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PPC Amigas Go On Sale
nastyphil writes "After a wait of almost 10 years and passing through a series of owners' hands, new Amiga hardware is on sale. G4 processors at up to 800 Mhz.
Development of AmigaOS 4.0 has been continuing at a steady pace by Hyperion and will be ready for release early 2003."
not to insult anyone or disrespect the work of the OS authors, but the interface is BUTT UGLY. My neighboors donkey poops better gooey than this stuff.
On a G4 there surely has to be another OS with better interface. I vaguely recall something... Can't remember. I'll ask the donkey.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Well, as a bit of a Mac zealot, at least now I know that my kind aren't nearly the most fanatical people using PPC these days.
I'm only interested if they rename the PPC chip "Even Fatter Agnus".
Agnus was just a memory controller and blitter (Block Information Transfer Chip), with extra hardware to control the CopperLists (Coprocessor Instructions for such things as Colour Register manipulation and handling of sprites).
Agnus was replaced by the Fat Agnus which could allocate 1 meg of ChipRam (Video/Sound memory - memory that could be access by Denise and Paula).
Later, Agnus was replaced by Super Fat Agnus, which could allocate a full 2 megs of Chipram.
Finally Agnus was replaced with Alice, the AGA version, and Denise was placed with Lisa.
There would be no reason to call the processor by any name other than it's own. And since the new Amiga design does not have a truely Custom Chipset in old Amiga fashion, this new Amiga isn't truely an Amiga in anything other than name.
Very sad indeed that they're praying on the hopes of the few remaining Amiga fans. I would support this platform by both switching over to it and developing for it, but the hardware is only so-so at best and the OS is obsolete before even being completed.
If they want me back, they're going to have to do a whole lot better than this.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
A new Amiga is, of course, a very cool thing but the question is where are the games. A new platform isn't going to be succesful without tons of games.
Sadly this is true. By the look of the GUI-screenshots of the OS it hasn't really improved much except for the horrible nightmare of customizable GUI.
If the computers were dirt cheap, maybe they would be good for something. But now it would just have nostalgia value for the Amiga-tinkerers. I live with one so I can relate.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
Just checked the AmigaOS4 website in the hope of seeing some revolutionary new design ideas and enhancements, quite frankly it looks a little disappointing. Yes, Its only a work in progress and as the site states they are "quite preliminary screenshots" but for something thats apparently due for release in early 2003 I would have expected something a little hmm, innovative?
I thought the AmigaOS was a thing of beauty back in the 90's but I'd like to have seen at least some improvement from the old design. Change can be a good thing!
I bet half the folks think of a CGA display 40x25 text mode when they hear the name "Amiga".
why? because thats all the PC had when the amiga of the time was showing 4096 colours (HAM) at 640x512?
it lways seemed unfair that the amiga, which had damn advanced for the time graphics and sound, was written off as a mere "games machine" yet what drives new pc hardware now?
dave
I really don't care if AmigaOS "makes a comeback", I want to continue using and developing AmigaOS, and as such I am dying to get my hands on an AmigaOne XE and OS4.
:( Use a MAC. I know... I know... but hey!"
I agree that there are certain things about the AmigaOS that I absolutely loved.
the C: and DEVS:, and LIBS:. The way everything in the S: directory was there for a reason. I loved how STARTUP was handled, and I loved how you could modify the icon properties to change startup options of programs.
Some things about Amiga OS have not been matched since, not even by Linux or BeOS (Yes, Linux fans, AmigaOS did some things much nicer than your precious little unix wannabe.)
On the other hand, most other operating systems have completely evolved past the Amiga. Protected memory, built in virtual memory. REAL retargetable graphics instead of a nasty hack. REAL retargetable sound instead of a nasty hack.
There are checks and balances when comparing any of the many operating systems, and what it boils down to is that none of them are perfect.
Amiga OS suffers from severe obsolescense, lack of modern software support, and a GUI that is over 13 years old.
Linux still suffers from the "let's throw files in places that only a seasoned unix user will think to look for them" mentality that is standard with all Unix workalikes, and the commercial industry still touches on it with a bit of uncertainty and a whole lot of fear.
Windows sucks on too many levels to mention, but at least it has market dominance and a whole ton of games (for what that is worth anyway).
Mac OS X has a whole lot going for it, but unfortunately it draws in a whole bunch of moron users and thus using it might be hard for the tech-savvy user to admit. "Yes... I... uh... hmm.
BeOS is dead kind of like the Amiga, only it's not quite as rotten yet.
Of course, there are going to be tons of morons who will swear FreeBSD is dead, but blah. It's like all the other Unix operating systems. If you love Unix, you won't use anything but, if you don't already love Unix, it may take you years before you ever get comfortable enough to try it.
When comparing all of the operating systems, it's not easy to choose one that I would say is "On top", but it's pretty easy to pick out the ones that are certainly on the bottom, even if they don't necissarily deserve to be there.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
How can these machines be called Amiga. They have nothing in common with the original Amiga and are just pretty standard and boring PPC machines.
You might as well put an Amiga sticker on your mac or PC...
True warriors use the Klingon Google
Do NOT try to tell me that the 800 MHz PPC outperforms a 2GHz PIV
Why not? I mean for integer stuff at least, a P4 spends a lot of its time copying data between the sparse set of registers, and there's a limitation on the instructions that can actually be paired to get maximum throughput. The extremely deep pipeline also means there's a high penalty for incorrect branch prediction. The legacy 386 stuff makes the CPU extremely inefficient.
The facts about floating point are a little harder to come by. Nevertheless, a different processor architecture will allow much better internal parallelism. The x86 series of chips still has latency issues, reducing performance here. A G3 is about twice as fast as a Pentium 2.
Incidentally, do you realise that a Pentium would run at about 3 times the speed of a 386 clocked at the same rate?
It may well be that an 800MHz G3 is not as fast as a 2GHz Pentium 4, but don't make the mistake of making any estimates based on clock speed.
Finally, I should point out this is not designed to be the ultimate in speed. It's only trying to be competitive, not a world beater. Just has to be as fast as a typical pentium CPU.
1. Amiga Inc is behind the hardware
2. Same reason you can call PPC Macs for Macs.
3. It runs AmigaOS.
Nicolas Mendoza
Prepare for MSIE 7
The point is, the Amiga is not dead (and I have an A3000/68040 in perfectly good shape on my desk to back that up), but it hasn't evolved for more than 10 years and this new toy is the proof: it's just standard PC hardware with a PowerPC CPU. Nothing in there remotely resembles the Amiga hardware. You might as well spend the same money on an Athlon + modern mobo + lots of memory and get far superior performance; if you really want some Amiga feeling from time to time, just install UAE.
What defined the Amiga was the integration between the OS and the hardware. The OS alone on standard hardware doesn't make much sense IMHO: Linux or *BSD or, hell, even Windows is better these days. I don't know what hardware does currently offer something like the extreme multimedia capabilities of the original Amiga hardware+software because I'm not interestad in that kind of stuff, but certainly it's not standard PC hardware. I guess you would have to buy a Silicon Graphics or something like that.
The AmigaOS gui is just fine. The buttons is in the correct places (you don't accidently close a window for example). You don't have to waste desktop space for the menu thanks to the old patent there the menu shows up in the title bar then you presses the right mousebutton. You have screens which works like virtual desktops in X, which means a program can choose if it only wants to have a window or a screen of it's own with only it's own windows in it. Those screens was dragable to and you could actually have a screen with one resolution dragged over another with another resolution on the old Amiga hardware.
//Hagge@IRCnet
Talking about looks there exists a lot of patches for the old AmigaOS which makes it look good.
But then again, I don't care that much about looks, i care about comfortability. That's why i use ratpoison as window manager aslong as i don't need a stupid program like gimp which uses a lot of windows.
...was two things:
... Then there was PAL/NTSC compatibility of course.
;-)
1) Cool hardware. It could do cool stuff: colorful screens, good sound, Hold And Modify mode, everything DMA-driven to waste as few CPU cycles as possible, blitter, copper,
2) Cool OS. Incredibly efficient, multitasking, windowing, and yet understandable. Files had logical names. There was a pervasive system-wide scripting language. You could modify OS-behavior in any way you saw fit. It did what you wanted it to do, without ever bothering you.
Amiga users like either the hardware or the software, but rarely both
The new hardware is not all that spectacular. Sure, PPC is nice, so is a big fat 3D card, but it isn't _cool_ like the old hardware was. You cannot fuck around with it and do cool hacks. Everybody else had it a long time ago.
The new software is not all that spectacular either. Other OS'es have learned about multitasking, and the brilliant original concepts got diluded by outside influences (I'm not saying those are wrong, but simply inappropriate for AmigaOS).
And then of course there was the other people you knew who had an Amiga. They made it fun: showing off cool hacks, borrowing each others' software (yeah, I know, that's what helped kill it in the first place...), seeing amazing demo's. The new platform will have to start from scratch in this regard.
In short, although I am happy people are still working on Amiga, I do not really see the point. Amiga should stand for massively powerful hardware, an elegant OS, and amazing innovation. What I see is a standard (not all that powerful) PC, using the same old OS except that it now has UNIX-style libraries.
I still have my A4K, which I used regularly up until about two years ago. I turn it on about once every three months, but the spark is gone.
To me, the Amiga was special. It wasn't just a chipset, or an operating system. Indeed, there were the games and the demoscene that banged away at the hardware and made it really perform. There were the digital artists and animators who used the fantastic software of the time to take advantage of the machine's capabilities to create great works. There were electronic music composers galore putting out more MODs than anybody can count. There were the users who adored the multitasking operating system which boosted their productivity and enjoyment. There were the programmers who filled up Aminet with software. There was the desktop video production revolution begun with the Video Toaster. And there was the team of dedicated people designing and building the machine itself. "The Amiga" was a gestalt of all these things; hardware, operating system, and a wonderfully creative, vibrant user community.
That's dead. I left the Amiga scene four years after Commodore went toes up. It was finally time to go when most of the talented, dynamic people had fled the platform for greener pastures: BeOS, Linux, even Windows. All that was left were the "somebody should" people. Y'know, the people who say "somebody should do X," but do nothing themselves. Well, except for the well-meaning, insane people who would try to run Amiga development companies on a wing and a prayer before collapsing into financial ruin. That reminded me very much of the "ghost dancing" of the plains Indians as they tried to fight a force that was extinguishing their whole way of life.
All that's left now are some real die-hards who are happy to just now get Quake II, a company that has salvaged the Amiga name from the post-Commodore disaster, and an outdated operating system. This new hardware is a fine thing for those die-hards. It'll give them new hardware, faster machines, and new OS features. It's not enough, though, to even reverse the Amiga Diaspora and bring back all the talent and drive that made for such a rich user community. It's certainly not enough to bring in significant new blood.
I wish Eyetech luck. I hope they can make a profit on the AmigaOne, that there are enough die-hards to keep it going. I just won't be back, because it's not "the Amiga" anymore.
On another note, I remember ALL games on my amiga, no matter wether they were running at 10 or 50fps, had perfect synchronization of input, video display and audio. I know this was made possible because of input, copper and lisa interrupts, (for sound there was also the fact that you could update the sound-playing pointer in two cycles, i.e. there was no mixing buffer that would add latency.) but.. why doesn't it work with Linux? It seems very weird.
Interrupts also work on the user level - I am not sure how linux works, but a user level program could request to be added to a list of interruptable processes for a specific event. I am not sure how large the latency of an interrupt is, but I think most OSes can manage something below 10ms.
As for the sound, I find it extremely strange that people use mixing buffers the way they do in current linux games. If you know what is the sample-rate of the audio card and what position of the buffer it is currently reading from you can have SFX with latency that is NOT dependent upon the length of the mix buffer. Simply predict in which memory address you should write to, so that you are just ahead of the audio DMA. (I wouldnt think there are any cards that dont support DMA right now..).
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
To be quite honest, this: "OS is obsolete before even being completed" Seems to be a very telling statement when finding out what's wrong with current opinion on non-Windows OS's. If Linux distro's consolidated and improved the core of what they had rather than bolting on new whizzbang stuff they'd have got a lot further than the hotch potch of usability they have now. I'm not saying this OS is any better or worse than any particular Linux OS. But slating it because it's not high tech enough is a little silly.
Free iPods - now in the UK!
Windows becomes stable, Mozilla comes out, Warcraft III is released, new Acorns are being made again, IBM are the good guys, Apple makes a server *and* decent OS, Apple plans to put out computers with CPUs made by IBM, and now Amiga puts out a new computer!
Who said the future was predictable...
But you know what... If I had the extra bucks right now I would probably buy one [I am a computer junkie.... ouch my wallet.].
I believe one of the AmigaOSs was the first true multitasking OS on a PC level system in existence... it would be really interesting to see how far they have come now. Linux PPC can't be all that bad either... perhaps even Darwin runs on these things [or could be made to anyway]
Mod this up! I'm tired of people comparing the price of random stripped down equipment with the price of a fully loaded Apple box. Usually it's people comparing the price of a headless white-box PC vs an Apple system that includes an LCD display, sometimes even the Cinema display. This time it's someone comparing a bare CPU board (not even a case and power supply!) with a fully loaded high-end Mac.
Don't forget to count what your time is worth to tinker with all this crap and get it working... call it at least $10/hr. And that's time to go shopping for all this crap and to open the boxes too. So what if you happen to like putting computer parts together... that's less time you could be spending playing Counterstrike. Er, except Counterstrike won't run on this thing when you're done. All you've got is a pretty toy with all the (in)compatibility of Mas OS X and none of the apps.
Someone else has already posted that once you go through your shopping list (case, power supply, video card, RAM, hard drive, keyboard, mouse, display), you've already spent enough to go ahead and get a 15" iMac. Not only does the iMac look better, but it's got a properly supported OS that's had two years to get stable, not some beta that'll be released Real Soon Now.
If you're going to compare prices, why not compare the price of an Amiga board ($600-$800) with your typical ATX mobo and AMD/Intel CPU, which runs more like $200-$300, or even less if you don't mind something "old" like a 1GHz Celeron or Duron.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Well, look at it this way. They just got back into the game. I spoke with a few more knowledgeable friends of mine briefly(I've never even touched an Amiga before) and I'm of the opinion that this could be just a dip into the pool.
After all, for the real stuff to come back, you have to start small. Its been a long time. The custom hardware and special nature of the Amiga can't just manifest suddenly. Takes time. Have to get money for more R&D and have to build awareness and get the name known once more.
This could be an opportunity to bring back the old. I don't know if it truly is or if the folk in charge now are thinking that, but it's worth a second look and some considering.
Kalen D'arrie
Well, in its time, I LOVED Amigas because they were a far better design that competing architectures: - Custom chips for specialized tasks. - True multitasking OS, including dynamically mounted filesystems and device drivers. - Built in graphical environment. - True AutoconfigTM (PNP-like). Only now consumer PC hardware is getting close to that innovation level (once technologic advancement and Moore's law is taken into account). PC hardware got up with Amiga rather quickly (custom graphic/audio chips, specific cards for specific needs). It took several years for this to happen after beeping 8086's and 80286's. They lack, anyway, true PNP support. While Autoconfig was REAL "Plug & Play", what today we actually have is "Plug & Install the f***ing broken drivers if you have them for your current Winslows version & Play if you are lucky". In Amiga the driver came in a ROM with the hardware, and you could install filesystem drivers directly into the partition table, so you could take your WhoKnowsWhichFS-formatted hard-drive to your friend's computer and read it flawlessly after pluggin it. About operating systems, it's true that the original design for AmigaOS left out very important things, like memory protection, virtual memory, security and a truly generical device model. These shortcomings were the main problems for the system to evolve further, but may be understood taking into account the state of the HW those days (neither 68000 or 8086 knew what an MMU unit was). But the important thing about the OS (and with lesser importance the HW) was innovation. Nobody had true multitasking then in a home computer (Macs, windows and GEM had stupid, fake multitasking). Nobody got an environment so straighforward, easy, dynamic, versatile and simple. Windows doesn't have yet all those dynamic features, and even Linux is still catching up (like recent developments for devfs and not so recent kernel modules, for instance). I won't advocate for the resurrection of the Amiga. I would rather prefer to be able to use a current platform, equally elegant and innovative. BeOS was the closest thing I saw for a long time. Hard to kill like Unix, friendly to configure like Amiga. What a shame that we allowed Microsoft to kill it! I think I would currently bet for Linux as my innovation horse, although being so heavily Unix-based, it will never have the elegant, easy to understand philosophy the Amiga had. I only hope the unsurpassable massive power of Free Software allows it to be successful where BeOS failed.
Amiga came out with a machine with "virtually" 4096 colors display due to its custom on-board graphics chips, a servicable but inelegant GUI, and built in digital stereo audio. This enabled it to be the PlayStation2 of its day. It was easy to program and developers jumped on board from the beginning.
It's popularity among gam3rz led to it's software being the most pirated around, and while the gam3rz were trading their Psygnosis games, they also copied all of the office/productivity/graphics software around, to the point where it was easier to get a pirated copy of a $100 word processor or $300 MIDI sequencer from the clerk at the mall software store than to find a store that carried the package for sale, even if you had the money to spend (True story.)
Amiga was loved to death by W4r3ZaX0rz and dead it will stay, because its real advantage as "ultimate gaming hardware" will never be regained.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
And I guess I'll throw another group into this category: there may be people who have actually been following whatever Fleecy's software team has been doing and think that it's a good idea. (I am very ignorant about this.)
Why this software goal requires a different hardware platform, is difficult to explain, and is controversial. Maybe the Mac guys can explain it to you. ;-)
(Some of your Penguinheads might fall into this category, although I think prolonged exposure to the overall Unix environment, can kill this type of thinking. When you start thinking that X11 is a good idea, it's probably too late.)
Looking at the prices, I don't think the revolution is here yet. But if it's ever going to start, it has to start somewhere. These projects can possibly create at least some installed base, which may lead to there being a real "cheap PPC" market down the road.
(Some of you Penguinheads might be in this category as well.)
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