Nokia Set-top Boxes to Ship with AmigaDE

AtlasT writes: "Amiga Inc. announced today that Nokia will be shipping their Linux-powered "Mediaterminal" STBs with AmigaDE pre-installed. These news along with the previously announced cooperation with Sharp for their Zaurus PDA make the future of Amiga Inc. look a bit brighter indeed. What we who use computers more often than PDAs and STBs wonder is when we'll see the release of AmigaOS 4 and new machines. If you'd like to have a pre-view of AmigaDE and some applications you can buy the AmigaDE Player for Linux or Windows. I wouldn't mind running games like Payback, a GTA2 clone, on a PDA!" The Nokia Media Terminal was supposed to be launched in the second quarter of 2001, then by the end of 2001, now... who knows. Update: 02/23 21:24 GMT by M : It seems the Mediaterminal is already available but expensive.

Comments

Too expensive

[Sircus]

With a 566MHz Celeron and that amount of RAM (64Mb), they won't reach the price point which would lead to mass-market uptake. There's also way too many connectors, etc., etc.

Having worked on a set-top box project, the prime goal seems to be cost-reduction on a per-unit basis. Various developments are in the pipeline which will enable PVR/MPEG/DVD/DVB boxes to be made at a cost point where cable and sat providers can afford to subsidise them to a zero cost. This is where the market lies for these things, and the first company to succesfully bring such a box to market will be the one who wins the big share of that market.

We've been hearing about STBs for a long time. Projects like these, with or without Amiga software, are the reason we hear a lot and see nothing.

Amiga have been claiming to have deals with STB manufacturers for a long time now. Aside from press releases and cryptic mails from Fleecy Moss, I've never seen anything solid come from any of these.

Re:Too expensive

[Sircus]

I'm under more NDAs than you can shake a stick at, but there's definitely ongoing interest from this kind of company in producing more functional STBs. Many of them need to provide STBs anyway, so they're obviously interested in providing more functional STBs that can generate additional revenue streams.

Also, the US isn't the only market here. Europe's cable providers mostly aren't in much better shape, but the satellite business mostly still has money...

Further, there's opportunities not too far down the road for FTA (Free To Air) STBs, since several governments are keen on the idea of moving over completely to digital, thereby freeing the juicy analog frequencies for sale to wireless ops.

How Cool Does it Look....

[elem]

Wow... I want one of these!

I'm not sure exactly where its supposed to fit into the market though... it seems to be a jazzed up WebTV, RePlay and Cable TV box, all in one. But if people already own one or two of those allready why would they buy this?

Although saying that I do like the fact that its Linux Based and it does look nicer than your average Set-Top Box (but the fact that you can't put the TV *on* the box may be a minus) I would almost buy one, but I don't want internet on my TV and I've got a Cable box already with Interactive TV.

Very nice... but I don't think its going to sell that well

Do you believe?

[mbrubeck]

I believe in the second coming of Amiga! Death to the nonbelievers!

Re:Do you believe?

[Jace of Fuse!]

Actually, no.

Amiga Inc. is the first time since the Commodore bankruptcy that Amiga has been self owned and run with some sort of direction.

Escom AG only wanted the Amiga brand name. Gateway the same. And QuickPak (who never actually got their hands on the name anyway) had their own uses for Commodore's Intellectual Property as well.

What it boils down to is that all of the previous "Buyers" of the Amiga name didn't actually aim to do anything with the company other than exploit the Amiga community.

Amiga Inc. have a vested interest in the ressurection of the Amiga. Amiga Inc. IS the Amiga.

Re:Do you believe?

[Jace of Fuse!]

Actually, I think Gateway is less guilty than Escom AG or QuickPak, though I don't think they wanted anything really to do with the Amiga other than wave the name around and hopefully lure in Amiga fans. I don't know how many idiotic Amiga fans I know who bought a Gateway shortly after Gateway bought Amiga.

Amiga Inc. is the last and best chance for Amiga to become something real again. But I'm not even sure that's enough.

As for your reference to the Jargon File entry, I've never run up on that one but it doesn't surprise me much. It's easy to poke fun at machine loyalists when they're using a machine that might just have advantages over what you have (or what you had back then) but you don't want to admit it even if years later.

I for one don't know any Amiga users who felt it was an industry wide conspiracy, however. In fact, I think every real Amiga fan knows that the true culprits were the Commodore Executives, who in one year alone granted themselves a raise higher than the total yearly profits from the previous few years (back when they were ACTUALLY turning profits). Anybody who truely knows anything about Amiga's history knows it wasn't Microsoft or Apple that Commodore had to fear. It was their own fuckwit of a CEO.

So, the Amiga Persecution Complex to which you refer, humorous though it may be, is hardly accurate.

Re:Do you believe?

[Jace of Fuse!]

Well, I was never much for such advocacy no matter what the system is. Though the Amiga WAS in most ways superior to the MAC, and most of the Mac emulators did much better than just 3% performance increases over a real Mac. Some of them were head and shoulders over a real Mac, but that's unimportant to what I'm going to say.

In the end I was never one to force any of my Amigas to run MAC software. If I had wanted a MAC I would have bought a MAC.

That sort of advocacy annoyed me be it from other Amiga users, from MAC users, or more recently, from Linux users.

What am I now? Certainly my Amigas, though they all mostly work, are only so much use to me. And certainly I use Windows for the vast share of software available for it. But now days I consider myself orphaned.

I use FreeBSD, I toy with BeOS from time to time, I use Windows (ME and XP), and I'll play with anything I can get my hands on just to tinker with it.

It's been a long time since I can say I loved an OS. I'm very much a multi-platform guy because no one OS is anywhere close to perfect anymore. Some would say for it's time, AmigaDOS 2.0 was about perfect back then. And others would say OS/2 hit that mark at some point as well. I don't know that I'd say I've ever used a perfect OS and I will certainly say the further along we go the further away from perfect they will all get.

That includes Windows as well as Linux.

Zarus no longer uses AmigaDE

[jockm]

While the Zaurus was originally announced to use AmigaDE, the developer version is using QT/Embedded + the Jeode VM

Re:A bunch of really dumb questions

[ColdGrits]

No.

It is related in name only. the current owners bought the name from Gateway 2 or 3 years ago, promised the Earth to existing Amiga users, and then proceeded to do stuff all except rebadge and try to resell TAO's software.

Oh, and put out lots of announcements of annoncements.

Oh, and tell us how wonderful it is working with Corel (nothing happened), how the Sharp Zaurus (sp?) was shipping with AmigaDE (it doesn't), and how AmigaInc was helping Matroxto design the new Matrox gfx chips (they aren't).

Despite their best efforts to kill off AmigaOS, though, third parties are stilldeveloping it thankfully. However, AmigaInc has nothing to do with thateffort (other than getting huge royalties on the name when AmigaOS4 finally gets released, if ever).

This ain't your old Amiga. ;-(

[dammy]

Simple answer, no. This DEad is more of a .com business trying to sucker developers in so they can sucker OEMs into contract$.

If your more into the Amiga OS, I suggest you take a look at Amithlon, AROS, AmigaXL or MorphOS.

Now if your really into a OS developed by a game porting company (that as the official Amiga badge), your in luck. HyperOS4 should be out this year.

Dammy, awaiting the Faithful Follower's of The Name Cult to come out flaming me. Who needs Scientologist, we have Amiga Inc!

Amiga

[thedbp]

I certainly hope that Amiga can make a comeback in this area. I don't really see them displacing any PC's to be honest. Its been too long, they're way out of the game, and any massive steps forward they have made with the Amiga OS have been dwarfed by the accomplishments of Linux and Mac OS X.

This scenario makes a lot of sense, however. Back in the day when video hobbyists and professionals stood by their Amigas like tenacious terriers, Amigas really WERE on the forefront of things. Massive port expansion, insane A/V capabilities, fully protected memeory ... Amiga really had their sh*t together. I think that a STB from Amiga would be an awesome product if they ever actually produce it, and put in the time/effort to make it as good as the A2000 and A4000 were.

Re:Amiga

[kubrick]

fully protected memory

Ummm... I don't count 'Enforcer' as "fully protected memory". Amiga adopted a number of things from Unix, but that wasn't one of them. All memory was shared -- this is what made IPC so fast.

Also, the people involved now have no real links with the hardware developers of the past, as demonstrated by their hiring of various 'software development partners' and spurious hardware platform announcements. It's always someone else doing the work... while the people behind the company itself do nothing but trade off the (once actually worth something) name of Amiga.

I used an A1200 for years, so I'm feeling a little bitter about what has happened to the Name since then...

This isn't bad at all.

[tcc]

Of course a lot of you will say "where does it fit, why would I want this" well the fact is it's not a majority of people that owns a PVR or a media station box (new buzzword?) should ring a bell.

I wanted one of these since I saw the replay/tivo hardware, but 2 things stopped me, first generation so probably there would be firmware issues, better revisions not too far ahead, etc.. and the other was the price for the non-upgradability (well without hacking it :) ) that it offered (and we can also add the price/meg of the HDDs that are getting very interresting the more the time go), and HDTV support, I could go on for days. OF COURSE the positive aspect of being an early adopter is that you already have the technology and can actually do something while the others wish.. but if I would have bought it right off I wouldn't have wanted to spend again on another box. The dream machine of course is some kind of tivo, with ethernet access, dual IDE brackets, divx codec in firmware, transcoder from grabbed->divx realtime, DVD+RW, and for most of you "not running windows" :).

This machine is a step in the right direction, and yes I am an avid amiga fan, if you think all the amiga people are lame zealots, you probably never owned or programmed or enjoyed that piece of advanced technology way ahead of it's time. That being said, I don't beleive it would do a comeback on the desktop unless it doesn't repeat all of linux's errors or arguable moves, even then, there would be a great need of marketting power and it doesn't mean it would still take off...(just look at where BE is today...) Nevertheless, amiga was famous for video, for one thing, whether it was for video processing, all it's gazillion video output possibilities, colors or advanced features, when you heard amiga you were thinking "multimedia" before that term became a buzzword on a 486PC that had a cdrom.

I think it's very nice to see amiga striking tangible deals like this and finally see a product, it's not what everybody wanted (i.e. a computer that rights off the bat kills windows mac and linux and is so revolutionnary that it will be the second video toaster), this will probably never happen because of the current infrastructure in companies, and besides, a lot of projects have tried before, and there are already 1000s of people paid just to think of the future and desings, and they aren't all FOC people. The time when one person could really change things in the computer realm is probably over (of course there's always exeptions so I keep an open mind) what you need to target now is "what is going to be the next electronic revolution and how can I bypass all my competitors" Cellular technology is gaining a lot since a few years, so is HDTV or any new video technology... I just hope they do the right moves and not to many errors, I wish them the best.

I've been wondering...

[BlueGecko]

Why are we so busy coding a clone of .NET's IL when we could be cloning Intent? Intent truly is language neutral, because its assembler is extremely low-level, and yet nicer than most ASM; indeed, it's almost a mid-level language, if there is such a thing. You have registers, but you have an infinite number of them, and you can give them names instead of referring to r823 and so on. You have looping constructs, but you also can jump around. As on .NET, you can include fully native methods in your code if you wish (and even have the VM automatically pick between a bytecode version and a native version of a function if both exist). Because of the lower-level nature than that of .NET, functional languages can be fully implemented, including tail-calls. Further, while the VM is object-oriented, objects and methods are really little more than mini-programs that run in the current stack space. (It's really tough to explain this; the best I example I can think of is shell scripts, where tasks are done by calling other programs and then parsing their output--only imagine then that this were done lower-level and was the way all programs were built, such that a program's functions were even little programs like this.) And, simlar yet better than .NET, as you run a program, the VM begins writing out a native version for the next run, but continues optomizing it. Think about all of the problems about getting a decent compiler for something like Itanium: now we'd have a VM that could continue to analyze program flow so that a program really could take advantange of an VLIW chip. The compiler doesn't need to do profiling; the JIT does, the upshot being that older programs will run faster and faster as the JIT improves, without a recompile.

What I'd kind of like to see, to be honest, is for the community to make an Intent VM and then make the C# compiler compile to that instead of IL. Throw in a .NET->Intent bytecode converter, and you've got yourself a winner, I'd think. However, I vaguely recall that there are patent problems here. Still, at least we could reimplement some of the concepts...

Re:I've been wondering...

[BlueGecko]

An infinite number of registers? Are you a troll, or just a crackfiend? You know nothing of assembly language, or you would be laughing as hard as I am now. If you emulate a cpu, and you design the virtual cpu in such a way that there are unlimited registers, they are no longer registers, but rather the equivalent of variables and/or pointers.

Neither troll nor crack, although if you haven't seen the AmigaDE documents I do understand why you think I might be. AmigaDE registers are 32-bit integers only which may be pointers or data. AmigaDE also has variables (data stored that must be fetched by pointer), just like every other assembly language. Without this, you couldn't have strings or complex data structures. It just so happens that it also allows you an infinite number of registers. In common use, I'd say a function uses maybe 12 or so registers on average when written in the Amiga's virtual assembly. On an x86, only 4 to 8 get to be lucky enough to be register variables. The rest will be regular variables, with all the lag associated with them. On a PowerPC, which has 32 integer registers and 32 floating registers (and 32 vector registers on a G4), you could fit them all in registers. On an x86-64 as well, you could fit all of them on there, and on an Itanium, with its 320 registers, you could probably keep all pointers and integers in register space. It's not really any different from declaring a variable "register" in C. The compiler tries to make it a register, and if it can't, it won't. Similarly, as long as a variable happens to be a 32-bit number, you can make it a register in VP, and if you're lucky enough to be on an architecture with lots of registers, it will be one. Further, if you use named registers, when the code is compiled, the assembler aggressively checks scoping to see where a specific register may be reused. When no additional registers are available, and for more complex data, you need pointers anyway, and you've got them.

Thus, they are not variables; but I suppose that, you are correct, they are not full registers, either. That said, you might want to be slightly less aggressive when you say someone's wrong. I understand why you think I'm nuts, but surely there was a more polite way to point that out.

Re:I've been wondering...

[renoX]

If memory serves, Parrot a VM which is developed for Perl (and maybe Python and Ruby) is using the "infinite number of register" scheme.

Maybe you should have a look.

Re:I've been wondering...

[BlueGecko]

Just went to check this out. Unfortunately, it appears that it in fact only has 128 registers: 32 int, 32 float, 32 string (!?) and 32 "Perl Magic Cookie," which would mean more to me if I knew Perl. On the whole, though, it does look like an interesting project. Thanks for the heads-up.

Contemporaries.

[saintlupus]

I always wondered why the other machines of the Amiga's heyday don't have the same bull-terrier style fan base.

Why am I not hearing rumor after rumor, year after year, about the return of the Atari ST, for example?

I seem to remember some vicious flame wars between these two camps back in the eighties, when Commodore and Atari were not only still in existence but actually relevant to the computer industry. Why are the Amiga folks the only ones still carrying the torch for their long deceased platform?

--saint

Re:Contemporaries.

[DrXym]

The Amiga world has been rife with one bullshit rumour after another of next generations Amiga for the last 10 years. This has bred a hard core of rabid fans who even now probably would claim the Amiga isn't dead.

I owned Atari STs and various Amigas but even I saw the death knell nearly a decade ago. It came when I tried to purchase an A4000 around 1994 and the bastards in Commodore hiked the price by £100! They went bust soon after. So instead I bought a 486sx which, including monitor was £200 cheaper and never looked back.

Re:Contemporaries.

[DrXym]

It was ahead of its time, but time moved on and it didn't.

I tried to buy an A4000 when they came out but CBM hiked the price that week. This caused me to think again and I bought a PC instead. For less money, I got twice as much memory (4mb wow!), a monitor, twice as much hard drive space, 24-bit graphics at 800x600 and a faster processor.

In fact, once I replaced Windows 3.1 with OS/2 2.1 on it I didn't miss the Amiga one iota.

It didn't have to be this way. Commodore just fucked up on the marketing big time. I had been an avid Amiga fan but I was exasperated that CBM seemed to be twiddling their thumbs. The price hike was the last straw for me and I'm glad I bailed out.

Re:Contemporaries.

[Stormie]

I always wondered why the other machines of the Amiga's heyday don't have the same bull-terrier style fan base.

Why am I not hearing rumor after rumor, year after year, about the return of the Atari ST, for example?

Well, that would be because Amigas rule and all the other machines suck! Duh!

Re:Contemporaries.

[DrCode]

Well, I was one of the earliest developers for the AtariST ('HabaWriter'); and frankly, the machine just wasn't all that cool. Seemed like every bit of hardware had its own power supply, and the whole thing was a jumble of cables. Also, the GEM component of TOS (its OS) was really buggy (although x86 GEM was solid and way ahead of anything MS had at the time).

It was kind of cool, though, having EMACS (actually, MINCE) as the editor.

As for fans of other platforms: I take it you haven't heard of TeamOS/2?

Re:A bunch of really dumb questions

[DrXym]

Not in the slightest.

Company after company have bought the "Amiga" trademark and used it as a cheap way to garner publicity for their vapourware products. Perhaps this company actually has some real software behind it but it has absolutely zero to do with the original Amiga.

Re:A bunch of really dumb questions

[Seehund]

Oh yeah, they only released AmigaOS 3.9, updates to that, own all Amiga IP and started the development of AmigaOS 4 which will run on current PPC-equipped Amigas. That's what they have to do with the original (i.e. obsolete) Amiga. I suppose you think making a new Amiga OS and letting companies develop new Amigas is a bad thing then. Should they wait for Motorola to release the 68080?

What you said is only true for abnormally high values of "zero".

Amiga is back ...

[SuperDuG]

Amiga is back, amiga is dead, amiga is back, amiga is dead, etc.. I think we've finally seen that Amiga is back in somewhat full force now. I remember back in the good old days when amigas were the coolest thing next to sliced bread. But I was silly, while all the other kids were playing with apples, amigas, and commodores, I was playing with my 286.

Figures that the x86 wasn't really useable until the 4th revision. I'd say the 3rd revision, but that whole deal with the mathco and what-not, the bugs weren't worked out until 486. Amiga was always before its time. And a little out of my price range, besides who used a computer for video and sound editing? That's what complex dubbing and recording tools were for, not computers. Sheesh, if I only I knew where dreamworks would be 12 years ago, if only ..

It still amazes me that these machines are selling for hundreds of dollars on ebay now, along with the apple II's, and commodores ... but 286's are a dime a dozen. What's this tell me? Absolutely nothing :-) ... just information.

Personally I think the day of MS is over, the day of apple is nearing, and the day of the underdogs is going to rise upon us once again. There will be hundreds on non-standards, software will be written for multiple platforms and operating systems, only to have one more victory to which we will be locked into another companies ideals and software. It's a vicious trend that does not have a foreseeable end to it ... maybe one day ... maybe.

But right now, Go Amiga! :)

They're dead, get over it.

[squiggleslash]

I used to own one once. A 2170, with rubber keypad and that menu rocker bar thing. Had a lousy antenna that kept bending and whose holder kept cracking but it was a good phone, with a nice big display, soft musical button tones, a nice design that fit in your pocket but was large enough to hold in your hand.

So I can understand the enthusiasm but let's face it, the Nokia 21xx series phone is dead and we need to get over it. They're not going to make any more, and putting the Nokia logo on every phone out there isn't going to bring back the 21xx series phone we knew and loved. Doubtless assocating with Amiga will bring more brand recognition and let people know that the name of Nokia is still alive, but it just will never be the same phone as we knew and loved. And furthermore... [...continued on page 94]

Re:A bunch of really dumb questions

[DrXym]

And what has AmigaOS got to do with this press release???

NOTHING

Origin of "Multimedia"

[Jhan]

...when you heard amiga you were thinking "multimedia" before that term became a buzzword on a 486PC that had a cdrom.

Interesting side note: the term "multi-media" is in fact a trade mark, much like "Ping-Pong". It was first used as the name of the presentation program Scala MultiMedia, for the Amiga of course. One of the slickest presentation programs ever designed, in fact it still slaughters Powerpoint even on a 7.14 MHz A500...

They've since migrated to PC, check it out a www.scala.com. Try doing a site search for "Amiga"... They still write about it and somewhat support it (kudos to them!)

Re:Origin of "Multimedia"

[jesup]

As a former Commodore/Amiga OS engineer (AmigaDos/SCSI/IDE/FS/networking/etc) and former Scala engineer, I think I'm qualified to comment. ;-)

The preferred term back in the Old Days was "Desktop Video". Still not something that most PC's even with TV-outs do super-well, though it's partly a software issue.

Scala was founded in Norway, but a US office was created, and now it's primarily a US operation, with almost all the remaining engineers being ex-Commodore engineers hired right before or after Commodore went under. The CEO is now Jeff Porter, who was head of hardware engineering for a number of years and later head of "special projects" (i.e. pushed aside by cronies of Mehdi Ali, the person who ran Commodore into the ground).

Scala has been growing in popularity, though the focus is mostly on larger commercial installations (HR depts, airports, point-of-sale displays, waiting rooms, cable companies, etc, etc). The local cable company (Comcast) has a local-info channel thats run by Scala software.

Scala has been proving since the days of Pentium 60's and 486DX66's that with the right software (and video card), you can do some very professional amiga-like smooth video generation, and have a really nice UI for building it. Of course, it's a lot easier nowadays than it was in '94.

Scala uses "MMOS", a multimedia dynamic-OO OS we built that runs on top of the host OS (which in most cases is NT/2000/XP nowadays). It's a pretty clean design, given that the people who designed it were mostly from the core of the OS team at Amiga, along with some talented Scala engineers.

The MediaTerminal is cool...

[CondeZer0]

Hi

michael: FYI the media terminal *was launched by the end of 2001*, I live in Sweden, and they
have been selling for quite a while now.

We also had a demo of the new version, that will be launched in 2 weeks or so, in the FOSDEM, at
the Mozilla developers room, it was really great, it runs Linux(2.4.10+ I think), uses an embedded
version of mozilla as browser(0.9.5+, and will be upgraded automatically to 1.0 when it's released),
have 2 USB, 2 FireWire, 1 PCMCIA, Ethernet, and I don't remember what else, but it was really cool...
(full specs here: http://www.nokia.com/multimedia/tech_specs.html)

I don't have a TV, so I doubt I'll buy one, but you can be sure that it will take very short
time to be hacked, also almost all(if not all) the software it runs it's opensource, and you
can find it at: https://www.ostdev.net/(I think they are
going to release even more software there in the very near future)

A really cool project, that uses opensource software... <rant>ah, sorry, I forgot that this
days slashdot is full of M$ zealots that run WinXP/IE and think that in linux you have to do
"./configure; make; make install" to install anything(have you heard of RedCarpet? that makes
me think.... RedCarpet/Ximian desktop for the MediaTerminal? that could be cool...(not for me,
of course ;) )</rant>

[End rambling, back on topic ]

I think it's great that somebody is doing something like this, have in mind that this
will compete directly with the next version of the X-Box(HomeStation or whatever it's
going to be called), and I really prefer to see people using a product based on opensource
(so I can hack it if I want) than having to run windows on their TV(<troll>anyone wants to get
a BSOD in the middle of his favorite movie ;) </troll>, ah, and one last thing, the person
from nokia(hi Magnus!) that made the presentation, said that they are going to release xDSL modems
for it, that means that this modems will have drivers for Linux, something that in the past was a really
big problem... in resume(I have to go back to work!) this is a "Very good thing(tm)" and
anybody that cares about open source should be happy that it exists..(even if like me, many
of us aren't probably going to ever use it, after all, we don't have a life, right? ;)


\\Uriel


P.S.: I use FreeBSD with Ion instead of any desktop, but it's really funny
to see people complaining that linux is hard to use when even a 3 years
old could install RedHat(in my experience much easier than installing any
WinXX)

P.P.S.: Hmmm. I think in the end it could be useful for me: a Plan9 CPU or file server...
and I could mount the TV screen(if I had one) from my Plan9 termianl ;)

Launch

[labil]

The Nokia Media Terminal was supposed to be launched in the second quarter of 2001, then by the end of 2001, now... who knows.

Actually, it's already available in Sweden, and I guess the rest of Europe, though at a price of 8.495 SEK (~ $1000), I can't imagine they sold many of them...

BeOS

[gUmbi]

Remember when Sony released a Internet terminal that used BeOS? It certainly cemented BeOS' future.

Jason.

Re:BeOS

[Adnans]

That Evil-la you are talking about was a piece of crap! It had a tied-in $20 month subscription, was dialup only, and BeIA (the BeOS part) was so buggy it was practically unusable. Only a couple dozen or so were ever sold.

Hardly a good comparison IMHO.

-adnans

Too many links!

[Mwongozi]

This article is beginning to look like something I'd see on memepool.