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Amiga

An Amiga Round-up 107

Posted by Hemos from the i'm-not-dead-yet dept.
Mike Bouma writes "Amiga`s CEO Bill McEwen announced in a keynote speech held prior to the AmiWest 2001 show that new consumer PPC motherboards, AmigaOS 4.0 PPC and also AmigaOS for x86 will ship by November 1. Furthermore the Amiga Digital Environment which offers full binary compatibility across CPU architectures and operating systems was being demonstrated at the show running on various handheld devices. In addition, Bill stated that Merlancia Industries has acquired the rights for the Amiga Multimedia Convergence Computer which was being worked on by the Amiga team under Gateway but was cancelled. Merlancia will release new PPC hardware soon after the AmigaOne launch. Their CTO is the infamous Amiga system designer Dave Haynie who designed many critical parts of the classic Amiga 2000, 3000 and 4000 desktop computers. "
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An Amiga Round-up More

An Amiga Round-up

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  • Irony and oldtimes (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Back in the 80's I owned an Amiga 500. It was a cool box! It had 4000 colors when 16 was state of the art and intutive GUI. It was a *cool* gaming system (way better than nintendo) and it had demos for everything! But it was more to me than just my console game system, it was a community of users. I missed the good old days of the "home-brew" computer society, but I'm still a hobbist of anything computer. I found my own "home-brew" club with Amiga users. Every month people would hand out demo's and talk about the latest coolest hack in an open forum at my library. The x86 PC today has too many kids and idiots abusing and selling their ideas to every have this kind of hobbist, or dare I say hacker mentality. Most windows users don't feel as their computer is something to explore with. Its a tool and a money maker. Do NOT get me wrong. The amiga stands very little chance of a comeback due to obvious economic factors, but is your x86 PC providing you with the kind of computing enviroment that you would like to be in? Do you really like dealing with huge coporations and idiot users? Linux users obviously try to take one step toward what I'm talking about (which is what I expect from slashdot), but still the linux community is not as fulfilling to me as the amiga one. Linux has a pretty serious learning curve and does not attract as many creative users as it could. The amiga is not comming back, but don't you wish it could? Rob

  • Re:Oh good grief get over it. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well here`s a picture report [stormloader.com] of a recently held Amiga show in the Netherlandd which shall provide you far more information regarding upcoming Amiga computers. Sincerely, Mike Bouma.

  • Re:The world was different in 1985 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually it was almost unimaginable in the 80s that computing would advance this slowly. Think of it. In the 80s you would boot into a GUI in 2 seconds, nowadays I turn on my 700 mhz PC before I take a shower so I don`t have to wait when I`m finshed.

    Also in the 80s I would easily multitask realtime between 6 applications with less than 2 Megs of RAM. My PC has 256MB and it still doesn`t feel near to being realtime when even multitasking between 4 applications.

    When looking at Amigas in the 80s many people would have imaginated that computing would become instant and realtime.

    Sincerely, Mike Bouma.

  • Re:Awaiting the Arrival of AmigaOS x86 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OK try this on any Amiga. Boot into the workbench. Open a program like directory opus or view a JPG in a different resolution. Now drag down the screen untill you see half of each screen. Yes you are viewing different resolutions within on screen! Now try this on your Ghz PC. ;)

    Sincerely, Mike Bouma.

  • Re:Awaiting the Arrival of AmigaOS x86 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > Out of curiousity, what things could you do with an Amiga in 1mb of RAM that can't be done on a modern PC running Windows 2000?

    I don't know. Yesterday, I booted up my w2k machine. A PC. K7/1.4GHz, 768Mb DDR. A (noisy) piece of hardware that seems to have some horsepower.

    At least I used to think so.

    Started a MP3 player (WinAMP), playing a file from the server, via a 100Mb ethernet.

    Took InCD, inserted a UDF fortmatted a CDRW into the 16/10/40 plextor. Copied a 200Mb file onto it (at 4x, don't ask me why).

    THE SOUND BECAME JERKY. THIS 1.4GHz PC WITH DMA-100 DRIVER, 100Mb ETHERNET IS NOT ABLE TO PLAY A MP3 FILE WHILE MOVING 600Kb/s ON A IDE DEVICE.

    I think there are a shitload of things that a 'modern PC running Windows 2000' should do but can't.

    Cheers,

    --fred

  • What is so bad? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So there is a faster x86 version of UAE JIT people can use AOS3.9 on, why all the hostility? Im sure many people slagging off Amiga here has UAE already and love it, so why not bring out a better version? Also, if Amiga is so dead, then why is the CEO saying that his targets are to have 10 million Amiga enabled devices sold to consumers by the end of this year, and 30 million by end of next. As Bill said in his keynote speach at amiwest, for a company that sold 7 million max in all their previous incarnations, its not too bad. I suggest people stop getting confused between the Amiga 500 Amiga Comapny from old, and what the new 'Software Only' Amiga company are doing. Choice is good, and a good choice is better ;) One little thing Bill did say in his speach that was a good idea of where they are going was that you can walk into a room with an amiga enabled mobile phone, and it will auto sense any other amiga devices in that room. using wireless communication, if this other amiga device is connected to the net, u can send an email there and then. Also, if u want to do something but your Amiga enabled PDA hasnt got enough raw processing power to do it, it will get the better computer near it to help out. Amiga enabled TV sends tv pictures to Amiga PDA to watch. Not a bad thought is it. I suggest listening to the keynote speach. its mp3 audio and can be found at http://members1.chello.nl/%7Ed.vandermeer/keynote. mp3 or http://home-3.worldonline.nl/%7Eamiga/keynote.mp3
  • Out of curiousity, what things could you do with an Amiga in 1mb of RAM that can't be done on a modern PC running Windows 2000?

    I sure can't think of anything. By comparison today the Amiga had really pathetic sound and graphics.

    Yeah, it was much cooler than the PC-XT clones at the time, but come on... let's get real here.
  • Interesting. I don't know, but I do far more than that on my Win2k box and I only have a PIII-600 processor.

    Sometimes during large compiles and such where the CPU hits 100% I will have problems with the mp3 player(musicmatch) skipping. The solution to this is simply increase the process priority for musicmatch.

    Besides, on the Amiga I had you couldn't play MP3, much less record CD-RW.

    Next!
  • Really?

    "680x0 Realtime Decoding
    AmigaAMP can do realtime decoding even on slower 680x0 processors using Stephane Tavenard's highly optimized mpega.library. On a 68040-40 you can play Layer3 at half the sampling rate and with reduced quality. Full quality and sampling rate can be archieved with a 68060-50. "

    DID YOU PAY ATTENTION TO THE HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS?

    We were talking about the mythical 12 year old Amiga with 1 Meg of RAM.

    Next time pay attention the context.

    Next!

  • I guess I'd like to see you point that out with more venom, I really would.

    Zip disks? Christ, I remember the rollout of the Amiga 1000 and the original bouncing ball demo. Later on when I was President of an Amiga Users' Group we had these fancy things called 40 Meg harddrives from Supra. Zip disks? What era did your Amiga exist in?

    "Is there nothing the 12 year old Amiga with 1 meg of RAM can't do?"

    Well yes, play MP3s and burn CD-R for example, not without signifigant modifications to the stock system.

    The hardware just wasn't fast enough...

    Next!
  • That's quite possible.

    But again, the original poster wasn't talking about the A4000, which came stock with 2 Megs of chip ram anyway. He/She/It specifically mentioned a machine with 1 Meg of RAM.

    So we're talking A500/2000/3000 model computers...
  • Such hostility!

    Maybe you should go back and reread the thread next time before butting your nose into something you clearly have no understanding of.

    Thanks!
  • Glad to see you are still trolling /.

    Please go back and reread the entire thread before responding further. You just keep making yourself look like a fool.

    Here's the start of it:
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/07/29/022 32 25&cid=42

    I never misquoted you, I was quoting the original author.

    Sheesh what a maroon.
  • "While AmigaOS may not be 10 years ahead of it's time as it was in 1985, it's availability for the x86 platform is great news. [...] Criticize it all you want but you could do things with 3D animation under AmigaOS in 1mb of RAM (and no internal hard drive) that you'd still be hard pressed to do on your adverace home PC under Windows 2000. "

    Perhaps reading this site will help:
    http://www.rong-chang.com/
  • Heh. Read the website, study the language.

    Get back to me when you learn how to communicate.

  • Re:Awaiting the Arrival of AmigaOS x86 (Score:3)

    by sheldon ( 2322 ) on Sunday July 29, 2001 @10:44AM (#2185876)
    Granted, that was cool in it's day.

    But the reason it was necessary was because you had to jump through hoops to display something at 640x400 @ 4096 colors... the best resolution possible in the glory Amiga days.

    I no longer need to do that. My screen is 1280x1024 @ 16 million colors. The jpg sits nicely in the bottom corner of the screen, and I can do other things at the same time...

    Like looking at another jpg!

    Next!
  • Wonder how open the hardware will be. It'd be great to port Apple's open-source Darwin over to another PPC box.
  • Why would you care about Apple's ROMs? Not even Apple ships ROMs anymore (they've been replaced by the "New World ROM" that's just code loaded into RAM. Apple only keeps that much for it's MacOS As Macs are all Open Firmware I can't imagine why you'd still be mucking about with the ROMS. Miss the past half decade?

  • ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Computer?

    -Kevin
  • Would amiga's vm be a good alternative to c#?
  • I missed out on the classic Amiga goodness, so I'm pretty clueless about the good points of this company. However, in three years or so of reading /., we've been inundated with announcements on upcoming new Amiga goodness which somehow never seems to materialize.

    The guy may have been a smartass, but his point is worth pondering.
  • Ah yes, but I can run:

    VMWare with Win2k while ripping a CD while listening to an ogg file and burning a disk

    I do this all at the same time under Debian Testing in KDE with my Athlon 900/768MB PC133 SDRAM/40GB 5400RPM UDMA33 drive...

    The music never skips. Not once. Maybe the hardware isn't your problem..

    (Now, having said all of that, th NT4 GUI is MUCH faster than Linux/X11 on my P233MMX laptop with 64MB RAM..)
  • Linux PPC which has no apps

    But isn't the beauty of Open Source the fact that you can just acquire and compile any needed programs for your favorite platform? Or is that just propaganda bullshit?

    If the code was written cleanly, you can do it with a simple recompile.

    If the code makes assumptions about, say, the endianness of the machine or the number of bits in a word, then it will probably break.

    Whether a given piece of code is cross-platform-safe or not is luck of the draw (you're hoping that the coder had enough motivation to put in the extra work to make it portable).
  • Hahahah. It's not total bullshit, but how many users do you honestly think know how to compile something (as easy as it may be)?

    That's why the web sites of large applications offer binaries compiled for multiple platforms and linux versions.

    All you'd need to do would be to convince them to make builds for pick-your-favourite-platform.

    Alternatively, you could find one dedicated person to build all of the apps you want to use for the target machine, and host their own site with the packages for the masses to download.

    Installation will still likely be a pain, but the user won't have to futz around compiling things.
  • I've given up waiting in the year 1995. And I'm glad about it.
  • POWER is not the same as PowerPC, and Apple's ROM has been open for about four years.
  • I would have pointed the same thing out, but with more venom.

    One would also note that you can run NetBSD on the Amiga, so any UN*X code that you could use to burn a CD or play an MP3 would compile under an Amiga running *BSD. I believe there was also an unsupported version of Red Hat which ran happily on Amiga boxes.

    It seems like only yesterday I went to an Amiga Users' Group meeting and saw fully-rendered 3D demos, brought in on Zip disk, running on ten-year-old Amiga hardware. Is there nothing this machine can't do?
  • If you were really the president of your Amiga Users' Group, I hope they impeached you for being a lying asshole.

    What I Said: "Is there nothing this machine can't do?"
    What You Claim I Said: "Is there nothing the 12 year old Amiga with 1 meg of RAM can't do?"

    "He/She/It specifically mentioned a machine with 1 Meg of RAM."

    I never explicitly mentioned which Amiga machine was decoding MP3s and doing rendering, you just misquoted me and then dared to claim I was incorrect because of your misquote.

    Nice try, you miserable son of a bitch.
  • Fine, then I will point this out with more venom.

    If you really knew shit, or at least read "Amazing Computing" you would know you can install NetBSD on an Amiga 3K and do everything you can do under a normal UN*X system. That includes burning of CD-Rs and decoding MP3s. Sure, the Amiga might not be able to do everything in realtime, but you can still do everything that needs to be done.

    ...on the Amiga I had you couldn't play MP3, much less record CD-RW.

    You could easily modernize your hardware with one of the many upgrade packages on the Amiga after-market and perform all the tasks that you claim you can't perform on your current hardware. If you don't perform the upgrades, whose fault is that, the Amiga engineers'?

    Later on when I was President of an Amiga Users' Group we had these fancy things called 40 Meg harddrives from Supra. Zip disks? What era did your Amiga exist in?

    I saw this box for the first time in 1999. You make it sound like I was claiming that Commodore was packaging Zip Drives with their computers in 1989. Geez.

    The machine was an Amiga 3000 with a PCI bridge and a decent graphics card. Sure, the box wasn't stock, but the upgrades done to it weren't very extensive, it was still a ten-year-old computer completing modern tasks. The machine I got to play with was utilizing a Zip-100 Parallel drive for storage, contained 16MB of RAM, and would do basic video playback and minor editing. One of the members of the users' group where this machine was spotted had rendered a demo of a generated woman showing off a rotating rendered Jeep.

    Just because your Amiga sucks, doesn't mean that everyone else's does, too.

    "Is there nothing the 12 year old Amiga with 1 meg of RAM can't do?"

    When in doubt, misquote. You're not fooling anyone, I never said that.

    If you're running your Amiga with a pitiful 1MB of RAM then you don't deserve to be able to do anything else.
  • Glad to see you are still full of shit.

    There is no quote that matches, "Is there nothing the 12 year old Amiga with 1 meg of RAM can't do?" in this entire thread, so nice try.
  • Nowhere in that statement do I see, "Is there nothing the 12 year old Amiga with 1 meg of RAM can't do?", a quote you attributed to me here [slashdot.org].

    Frankly, you snide cocksucker, it's not surprising you know the URL to that English as a Second Language site. How long ago did you graduate?
  • "Clean and efficient code?" Well, sometimes, yes. Are you not familiar with the Guru? Run some programs with Enforcer to see how clean they are. :-)

    Don't think that I won't buy a copy of this if/when it is released, but aside from being efficient, because they had to be, I don't think that all the programs I loved were necessarily clean.

    For those not familiar with Amiga programming, Enforcer is a program that provides some memory protection of system areas on the Amiga. Using this with Mungwall (to write "MUNGEWALL!" or something like that to all unallocated memory) was about as close to having memory protection and Purify as I can recall on the 680x0 Amiga.

    end of line

  • ALL YOUR BLAZEMONGER [blazemonger.com] ARE BELONG [webworldinc.com] TO US [blazemonger.com]!
  • I gave up in '97. Nex
  • Hasn't Be proven that a new proprietry OS, no matter
    how cool and wonderful, simply cannot get enough market share to survive in this day and age?

    I can't see that any new OS has any chance unless it is free and open, and even then it would be up against the encumbant *NIX systems.
  • But, more importantly, will that most advanced piece of software ever written (nay, conceived in one maniac's crazed mind) -- BLAZEMONGER -- work in this "full binary compatibility across CPU architecture"?

    I'm not Dan...

    but OF COURSE it will work! BLAZEMONGER works on all CPU architectures currently sold, and all CPU architechtures ever sold! If YOU can't get it working, that's your WIMPY LITTLE LUSER FAULT!

    Some people say that new versions of BLAZEMONGER haven't been released in a while. What these infidels don't realize is that the last version of BLAZEMONGER was PERFECT!

    Be quiet, otherwise we might have to send the boys from "Customer Relations" around again.
  • Since all of the alternative you've mentioned are inferior to your standard PC, why do you feel the need for an alternative?

  • ObTroll (Score:5)

    by xixax ( 44677 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @09:00PM (#2185898)
    Why in the heck do people insist on selling houses with kitchens? I mean, when I can _buy_ a ready cooked burger for a dollar, why should I bother learning how to make a nutritious meal? Besides, McDougals already has ever kind of burger there is, so what could a home kitchen possibly offer?? People don't want to learn how to cook, they want more burgers because they are too busy now to eat anything else.

    Then them crazy old guys with 1950s Chevrolets, they are such l0Z3rz when I can buy a 2001 Hyundai that has a CD stacker and cup holders!

    And that old dude who _walks_ to the store!!! What, doesn't he have a car or sumthin????

    Xix.
    --
  • Cool news, especially with Dave Haynie's name tacked on as CTO.

    But, more importantly, will that most advanced piece of software ever written (nay, conceived in one maniac's crazed mind) -- BLAZEMONGER -- work in this "full binary compatibility across CPU architecture"?

    Dan?
  • Yahoo. Who exactly cares what you think? Seriously! If you are that far off base on the actual market angle of the new Amiga, you aren't entitled to have an opinion!
  • And you reply without being sure yourself? Even on my 300MHz Pentium II you can play Quake and an MP3 at the same time. If you're facts are wrong, then you DIDN'T make a point, you just made yourself look foolish.
  • Snoqualmie WA, July 29 (Reuters) -

    Amiga Inc. announced today their schedule for announcements over the next 12 months. CEO Bill McEwen said "We're very excited about the new announcements we'll be making over the next 12 months. Previously we were only able to make one or two announcements about possible future announcements every month, but with the new technology available now, we'll be able to make maybe 5 or 6 announcements. We've already got 4 signed up for this week alone!"

    When asked about the timeline for a new product, Bill replied "I can't comment on that, but check out our website for some exciting new announcements coming up soon!"

  • Re:Oh good grief get over it. Troll. (Score:4)

    by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @09:41PM (#2185903) Homepage
    It's because Amiga is dead. It's not coming back in any form, be it virtually under Linux or otherwise. Can we please move on?

    It's not dead as long as there are people still wanting to make a viable platform out of it.

    I for one gave up on the Amiga a long time ago, specifically when the whole Amiga DE crap came about. I voiced my disapproval, I wrote a few e-mails, and I generally bitched and complained about how AmigaDE would not be the "real Amiga" but would rather be just some hoakie bullshit company using the Amiga name.

    Then, something unheard of happened. Amiga Inc. apparently took the voices of thousands of people just like me into consideration.

    What happened? Amiga OS 4.0 was to be based on the classic Amiga OS. AmigaOne "Zico" was to be based on the original Amiga hardware - as a transition platform - if you will.

    They rethought their roadmap, and made way for fully retargetable hardware, not just graphics, but sound and IO. They considered what their users wanted, and they considered what they felt was necessary to build a whole new platform from something old and once loved.

    If you ask me, they've made all the right decisions, and the only thing left to do is put their money where their mouth is and finally deliver upon a product.

    November 1st is the day of judgement.

    They've FINALLY given an official date by which they plan to have on the market their new vision of home computing. In my opinion, because they've listened to what the Amiga Community wants, they've earned my attention until at least November 1st.

    I think anybody who once loved the Amiga would be well wise to give Amiga Inc. the benefit of the doubt until November 1st.

    "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
  • Actually, Apple's Titanium PowerBook G4 is rumored to have the capacity for dual 7410 processors. Its currently a heat and power consumption issue though. Merlancia sure is copying some notes from the Apple playbook. Of cource Apple and NeXT both have taken some minor inpiration from Amiga's one time pushing of the state of the art. (no examples, deal with it)

    --
  • Take a look at the keyboard in this picture [gotboing.com]. It looks like a membrane keyboard from a cash register! Somehow I don't think that's aimed at programmers. Or anyone else who can type.


    When are we going to be able to get one of these things in a beige case for a sane price? That box will run $2000 and up. I just put together a 1GHz Athlon for about $800. Notice too that there are only two ram slots (see here) [merlancia.com] and only 1Gig of ram max. Pretty weak. I guess cool sells better than performance at a sensible price; that's why the Apple Cube sold so many millions.

    I would really like to be able to put together a good, non-intel machine for doing simulations, but this doesn't seem to be it. I DO think that these things would sell like hotcakes, if they didn't cost much more than pc's, say, not more than a 10% premium for the motherboard, and all else straight pc hardware. Unfortunately, these guys seem to be trying to compete with Apple on their home turf, without the Apple OS. It worked so well for Franklin (remember the Apple][ clones?), and BEos, I'm sure it will work equally well for these guys. I wish them luck, but I'm not holding my breath.

  • Get you TRS-80 News here... the Coco at least:
    http://zeppelin.tzo.cc/coco/coco.jhtml
  • If this company is coming out with PPC-based motherboards, it probably means that Linux and BSD fans will have new, cheaper and non-Intel alternatives soon than they have from Apple at the moment. The PPC has long been cited as a CPU platform that Open Source and FSF folks have an interest in seeing available, but not with the MacOS tax that they have to pay to get the same thing right now - the new PPC motherboards mentioned in this article would probably present that opportunity.

    No more Intel electronic chip keys for people to track you!

  • Woah. Dave? (Score:3)

    by tcc ( 140386 ) on Sunday July 29, 2001 @09:21AM (#2185909) Homepage Journal
    Cool, at least seeing Dave Haynie in the loop gives a bit more credibility. Nice to hear he's still alive and involved somehow.
  • Finally these x86 drones will rock. Hope it's not all wapor, like the last years (96->) releases and rumours about amiga have been. I was going to convert my old 1200 into a tower and add some nics and stuff to it, but this AmigaOS 4.0/x86 sounds like a better deal. Except it's still x86.. :p
    Hey, I might even get into my old programming habits, haven't really done any programming since i moved to x86's five years ago. Whoo, I really hope this will happen.

  • Ok, let's be true to ourselves. When Amiga was still alive and competing with Atari (I was Atari fan, I hated Amiga *grin*) PC's were junk compared to those two. There was WOW 4 Color graphics card and that was pretty much it, not to mention the glorious PC speaker. *grin* So if you wanted to work with graphics or sound your choice was Amiga or Atari. Period. They had just about everything better than average PC, also they were faster. Heck, they could also compete with VGA in all aspects.

    I am personnaly glad that there is still something going on, on that scene. I'm just guessing, but all of you that bitch about Amiga being dead, must be too young to see it or something. This article is like a reminder to us all, well to us that lived in that era... *grin*

    Anyway, I think that the real problem was that creators of those great platforms were mostly hackers and not bussiness men and what they were able to do is to hack and not to market. So PC overwhelmed them. Same thing now with the OS'es. Windows are so popular bcs they have good marketing (and FUD) not because they are soooo good. ;)

    So, stop whining and comparing your 1Ghz Athlon and GeForce3 to a piece of hardware that is almost 20 years old. Get a life, anyone can do good 3D stuff on that kind of platform, real hacking is doing a 3D shaded landscape on Atari XL/XE. And I saw it few weeks ago on, yes a working Atari 800 XL. :)


    ---------------
    I never wanted to go anywhere. I'm happy here...
  • That would be because your an idiot and more than likely dont have DMA enabled on all your ATAPI devices, mainly your CDR.

    Right click `My Computer', click on manage go down to device manager click the little plus hoobie on IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, right click on Primary IDE Channel. From there go under Advanced Settings and set the transfer mode to `DMA if available' on all IDE devices you have on that controller, repeat this process on your Secondary IDE Channel.

  • What do you mean that OS X has no apps? Most of the software which runs under 9 runs under X (the exception being software that accesses hardware), and the last time I checked, there were >12,000 apps. Plus, you can run X native apps too. Most of the time, I don't have a need to use classic - I run Mail, OmniWeb, ssh, ICQ and other apps natively.

  • Amiga Undead.

    Was dead. Still is Animate.

    Stock up on garlic.

  • Just so you know, this rumor has being doing the circuits for yonks and is a complete joke. Apple is one of Motorola's smaller PPC clients, most PPCs go into embedded systems, eg cars, etc.
  • that would be www.amiga.org and you should note that they had about 3-4 days of having the system off line complaining that it was to difficult to maintain (Hmmmm, hows /. manage??? :) ) and then they came back on with the same software and added a wall for Anonymous posters, to keep them out...... Go figure...


    3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!

  • A few clarifications... (Score:3)

    by CaptainPotato ( 191411 ) on Saturday July 28, 2001 @09:01PM (#2185917) Homepage
    With the greatest respect to all /.ers out there, I think a few have missed a couple of elements about the latest Amiga announcements.

    1. The x86 version is, for the time being, going to be an emulated version, using a Linux kernel as its basis, so AmigaOS can be cold booted, with no underlying desktop OS, like other emulators. The advantage of this is speed: apparently the few benchmarks (on a Celeron 500) made public ran up to 1118x quicker than on the fastest 68060 'Classic' Amigas, and boot time on a Celeron 500 was about seven seconds, or so it has been said. Another advantage of this approach is hardware support (by relying on Linux drivers). Another is compatibility. Also there is the short time until release. Nobody was expecting this anouncement, and until it sinks in, I expect there will be some misunderstandings.

    2. x86-AmigaOS apparently will be based on 3.9, and on the same day, OS 4.0 will be released for PPC (AmigaOne hardware) - ie - the latest release. The main purpose, as far as I can tell, of the x86 release is to attract former Amig owners back into the fold, without them having to shell out on a whole new system, until they are ready to so do. It is also another step towards the hardware independence scheduled for OS5.0. AmigaOS and AmigaDE will be combined, as will platform-specific versions. Another advantage is simply revenue: for little outlay, it has the potential to boost Amiga's income substantially.

    3. Other important announcements were news of AmigaDE on three Sharp devices, including a mobile phone, AmigaDE on Psion's NetBook, a possible GameBoy Advance-type machine before Christmas, other content providers deals to be announced soon, and a deal with one of the world's largest wireless carriers. Place the emphasis where you choose, but it's generally good news nonetheless. There's other stuff as well, so have a look at Amiga.org [amiga.org] for a start.

    There's no doubt other stuff I haven't mentioned, but these are just a few thoughts that have occurred to me having read the news.

    Amiga itself will have material available publicly by Wednesday.

    All in all, a good day for Amiga news, IMO. I shall be buying x86-AmigaOS when it is available, as an interim step towards new hardware in the future.

  • Man, ColecoVision was cool. I was so SAD when mine finally broke - by then, Nintendo Entertainment System had already been out for a while, but Coleco still rocked.

    They had it all - Donkey Kong, BurgerTime, SubRoc, Zaxxon...

    Remember they had that slide-on expansion module so you could still play all your old Atari 2600 games? I got so much use out of that thing.

    Does anyone know where I can buy a working ColecoVision? Still got tons of games...

  • You're still pretty sad, bucko.

    And you aren't, posting anonymous coward? Fuck right off.

  • Linux PPC which has no apps

    But isn't the beauty of Open Source the fact that you can just acquire and compile any needed programs for your favorite platform? Or is that just propaganda bullshit?

  • since it costs the same as Apple's (overpriced) PPC boxes, who cares?

    You would have succeeded in porting a useless OS to another platform. Whee.

  • Yeah, I've been dying for PPC hardware. Currently it's a nice cool night out but I'm still running A/C, @#$^^ Intel...

    Did you see the "Leopoard" laptop?

    The Leopard will out-style and out-flash even the best laptops offered by the competition , whilst offering superior performance to any other laptop in existance*. (*Dual Processor 7450 model.)

    A dual cpu laptop? Is there anything cooler than that? Of course the "detailed" page for that model doesn't mention dual...

    It's very strange that the only vendors I've seen talking about non-Apple, non-server PPC are both Amiga related. I hope that doesn't mean we'll see hobbiest prices on these - the suggested prices look a little steep. I'd pay a premium over an intel box for one of these, but not over Apple.

  • obvious troll... go over to windowshelp.org and post there
  • "Amiga`s CEO Bill McEwen announced in a keynote speech held prior to the AmiWest 2001 show that new consumer PPC motherboards, AmigaOS 4.0 PPC and also AmigaOS for x86 will ship by November 1."

    For us Amiga fans, I believe this is called a "guru meditation".

  • I would really like to be able to put together a good, non-intel machine for doing simulations...

    Alpha.

    --
  • It appears you're in a similar market as I am. One that is slowly disappearing. Mid-range and entry level workstations and parts are going... (People assume a powerful PC will replace a workstation but it does not.) Alpha is dead. (Death by Intel.) SGI is dying. IBM's RS/6000 never got low enough. If you want to buy a complete workstation the only thing I can suggest is Sun's Blade Workstation [sun.com].
    You seem pretty bent on getting a PPC based solution. Forget Apple, they're not going to play ball. They want to sell shiny systems at a niche price. Better start bugging IBM about those PowerPC based hardware kits [ibm.com].

    --
  • Yummy ...

    Hope they're available sans OS (and sans firmware wierdness) so's I can easily install my own (i.e. NetBSD and YellowDog ;-) )

  • run twenty-odd tasks without crashing.

    really.

  • There's a rumor floating aroudn the Mac web about a clause in Apple's contract with Motorola that would allow Apple to buy all of Motorola's PowerPC assets for $500million. They are likely to do this, since Apple has been doing much of the G4's development in-house already. If Apple decided to actually go ahead and buy out the PowerPC from Motorola and do all future G4 and G5 in house, what would be the odds that Amiga could continue to buy them? And if they could, would they ever be able to make a PPC machine that is faster/cheaper than Apple's? I don't think they'll be successful in the x86 market for the same reason Apple won't release a port of MacOSX for x86. Microsoft would pull strings and kill it very quickly. So Amiga is caught between two worlds, spinning in limbo, unable to find a place to rest, much like BeOS. I think they'd better team up with Sun or SGI if they ever want to be in the graphical workstation market. Honestly, this new Amiga software company is starting to sound a helluva lot like NeXT... great software, no market share.
  • While AmigaOS may not be 10 years ahead of it's time as it was in 1985, it's availability for the x86 platform is great news. The addition of another alternative os for this platform is always great news, especially a mature OS like this one. Criticize it all you want but you could do things with 3D animation under AmigaOS in 1mb of RAM (and no internal hard drive) that you'd still be hard pressed to do on your adverace home PC under Windows 2000. As for weather there will be a truly meaningful resurgence of the OS, I would expect not, however I do see a sufficient market share being available to keep the company in busines (and selling the OS on multiple platforms) for quite some time.

    It's also good to see their forray into the handheld device market, however I'm honestly not sure what AmigOS's strengths have to offer here that's significantly different than that of PalmOS or Windows CE (except in the case of Windows CE that the programmers at Amiga know how to write extremely clean efficient code that beats Microsoft OS's in such areas as memory efficiency any day).

    Here's to the successful migration of the AmigaOS to the PC platform. Good luck guys!

    --CTH
  • To add a little here.. iirc, the increidible thing about the Amiga was/is the 3 hardware chips and how they were integrated into the motherboard to provide a better implementation of parallel processing on video vs. i/o vs. audio.

    Yes by today's standards the capabilities of each are wanting but I think one of the things the Amiga always did best was to execute programs efficiently.

    It's been a while since I've read up on the AmigaOS develeopments that have been happening in the last 1-2 years but they seem to be making decent strides with the OS as well. Now if they can update the hardware, they may truly have something unique again.

    It seems to me that the PowerPC stuff is just going to use that stock design (I hope I'm wrong) and rely on the OS for more of the performnace gains.. Either way it will be interesting to see what happens (if anything..I have to be realistic).

    But when I sold my original 128K Mac for the 4th A1000 sold in my area, I knew I did the right thing. Nostalgia, yes, but this is being typed on a x86 laptop and I doubt that will change soon. Although as a long time Motorola fan and anti-Intel architecturem, anything to bolster that platform is hopeful to me. (2001 and I gotta worry about 640k ?????)

  • I must say that i was almost considering getting an AmigaOne and the new PPC AmigaOS when it finaly hits 5.0 (long way away).

    I havnt used an Amiga in years, but now with the x86 port i truley believe that Amiga Inc can find many past Amigaians return.

    I for one have been giving many OSes a go (just downloaded QNX) and i realy want to give AmigaOS another go.

    Amiga Inc, you have just found yourself a new customer!! :)
  • That was a bit harsh dude :} And i must admit yer, its been a while since nothing has happened. But bill Mcewen or whateverhis name is has given us an SDK, a developer machine which is more than anyone gave us, and on novermber the first the new add on boards will come out, also with AmgiaOS4.0 PPC and AmigaOS 4.0 x86 which i encourage you too look at, and you did say you would buy it if they did come out with a product, although warn you, this wont be liket he PPC AmigaOS, i dont know the full details, but check out Amiga.org within the next few days, because there should be some large technical updates, and you'll be able to read them at Amgia.com. Amiga.org is where you mainly hear about everything, like slashdot.org. Just take a look... :)

  • Choice (Score:1)

    by POds ( 241854 )
    Why do people keep on ranting and cursing about a particular choice a person has made that may make them feel happy and apart of something? A lot of people don't use Amiga's because they believe they are going to go on forever. Most peoples, I would think, use these machines because they grew up on them and now, after (possibly) trying others, enjoy these machines most of all.

    I have heard a lot of people say that Linux will never be a main stream OS. But do you Linux users really care? Why do you use Linux? Because you enjoy it. I use Linux cause I enjoy it. I'm using BSD and QNX now because I'm curious. I use Windows because sometimes (in-between it crashing) I get the odd chance to use some relatively good applications like word and a browser that supports most modern features.

    People like to use what they are most comfortable with and what they enjoy so why all the rants and " your beating a dead horse "? We've all heard it before. And its all getting a bit boring.

    I believe one day, there will not be one main stream OS. It will be a collecting of Linux, BSD, Windows, Apple and maybe even Amiga. They all have their strengths. And I believe that no system has the right to have sticks and stones thrown at it. So I say to those users of non-Amiga machines who rant and curse about it (and possibly about all other architectures that may not be as well supported as theirs), read something, learn and grow up.

    Choice is grand!!!
  • If Apple does buy the PPC, odds are that they'd be more than happy to have a few customers like Amiga buying chips from them. It's called "cash flow" from a "revenue stream", something that Apple is, as always, greatly in need of.

    And Jobs is smart enough to know that another competitor to Microsoft isn't going to hurt Apple. If anything, Apple did better when Atari and Amiga were in the marketplace than they are doing now. Having any competition to MS legitimizes the idea of viable alternatives.
  • Wasn't there a time not too long ago when people thought AMF Harley-Davidson motorcycles were lousy rattle-traps that only hippies rode? And the only thing that kept them from going completely bust was a niche market, i.e. police departments? Well, in 1981 Harley Davidson bought out the rights to the name leaving AMF to make nothing but bowling alley equipment, and managed to re-establish itself without the name being owned by a huge conglomerate. Kinda sounds like the story of the Amiga name being owned by Commodore, then Escom, then Gateway, with a niche market, i.e. video production keeping them afloat. But now they're on their own. As the old Harley aficionados used to say, "The eagle soars alone."

    Now look at Harley-Davidson. They're publicly traded, the company is a huge success, and people wait months for a new bike to be delivered. Police departments auction off older models for more than what they paid for them in the first place. Harley owners often form clubs and socialize with other Harley owners. This reminds me of the social gatherings centered around the Amiga: User groups, demo parties, etc.

    The fact that they're still churning out updated OSes to run on hardware that hasn't been in production for almost a decade says something about the dedication of the company (and the robustness of the hardware.)

    So what if Harleys have oversized, air cooled, out of balance engines that any Kawasaki Ninja can run circles around. People still buy them. The name has survived, and so has the Amiga name. I hope their future is as bright as Harley-Davidson.

  • No, Be proved that no matter how cool and innovative an OS is, if the company backing it is incompetent, and unmotivated, it will never become anything.

    If the price is right and it can live happily beside another OS, I'd be willing to try out AmigaOS on x86. I always felt bad that C= bit the dust when PC's began to dominate; they went from one of the biggest computer manufactures to nobody in one decade. Maybe this can revamp C=.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Amiga that is.

    Get OVER it!

    This is the age of Dell computers and that annoying little blond boy who tries to talk parents in to selling his neighbors Dell computers.

    Why does the dell sell?

    well, 'cause the thing is packaged in a way that an average american consumer can understand.

    This Amiga box on the other hand, to whose website I dutifully ventured, has very little information about stuff that I care about. Like how it compares to other newest systems on the market and how much it costs, etc. etc. Instead I am reading a misspelled, non-edited, geekly comparison of the latest thing to the previous Amiga creations.

    Slashdot, you are brilliant in many ways but you are a throwback in so many others. From vintage pinball machines to brand name fetishes (Amiga, AMD, etc.), you look back to the Good Old Days of computing and actively help maintain the cachet of brand names that bloody don't well deserve it.

    I think it is mucho "leet" to have a $799, fully pre-programmed, fully tech-supported, reasonably configurable and powerful Dell or Gateway box for the average dolt in Peoria, Illinois to buy and set up in his or her home. Steep learning curves are not a priori cool. Hence I am bypassing your latest consumer plug for the Amiga brand..thanks anyway, though.

  • Wrong noise -

    * BOING * *BOING* *boing*
  • When I last had my Amiga 2000 I'd shrink boot times by two simple tricks.

    First - On my AMIGA 500 - I'd make good use of the WAIT command in the boot batch file (once I put WAIT 1 second pause the single-task loader was quicker). For the AMIGA 2000, a WAIT command would stop the hard drive thrashing on loading many small files at once (which was DEAD SLOW). Waiting a second or three would speed the load times up dramatically over the try-to-load-everything-at-the-same-time approach that was default. I was able to shrink the load times to around 30 seconds that way from 1 minute + 30 seconds before.

    Second - I learned a better trick. I'd push all the small loading files into a *.LHA file, copy that to a virtual RAMDISK, unzip, boot from that, then change volume to the real hard disk. I shrank the boot time to 10 seconds flat. The PC load times are using the same slow method the AMIGA used as default without the benefit of a WAIT command or the ability to switch your main boot hard drive (at least without a moronic REBOOT). God I miss the Amiga's MOUNT command and the other useful CLI tricks I learned. Windows sucks so very badly.
  • "Besides, on the Amiga I had you couldn't play MP3, much less record CD-RW."

    Hmm, could that be because MP3s and CD-RWs didn't exist when it was made? *doh*

    I lost interest in Amiga a looong time ago, but I know they're still out there and I'm sure someone could fix your Amiga to both play and burn.

    a quick search revealed amigaamp.de
    "a powerful realtime MPEG audio player for Amiga computers"

    Finding CD-RW drives that support Amiga isn't that hard either..
    ...and from http://www.amiga-news.de/cgi-bin/anwd-db.pl I'm sure you can find some software to go.

    This took me about 2 minutes to find out.
    Sorry, you were saying?
  • Sorry, _here_ is the software.http://ftp.wustl.edu/~aminet/

  • I'm greatly looking forward to a better PPC vendor personally. I think the competition would do Apple well.

    I wish the IBM POWER-3 workstations and the RS/6000 are cheap.

    Frankly, Apple's ROM stinks, it isn't open, and I hope we can get a source of PPC hardware from a company that needs to please its customers to survive.

    I'll wish them the best.
  • he didnt get modded up pooplicker. he posts at +2 because more karma than your penisless self.
  • Power is made by IBM, PPC is made by Motorola; The instructions set is the same, the CPU is vastly different. (Power is better).

    Needless to say the POWER CPU is of a higher caliber, particularly when it comes to memory performance.

    The ROM/BIOS whatever you want to call it, I am complaining about the lack of an SRM-like firmware OS 'loader.'

    Sorry to spark a discussion that leads to Mac zealotry.

    Check out the wholly overpriced IBM workstations here [ibm.com].

    But, back to the PPC,in general, I find Apple's hardware interestingly substandard for the price. Lots of IDE, usually pretty low end video cards and minimal RAM. The price/performance of, let say, Athlon/Geforce2/3 (doesn't matter) makes Apple/PPC look fairly bad. I just want another PPC vendor to drive the prices down, hopefully, and make PPC more accessible than somthing like an RS/6000.

    I just miss the days of great Macs like the 9600.

  • Too cowardly to discuss without going AC. Typical. BTW, I use RS/6000s and I owned a MAC. Your actions speak for your community, which is, essentially, Microsoft's lackey given that JObs as let Claris be ovverun by MS Office and does't even produce its own browser and coattails IE. Apple needs an overhaul. Maybe some competition on the same platform will do them some good.

    Like I said, I'm opinionated, I base this on experience I have had. Certainly your profanity would lead me to believe you are a feeb.

    (Note to some people in this thread, when posting in HTML, dont forget the

    please.)

  • What Be really has proven is that a new proprietary OS, no matter how cool and wonderful, can easily be ruined with poor marketing and a focus shift in the worst moment.

    --
  • Yes, that was holding me back a long time from switching from my Amiga 4000 to a Mac or PC. Only in 1999, when I saw BeOS R4 on x86 for the first time, I immediately sold my Amiga and got me a cheap PC just in order to run BeOS on it (and it still runs 90% of time on it). But Windows or Unix flavours never came anywhere near the responsiveness of the Amiga.

    --
  • Honestly.. it is "mucho leet" to have a box you built yourself.. not some dork sitting amongst a bunch of other dorks building the same computer over and over again. Getting a Dell or *cough* Gateway system is the lazy way to go and everyone knows you can build a better and faster computer than any of those tards can build for the same $799. Tech support? If you're building it yourself, you shouldnt need tech support because you know you did it right in the first place.
  • For the last time, Amiga, under C= never had any intention of going PPC.

    It's nice of you to praise Phase5, since they were instrumental in getting Amiga into its current sorry state, due to the Kernal War with H&P. Pretty impressive that that little incident cost them a couple hundred thousand sales of PPC cards.

    And lets not forget the German liquidators who stonewalled QuickPak for over a year and ended up selling to GW. If it wasn't for that little maneuver, we would have DEC Alpha (I refuse to say Compaq or Intel) Amigas now, as was there well documented plan.
  • I wonder, is there ever going to be any sort of real competitor for the PC? I've watched the Amiga, various modern Atari clones (Medusa etc), SparcStations, BeBoxes, and Alphas, always wanting to buy a non-IBM PC-based system. But they are always slow, expensive, poorly supported, and have all sorts of quirks and problems that make the screwey world of PCs seem tame by comparisson.

    The only real contender, that I have seen, is Apple's G4 line. And even those still put you in a tough spot: use MacOS, which locks up all the time, Linux PPC which has no apps, and OS X which has no apps.

    Will there ever truly be a PC alternative? Or should I just stop worrying about it and accept my fate?
  • Even cooler, check this out... "We are bringing out new punch cards which will be usable on the Imac and powerpurse.. errr, ibook. We know what you're thinking... those things suck. Well yes they do, but these new punch cards feature colors rejected by both crayola and volkswagon. What's better, we even have a new special colored punch-card reader" Costing on punch cards are 1000 for about a buck, or our new lame-colored cards for a buck each." Where do I sign up?
  • Why won't this fucker just die?
    What I would like to know is why are there so much hostile replies to this story? Is it really that bad to see someone trying to create/bring back alternatives to the wintel-platform?
    --

  • Well folks, guess what. Yes, the new plans and goals of the new Amiga are -NOT- the same as original. And why is that? Simply put, because what made the original Amiga so great, is what wound up -killing- it in the long run.

    I mean, seriously, Amigas were pretty much integral machines. They didn't need whopping fast CPUs, because the various functions were sub-divided amongst custom chips (ie. good ol' Agnus). The hardware was developed integrally, so it all performed beautifully together. However, components began to be produced by individual, competing companies, who had entire R&D staffs for the development of new components, handling 'task Y' exclusively. It's damn hard to compete, trying to develop new technologies for a whole -system- instead. Thus, one of the main advantages of Amiga, was one of it's disadvantages in the long run.

    The time is now. Getting itself out of the hardware where it can't really compete against multitudes of vendors and makers, Amiga narrows focus on, guess what, a GUI OS! They were in the forefront of GUI back in the day (ever play with an old 1000? Very innovative and original) and machines of even not that long ago could boot a GUI OS with preemptive multitasking that uses little memory (under 1 meg) and disk space (a minimal system can run from a DD floppy).

    With such advances before, now just -imagine- what Amiga can do, focusing solely on an OS. They don't have to make their own hardware, but instead, decide what would perform the best, and declare the hardware as 'optimal configuration'. Hence the 'Amiga One' is born.

    Is Amiga 'the same' as before? No. They've learned from the past, and have taken steps to improve and be adaptable to the future. And I for one, certainly look forward to see what comes along...

  • How can you all be so hipocritical? You read slash dot for christs sakes. Obviously you care something about open source, Linux and free thinking, or at least you enjoy flaming those who do... And my point? Well I was an Amiga dealer and devotee for a long time. I lost my butt. I nearly went bankrupt. But for what? To keep the dream of a better system alive. I gave up, became an MCSE, CCNA, Linux nerd, and every other conceivable thing to make myself profitable, and yet doing my damnedest to keep the dream of a great system alive. I love linux, and welcome the amiga back into the foray. Is it commercially viable? Sure. Linux is free and everyone laughed at making a real business model out of something that might take marketshare from Microsoft. Ask Redhat if they think its a joke. Support a new Amiga is a great opportunity. BeOs was a great opportunity, but it hasnt been successful, does that mean all further attempts to supplant the Juggernaut are for "naut"? Get over it. The glass IS half full.

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