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Many people would be happy to sell you a board with a G4 on it. Maybe even 2 G4s!

Marvell makes ATX boards with 1 or 2 7450s.

MotorolaMakes a very nice ATX board with 2 7450's on it. They also have the Sandpoint platform which you can use with many different PPC chips.

Merlancia seems to have some good stuff.

There's a bunch more too, Tundra, GMS, Force, just do a search on google. You'll likely find though that Apple has the best prices. If you want to play with a PPC (I'm assuming you want to do some low level stuff for fun or profit) you'll end up spending $1500 on just a board from somewhere else, or $1500 on a complete system from Apple. The Apple systems retain their value for a long time too.

I'm drooling for an open-design PPC system. Something as generic and clonable as the current x86 family, but using G4 or better, and modern interrupts, interfaces etc. Current machines from Apple have nothing to do with this idea - but one of these from Merlancia is on my wishlist.

Unfortunately, Amiga Technologies sold out to Gateway before it could be released.

Fortunately, Gateway then sold out to the new (and hopefully here for good) Amiga, Inc.

...and the Walker patents were sold on to Merlancia who plan to use it in their Radian PPC-based box slated for Q2 2002.

Merlancia is doing a whole slew of models, from power towers to STB's. They're primarily aimed at the new Amiga desktop OS (4.0), but they will actively support (sell preinstalled?) PPC-Linux.

Unfortunately, Amiga Technologies sold out to Gateway before it could be released.

Fortunately, Gateway then sold out to the new (and hopefully here for good) Amiga, Inc.

...and the Walker patents were sold on to Merlancia who plan to use it in their Radian PPC-based box slated for Q2 2002.

Merlancia is doing a whole slew of models, from power towers to STB's. They're primarily aimed at the new Amiga desktop OS (4.0), but they will actively support (sell preinstalled?) PPC-Linux.

Carl Sassenrath is now pushing his yet-another-lisp-like-language-with-prettier-synta x Rebol. It's quite a nice language, but it's proprietary. Doubt it'll go anywhere unless he open sources it.

Dave Haynie is now working for merlancia, who are producing nice non-apple PPC boxes to run, among other things, Linux, QNX and the new Amiga/ Tao system (which is a kindof Java/.net-done-right generalised multi-language VM architecture)

Some are thinking (quietly) that if the AmigaOne
hardware is brought to market- that other OSes,
besides AmigaOS4, 4.2, 5+, will run on it!

The "quietly" is because MacOSes *may* be among the
'other' OSes!

Of the hardware, Merlancia's has the highest
specs-
Merlancia

Regards,
JK

Just to let you know, Amiga Inc. actually have a product available again, in conjunction with Tao - it's a language independent VM architecture that can run on x86 among other things, both native and hosted under linux or windows. It's actually pretty well-designed, sortof a cross between what Java or .NET should have been and a unixy system, and has some pretty sweet features (including being a very fast Java environment). It doesn't really have all that much to do with the original Amiga design except for the name, though (and the virtual processor assembly is very similar to the (already quite C-like, with structs and so on) Amiga-style M68k/PPC macro assembly).

I've actually got the SDK sitting on my desk, so, for once, it's not complete vaporware (unfortunately I've got the windows-hosted version, which is utterly useless to me with my linux-only PC).

It's also the OS for a product that /is/ currently vapor - a non-apple PPC computer from merlancia. Even without the new Amiga OS, the merlancia box'd be nice, if only to put LinuxPPC on. PPC is so much nicer than x86, it's a shame it's tricky to find anything but apple mobos...

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) 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.