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Amiga

Amiga 510 & 1010 released? 72

Posted by Hemos from the too-good-to-be-true dept.
bbrindle writes " An unknown German company called IWin just recently announced the release of the Amiga 510 and Amiga 1010. The company just came about at the beginning of this month and is offering Classic Amiga compatibles at decent prices. It seems though they are slow to respond to the media and have not contacted Amiga Inc. in any way. Check out the story in Wired. " It doesn't look good though-if they've built them without contacting Amiga Inc., then they have violated the copyright-and they don't ship with Amiga installed apparently. You have to get it from a local dealer-wherever you might find one, that is.
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Amiga 510 & 1010 released? More

Amiga 510 & 1010 released?

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  • Sorry dude, no way. You still have to double the CPU speed a few more times to reach the speed of a o6o/PPC combo. -- kolla
  • For years since Commodore's demise the the early 90s' (and even some *before* then) companies have been building knock-offs of Amiga models, and giving them similar names. The A1500, A3500 and A5000 come to mind..Machines that sure-enough ran like Amigas, and looked like Amigas, but were not actual production models made by the company. Often, they were simply package deals made by independant shops to attract attention.

    For the sake of comedy, it should be pointed out that the "Amiga 1010" has already been used as a name--The first external 3.5" disk drive Commodore made for the Amiga back in '86 was named the "Amiga 1010". Sorry, guys..its been taken. :)

    Bowie J. Poag
  • Ehmm... OSes do multitasking. Aren't you referring to multithreading?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Re:It's a hoax, guys. (Score:3)

    by psaltes ( 9811 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @09:06AM (#1724194)
    Some more information about this "300 person" company...

    The domain name is, of course, registered to the mysterious Martin Steinbach. His phone number and assorted info can be found by doing a whois lookup.

    transcript of an nslookup session (minus all the stuff where I could remember syntax of course :):

    > server ns1.germany.worldcix.net
    Default Server: ns1.germany.worldcix.net
    Address: 195.206.86.101

    > ls -d iwin-corp.com
    [ns1.germany.worldcix.net]
    iwin-corp.com. SOA ns1.germany.worldcix.net dns.ibg.net. (929948882 10800 3600 604810 41000)
    iwin-corp.com. NS ns1.germany.worldcix.net
    iwin-corp.com. NS ns2.germany.worldcix.net
    iwin-corp.com. MX 10 mail.iwin-corp.com
    iwin-corp.com. A 151.196.202.71
    mail A 151.196.202.71
    www A 151.196.202.71
    iwin-corp.com. SOA ns1.germany.worldcix.net dns.ibg.net. (929948882 10800 3600 604810 41000)

    pretty amazing that this big company thats made all these wonderful products only has ONE server...

    And about that server. telnet shows it to be Sunos 5.6. FTP is more interesting. It prints out the message:

    Connected to iwin-corp.com.
    220 usahost.net FTP server (SunOS 5.6) ready.
    Name (iwin-corp.com:rawlins):

    usahost.net? first time I've seen that in my little investigation. Well, upon looking at usahost.net, that seems to be a virtual hosting website! This guy's server count has shrunk from 1 to 0.

    The pictures of the amiga boxes (to my untrained eye of course) look like they were done in gimp (or photoshop etc). The different color pics are EXACTLY the same with only color different...same shading, highlights, etc. Not only that, but the computer is advertised as having all these dvd, zip, etc drives, but the pictures show only what appears to be a 3.5 floppy!

    well enough of my picking that apart...back to work :)
  • As a Amigan from the early days (Anyone remember Andy Warhol's AmigaWorld cover pic?) I was happy to see this article, etc. The more I read the web page, the more I thought it was a hoax. Then I ran a whois, and got this:
    Record last updated on 21-Jun-99.
    Record created on 21-Jun-99.
    Database last updated on 26-Aug-99 04:16:42 EDT.

    Somehow, a company that has been creating internet applications since '93 and just got their domain sounds a bit fishy. Anyone else notice that for their Mac Software section they have a picture of an iMac. From above. As in from an on-line ad?
    Heck, if this is a hoax (and I firmly believe it is), someone has way to much freaking time on their hands. That, and they need to take a web design class . . .

    John
  • When they announced this a week or two ago, the whole Amiga scene went crazy. We're split between the believers, the wait and see-ers, and the no-wayers. Alas some of the more vocal of the latter have been ringing up company employees and abusing them :(

    It's been ascertained that they are a real company alright, but that's about all. They have promised demos of the machines soon.

    As for getting the Amiga OS to run on it - it's no big deal. If you already have an Amiga, you have an OS to transfer, if not there are quite a few dealers for the new OS3.5.

    Of course, even if it is true, it may be too little too late for the Classic Amiga. Most of us are waiting for the Linux based MCC now.
  • Hey, infringements or not, it's always good to welcome another flavour in compu-world. Why .. it's almost even .. *sniff* .. nostalgic. Interesting to see where this goes ...
  • I wonder if the new (ie; the one nobody can decide what it's gunna be based on) OS will run on these... Did they have plans to back port the OS to the old hardware or where they going to just release the new OS for the new line?
  • Yup, I remember it. There was supposed to be aliens in the other tanks if I recall correctly. The fun wore off pretty quick with Arctic Fox, but I still fondly recall other games of the era:

    Carrier Command
    Personal Nightmare
    Elvira Mistress of Darkness (believe it or not, it was a great game)
    Popolous
    Powermonger

    I've heard that Bullfrog are producing a new version of Popolous, but are they going to do the same with Powermonger. Even if they ported the original to Linux I'd buy it. I'm pretty sure they ported both Pop and PM to the Mac so who knows?

    Chris Wareham
  • Looks like they say they have released the machines, then on the specifications page they say the two machines are still under development and there's no pricing I can find.

    BTW, I owned one of the original machines in the 80's. WOW! Having an Amiga back then was great.

    BTW#2, Does anyone remember the game ARCTIC FOX? It was the first true multitasking game I played. Essentially, you were in a large tank, filled with weapons, looking for alien ships and bases in the Arctic. The neat thing was, you could fire a missle with a camera in its nose, fly the missle behind a mountain, and do recon work viewing the camera-eye view of the missle on a small window, all while simultaneously looking out your main tank window at any nasties in your immediate vicinity. Way cool multitasking for when it was released!
  • Yeah, if they mean good and aren't hurting Amiga, I doubt they'll get sued for helping to bring back Amiga.

    I've never used anything Amiga, but from what I've heard, it's a damn good OS. Maybe it will return and I'll get a chance to try it.

    ---

  • It's a hoax, guys. (Score:4)

    by Squid ( 3420 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @04:16AM (#1724209) Homepage
    We've been following this story all week, and it is absolutely definitely indisputably positively a HOAX.

    No one has ever HEARD of the spectacular PowerSE product they claim is their flagship software - even though they claim its first release was in 1993.

    They have surprisingly few screenshots of their software - and what they do have are suspiciously boring and devoid of actually displaying FEATURES. This makes perfect sense if screenshots are not merely a keyclick away, but actually require doctoring in paint programs (the few meaningless PowerSE screenshots on their site are obviously NeXTstep screenshots heavily doctored).

    All their pages used to have meta tags listing the author as Martin Steinbach, the guy claiming to be their CEO (of what they say is a 300-person company, mind you). When people noticed this and began mentioning it publicly, suddenly the meta tags all change and now the company has an "internet division".

    Their software downloads section is perpetually broken.

    Most of what is described for the A510 and A1010 feature list is either unachievable or impractical at the listed price points. Some of what's listed would seem to require Herculean engineering efforts, yet iWin seems to have pulled it out of their hats.

    Read the specs on their site for what PowerSE is capable of doing. Why aren't we all using this instead of VMware or WINE?

    The tech specs are all suspiciously vague and misleading-sounding, but not in a way that can be blamed on poor translations.

    It's not yet clear what purpose is to be served by perpetrating such an elaborate (and expensive!) hoax, but especially in light of the Godlike specs of PowerSE, it is the only reasonable conclusion.
  • Almost certainly.

    In fact, a variant of LinuxPPC called APUS is already up on running on Amigas with PPC cards. Linux can read the Amiga FS, and you can get a driver to let the Amiga read the Linux FS... all very cosy.
  • I use to play it. It was good.
    My favorites though were Faery Tale adventure
    (best rpg I've ever played) which I'm playing again on the amiga emulator on my Linux box,
    Demons Winter, and Phantasy 3: The Return of Nikodemus. Man were those good games. I still haven't found anything I have as much fun playing.
    Nowadays you have nice eye candy, bad game play.

    Cheers.
    *************************************** *****
    Superstition is a word the ignorant use to describe their ignorance. -Sifu
  • It was a cool machine, and I'd love to have a fresh one with a big drive, etc. Besides, it's like anything: my first car was a '66 Mustang convertible. Any new Honda would beat the hell out of it as a car, but I still want another one.

    Sentimental humans. :-)
  • It looks like IWin changed their page. They did have pricing information on it a few days ago. They were asking around $750 for the A1010 with a 17" monitor.

    Never did see a number to call and order...
  • I believe that Franklin wrote their own compatable ROMs, which Apples sued them over. I remember that it definately booted up with a Franklin specific greeting.

    You may be thinking of the AMax Macintosh emulator for the Amiga. To use that, you needed to obtain original Mac ROMs (they went into a dongle that plugged into the disk drive port I believe).
  • ...it seems Amiga,Inc. is going to screw up the Amiga just like commodore did.

    It wouldn't be an Amiga if the parent company didn't screw things up, now would it? =^P
    --

  • Four words: You are mostly wrong.

    An Amiga running AmigaOS on a MC68060/50 is quite nice and very alive.

    An Amiga with a 233Mhz PPC604e running Linux is really cool - and you can get nearly all new software.

    But hey, I didn`t say "go and get some", these freak-systems are expensive like hell, hard to get - but they are not dead!
  • >> UAE runs full speed on my P3.

    > What do you mean by "full speed?" The same as a
    > 68000 at 7MHz? A 68030 at 50MHz? A 604e at
    > 200MHz? Like many other computer systems, Amigas
    > don't just come in one speed :-)

    Some numbers I once checked with lha and gzip under uae:

    My 486dx4-160 running Linux runs about 80% of the speed of my Amiga1000.

    My Dual-PentiumMMX-233 running Linux runs about half of the speed of my Amiga3000.

    A PentiumIII-560 (overclocked) runs around the speed of an 68040/40.

    Not to bad for little optimized c-source :-)

  • Dead? Oh, probably... As useful as a C64? I'd say more useful.

    Hell I STILL use my Ami1200 on a regular basis for all my sequencing (in my studio). Sure there is nothin for hard-disk recording, and its not as high powered as Cakewalk, Qbase, or Logic Audio, but...

    • It almost never crashes. Stable as a mountain I tell you.
    • Its bleedin cheap on memory.
    • Octamed (my sequencer of choice) has a great Arexx interface/API. So theres all kinds of possibilities there. (fractal music, macros, etc.). I dont know if todays sequencers have this kind of programability.
  • I remember I already had an A-1010 back in 1988. The A-1010 was the official external floppy-drive for the A1000. (You know, the one that looked like some sort of toaster.)
  • UAE runs full speed on my P3.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The 1010 was the official external floppy drive. One magazine review at the time summarised it as, "If you buy this drive after reading this review, you are profoundly stupid" (or something like that). I had a slim-line RocLite which was v. nice. Wasn't the 510 an A500 add-on of some description?
  • Oh ya... well i once multitasked with only .00002K of memory!!!!
  • Sure there is nothin for hard-disk recording...

    It's not the most elegant thing, but I actually possess (that is, not vapor!) direct-to-disk software for my Concierto sound card. I'm not making any allusions to its perfection or beautiful interface, but it does in fact do a pleasantly nice job of laying incoming data onto a drive.

  • Maybe the purpose of this sight is for him to collect emails and contact details of thousands of geeks wanting demo cd's of PowerSE and then sell his mailing list? Possibly he could make enough money off this to make the time spent designing the site worthwhile.

    I wouldn't give my real contact details to this guy....
  • I remember many years ago I made a fake online "catalog" of hacker/phreaker gear such as redboxes, linemans handsets, etc. The most popular "fake" item I had on there was the Katana laptop, which had a 300MHz processor(this was before they were out). We listed our warehouses in New Tokyo, California. It was totally bogus. Yet, every day, I got email from people asking how to order items from the catalog, especially that Katana laptop. Take note, this was done in notepad, with more drawings of the equipment for sale than photos I grabbed off of other webpages. Regardless, I proved that there was a sucker born every minute. No, I didn't take anyones credit card #s or anything like that. I just told them it was a fake.
  • I still use my A500 on a regular basis with DPaint IV. If this company comes through with Amiga compatible hardware at the $800 price tag for the wannabe G3(1010) with a DVD drive, then I will be first in line to buy one. A good place to get the OS is at Softhut [softhut.com], they have OS 3.1 for $92 and the upgrade to 3.5 costs $40(Pre order). I say good luck to this company, since it seems Amiga,Inc. is going to screw up the Amiga just like commodore did.
  • three words: amiga is dead.

    Amiga is about as useful now as the Commodore 64.

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