the developers need something new as the advances in processing power and memory chips were able to compensate the inferior technologies in the current PC hardware architectures and Bloatware OSes.

    For the Amiga community this is an Amiga succesor because it is being developed by the people who love the orginal Amiga and keep that in mind while creating something more advanced and future proof.

    > Actually, is this new operating system going to be backward compatible with the old Amiga apps?

    Yes it will be. But this is NOT Amiga`s top priority right now! Old apps can still be run on classic Amigas while running the new OS. An emultion layer will be written in VP code, but first things first.

    > If it's a total break with the past, then what roots of the Amiga are in it?

    The users, developers, designers. Apart from that what does MacOS X have in common with the current MacOS? Consider this OS as an AmigaOS X.

  • Re:Some facts about the SDK for non-Amigans (Score:4)

    by hattig ( 47930 ) on Saturday June 03, 2000 @07:51AM (#1028498) Journal
    (of course, the fact that a good chunk of the Amiga kernel resides in the hardware Kickstart chip rarely gets factored into the equation, so I leave it to you to duke out the kernel-to-kernel faceoff silliness)

    But the PC has 1.44Mb disks, and the Amiga had 880Kb disks and a 512K ROM. Together, that is 1.4Mb for the Amiga, uncompressed. Many of the single disk Linux distros are compressed to fit everything on.

    Of course, the Linux kernel has more features, but you would hope so considering how much more recent it is and the amount of work that hos gone into it. But being able to boot up into a full GUI, filemanager (Workbench), CLI available, many programs available on the first disk was amazing. A full preemptive multitasking OS, with autoconfig that is better than plug and play, and everything else that you all know, in only 1.4Mb. Nothing has come close since.

    The Amiga was great in its day. Strict control of the hardware helped though, there was no having to support 100 different sound and graphics cards, the computer already came with the best you could get! A computer with real charisma, great games, but no killer applications, despite the superiority of the OS. WIthout the backing of business it didn't get brilliant sales except to designers and gamers.

    Commodore were to blame. The managers there had no vision or foresight.

    Hopefully the new Amiga will combine the best of the old Amiga with the best of other operating systems. Tao's VP technology is very good and doesn't take much of a hit on the system. The best way I could describe it is a very rich object code, and the OS loader incorporates the last stage of a compiler (very optimised) to get the best performance possible. I would bet that it would bo better on PPC, Alpha, MIPs, ARM etc than on x86 because of the limited instructions though. Also, the VP can include instructions like malloc, qsort, etc, so processor intensive applications will not be slowed down overly but core functions, as they will already exist in optimised formats.

    The GUI is interesting as well. It isn't X, but it does allow anti-aliasing of text, transparency etc like Mac OS X. I don't know much else though, but it is a lot better than X, more like Berlin in a way.

  • "strict control of hardware" (I assume you mean integrated sound and graphics hardware in the system spec) sort of hurt Amiga in the long run.

    Commodore was notoriously slow in developing their future chipsets. They held us over with minor enhancements such as the ECS chipset while the PC were gearing up with increasingly more powerful plug-in graphics adapters.

    For the Amiga, there was really no choice--you had to wait for Commodore's latest offering. And when they did come out with a new chipset, you couldn't just upgrade. You needed a new machine.

    Sure, you had cards like the OpalVision, etc. but since the regular chipset was included in the system spec, everyone wrote directly to the hardware and bypassed the OS. So your brand spankin' new card was useless except for the included applications and maybe some rare OS-friendly software.

    Sure, the PC had a bazillion different graphics cards and such, but this allowed the PC to evolve while we had to wait for a single company to provide the new graphics solutions.

    The fact is, the Amiga was so far ahead of its time, it took until about 1993 for the PC to catch up to what was essentially 1984 technology.

    That year, Commodore introduced their new 'revolution' in graphics--the AGA chipset. What a joke--it was almost unchanged from ECS.
  • And I suppose that you work for free?

    When I am distributing infrastructure software for a platform that runs a free operating system?

    You're damn right I do.

    The purpose of a development kit for an Amiga is not to be a profit center; it's to get people to write apps. The more apps the better, because they make their money from hardware sales, and who'll buy it if it doesn't have apps?

    I am really tired of all the college kids screaming "but its not free".

    Sorry, I'm a middle-aged professional systems administrator for a Fortune 50 company.

    I haven't set foot in a college in over 10 years.

    --

  • I am really tired of all the college kids screaming "but its not free". HELLO, WAKEUP !!!

    While I agree with you in the general sense, he actually has a point in this case. It's not uncommon to give away developer kits when you are trying to attract developers to a new platform.

    This said, it could be a lot worse at $99. That was one of things that held Apple back for years was the outrageous prices they charged for their developer kits.


    --

  • It seems a lot of people missed the updated Amiga World today (http://www.amiga.com/press/zine/6-3-00/AW1.htm)

    There where actually a number of announcements today from Amiga. The update on their Amiga World magazine is the most informative.

    The Amiga World actually contains a simple 'Hello World' sample code in VP (Virtual Processor Code) and a good explanation of the new Amiga Foundation Layer (AFL).

    Quite an interesting read, I thought ;)

  • Portable assembler? (Score:3)

    by Dust Puppy ( 63916 ) on Saturday June 03, 2000 @02:59AM (#1028520) Homepage
    With the new environment, developers will be able to take advantage of both Java, and portable assembler coding.



    A portable assembler? Isn't that another name for a C compiler?

  • Why charge for dev kit? (Score:3)

    by {*} ( 36377 ) on Saturday June 03, 2000 @03:21AM (#1028525)
    They want developers? Then why charge for the dev kit? I would think _they_ need developers, rather than the the other way round. Feeling a bit pissed about how costs of (some) dev lits.
  • And in other news:

    Nasa is trying to use "Pig Power" in order to fly the space shuttle.

    Elvis admits that yes indeed he has been living a trailer park in Texas since he faked his death.

    Aliens meet with president. Claim that now they are going to disney world.

    This seems more real than anything in the past. So I hope they do have something here, but who else has seen one to many Amiga sigthings?
  • I start (say) MS-DOS with a bootdisk with command.com configured to load resident in high memory. I replace the bootdisk with a freshly formatted disk. To the computer, I just erased the bootdisk, but I can still do things (e.g. launch programs).

  • All applications will be totally code identical across platforms.

    How can assembly programs (the language is assembly; an assembly compiler is an assembler) be compatible across platforms?

    • Binary compatibility? No. Different platforms have different instruction sets.
    • Binary compatibility through emulation? No. Some consider Java (the current model of this) to be quite slow (but see also this story [slashdot.org]).
    • Source compatibility? No. Different instruction sets implies different numbers of registers and different addressing modes.

    The closest we could get to portable assembly would be C.

  • The Amiga community is supporting the classic Amiga because there was no viable elegant non bloated alternative available. Now the developers need something new as the advances in processing power and memory chips were able to compensate the inferior technologies in the current PC hardware architectures and Bloatware OSes.

    OK, I'd like to hit this "bloatware" issue head-on. What is it about modern OSs that you dislike so much?

    Size? Who cares in an era of 20 gig drives and 1 Ghz processors? I run Win/2000 on a Celeron 466/128 meg of memory. Things run instantaneously.

    Features? What features do you advocate cutting? I like having a full-featured operating system. What benefit is there to stripping everything down?

    I simply don't understand this longing for a stripped-down operating system. Help me out. What will a "non-bloated" new-style AmigaOS offer me, as a desktop user, that Win/2000 won't? [and don't say "reliability" because Win2K is pretty rock solid]

    P.S. I do prefer Linux/Unix as a server OS, but I'm focusing on the desktop for this discussion.


    --

  • Have a look here [amigaflame.co.uk] for an interesting interviwe with Hyperion Software [hyperion-software.com]. They have spent lots of cash on game licences (some costed them 50.000 -100.000 USD) for the new Amiga! Titles include Sin, Shogo, Heretic2, Worms: Armageddon, Freespace: The Great War and many other "Very recent" games soon to be announced!

    They also have the rights for an Linux and Mac port of Shogo. They also promise to soon release some info about some Amiga only games.

  • Amiga? (Score:3)

    by Jouni ( 178730 ) on Saturday June 03, 2000 @03:27AM (#1028543)
    While I'm a long time Amiga-user and love(d) the system, I can't really get excited about the resurrection of the platform. You can wake up the OS but to make it live you have to create all the applications and content from scratch, and it's been quite a long break for everyone.

    However, one of the parties behind this movement, the Tao group [tao.co.uk] I find very interesting indeed.

    Platform-independent, binary-portable high performance Java implementation? I'd sign up today.

    Jouni
    --
    Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com [surrender3d.com]

  • "I for one am quite sick of having a bloated OS like linux on my HD. It's getting to the stage with GNU/linux/X that I am reminded how bloated windows was when I used to use it. Full Mandrake 7 install - 1.5Gb. Minimal - 250Mb. That story of putting linux on a floppy is bull**it."<BR>

    Then don't be such a dumbass and get yourself a distro that *discourages* bloat:<http://www.slackware.com>. A reasonable non-X install with no kernel sources can be done in less then 50megs. Mandrake is installing not just the kitchen sink, but most of the plumbing in the bathroom and down to the sewer main. You don't -need- all that.
    And a decent Linux install can be done to disk, it's been done, many times.
  • AGA was really naff - the sort of thing that should have been released in 1988 to keep the Amiga way ahead of the competition.

    AAA was meant to be the replacement for ECS, and it was pretty good specwise. Unfortunately, Commodore went all funny, and then it was cancelled at the last minute and they had to produce AGA quickly. Terrible shame, as otherwise 1992 Amigas would have had much better facilities, such as true 24-bit screenmodes, 8 or 16 channel 16bit sound, etc, and it would have been a lot faster.

    It is such a shame. PC 2D hardware still isn't as featureful as the Amiga graphics hardware (although it is a lot faster and more resolution etc). Of course, these features are needed less now with 3D hardware and 1GHz processors. Brings a tear to the eye.

  • Haiku (Score:2)

    by 575 ( 195442 )
    Amiga, alive!
    Our destiny etch'd in stone
    We mean it this time
  • I've seen one of these dev systems in person (an early prototype version of the kit). The 'portable assembly' actually refers to a CPU-independent bytecode with its own assembly language.

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