Mini-ITX AmigaONE Board

bhtooefr writes "When I was checking Mini-ITX.com, I found this little gem, info on the AmigaONE Lite board that will be coming out. It's a Mini-ITX compliant motherboard, so you'll be able to throw an Amiga in a Cubid case. Pictures are here (first two - first is without CPU, second is with)."

Comments

Who actually still uses amigas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who actually still uses Amigas? Where are they popular?

Re:Who actually still uses amigas?

[troutsoup]

the same kind of people who use C64s, program games for atari 2600s, vic 20s, ti99 4a's.....

Re:Who actually still uses amigas?

[mig0]

I've thought about buying another amiga, and I'd have to have 1 fall in my lap to own one again. I'd own one for nostalgic purposes- the 4000s are/were grotesquely overpriced and the A1200s require too much expensive jury-rigging to get on the net & just be a nice, useful machine. (a $140 or so scan doubler, a NIC for the same price, a $200 or so expansion board to put a 1200 into a standard PC case...).

My dream would be to retool the A1200 (or A4000) so as to produce a machine that supported some more current standards (USB 1.1/2.0, firewire, Compact Flash, SD cards) in order to make the classic amigas more useful/nice to use daily.

Re:Who actually still uses amigas?

[bluethundr]

I don't even have a PC because i can do everything i need with my current Amiga.

Let me guess. Just taking a wild guess, you're not anywhere in the Good Ole USofA, and somewhere across the pond. Somewhere where you can either take the "chunnel" to the main contenent (or vice versa) or somesuch place where there are "Biergartens" everywhere.

I keed, I keed because I love...

Re:Who actually still uses amigas?

[amigabill]

I still use mine. An old 66MHz 68060 CPU (well, a 50MHz chip overclocked). I use it for email, web browsing, maintaining my web page, occasional games, word processor, basically what any normal Windows user uses a PC for, and what many of you guys use Linux for.

Realize, there are lots of people out there that have no clue what anyone would actually use Linux for, your assumption is no more educated than theirs is about you not having anything at all to actually use with Linux.

Re:Who actually still uses amigas?

[StarWreck]

I see everyone talking about their Amiga's running 68K processors. And then everyone else bad-mouthing those 68K processors. I think most people are failing to realize that the thread is referring to an Amiga that tops out at a 933MHz G4!!! Thats a bit faster than a 50MHz 68060.

wow.

[fjordboy]

That's totally small...I was looking at this picture, but it doesn't have anything else to compare it to. Anyone have a picture next to a penny or something to compare?

Re:wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare it to itself. There are PS/2 ports, 100mil spaced jumpers, 3.5mm audio jacks, etc etc.

Re:wow.

[fjordboy]

eh...I guess, I just wanted something more common. Heck, I can't exactly visualize the size of a ps2 port unless there is something next to it. But that's a good thought, it does lend a different perspective now that I've looked at it again. Thanks.

Re:wow.

[hattig]

17cm by 17cm

The board is a beta design, not the final one. It'll be a few more months yet as they get all the functionality they want onto the board sensibly.

AmigaOS4 is now booting on native PPC platforms now (well, the AmigaOne).

Re:wow.

[MatthewB79]

Well that backup battery is about the size of a nickel or a quarter.

Re:wow.

[gfody]

how about the pci slot? I'd imagine its a standard sized pci slot

Re:wow.

[merlin_jim]

Well I don't have any pictures of this particular board for comparison... but all Mini-ITX boards are the exact same size (170mmx170mm) so here are some pics I found real quick of other Mini-ITX boards:

Here's one with a CD next to it...
http://mini-itx.com/reviews/b860t/images/B8 60T0001 .jpg

Here's one with a coke can next to it (REALLY puts it into perspective):
http://mini-itx.com/news/images/sto ry0026.jpg

Here's one inside a humidor:
http://mini-itx.com/projects/humidor64/i mages/humi dor0001.jpg

And inside an NES:
http://mini-itx.com/projects/nespc/images/ne s0009. jpg

And inside a breadbox:
http://mini-itx.com/projects/images/pro ject0020c.j pg

And inside a PS2:
http://mini-itx.com/projects/playstation2pc/ images /ps2pc0000.jpg

Re:wow.

[ameoba]

How about the DIMM slot, that's a reasonable size to vizualize (at least for me; I've got like 10-12 of 'em on my desk).

Or for a better idea, Mini-ITX boards are almost the same size as a std. CD jewel case.

For the man who has everything

[Hadlock]

Including one of those four propeller helicopter things sitting on his desk as a toy but never uses, an equally usless gift that costs far too much and has been used a total of once, the mini-ITX Amiga board!

now if you could just rig it so OS X would run on one of these babies...

Re:For the man who has everything

[Anonymous Coward]

I think actually getting AmigaOS 4 to run on the things is the first step. Amigas are about the only machine I've seen selling without an OS for more than a year before release. The only option is Linux PPC. Not bad, but when you're paying the Amiga premium on the hardware it's getting a bit grating.

All the same, I can't wait for AOS4. I have 2 AmigaOnes here waiting for it

Re:For the man who has everything

[styrotech]

now if you could just rig it so OS X would run on one of these babies...

I thought there was a Mac on Linux project that could do stuff like that - I could be wrong though :)

Re:For the man who has everything

[Fancia]

There is; it runs MacOS 9/X without the need for an actual Mac ROM. The site can be found here.

Re:For the man who has everything

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

AmigaOnes have been shipping since before the start of this year I think your a bit late

He asked about Amiga OS4. It is irrelevant as to whether A1's have been shipping because the A1's can only publicly run PPC Linux at the moment.

your a bit late

You're, as in, "you are". Stay in school, kids.

YLFI

Re:For the man who has everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I can say that all versions so far impressed me much(!), just the coding community did, then there is the gaming nostalgia (it's the system that was there when 2d gaming peaked, I WILL NEVER FORGET THE FUN I HAD WITH MY AMIGA 500. It's boring to all those who weren't involved back then, and they have their own things. But if you're an Amiga zealot.. "Guru Meditation" is just so much cooler than "Blue Screen", and it was better too because you saw the error message AND the screen.. like you write a letter and it crashes, you could write the last lines you wrote before saving the last time on a napkin. Not that I ever was in that situation, but the bluescreen of windows is just retarded, it spews unhelpful info at the user and much too much of it too.

It was WAY ahead of its time in a lot if things. Too bad Commodore was greedy and milked Amiga500/2000/3000 for cash.. the Amiga 1200 could have come out a lot sooner, and it was fucking awesome when did it came out.. too bad the Amiga had already begun dying then =/

You see, when I watch/use amiga stuff, I also enjoy the knowledge that this isn't only created by raw processing power alone, but a very elegant system and ingenouity of the enveloper.

And look at the demoscene, like here [ http://www.pouet.net/ ] A lot of the ideas still expanded on today originated on the Amiga (as well as the C64).

Hey, and think of trackers like Renoise or Skale Tracker or maybe even Buzz... I guess partial credit goes to the C64 there too though. I could talk hours and hours about this stuff, but it's useless. Look for some sites, you can get emulators and screenshots and whatnot, if you really want to you should be able to get an idea why so many people hold the Amiga so dear.

Re:For the man who has everything

[Suppafly]

There is; it runs MacOS 9/X without the need for an actual Mac ROM.

But can it run without the actually PPC architecture?

Re:For the man who has everything

[gurumeditationerror]

It's boring to all those who weren't involved back then, and they have their own things. But if you're an Amiga zealot.. "Guru Meditation" is just so much cooler than "Blue Screen"

Yeah and there is a story behind it too, the guys that designed it were originally working on what would be one of the first 16 bit games consoles but they kept adding more features and ports onto until eventually they realised they had nearly built a decent computer.

To keep the project secret they pretended publicly to be designing joysticks, one joystick they designed was a full size surf board you tilted when standing on it.

They had it rigged up to a computer that detected movement and the goal was to sit as still as possible (to relax). When they were designing the system and it would frustratingly crash they'd be told the error to go and meditate on....

Re:For the man who has everything

[Fancia]

The AmigaOne *is* a PPC machine. Mac-on-Linux will run on any kind of PPC box.

Re:For the man who has everything

[Shadowmist]

the above is a cute story and some of it is actually true.

Jay Miner, who was working at Atari developed the original three custom chips which were named Agnes, Denise, and Gary. Among the things he was aiming for was a really good flight simulator. When Atari expressed it's lack of interest in pursuing the design, he made a deal. He and others took out a loan with the chips and designs as collateral and formed the original Amiga Inc.

They sweated blood, worked long hours and built a prototype which had giant transitor versions of the three chips, spending virtually all their money getting something together for the big Western show, which I think at the time was ComDex. They had gotten it to the point where Miner could at leaast diagnose what transistors to replace and where depending on how the machine crashed. And at that point they were broke with the loan from Atari coming due.

The rest is mostly history. The ungangly prototype wowed the crowds at Comdex, including some folks from Commedore Buisness Machines which by that point was looking to move beyond it's 8-bit success with the C-64. Commedore bought Amiga, set it up as Commedore-Amiga and it would be this company that launched the Amiga 1000. It was actually during this honeymoon part of the Commedore purchase that most of the above actually happened, including the experimental Joyboard, a joystick which one sat on and used by manipulating their weight. The technique known as "Guru Meditation" would be the technical name for Amiga crashes until it was dropped in OS 2.something.

Re:For the man who has everything

[deanj]

The joyboard was meant to be stood on. It was demoed on Good Morning America by Suzy Chaffee (remember the girl nicknamed Suzy Chapstick from those Chapstick commercials? That was her). The Guru Meditation was coined by the folks that would try and sit on it and balance.

That's all info from a speech that RJ Mical gave back at one of the numerous Amiga conferences. (I did see the GMA demo myself though).

cool hardware hack!

[ender_wiggins]

but does anyone use amigas anymore for anything? just like the apple remake was pretty cool hack, would love to have one, but its not like im gonna do my work on it or server websites off it.

Re:cool hardware hack!

[zakezuke]

Cable companies were still using them a couple of years ago, don't know if they still are. Amiga OS 4 is being developed, There is suppose to be a new amiga coming out someday.

Yes, I noticed while under AT&T cable I did see a "Guru Meditation error", so I can verify one was in use roughly 3 years ago in washington. I think Perhaps it was an amiga 2000. Though the layout of that particular information station did change shortly afterwards, I would "guess" they may have switched platforms. Dispite the fact that I have a softspot for the Amiga I can see that it would be a pain in the tookus to support in the 21st century, esp a one with zorro based slots.

The reason I abonded my amiga was just a simple matter of moolah. To do web even in 8bit color I needed new roms, either 3.x roms or 1.x roms where I could softload the 3.x roms. The 68030 was somewhat adquate, I would have prefered a 68040 or better, and upgrading the 2000 was just too much money for the speed increase. Further that whole zorro II vs zorro III thing, the fact that my selection of graphics boards were pretty limited in the zorro II department, and there was a super major slowdown with AGA emulation. Basicly the upgrades I wanted to peform would set me back a close to a grand, and franky I could get a PC or a Mac for that.

On the cool beans level, the scsi support was superb. I could copy CDs to the hard disk with ease due to the fact that I had a nice toshiba without digital copybit proection with a simple copy command.

Is this still a viable platform? To be honest, I've not seen their lastest OS [3.9 I think was their most recent]. I must admit I was curious, but I could never find a copy online and I wasn't about to shell out cash just to look at it. Still if there is decent linux support I imagine this could be a viable alternative to the intel based machines, though a touch spendy IMHO.

Re:cool hardware hack!

[bhtooefr]

Currently, OS 4 (the first PPC version) isn't out yet, so the only option is LinuxPPC. It's a generic PPC system, except it uses a custom CPU socket, and the ROMs will be specialized for OS 4 (currently they're LinuxPPC optimized, but an OS 4 "kickstart" ROM will be released). If you want, run MacOnLinux on LinuxPPC, and you've got a Mini-ITX Mac.

Text in case it gets slashdotted...

[OrangeHairMan]

AmigaOne News:Alan Redhouse Comments on AmigaWorld about the A1-SE Lite

Posted by Mikey_C on 20-Sep-2003 18:14:27 (2452 reads)

Read Alan's full post

TA magazine issue 15. To quote myself (because its easier than typing) :

Quote:

AmigaOne Lite - some more details.

In the last edition of Total Amiga I gave a brief overview of the AmigaOne Lite - an entry level AmigaOne designed to both as a CD32/A1200 successor and for use in embedded systems such as kiosks, STB's etc. However the more observant of you will have realised that in the last issue I actually described the AmigaOne-SE Lite - so why the change of name?

In the interim period we have re-examined the costs and decided that it is economically feasible to significantly increase the A1-Lite's specification and flexibility within the same overall target pricing. As one of these changes is to use the standard A1XE CPU modules (plus a new entry-level 750CXe module) we dropped the 'SE' from its name.

The full specifications for the AmigaOne Lite are as follows:

Micro ITX form factor (170mmx170mm)
Gigabit and 10/100 ethernet on board
133MHz UDMA RAID IDE controller
USB 2.0 on board
IEEE 1394 ('FireWire') on board
2x AGP graphics on board with PAL/NTSC TV out
AC97 sound on board
1 x PCI33MHz slot (horizontal, via supplied riser card)
Cardbus slot for flash card support (diskless booting, applications, games slot etc)
Usual legacy PS/2, serial, parallel ports

Being a standard form factor it will fit in a standard micro ITX case, such as the one shown in the enclosed photograph. Please visit the web link at http://www.morex.com.tw/minicase.htm and www.mini-itx.com to see other suitable case designs.

We are aiming to bring the AmigaOne Lite to market early next year.

Not mentioned in the above spec is that the board is now designed to take the standard A1XE megarray cpu module so that it can be supplied with/upgraded to anything from an entry level (=cheap) 750CXe@433 to (possibly) a 1.3GHz G4.

The pictures published on the Soft3 website are of the first pre-prototype version - there will be 2 or 3 revisions before the actual production version is ready. The first step - this board - is basically to shrink the A1XE board to a mini-ITX formfactor and make sure it works properly. Then the other chipsets and connectors will be added and that series of boards use for developers to port OS & applications. It will also be used to demonstrate capability - and hopefully gain some significant orders - in the industrial markets that we and other dealers are targetting (display controllers, kiosks, etc).

Finally we hope the final version (which will be as near as possible to the above spec) will be available for sale in the specialist shops (and ultimately in the high street electronic entertainment chains) - with OS4 and some Amiga applications - in 1Q04.

The pre-production pictures were intended to be shown - at this stage - only to the A1 developers and to the A1-users list on AmigaWorld to try to get some useful feedback. Thats why there was really no explanation available to the world at largel when Soft3 (due to a misunderstanding) put them up on their own website.

However, from what I can see the, open publication of these pictures, together with the screen shots of a beta of OS4 running on the A1 - has had a very positive reception. But, please, no private emails for more details on availability dates and prices - we're swamped with emails as it is. This stuff will be posted 'when its ready' (c).

Hope this helps

Alan

ITX prices are becoming very attractive

[Mr. Ophidian Jones]

When I was setting up my LTSP-style arrangement at home, I shopped around a bit for clients. I already had an old Javastation Krups, but found it much to slow for heavy use.

These thin clients are $599 to about $629, similar to the prices I found but I can't understand why companies make them so expensive. I decided to build my own using VIA mini-ITX boards for less than $300.

It amazes me when companies fail to analyze why previous thin client computing initiatives haven't caught on, and put out thin clients that cost the same as a full desktop PC. My local bank (Barclay's) have replaced old X Terminals with Dell desktop PCs (P4s!) running Exceed, and I assume they chose this based on price.

Re:ITX prices are becoming very attractive

[King_TJ]

Honestly, I think it's because the manufacturers realize there's a lot of profit to be milked from thin client sales. They're not really interested in getting in big price wars with them - because despite the advertising talk about how inexpensive they're supposed to be, they know they've got a niche market that will keep paying the higher prices. Discounting the thin clients isn't likely to increase that market very much.

I worked with the Netier thin clients for a while (now bought out by Wyse Corp.), and they provide centralized management software for them that helps get users "locked in" to buying more and more of their thin clients. Why? Well, you have to go to considerable effort to build update packages that their software can push out to the clients, so software in their flash memory can be modified. If you spent a whole day building a package to, say, update the Citrix ICA client on your thin clients, you're not going to be too happy if it only gets used to update 15 or 20 systems. You'd rather have it do all 200, 300, or even 1000 systems in your company, right? So right there, Wyse knows you'll be back for more thin clients - whether they cost $600 each, or $150 each.

The majority of people I've seen using a freeware solution like LTSP are on tight budgets to begin with, so they're generally using it as a way to recycle old, existing computers - as opposed to shopping for bargains on new thin clients.

Re:ITX prices are becoming very attractive

[Kenja]

ITX, all the disadvantages of a PC combined with all the disadvantages of a thin client.

Re:ITX prices are becoming very attractive

[mabhatter654]

Not really, The VIA edens fill an important niche in computing...they run with low enough power and x86 compatible to use regular off-the-shelf auto/boat/hobbie batteries as power supplies for a USEABLE amount of time. P4s are nice, but 100W power usage will suck any batteries dry in minutes..not very useable. Also, the size lets you put a PC anywhere you want. Add linux to the mix and you can get a tiny, purpose-built "black Box" for cheap!

Re:Great, another place to throw an Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

My trash? Yes.

Finally.....

[moodswung]

Lemmings, the way it was meant to be played!

Re:Finally.....

[LucidityZero]

I'm only 21, but I grew up on AMIGA's. I lived in Holland till I was 10, so it was only natural. I didn't have a PC clone untill I was 12.

*deep nostalgic sigh*

As far as I can tell, the AMIGA really was just about the perfect computer. I can't even imagine what computing would be like today if Commodore still ruled the ring... (Remember - they really did in the late 80's in every place but the US)

Re:Finally.....

[Larsing]

Oh-Ow!

A new mandate?

[Obiwan Kenobi]

I think the next time someone links a pictures page, a paypal donate link should go right beside it, in order to pay for their melted server.

Those poor hardware sites just get pounded :)

Re:A new mandate?

[bhtooefr]

Hey, relax. I thought people might WANT to see the pix. Besides, they're not THAT big, and their server didn't seem to get taken down by us.

again?

[Lxy]

First I'm told my C64 can be be modded for broadband.

Then an Amiga runs at 900Mhz. /me dusts off his Apple ][

Re:again?

[downix]

Not quite. There is nothing "Amiga" about this board other than the name. But, for an embedded Linux box, it seems decent. But, I would sooner go for the Pegasos 2 and pay a fraction of the cost.

Re:again?

[vandan]

How about the fact that it runs the Amiga OS 4 and is compatible with old Amiga software? That must count for something...

Re:again?

[TheLittleJetson]

amigas have been quietly kept alive... it never really died, as i understand.... however, i see value in this board as being a good linux box material. dual G4 933mhz in an attractive itx case, running linux? yes, i would find this QUITE useful. :-)

Re:again?

[Emil Brink]

[...] is compatible with old Amiga software?

Um, if it's really going to be compatible with "old Amiga software", it better do The Right Thing when said software pokes $DFF180 and peeks $BFE001. Which I somehow doubt, I didn't see any register-level emulation of the original Amiga hardware listed in the specs... It'd be cool, though! :)

Re:again?

[k8to]

You can attach your old amiga motherboard to supply this level of compatability if desired, while not sacrificing the PPC speed of running OS4.

Re:again?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, do you think that current MAC:s are not MAC because they are so different when compared to original MAC computers ?

Or do you think that current PC's are not PC's because they are not like opriginal IBM PC ?

Why should amiga be always like original A1000 ?
Amiga can change as much as other computers.

And AmigaOne doe run OS4 and Amiga software. "If it feels like Amiga, if it runs newes AmigaOS, if it runs original and new Amiga software then it IS an AMIGA" So AmigaOne is as much Amiga as A1000, it just has modern hardware.

Pegasos is basicly the same computer as AmigaOne, no matter if it was designed by the different people.

I don't run around saying that Pegasos is not Amiga: I don't go as low as you. But if you really think about it then Pegasos is what can't be called Amiga, it can't even run newest AmigaOS 4.

Re:again?

[bhtooefr]

Hmm, I'd think that running MOL would be an even better idea. (anyone want to port MOL to assembly in ROM? - let it interface with the hardware, too) A full-powered Mac OS X box in a Mini-ITX case would ROCK. BTW, AFAIK the Dual G4 A1 CPU card isn't available yet.

An Amiga with a Radeon and VIA chips?

[Anonymous Coward]

Denise and Agnus are spinning in their silicon landfills.

Re:An Amiga with a Radeon and VIA chips?

[gilesjuk]

Exactly, a PPC based board filled with off the shelf parts? why not just buy a Mac and replace the OS with something else.

Always been an Amiga fan, but they have nothing to offer over anyone else these days.

Re:An Amiga with a Radeon and VIA chips?

[gilesjuk]

The world was a different place back in the Amiga days though.

PCs displayed text and 16 colours, people didn't play music or video on their PC or have any thought of playing complex games.

Amiga was born out of the games and home computer industry, created by some of the brightest sparks at that time. They put their life and soul into the chip and architecture designs and that's why it was one of the best systems at the time.

However these days you have PCs that play, record, edit and encode audio/video, high power 3D chips, good off the shelf audio hardware etc.. etc..

That fact is an Amiga that is based on PPC and some off the shelf chips isn't really that cutting edge. They're not even using very fast PPC chips looking at the specs shown.

If it was really an Amiga it would be doing something different like using two CPUs and unified memory archtecture and it would have 5.1 audio outputs, multiple VGA display outputs, TV in and out, video recording and playback etc... The Amiga defined the term multimedia, why would an Amiga just be a PPC board and not have incredible audio and video facilities?

Re:An Amiga with a Radeon and VIA chips?

[miksuh]

Ofcourse it would be cool, but. It could be too expensive to make computer like that after there was no new Amiga models in ten years. Current AmigaOne, Amigaone Lite and Pegasos too, are meant to be new start for the current active Amigans. That's the main goal, to have something which can allow you to start again. The aim is not to do everything asap. it's more important to stop Amiga community going smaller. So this new hardware needs to be powerful enough so that it is atractive enough for the current Amigans. Hardware needs to be cheap enough, because othervise it would be difficult to sell it. They don't have huge amunts of money which they can spend on hardware development.

Re:An Amiga with a Radeon and VIA chips?

[skvngrx]

Pretty much sounds like BeOS and the BeBoxes... Oh damn, they faded away too.

I had an Amiga 500 w/HD, then an Amiga 3000T with the Picasso graphics card, and later ran BeOS on a PowerPC as my main machine, and still have BeOS as a spare partition on my Athlon.

The problem is many things: the community activity, development, new applications, and cool hardware/features. Hence I also run a MacOSX laptop, a SuSE Laptop, and some FreeBSD servers - but they still don't give me the excitement I had with the Amiga and the BeOS.

Re:An Amiga with a Radeon and VIA chips?

[gilesjuk]

500+ was expensive when I bought my A500. An ST was cheaper and the C64 was probably somewhere around the 100 mark. So the original Amigas were at a premium price.

Re:An Amiga with a Radeon and VIA chips?

[bhtooefr]

Two CPUs is different? BTW, there's a Dual G4 A1CPU board in development (it seems to use a custom CPU interface - on the XE and Lite models) for the AmigaONE G*-XE and Lite. (the SE uses a soldered on G3@600MHz)

Re:An Amiga with a Radeon and VIA chips?

[gilesjuk]

It would be different for a twin cpu computer sold to home users. The norm is single CPU at the moment.

Plus all the other features I detailed.

"This little gem"?

[psyconaut]

No, GEM was on the Atari ST ;-)

-psy

Re:"This little gem"?

[shplorb]

So? Everybody knows Atari sux! Amiga kicks ass! =]

Re:"This little gem"?

[psyconaut]

Atari had a better logo. I was wearing a t-shirt with it on as I typed that ;-)

-psy

Re:"This little gem"?

[scottgfx]

And TOS was actually CP/M 68K. Where I work, we have a doppler radar that runs on an Intel based PC with CP/M and GEM. If you didn't know the hardware, you would swear that the radar ran on an Atari. :)

Re:"This little gem"?

[gl4ss]

gem was on the pc too(if by gem you mean the graphcical ui/windowing system thingy). first computer experience i ever had was on it(with the paint).

ok.. little off topic. i never had an amiga as a kid and of course we had pretty petty flame wars at school which was better(in the end, pc did prevail after few years but then i wasn't so glad about that it did since i'd grown to be a little more geeky by then)

anyways.. one of these boards would be a really cool thing to play around with.

Re:"This little gem"?

[Lispy]

The world as it used to be:
Musician: "Atari rocks!"
Gamer: "Amiga rocks!"
Designer: "Apple rocks!"
Accountant: "PCs are the future!"
All others together: ROFL

*Sigh*
Back in 1992 I had a megaST with a 40MByte Harddrive and two screens, color and b/w. That machine looked really cool, even better than the apples from back then.

While were at it: What really rocked my world was the Atari Portfolio. I could never afford one so I got one on ebay a few months ago. Its serves as a really neat terminal for configuring firewalls and stuff via a serial conn.

Re:"This little gem"?

[bhtooefr]

LITTLE is the key word (in the Mini-ITX sense of the word, anyway...) GEMDOS looks to be a touch big for it's time (~200KB - for the core OS, which was in BIOS on the Amiga).

AmigaONE ITX + G4 + ??? = ITX G4 Linux box?

[subk]

Sounds delicious! Whats to stop me from just slapping a G4 on this baby and having a nice 1.4ghz G4 Linux box with Radeon video in a cubid? Why the hell would I want to run AmigaOS on something that is obviously a god sent Linux desktop?

Re:AmigaONE ITX + G4 + ??? = ITX G4 Linux box?

[Whigh]

Absolutely nothing. The best part is the PPCBoot Bios . . . Best part of cpu, upgradeable slot that will take the G5 PowerPC chip when people other than Apple can get their hands on them.

Re:AmigaONE ITX + G4 + ??? = ITX G4 Linux box?

[ameoba]

Umm... Maybe because the ATI drivers for Linux suck.

Re:AmigaONE ITX + G4 + ??? = ITX G4 Linux box?

[Wesley Felter]

Not quite; the G5 uses a totally different bus protocol, so you can't put it in a system designed for previous PowerPCs.

Re:AmigaONE ITX + G4 + ??? = ITX G4 Linux box?

[angle_mark]

They don't suck for me. Running the ATI 3.2.5 XFree 4.3 drivers with Radeon 9000 pro and everything is goin' nice and smooth. Also as far as drivers go I've had more troubles with Nvidia cards be it under windows or Linux than anything else.

Re:AmigaONE ITX + G4 + ??? = ITX G4 Linux box?

[subk]

You obviously haven't tried an Nvidia Linux driver lately. The damn thing downloads a kernel module for your kernel and if it can't download one it compiles and inserts it for you!! Even my Dad could install the Nvidia driver.

Re:AmigaONE ITX + G4 + ??? = ITX G4 Linux box?

[dreez]

You would perhaps like to run Amiga OS on it because it boots in 20 seconds, because it starts applications within a second most of the time, because the user interface is really lighting fast (instead of lighting fast on a 4+Ghz Pentium). Just to name a few reasons. The Amiga OS is really fast, not linux fast, real fast (try running a graphical linux on a 12Mhz processor, then try using a A1200 you'll see what i mean)! Grtz Dries

Re:AmigaONE ITX + G4 + ??? = ITX G4 Linux box?

[jejones]

Nothing's stopping you. In fact, if a bunch of people do that, that will just feed the economy of scale, which will even help the people who will be running AmigaOS on it.

Re:AmigaONE ITX + G4 + ??? = ITX G4 Linux box?

[bhtooefr]

Actually, that's the only thing you can do right now (when it's released - they might wait for AOS4 to be released). If I were to get one, I'd try to load it up with Open Firmware to straight boot Mac OS X. If I couldn't do that, I'd use MOL on LinuxPPC, and MAYBE dual-boot with AOS4 (when it comes out).

Re:AmigaONE ITX + G4 + ??? = ITX G4 Linux box?

[angle_mark]

Yeah I have its not the installation that bothers me, that was good. More it was an issue with things like 2d quality. The Radeon seems to have the better font rendering for example, at least to my eyes anyway.

Testing for full vaporware compliance...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've only got 4 questions:

Is the processor 64-bit?
Does it support IPV6?
Will it run Enlightenment 17?
Will it run Duke Nukem Forever?

If so, I'll buy a million!

Re:Testing for full vaporware compliance...

[waferhead]

Kids, RTFA, it's a PPC mini ITX board.

It will run Linux/*BSD fine.

Get a grip. Think of the possibilities for goodness sakes---

The NEW "Amiga" is an interesting beast, and shares little (save running old apps via UAE proably) with the old but the name.

IANAP, but the runtime environment supposedly runs circles around JAVA, and will work across Arches via a platorm specific runtime.

Disclaimer---I still have, and occasionally fire up, my "killer" A3000.

Save for shot kbd, it still works fine after all these years, and the interface could still teach lessons.

It will also boot to a full GUI off one 880K floppy.

UAE Rocks about 100x faster on my 2100+ tho.

Re:Testing for full vaporware compliance...

[GQuon]

The NEW "Amiga" is an interesting beast, and shares little (save running old apps via UAE proably) with the old but the name.

And that will be mostly true untill AmigaOS 4.0 comes out. The new kernel, ExecSG, is not based on *nix/BSD. It is a re-implementation of Exec on the new PPC architecture.

Disclaimer: This is posted with my AmigaONE board, running KDE on Debian.

Re:Testing for full vaporware compliance...

[bhtooefr]

It's a G3 or G4 (your choice - as long as it's on an A1CPU board), it runs anything that'll run on a PPC (including Linux), so yes, it'll support IPV6, Enlightenment 17 runs on Linux, and DN4E - you might want to use Bochs for that. So, your answers are:

No.
Yes.
Yes.
Maybe.

What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[squiggleslash]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Amiga fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an Amiga (a A500+ with 1Mb of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Amiga, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, AMosaic will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Cygnus Edit is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Amigas, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen an Amiga that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Amiga's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 7.1 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Amiga is a superior machine.

Amiga addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an Amiga over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

[I've been waiting to post this for ages. Just kidding btw, I really, really, miss my A500+, with 6Mb of RAM and a 45Mb SCSI HD. :-(]

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[tempest303]

The deal is that Amiga WAS superior... years ago. Some people just never got over the fact that Amiga never really made it.

I'm in the same boat as you, I honestly have no idea why people still use them as their main computers. Having one for nostalgia, sure, but as a main PC? What's the attraction over Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, or Apple??

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[squiggleslash]

My comment was tongue in cheek, it's a copy of a standard anti-Mac troll, except the anti-Mac troll original does actually quote a superior Mac to the PCs in it.

The people looking at the AmigaONE boards are after different types of hardware from the mainstream. I can relate to that, and while where they're going is not for me, I appreciate that there are people out there still doing that. The loss of Amiga and Atari, together with the dropping out of sight by Apple, has really hurt the computing industry from an innovation point of view. How exactly does one get excited about a new Dell? Because it has a faster Pentium? More RAM? A better themed Windows? Apple has made up for this a little in the last couple of years by doing some original things, but we're still a way away from the heyday of the late eighties when there was good reason to follow the computing press, and everything was new and exciting.

*sigh*

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[benzapp]

Quite a few places still use it for television production. I just saw one of the public access channels in NYC get stuck at the AmigaDOS prompt for a whole afternoon.

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[starling]

Hey, the Amiga might suck, but it does it with style!

BTW, 6809? Oops, what a giveaway. Dragon?

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[LucidityZero]

I really, really, miss my A500+, with 6Mb of RAM and a 45Mb SCSI HD. :-(

You're not the only one... you're not the only one...

I run Linux now, but I swear I'd switch back to AMIGA Workbench in a SECOND if I could.

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[marko123]

http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/?

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[SWTP_OS9]

You must be from England! The Dragon was not that big of a hit in the U.S. since RS was already selling the orginal { Coco } here.

Funny. It was always fun coding a game to run as fast as possible but with an clone using today parts would be fun to try to slow down one to play on it!

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[master_p]

Right now Amiga is a dead horse. It just does not stand a chance, even against a lowly 486/66. But you should compare computers with similar price at the time that were available. In 1991, I could play 2D games with 768 colors and 40 levels of parallax scrolling at 60 frames per second on my Amiga, with 4 channels of 22KHz hardware-driven sound. I couldn't do the same with a 1991 PC 286.

The PC got the edge over the Amiga because of the Amiga's graphics architecture, which was heavily geared towards 2d blitting: it used bit planes, where the PC had packed format. The use of packed pixels made 3d much easier, and the lack of 3d killed the Amiga.

The Amiga had many advantages:

-a nice Unix like O/S where everything could be done from the command line

-each executable had its own 'registry': a text file with '.info' extension; applications could be copied by dragging their directory around

-nice multitasking; very light

-Arrex, an advanced scripting language that could do gui as well as command line apps

-a nice library system; and O/S file organization

-an Ultra light gui, that could be easily customizable

-each app could be in its own screen, with its own video mode. Drag and drop from one screen to another worked

-many custom chips, especially for blitting. The Amiga 1200 could do many graphical tricks, and its blit speed was close to a Pentium's.

Commodore did many mistakes and really killed the Amiga. Back in 1991, Amiga needed hard disk support, cd rom, and a custom chip that could do 3D.

I really miss the Amiga, as well as those halcyon days of back-bedroom coding. It just don't feel the same with a PC: although the PC is vastly more powerful, it's nowhere near as beautiful(as a concept, as a design, as a promise!!!).

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[CausticWindow]

Cygnus Ed! That brings back some memories..

I want Cygnus Ed for Linux! It was so slick..

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[vidarh]

I agree about Cygnus Ed - I still haven't found any editor I'm even remotely as comfortable with as that. Jed is the closest I've gotten to something usable.

And Arexx. The language is a nightmare, but having almost every app scriptable with a common scripting language, letting you "remote control" one app from any other was heaven.

And Screens. Even thought splitting the screen with multiple resolutions isn't really doable on modern hardware, it would still be nice (though I think some version of Enlightenment supported it for X).

And placing the application menubar at the top of the screen - frees up so much screen real estate.

Deluxe Paint, or a similar quality SIMPLE paint program (sorry, Gimp just doesn't cut it - not even remotely - Photogenics sort of works on X, but it's bug ridden)

Datatypes!

Assigns, though that is FINALLY making an appearance of sorts in X based desktops with multi rooted virtual filesystem support.

A quick, responsive GUI - my 2GHz x86 based PC with a GeForce, and 512MB RAM is still less responsive most of the time than my Amiga 500 was...

AsmOne, now that actually made assembly programming pleasurable (of course 68k assembly was a dream compared to the horrible hack that is x86)

And DiskMaster II or DOpus...

And Workbench. It's embarrassing that file managers under X either are slower, or is a nightmare to work with compared to a basic file management interface that's didn't change fundamentally after '86.

Damn, I want my Amigas again now... Maybe it's time to give Aros a spin :)

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[jpop32]

I want Cygnus Ed for Linux! It was so slick..

Hear, hear! Win32 port wouldn't hurt either. An editor always a ctrl-enter away...

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[whaley]

A570 is a CD-ROM, A590 is a hard disk (incl. controller, etc.)

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[squiggleslash]

Yup, a Dragon 32. I always got stuck with the technically superior (well, for the 6809 part anyway, the Dragon was always a little hampered by its lousy 6847 display chip) but too-late-to-take-over-the-world platforms.

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[Oddly_Drac]

"Amiga addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an Amiga over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems."

The Amiga (A500) ran at 7Mhz, but it was blistering fast compared with 386DX40 of the time simply because of the wide pathways between the relevant custom chips. PCs didn't really get this until AGP & Northbridge/Southbridge separation (correct me if I'm talking codshite).

All in all, it was better at handling graphics than a PC because we were thinking S3 chipsets were the dog's back wheels.

"My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 7.1 mhz machine at times."

In terms of raw performance (very raw), your 486 should run roughly nine times faster. But it won't.

"I really, really, miss my A500+, with 6Mb of RAM and a 45Mb SCSI HD."

Ah, one of those. Diamond shoes fit alright? Wallet snug with all the Benjamins? Ferrari still shiny? :o)

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[squiggleslash]

FWIW, I had something called a "Reference 40", from Evesham Micros. I actually did a review of it on csar which crops up occasionally when I do searches on old email addresses. It was an A590 style deal, slightly longer and less elegant, with a 40Mb HD and four 1Mb SIMM slots.

I'm a little baffled by the original AC who's managed to read the last sentence stating I'm being tongue in cheek about comparing an A500+ to a mid-nineties PC, yet flames me for doing it anyway. Also baffling is that he doesn't realise most Amiga users did indeed use SCSI to hook up HDs, until 93 or 94 when C= started sticking IDE interfaces in some machines. No Amiga, to the best of my knowledge, came with an RLL (or MFM) interface and I don't recall ever seeing an interface card for one, though interestingly the A590 did include a rarely used IDE-8 interface. I'm not sure what IDE-8 was, presumably it's related to the original IBM PC's 8 bit slots in the same way as IDE is related to the PC/AT's 16 bit slots (later known as ISA.)

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[squiggleslash]

There's a project called AROS (Amiga Research Operating System) that's trying to produce a semi-open source clone of AmigaOS and getting quite far with it. It's worth checking out. The Workbench itself is at an early stage, though it just about works. The command line seems fairly mature, and the major other parts of the OS, Intuition etc, work just fine.

Unfortunately while it works well, it suffers from the same problems as the original in terms of resource tracking and memory management. Still, it provides a framework to start from.

If you want to fire up something Workbench-like on your PC, it's a project worth following.

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[mdwh2]

What's the attraction over Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, or Apple??

What's the attraction of say, FreeBSD over Linux, Windows or Apple?

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[miksuh]

And ofcource CPU is 68060, which is MUCH faster than 68000 in A500 etc :)

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[hesiod]

> -Arrex, an advanced scripting language that could do gui as well as command line apps

I have to nitpick because the Amiga is one of the few places I can actually do that. It's ARexx, and it kicked ass. It was the first language I ever learned, and I used to write BBS games in it.

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[tempest303]

heh, I have no idea. I personally can't stand any of the BSDs, but some people claim they're "more stable" or something. It's really more just a matter of preference for the fine nerdy details of a BSD unix over a SysV unix or the GNU tools.

Re:What is it with you Mac fanatics?

[bhtooefr]

The site's down, but this article has the story of an alcohol-cooled 486 that lasted 3 minutes at 247MHz (a sober person had taken off the jumpers to put it away, and some drunk guy booted it and played Half-Life).

Future of Amiga?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what the future of AmigaOS4 actually is. Amiga Inc. does not appear to be in particularly good shape at the moment. If you're interested, go ahead and read this.

Some choice quotes:

During the deposition of Mr. McEwen, he admitted Amiga was insolvent. It currently has outstanding debt of 2.2 million dollars

McEwen has testified that Amiga's bank account balance is currently "about a hundred dollars"

There's a lot more detail in the file, but given the history of the company in general, and what seems to be a fairly consistant lack of producing an actual product, I'd be wary about actually spending any money with them (note, I'm referring to the OS, not the hardware linked in this article).

Incidentally, this is not a troll. There was a time when I was as fanatical an Amiga user as the next person. Personally, I got sick of all the "we'll have something next year, no really" promises about 6 years ago. Glad I didn't wait, frankly.

Of course, if you're a true die-hard fanatic, there are other products that might be of more interest.

Re:Future of Amiga?

[aliquis]

Hey Mr Anonymous MorphOS zealot. You probably know aswell as I do that they already sell the AmigaONE in two different versions and that they just have managed to run AmigaOS4 on it. Sure Amiga Inc is short on funds but AmigaOS is developed by Hyperion, not Amiga Inc. And the AmigaONE computers are developed by Eyetech, not Amiga Inc. Amiga Inc just gets the license moneys and try to sell their AmigaDE.

Re:Future of Amiga?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been running MacOSX (10.2) on my AmigaONE for almost a year! :p Sweet!

Amiga - The champion of versatility!

Re:Future of Amiga?

[Seehund]

> Eyetech is building the hardware ...

Eyetech designs, decides and builds nothing.

Eyetech is a distributor, and has chosen to market this upcoming (maybe) board, which looks like it's Mai Logic's successor to their Teron CX and PX boards, under the "AmigaOne" trademark which is licensed from Amiga, Inc. With regards to AmigaOS and the hardware it'll run on, AInc does nothing but license IP.

> ... and Hyperion the software (PPCBoot ...

PPCBoot is dead, long live U-Boot. And it's not made by Hyperion. Hyperion is a rather new contributor to this open source project by making it support the Teron boards.

> Certain Amiga clone vendors ...

There are no more Amigas, and thus there are no Amiga clones. The Amiga is dead, thank $DEITY, and if it weren't for artificially added market restrictions AmigaOS could finally take advantage of a third party hardware market. Well, it can, but it's not allowed to.

OTOH, there are AmigaOS "clones", or rather new OSes providing AmigaOS API compatibility.
MorphOS and the open source AROS. Maybe that's what you were thinking about.

Re:Future of Amiga?

[miksuh]

I think you are lying because i know one betatester and your story does not match with his.

Re:Future of Amiga?

[bhtooefr]

Quick question, are you using MOL? If you've found a way to directly boot Mac OS X, I'd like to know. It might make me buy one of these over a VIA EPIA M10000 Nehemia.

With Gigabit Ethernet too....

[billstewart]

Seemed a bit like overkill for playing Frogger, though I suppose if you want a networked MMORPG version of it where you're trying to frag everybody else's frogs before they cross the road, I guess it'll help...

Re:With Gigabit Ethernet too....

[bhtooefr]

I have Frogger 1.0 Win32 with networking support (races), you insensitive clod!

Re:Just like the dodo...

[Zork the Almighty]

It isn't dead until it runs BSD.

Mac question

[powerline22]

Question: Is it possible to run OS X on these?

Seriously, it woudl be so cool to build my own mini-itx cube runnign OS X!

Re:Mac question

[ikewillis]

"Question: Is it possible to run OS X on these?"

Yes, through Mac-on-Linux

Re:Ice Cream Penis

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's Amiga users getting attached to the name and the 'image' and the what-it-stood-for more than what it actually IS.

The Amiga brought a lot of new ideas to the front. Preemptive multitasking in a consumer OS. Coprocessors. Good quality sound and video.

The thing is, now every machine made in the last 5 years barring some real tragedies have all that. We are all using the Amiga's legacy. About the only thing left is the extremely small efficient OS. Why it's only being made to run on certain hardware, I don't know.

Amiga releases?

[Chromal]

Yawn. You can sell a new product, you can call it Amiga, but if there's no continuity, it seems like a misnomer. Yeah, I can release a new computer and name it after an old discontinued line, but why? Anyone got dibs on the Apple IVne (Nostalgia Exploiter)?

Re:Amiga releases?

[geordie]

Just like you can sell a G5 based machine running OSX and call it a Mac, or a Pentium 4 / AMD XP based system running Windows XP and call it a PC.
The Amiga just skipped the inbetween stages.

Sure it doesn't have chips named Agnus, Paula and Denise and it doesn't come with a Zorro slot. But then again, how many Mac's come with a Nubus slot and are powered by a 68000? and how many PC's still have ISA and a socket for a 8087?

Who's to say that if the Amiga's development hadn't followed a more 'normal' path, that what we would have seen today with is anything different from the Amiga One?

Re:Amiga releases?

[Seehund]

OTOH, the Apple Mac is called an Apple PowerMac G5 because Apple designed it, built it and decided to sell it as their product "PowerMac G5". Apple has control over all stages of the making of their own hardware, as well as control over the future of that hardware.

Luckily, there are not and will not be any new Amigas. There is (or will be) a new AmigaOS, and AmigaOS 4 and beyond will run on third party hardware, like this mini-ITX Teron motherboard.

Nobody develops hardware with AmigaOS in mind. The company that licenses out the "Amiga" trademark has no control or influence on the market and products of third parties on which they depend.
AmigaOS is no longer technically dependent on or locked to special Amiga hardware. AmigaOS 4+ is made with portability and hardware abstraction through a HAL in mind.

The "AmigaOne" label is just that. A label, licensed from the Amiga, Inc. company, used by one distributor for third party hardware, when the distributor sells that hardware much more expensively to AmigaOS users.

That AmigaOS is not allowed to actually take advantage of an open third party hardware market is just an artificial marketing construction. Of course this added restriction can and must be removed.

Re:Amiga releases?

[miksuh]

Where is it said that Amigaone lite is teron board ? Original Amigone board was based on Teron boards thats sure, but AFAIK Amigaone lite is not.

Go ahead knock Amiga.....

[Shifty_McWriteoff]

But in 10 years lets see if
Windows XP or OSX
can still play ball like
AmigaOS3 can - from 1991!

The real strength of Amiga
was in the people. Development
kept on for a decade after
the platform died!

At the very least
it should serve to illustrate
why upgrading to MS-WindowsX.X
is generally only good
for MS..

Re:Ice Cream Penis

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't understand why these amiga stories keep coming up from time to time. No matter how good the original was the platform is hopelessly antiquated, and any new product will surely be a nearly complete redesign. It makes no sense to attach all that work to a quaint rebrand.

I was thinking roughly the same thing, but then I thought of a few positive points:

1) The PowerPC has a much cleaner architecture than any of the Intel Pentium chips and AltiVec blows the doors off MMX (in hindsight, IBM should have gone with the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8086 for the original IBM PC).

2) According to the article, the first production run will run PowerPC 750CXe and maybe the G4, but think about it. If they're successful, there's no reason they shouldn't come out with a G5 version in a year or two, perhaps even a dual-G5 version (mmm, yummy).

3) For you Linux fanatics, here's a platform without an entrenched operating system to go with it. Guess what most people will chose to run on it.

All in all, I think these are all good reasons for all you good little geeks and nerds to buy one of these boards, slap it into a cheap case and help port your favorite apps to it.

Finally, a sales opportunity!

[xenoweeno]

Anyone looking for a loaded Amiga 2000 to run their imaginary copy of AmigaOS 4.0 on?

(duck)

Re:Finally, a sales opportunity!

[vortexau]

Ah! An "intelligent" person. . . . .

the kind who would try to install OSX on a IIsi!
or . . . WinXP, on a 286 with 8Mb RAM!

Does that A2000 you speak of have a PPC cpu?
.

Cooool!

[vandan]

Have a look around on the amigaworld.net website.

The screenshots of OS4 are looking pretty damned sweet. And with a G4 under the bonnet, it would move along quite nicely. I wonder if OS4 is being ported to the G5?

Very cool, and quite reasonable price.

Amiga Forever and ever and ever and...

[SoupIsGood Food]

They still are, most notably to run the "community bulletein board" software on the public access channels in between highschool football games and Trekkies griping about the state of the Sci-Fi channel in someone's basement. Every now and again, the hard drive will crash, and the Amiga screen will pop up on the TV and demand that you mount a volume or stick a floppy into Drive A. I think the "previews" channel runs the same program, as I've seen the ugly-as-sin Amiga UI whining that it needs a drive on those channels, too.

They knew how to make computers that last in the '80s...

SoupIsGood Food

Re:Amiga Forever and ever and ever and...

[jpop32]

stick a floppy into Drive A.

Drive A? Infidel! That's df0: to you!

Re:Amiga Forever and ever and ever and...

[zakezuke]

Actually.... I believe you could define the names of your drives... though my memory is a touch vague on the subject about how workbench would react to a diffrent name. I do doubt that you could have "a:" but i'm sure "a0: might be possible. I'd have to turn on my amiga to check my facts, but to see jack squat i'd need one of those damn 23-pin monitor cables, oh, and a damn monitor too!

I can understand the confusion though... esp for an infidel who wouldn't know a dh0 from a /dev/hda

Re:Amiga Forever and ever and ever and...

[91degrees]

Assign A: DF0: should give you a logical drive A (unless I got that the wrong way round). Or simply sticking a floppy named A in the drive. Can't remember if there was a way to change actual device names though.

Re:Amiga Forever and ever and ever and...

[zakezuke]

A500 computers did have AmigaOS 1.3 or i.2 and that looks ugly when look it today. It was not possible to configure those much.

Yes, what people have to keep in mind the fact that their mental image of workbench 1.3 is very much vintage. The only fair contrast would be windows 3.0, Atari ST os, and mac pre system 7 (lovely monochrome). While you can argue that a 3 (or was it 4) color workbench does *suck* keep also in mind that on the same workbench you could have running boink and a, a newteck demo (welcome to newtech... anew new new new newtech) and a 4096 digipaint image. This does not suck by modern standard... if i'm not mistaken win2k / winxp can't really do diffrent windows with independent bitdepth, nor that lovely pull down graphic screen which I will say would be damn useful when playing quake if I could just with a mouse swipe pull down and peek at my desktop.

While you "could" possibly upgrade an 500 with either 3.x roms or soft boot to the 3.x roms, you are pretty limited on the desktop front to the stock amiga graphics unless you were to invest in a graphics board, which is a pain in the tookus unless you have a card cadge for the 500. These things are a touch rare, and doing it your self is a whole bunch of no fun as each zorro card is 100 pins if you can even find a 100pin edgecard connector. I have a few, I was going to do this, but said fuck it and bought a 2000.

If you think Amiga workbench is ugly, just look at STos (gem or whatever it was).

Re:Amiga Forever and ever and ever and...

[hesiod]

> Can't remember if there was a way to change actual device names though.

Sure you could.. there was a file called... eh... device-(something) that had all the devices (DF0:, DH0:, CD0:, etc) defined, named, and what their "driver" was. All you had to do was rename it in there, IIRC. Maybe it was in mountlist... It's been about 5 years since I've seen an Amiga.

Re:Amiga Forever and ever and ever and...

[Larsing]

AAMOF, the A500+ shipped with AmigaOS 2.0 and later 2.1.
3.1 was available as official A500 upgrade ROMS.

Re:Amiga Forever and ever and ever and...

[miksuh]

In older AmigaOS versions (1.3 etc) there was one single file DEVS:mountlist which contained all information nesessary to mount devices. In newer AmigaOS, like 3.1, there is folder Devs:DosDrivers which contains many mount files, every device has it's own file. All devices in Devs:DosDrivers are mounted automatically when Amiga is booted, you don't need any mount command in S:startup-sequence. If you want to disable device you just drag it's icon from devs:DosDrivers to Storage:DosDrivers. Name of Harddisk partitions, like DH0:, is set in HDToolBox partitioningtool.

Re:Amiga Forever and ever and ever and...

[zakezuke]

AAMOF, the A500+ shipped with AmigaOS 2.0 and later 2.1.

While this is true... I discovered later on that having 2.x roms wasn't really all that spiffy. Near as I could tell you couldn't softload the 3.x romimage if you had 2.x roms.

Re:Amiga Forever and ever and ever and...

[Larsing]

Man, what are you smoking..?

Leave it alone and let it RIP

[Billly Gates]

Not to sound like the BSD troll but sesh.

Its been dead for a long long time. Not dying for 15 or 5 years like Apple or BSD like trolls or the pro MS crowd but I mean it makes OS/2 look lively in comparison. Its actually dead! Name one commercial AMiga app still on the market? One?

How many people will buy this? 5! I am dead serious too.

Let it die already.

Re:Leave it alone and let it RIP

[Billly Gates]

How many are still there?

Yes even vim and gvim that are so popular in Linux/*BSD started out as a vi clone on the Amiga. But frankly its dead.

Re:Leave it alone and let it RIP

[RustyTaco]

ME! Not that I've been sipping the Amiga koolaid. I've never actually seen one powered on, but this is a sweet little PPC system in a nice small MiniITX formfactor, what's not to like? Will it replace the Dual Opteron I'm plotting for keeping the air conditioner running? Hell no, but it would probably make an awesome PVR box with a G4 in there. Or, a small light-use terminal for when I don't want to put on ear muffs and wind goggles to approch the fans in the Opteron.

- RustyTaco

Re:Leave it alone and let it RIP

[miksuh]

Check eg. http://www.ann.lu. If you don't follow what happens in the Amiga community you can't really say what the situation is. There is still software and harware development. If they would not then there sure would not be any Amigaone lite, right ?

Re:Leave it alone and let it RIP

[bhtooefr]

www.vapor.com - all shareware.

Also, this is the smallest PPC Linux board yet. Plus, if you want to run Mac OS X, you can (through MacOnLinux). Non-Amigans will buy it - for LinuxPPC (which is all it runs now anyway...) If it's hackable to directly run OS X, I'm tempted to get one instead of a VIA EPIA.

An Amiga By Any Other Name

[bluethundr]

If BSD is dead, what the heck is AmigaOS? It was a great platform for it's time, however. Please don't misunderstand me to be an "Amiga Basher".* Who else was preemptively multitasking with a desktop OS back in 1990? No one, at least not on a commercial scale so large. And let's not forget AMIX, the Amiga Unix! The integration with video and sound was unprecedented. ASTOUNDING, even! Sexy machines they were way back when. And those CHIPS! Those wonderful lusty CHIPS!!!**

But, alas, it would seem a decade's worth of lack of software and hardware development renders it about as irrelevant as you can get.

And since Amiga OS 4 is Linux based, why do we need to PAY for Linux based "Amiga" OS? We can just cut out the middleman and run Linux on the hardware. But the new Amiga hardware is sorta spendy, so why not just buy an Intel box and install Linux there? And you can emulate the Amiga environment on top of Linux just fine to boot. Which is really what they're doing with OS 4 , I'm afraid!

If you're a real Amiga enthusiast out of a sense of nostalgia, there's always eBay. I think nostalgia is a perfectly fine reason to be collecting hardware, I can totally appreciate that sentiment. What I would most definitely *NOT* do is try to use this old hardware to get any real work done. I know what time it is! ;)

But is this new Amiga hardware really "Amiga" just because a buncha German folk are saying it is? To me, what makes an Amiga is chips. Chips that are highly specialized and each of them doing their jobs very well, robustly and with gusto. Does this new Amiga board have modern analogue of those wonderful old chips? I have to say, I really have an honestly hard time understanding a country who can't stop using an outmoded computer brandname amd who considers David Hasselhoff to be a major pop music sensation! I think I can actually understand the odd French peoccupation with Jerry Lewis a tad bit better than either of those two traits.


*Despite the fact that bash does run under OS 4.

**And so were the names of the chips. Denise, Paula, Amber, Alice, Gayle, Lisa, Akiko, Grace. Those names had style. Even Gary and Budgie and Ramsey had class, tho not "sexy" names per se like the aforementioned. ;) I tell you what though, those chips are *FUN TO PROGRAM* even in this day and age.

Re:An Amiga By Any Other Name

[the_arrow]

And since Amiga OS 4 is Linux based

AmigaOS 4 is NOT based on Linux! It is, more or less, a complete rewrite of the old AmigaOS for a new platform.

The AmigaDE (Desktop Environment?) on the other hand, is hosted either on Linux or Windows, and it's rumoured (sp?) that AmigaDE will be hosted on AmigaOS 4.1.

Re:An Amiga By Any Other Name

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically the new amiga should be a hybrid game console/desktop computer, with outstanding 2D and 3D video and sound chips, and 100% plug-and-play expansion capability, and an OS and applications/games that take advantage of them. And it should be hacker-friendly and come with schematics of the mobo and chips...
Anything else isn't justice to what the amiga once was.

Re:An Amiga By Any Other Name

[mdwh2]

And you can emulate the Amiga environment on top of Linux just fine to boot. Which is really what they're doing with OS 4 , I'm afraid!

No it isn't.

If you're a real Amiga enthusiast out of a sense of nostalgia, there's always eBay. I think nostalgia is a perfectly fine reason to be collecting hardware, I can totally appreciate that sentiment. What I would most definitely *NOT* do is try to use this old hardware to get any real work done. I know what time it is!

No one is suggesting using old hardware for "real work". But this machine, whilst a G3 may not be cutting edge, is still more than adequate for plenty of real work.

But is this new Amiga hardware really "Amiga" just because a buncha German folk are saying it is? To me, what makes an Amiga is chips. Chips that are highly specialized and each of them doing their jobs very well, robustly and with gusto. Does this new Amiga board have modern analogue of those wonderful old chips?

If you prefer the old machines, then follow your own advice and pick an A500 up from ebay. And yes, the new machine will have specialised chips, just like any modern computer does.

Re:An Amiga By Any Other Name

[mdwh2]

1) Because BSD doesn't run Aqua. (it's not open source)

2) Tivo is proprietary, and I have other things to do with my time than figure out what Tivo already figured out.

And AmigaOS is proprietary, and runs software that Linux doesn't. So even if AmigaOS was Linux based (it isn't), the original example is just as stupid.

Re:An Amiga By Any Other Name

[Gumshoe]

BTW, my Amiga 2000 is not dead, it is only sleeping.

Mine in is in suspended animation until science has reached the point of advancement where it can be resuscitated.

Re:it's worse then that

[geordie]

We come in peace
shoot to kill
shoot to kill
shoot to kill
We come in peace
shoot to kill
Scotty beam me up!

There's kilngons on the starboard bow
starboard bow
starboard bow
There's kilngons on the starboard bow
starboard bar JIM!

Joystick/MIDI port???

[Doppler00]

I am always amazed at how they try to make computers with small form factors, yet still include hopelessly useless ports that possibly one in 2000 people use. Can we please get another USB or Firewire port instead?

Less useless

[rsilvergun]

when DRM crap gets implemented at the hardware level on intel/AMD boards. Frankly I'm glad to have alternatives.

Loraine is back, and she has lost weight

[thanjee]

You go Lorraine!!!!!

Round those other girls up, Paula, Fat Agnus, you know the whole gang and lets show the computer world who the best girl in town is :)

Re:it's worse then that

[geordie]

It's life Jim but not as we know it
not as we know it
not as we know it
it's life Jim but not as we know it
not as we know it, captain.

AmigaOne-XE ATX review

[Mike Bouma]

AmigaOne-XE boards have now been available in volumes for some time now. Miffy has reviewed a pre-built system in combination with Linux here. Also here's another article about building a system yourself.

The last couple of months AmigaOS4 has been demonstrated at special 'AmigaOS4 Tour events' around the world on classic systems equiped with PPC boards. At various events in Slovenia, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Austria, US Westcoast (Sacramento), US Eastcoast (New York), Sweden, Italy, France, Denmark, etc. The Tour will also go DonwUnder.

Personally I have been to Switzerland to report on one of these events. You can read it here:
Swiss 'AmigaOS4 on Tour' presentation in Basel (29-Jul-2003)

At the Italian Pianeta 2003 fair AmigaOS4 was demonstrated on AmigaOne hardware for the first time! More screenshots of AmigaOS4 can be found here at the AmigaWorld.net community portal.

Hyperion will also be present at the upcoming Benelux Amiga Show which is planned for the 4th and 4th of October in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. I plan to be there as well. :-)

Re:AmigaOne-XE ATX review

[miksuh]

Do remember that when OS4 was demoed in Pianeta it wa not ready yet. graphics.library and Picasso96 RTG-graphicslayer was still in m68k code. Those were emulated under NON-JIT emulation and debug level was wery high. So you can't really say anything about it how fast the OS4 is.

Re:Ice Cream Penis

[bbk]

2) According to the article, the first production run will run PowerPC 750CXe and maybe the G4, but think about it. If they're successful, there's no reason they shouldn't come out with a G5 version in a year or two, perhaps even a dual-G5 version (mmm, yummy

Sorry, no. The G5 uses a totally different frontside bus protocol than the G3 and G4 (which both use the 60X style bus). It would require a redesign of the entire board, changes in RAM, etc. Wishful thinking though.

I wonder how quickly the non-apple PPC markets will start using the G5 - most of the embedded design firms are nearly married to Motorola as their CPU supplier (as they've done the most with the 68k, 88k, and now PowerPC processors, which historically were used in a lot embedded designs)

I agree.

[PotatoHead]

We need people doing different things; otherwise, we risk accepting the fact that the computers of today are the best we can build.

I am not sure that's true though I am sure the AmigaONE is the right path either. Comparing the two will be interesting however.

BTW I learned assembler on the 6502 (atari / apple). Then got a chance to work with the 6809. Man, what a sweet chip to work with. Too bad the better computers got the brain dead cpu's huh?

Re:I agree.

[squiggleslash]

Yup. I think the 6809 came along a little too late. I recall that for Steve Wozniak, he felt he had the choice between the 6800, 8080, and 6502 for the Apple I, and chose the latter because it was about a quarter of the price of the other two, which were in the hundreds of dollars.

The 6502 took off because of price and quickly became one of the two ingrained platforms. The Z80 took off because it could run CP/M. The 6800 (deservedly) dropped off the map, and the 6809 couldn't really enter a market where the decisions had already been made.

A beautiful processor. I felt I could program "high level assembly" in it, which isn't something I could do on the Z80A (and trying to do anything high level on a 6502 was... ahem.)

Then there is Open Source Amiga ...

[3seas]

Amiga Research Operating System

Re:Then there is Open Source Amiga ...

[miksuh]

The biggest problem in AROS is that it does not have software. AROS does not have m68k emulation, it can't run PPC software and there is just couple of AROS native tools. So AROS can't run, whitout recompilitaion, any of the current Amiga software, not new or old. So what you really can do in AROS ?

Re:Then there is Open Source Amiga ...

[3seas]

It's open source and is being ported to the PPC, an 68k emulation is being considered, etc...

On a similar note....

[MegaHamsterX]

I have started building replica Ford Model Ts.

Get the car that changed the auto world, the car that brought motorized transportaion to the masses.

This version is equipped with a gravitational wave disruption unit, allowing you to zip around the world in style with all the same controls you are accustomed to, down to the crank to start and all the retro styling you would expect, any color as long as it's black.

The Amiga is dead, cool while it lasted, bury it, go on, please.

(former hardcore Amiga fanatic)

Re:On a similar note....

[Weissmohr]

Why this burning desire to stop other people from using alternative systems? I would think a crowd like slashdot would appreciate the burning need some of us geeks in this world have for toying with things like computers, and just so you know, I DO NOT CONSIDER WINDOWS TOY-WORTHY! ;-)

My mother used to say that if you don't have anything nice to say you should shut up, and while I think this is a bit extreme I am inclined to agree.
If you would rather play with your Windows XP machine (or whatever) than have a go at AmigaOS4 PPC (which I presume you haven't read ANYTHING about, because we can't ruin a good argument with facts, can we?) then that's your call. I'm not going to even HINT at what I think about that decision ( ;-) ), all I'm asking is that YOU don't try to force ME to make the same decision.

You not understanding why geeks like to play with geeky toys would be ok if this was the NY Times or something, but it's frelling slashdot, for crying out loud. You know, "News for Nerds."?
Why is mainstreaming so important to slashdotters? Are we just a teensy bit afraid of standing out in a crowd?

Re:On a similar note....

[anarchic_teapot]

IMO this
> (former hardcore Amiga fanatic)

explains this

>The Amiga is dead, cool while it lasted, bury it, go on, please.

Sorry, but I don't think people want to give up their OS because you don't use it any more :D

Re:On a similar note....

[miksuh]

(former hardcore Amiga fanatic) Yes that tells it all. I don't understand those people who DID USE A500 about ten years ago, then they come to say that they know everything and that they know that Amiga is dead and so on. It is maybe dead for you, but it does not men it really was dead. It's just your opinion. But i have noticed that it is pointless to try to explain anything to ex-A500 users who always think they know everything about Amigas situation. Even if they have not touched it in ten years :P

Re:On a similar note....

[MegaHamsterX]

OK, I see I hit on a nerve here. I guess I didn't make it clear enough.

Old Amigas are geeky just like C64s and AppleIIs are, but don't say something is an AMIGA just to MARKET IT, that really does piss me off.

Yep, I really want to FORCE you not to run something called AmigaOS, I think not, do what you want. Necrophilia ain't my thing though :-P

If my attention is not needed call it something else, as long it is called an AMIGA I will hold it to a far higher standard than any other computer, the Amiga DELIVERED that with ELEGENCE in the 80's and early 90's. The Amiga DIED when Commodore did, I couldn't get my AGA Amiga fixed when they were in business, heh, I could imagine getting one fixed after their demise.

I see those who posted below me that just don't get it. I owned the machines, I bought the software, I scripted ARexx, I wrote programs in C, figured out how to use the copperlist, etc. Hell I upgraded the ROMS in my new and old machines and the custom chips in the old machines.

This Amiga is not an AMIGA, it is a beige box ppc clone, it has the same properties as every other computer out there, hell the BeBox had a geek port, what does this have?

Shit, they could have stuck a DSP to the board to assist with the graphics and sound at the very least, at least the prototype 4000s had that.

Give me a SMP G5 or Power4 with a cutting edge DSP, you could call that an Amiga as it would CRUSH the competition like the original did in '85.

This would be my idea of a new Amiga.
Kernel -> Linux
CLI Userland -> GNU BASH and assoc utilities
GUI -> Intuition with high level 3D calls, no X11
Processor -> Power4 or SMP G5 tons of cache and memory as options
Graphics -> Off the shelf 8x AGP (DVI HDTV compatible)
Sound -> Off the shelf multi-channel 24bit 96KHz
CoProcessor -> DSP capable of feeding enough manipulated data to Sound and Graphics.

The main processor is there for AI, and UI events as well as doing what processors are meant to, process program data.

When the machine crashes I should still see 3D and sound continue to play as they are controlled by that DSP.

Linux and BSD have many millions of man hours in them, the best minds argue for what is best.
I won't defend X11 though.

The Amiga could build on Linux or BSD and deliver a real GUI with exceptional performance, high level 3D acceleration and have a whole array of apps for many NEW willing users to port over.

NDAs are incompatible with opensource, yet they are needed for programming a graphics card with Gee-Wiz functionality, who wouldn't want a chance to bang on an Nvidia chip at the hardware level.

SELECTIVE capitalization courtesy caps-lock and of the old linux FORTUNE program on '94 SLACKWARE.

Re:On a similar note....

[MegaHamsterX]

Why are you posting as an AC? My prefs make you invisable. Anyhow...

True the PC and Mac have changed, they have evolved and become better over the years, they now rival old school big iron machines.
The new Opteron is an excellent SMP design, they eliminated the shared bus that slows my SMP Intel, the new Mac has a Ghz front side bus.
This is the new manditory starting point, this is not an option.
The current Amiga userbase is much too small, when all the US Amiga mags went under, I thought hey I liked the European ones better anyhow, when they couldn't float on the new American and European userbase I knew it was over. I still have the last Amiga Format as a memory of what could have been.

The misconception is the current userbase is needed, hate to break it to you, it's not.

The old Amiga user base is what's needed, all those people who spent thousands on a harddisk controler with accelerator and tons of RAM when the PC might have had 2MB (my earliest lowest spec system was an A500 1MB chip, 8MB FAST with GVP controller w/ big scsi drive).

These new systems will not get the old userbase back, it may get a few people running Linux on them, but that's it.

An Apple XServ is a much better deal if you want PowerPC in a rack mount chassis, the new G5 is a better deal if you want performance. The new Opteron will be a better deal if you want your new online games at Max FPS, and have a bunch of TiVo streams to recompress.....

The new PPC Amiga lacks software developers to port and update the old catalog of software, what's out there for 3D now, Newtek moved on from what I understand, not sure about Impulse, all the others are on the PC now.

The market was tough when the Amiga was originally created, in that day the Vic-20 and Apple 2 reigned, when the Amiga was released it was the dawn of the GUI.

Jay Miner and his crew were brilliant, it will be hard to top them. Keep to the original hardware concepts and a new Amiga is possible, remember AmigaOS was a hack from day 1, it was a rushed affair, it was never quite fixed the way the creators intended. It is a port of TripOS after all. Then a Unix TCP stack is stapled on that.

Actually you're right the Mac and PC have changed, we run nothing which resembles DOS or the original MacOS from '84, they evolved the Amiga didn't.

I would like to buy something that is really Amiga, sadly I don't think it will happen. A SMP g5 with a fast multimedia processor to feed a top of the line NVidia or ATI card and sound, is that really too much to ask.

68000

[kasperd]

in hindsight, IBM should have gone with the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8086 for the original IBM PC

AFAIR the 68000 was released after the original IBM PC. That is about the only good reason IBM had for not using the 68000.

Re:68000

[amorsen]

AFAIR the 68000 was released after the original IBM PC. That is about the only good reason IBM had for not using the 68000.

I remember it that way too, but some googling makes me believe that the 68000 was actually out early enough that it could have plausibly been used for the PC. However, the 68000 was always a single-source thing. Intel has been fairly open towards cloning, all things considered.

Re:68000

[k8to]

Computer Industry legend says that the IBM PC design team wanted to use the 68000 but that there was a pre-existing industry deal struck with Intel that allowed them to use the 8080 for super-cheap.

I believe it, but haven't bothered to verify.

Re:68000

[vidarh]

Price was another. The 68k was ridiculously expensive in the beginning.

Re:68000

[evilrich]

The reason IBM used the 8088 was that it was similar to the most popular processor of the day, the 8080, and hence would be easily able to run the most popular OS of the day which ran on the 8080, CP/M. Of course, the whole IBM/Digital Research (the creator of CP/M) catasphrophe is something that has entered computing folklore. Ironically, the OS that became MS/DOS was a cheap clone of CP/M for the 8088 - meant as a stop-gap until CP/M was actually ported to that processor. The rest, as they say, is history.

Re:Just like the dodo...

[GQuon]

It isn't dead until it runs BSD.

Cripes! I ran NetBSD on my A1200 over five years ago!
I deleted NetBSD to get more room on my harddrive. Does that mean it's allive again?

Sent with AmigaONE board running Debian. (My A1200 is sitting at my parents' house. In a few weeks I'll get it here and set it up as a gateway machine. Broadband all the way, baby!)

a modern amiga system today?

[aliquis]

http://www.genesi.lu/
http://www.phinixi.com/
ht tp://www.morphos.de/
http://www.pegasosppc.com/

save your money 'til mid october, then go get yourself a brand new Pegasos2 with a PPC74xx/G4 and live happy ever after =)

i dont get it..

[Suppafly]

Can someone explain why this is exciting? It looks like hardware that run's linux from the pictures. Isn't the whole idea of the Amiga to run Amiga software on Amiga hardware so that it is better at the tasks it's designed for? This could be a pc motherboard and processor for all you'd care.. It'd still run linux and kde just fine.

Re:i dont get it..

[miksuh]

If you look at MAC motherboard it looks more or less PC motherboard, if you lok at any other modern standard motherboard it looks more or less PC motherboard. That's why ALL computers use more or less same technigues these days.

I don't really understand you people why you expect that Amiga should not be allowed to use modern standard hardware ? Why should Amiga motherboard look like A1000 motherboard ?

I really don't get it why people think like that. MACs are not like original MAC's PC's are not like original IBM PC, so WHY SHOULD AMIGA BE LIKE A1000 ?

Why the Amiga?

[adeyadey]

When Microso.. er I mean SCO are charging you $599 for every copy of Linux you run, the Linux will have an open OS they can migrate to..

Re:Videos of AmigaOS4 running

[aliquis]

Hey, I specifically asked people to NOT link against them on ann.lu.
It's my home machine, poor nic =D

You could atleast have given them http://hagge.no-ip.org/personal/computers/amiga/ so they would know about my mirror on
http://hem.bredband.net/johkru/stuff/.

Who actually still uses amigas? Look around . . .

[vortexau]

I do! I can have this A2000/060 crash, and retain my dialup-ISP connection. MS Worms pain my ISP but not me directly.

Big business customers in Queensland include Queensland Rail (Visual Arrivals Info at inner-city Brisbane stations) and Queensland Transport (Visual Information).

Second-hand (10 year old) Amigas are MORE valuable than 10 year old x86 systems.

The AmigaOne Lite is certain to be popular in imbedded and kiosk applications.
.

No Amiga

[LentoMan]

I used to be a hardcore AmigaFreak back in the good old days A500-A1200. I still have my A1200Tower though (home made/customized), but when gfxcards and ppc for Amiga started to get popular I decided to leave the platform. I mean I do have UAE installed but mostly for the sake of the olden goldies.

I'm pretty sure that PPC is better than any x86 architecture but to me it just seems like a mac without MacOS, it's no Amiga.

Amiga has to me always to me been about the cool hardware with lots of custom chips, but even more important, it's users. I think the community is still pretty strong but I haven't been very active the last years so I'm not sure how big it is. I'm not sure this hardware will do much good, but it'll keep some of the masses entertained for a while.

If I were to involve myself with Amigarelated stuff today I'd rather go with something like the AROS OS: http://www.aros.org

There are two x86 flavours of AROS (with binary compatibility). AROS/x86 Native (bootable from CD/HD) and the one that runs ontop of AROS/Linux for compatibility.

As I said I'm not very keen on getting new hardware, but it's still nice to see that some hardcore fans make that option available. Guess I'll be watching this though and see what happens to it.

Re:No Amiga

[miksuh]

"I'm pretty sure that PPC is better than any x86 architecture but to me it just seems like a mac without MacOS, it's no Amiga." I really can't understand your logic. So you know that MAC's were first based on m68k series CPU ? MACs used m68k now those use PPC. Amiga used m68k now it use PPC. Were is the difference ? I really can't understand you. Are you saying that MACs are not MAC's beacuse they are so differnt to original MAC computers ? Or are you saying that current PC is not PC because it's hardware is not like orihinal IBM PC ? So why AmigaOne could not be Amiga ? I think there is no good reason why it could not be. "If it feels like an Amiga, if it runs newest AmigaOS, if it runs new and old Amiga software, then it is an Amiga."

Re:Amiga Forever and ever and...DRIVE WHAT?

[vortexau]

Drive A?

You lost YOUR credibility there!

http://home.iprimus.com.au/vortexau/images2/M-Re qS cn.jpg

DF2: (left of yellow window) represents the THIRD floppy drive, or the FIRST external on an A2000!
.

let it RIP over the establishment!

[vortexau]

> Name one commercial AMiga app still on the market? One?

I'll go you better:

PageStream 4.01 (at home prices :-)
ImageFX 4.5
Candy Factory

and no BG looking over your shoulder, either!
.

Yes, WHAT OS can

[vortexau]

What other OS (running on home-priced hardware over 13 years old) can be re-booted to a DIFFERENT OS version, and retain the contents of a Recoverable rAm Drive?

http://home.iprimus.com.au/vortexau/images/wb3-1 .j pg

http://home.iprimus.com.au/vortexau/images/wb3-5 .j pg

"AMIGA.OS - Too COOL for the 20th Century; returning in the 21st!"
.

BFHD

[Salamander]

Yeah, so you can put it in a Cubid case...if you don't mind the undervoltage and lack of grounding. I have a Cubid 2699R which used to house a VIA ME-6000 mobo, but that system wasn't stable so I got a case that actually works and the Cubid lies empty in a drawer. The same components have been completely stable in their new home during the months since I ditched the Cubid POS.

Re:BFHD

[bhtooefr]

RTFMFS (Mini-ITX fan site - mini-itx.com). They tell you how to fix the grounding problem. (As for the undervoltage, well...)

Re:BFHD

[Salamander]

Been there, read that. Proper grounding and adequate voltage are minimum expectations for any case out of the box - not something the buyer should have to fix. Any case with problems like that is simply defective, and when somebody sells a product that is defective by design I think it deserves public mention. If somebody sold you a car that didn't run, even if you were capable of fixing it, would you not be annoyed?

I, for one ..

[steveoc]

I, for one, welcome David Hasselhof as our new Overlord !

Do you get a free David Hasselhof fridge magent with these Amiga boards ?

---

BLAZEMONGER

[maiden_taiwan]

But it DOES run "BLAZEMONGER P2P EDITION," which serves out not only EVERY FILE ON THE PLANET, but also HARDWARE, LIVE GOATS, and FRIVOLOUS LAWSUITS!

Re:BLAZEMONGER

[crataegus]

*sniff*
It's been so long since I've seen someone tanlk about BLAZEMONGER that I'd almost forgotten it ever existed. It brings a tear to my eye that someone has ported it to PPC.

Re:BLAZEMONGER

[maiden_taiwan]

Hey, BLAZE ON, d00d! Visit my BLAZEMONGER WEB SITE for more nostalgia....

Re:Videos of AmigaOS4 running

[miksuh]

Do remember that when OS4 was demoed in Pianeta it wa not ready yet. graphics.library and Picasso96 RTG-graphicslayer was still in m68k code. Those were emulated under NON-JIT emulation and debug level was wery high. So you can't really say anything about it how fast the OS4 is.

AmigaOS is not Linux based

[miksuh]

AmigaOS 4 is not Linux based. AmigaOS4 is PPC native new version of AmigaOS.

Re:CLASSIC AMIGAS HAVE PCI CARDS ALSO AND USB2.0

[miksuh]

Yep here is again my Amiga harwdare: I do have Amiga like this: Amiga 1200T, Mediator PCI-busboard, Voodoo 3 3000 PCI, 10Mbit PCI NIC, Hercules SmartTV PCI TV-card, Soundblaster 128 PCI, LG 52x24x52 IDE CDRW, 10GB IBM, 64MB Ram, AmigaOS 3.9, Canon BJC-210.

WTF?

[infinite9]

Were you typing this on your amiga in 40 column mode? It almost looks like haiku:

Oh my Amiga!

How I wish the floppy drive

would shut the fuck up

Re:WTF?

[miksuh]

I have not even seen screenmode as that in many years :) I currently use 1280x1024 32bit screenmode in my Amiga. And I use CDRW more than floppydrive :)

Re:CLASSIC AMIGAS HAVE PCI CARDS ALSO AND USB2.0

[miksuh]

And CPU 68060 50Mhz

Re WTF?

[miksuh]

in about ten years :) I currently use 1280x1024 32bit screenmode in my Amiga. And I use CDRW more than floppydrive :)

Parallels Then & Now

[itomato]

In the same way the PC was limited then, it is limited now.

What the Amiga did then was point out the limitations of the PC, and overcome them with a series of ingenious solutions, that were remarkably powerful then.

This article proves that it was robust and flexible enough to endure 4 or 5 generations in Home Computing by virtue of its design.

What I think the world is expecting from the "New Amiga" is some kind of breakthrough, or at least an execution on par with the "Classic".

It's still cool, though! :)

Re:Parallels Then & Now

[gilesjuk]

Well these days people expect computers to either be dirt cheap or they expect to pay a bit more and get something attractive like an iMac.

I would like to see a very quiet well designed Amiga that will be able to sit in the living room playing DVDs, audio, recording TV programmes. Perhaps the base unit could sit in the living room and communicate with the display/keyboard/mouse via a wireless link?

I expect a super new Amiga, otherwise why do I spend loads of money on it? AMD x86 and Linux does everything I want on the net. My Windows box runs all the audio/MIDI apps I will ever need.

Name one? Ok - Lightwave

[fallen1]

by NewTek. Even though it has been ported to PCs the original (and the one that won an Emmy no less) was the Amiga version. The company is still going strong and Lightwave is now 3D.

Re:YOU FUCKING COCKSMOKING AMIGA FAN BOYS ARE FUCK

[bhtooefr]

I'll feed the flamebait... You can run Mac OS X via MacOnLinux on this board. Granted, it's only a G4, but in Mini-ITX? That's damn good, especially considering it'll take a DUAL CPU card when they come out. (It's the Mini-ITX version of the Eyetech G4-XE)

Re:You both need a little correction

[mdwh2]

Well, it's clearly wrong to say that all of computing comes from the Amiga, but I never understood those who think it all comes from Apple either.

They brought the GUI to the masses,

So we agree that they weren't first with it, but who were "the masses"? I would have thought that most people's first experience of a GUI was with Windows. Similarly with the other things; they only got there "first" from the point of view of a Mac fanatic.

They will more than likely ape what Apple has done and introduce a more flexible shell than CMD.

Erm, it wasn't until Mac OS X that Apple had a shell - their previous one didn't have one at all! Plenty of operating systems (including AmigaOS) successfully combined a GUI with a shell, that was more flexible than Windows/DOS.

I still use Amigas

[AlienRelics]

Started a digital photography business using an Amiga 3000. With a 68060 at 50MHz and 128MB of RAM, it blew away Windows computers. Wasn't until my Windows computer was up to 450MHz that Windows started to feel faster. Yes, it was faster in raw CPU, 3D rendered faster but I couldn't do anything in Windows 95 or 98 while it was rendering. I'm sure many will write this off as blowing smoke, but on my Amiga I could: Load a 2400x3000 pixel image in ImageFX and start it printing to a Fargo Primera Pro (very CPU intensive, cannot pause or it ruins the print). Then -start- Real3D and set 3 separate scenes to rendering at high res. Then -start- my internet software, browser and email, read and send email and roam around the internet with 3 browser windows open. The mouse pointer never stuck, not once, and the print did not pause and came out perfect. Only affect on printing was instead of 2 minutes to RIP it took 3 minutes. A friends Pentium 100, 128M ram, W95, took 20 to 40 minutes to RIP depending on the program and he literally could not so much as move the mouse or it would pause for several minutes before finally updating the mouse pointer. If that happened during the fixed 15 minute print time, a $3 print was ruined. I could also print from ImageFX (it's a Photoshop-like program that is still commercially available) to an inkjet in color, while printing to a BW laser printer from PageStream (a DTP program still commercially available including versions for Windows, Mac, Amiga, and Linux). While on the internet, reading my mail and surfing sites, usually several browser windows open. Again, the mouse pointer did not get jerky, not once.

DISCLAIMER: Poster works for the competitor.

[GQuon]

Re:again? (Score:2, Insightful)
by downix (84795) * on 4:18 23 September 2003 (#7030423)
(http://www.pegasosppc.com/)

At least he was generous enough to include the link and not post as Anonymous Coward.

So when is this fabled Pegasos 2 comming out then? When it's done? And at a fraction of the cost? 1/2, 1/3, 7/11, 19/14?

Re:DISCLAIMER: Poster works for the competitor.

[downix]

That's always my link, so as to show support for my employer.

As for the Peg 2, if you were keeping up, it's public debut is on October 15th. Please read more here for it's release. Thank you.