Slashdot Mirror
Hyperion Promises An AmigaOS Netbook
An anonymous reader writes with a report that an employee of Hyperion Entertainment has disclosed (but not officially announced) that there is a new portable computer with the Amiga name on it in the works, quoting: "Supposedly, the new netbook Amiga is will be 'sourced in a special configuration from an OEM.' The manufacturer in question is, just like the price tag, the launch date and the hardware specifications, currently unknown paving the way for further speculation and rumors. The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985."
For those who didn't read TFA, it states the netbook in question will be running AmigaOS.
(When I read the summary, I'd assumed someone had bought the trademark and was going to slap it on a Windows 7 Starter Edition laptop)
Advice: on VPS providers
I see little point in making one other than nostalgia and/or geek rep...
In the end it will likely end up a "special edition" Dell laptop with nothing special other than the price.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Since when was the Amiga 1000 considered portable?
Hyperion Entertainment announced that they will be launching a new media campaign for the Amiga line staring their new mascot, Biggie Bigfoot. No word on where they will be appearing, but Hyperion gives their assurances that the ads do indeed exist.
Insert pithy comment here.
I remember that the Amiga OS was fundamentally different than other computers of the time, is that still the case? I had an Amiga 500 and it was so far ahead of its time. Does it really bring anything to the table now though?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
http://www.videoweed.es/file/xllqh0qgbs4v1
and i assure you, if it was out as a board game, i might have considered playing it.
Read radical news here
From Wikipedia:
Hyperion Entertainment was founded in February 1999 after Belgian lawyer Benjamin Hermans wondered why no one had ever tried to license PC games to do Amiga ports.
Because very few people really want to play PC games on AmigaOS?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I still own several amiga including the 1000
The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.
Even if true, so what? The Amiga was a fine machine 20 years ago. It died. Things have moved on rather considerably since then. I don't really understand why anyone is trying to resurrect a proprietary platform that died out eons ago and that even most geeks didn't buy back during its heyday. If all they are doing is slapping the Amiga brand on a more modern system, again I have to ask why? Nobody cared about the Amiga back then and even fewer people care now.
Everything since has been just a name.
Amiga inc since it left Gateway has been a complete mess. Marketing a name and products, but offering nothing but rip offs, shambles and diabolical product plans.
Hyperion, peddlers of junk and broken software. Originally the two pitched up with a third entity, Eyetech and produced the Amiga One platform. A broken junk pile of crap unworthy of being unleashed on the poor unsuspecting public. The broken hardware all backed by a warranty system designed to be malignant and to rip people off because they were 'developer' boards.
Hyperion have failed to deliver a proper product, and its riddled with issues. Its carried on leaking with its foul stench across a very short list of PPC equipment, and now apparently you'll too be 'lucky' to be offered a new 'Netbook'. They are the only member of the original three still trying to peddle this garbage and primarily each time they find some new victim-able hardware they can hang their hat on, they start making pronouncements.
I have no idea how this 'news' got pitched as being tech news of any kind on Slashdot. Whoever thought it was worth posting as an item_is_wrong.
The standing advice remains. Steer clear of anything from this bunch of cowboys.
We`re all equal
Most people I know that are nostalgic about their Amiga's (and C24's etc) have a perfectly capable emulation environment available to them that runs orders of magnitude faster than the original hardware, on even moderately powered netbooks.
But even if they get new hardware out and AmigaOS is fantastic, where are the apps? What's the draw to get people to buy this thing other than the nostalgia of having a computer with the Amiga stamp on it? It can be the best damn OS in the world but if it hasn't got apps then it hasn't got anything.
BeOS was pretty cool back in the day and kicked Windows to the curb in terms of performance but it died because it didn't have apps. Making an AmigaOS laptop today makes about as much sense as making a dedicated BeOS laptop (yes, I'm aware of various efforts to resurrect BeOS...still makes no sense)
I guess it's time to update the Amiga Portables page.
Id buy it for no other reason but to own one... but this might be a big break to progress the OS to modern standards. Its not that far off from where OSX is.
I loved my Amiga 500. In it's day, it was so incredibly powerful with it's hardware-accelerated GUI, sound hardware, and rich OS API. Incredible to think that the core of the OS was written in a matter of weeks by a British student.
But there is nothing special about it any more, save fond memories. Everyone has hardware acceleration and a GUI nowadays, even the cheapest of smartphones and netbooks.
The OS was not complete, and missed many features we now take for granted. There's no point itemizing the details, because they don't matter. Suffice to say that the glory days of the OS are lost in the sands of time. The world has moved on.
This new machine will either be running a completely different or seriously upgraded OS. If that new OS provides POSIX APIs and other interfaces that are important, it might see a new community of ported software. But if it's the old Amiga OS API, why would anyone want to develop for a proprietary OS with zero market share?
Wind is filling in the footprints that the Amiga trod in the sands of time. Soon there will be nothing left but dunes. All that's left is a brand name.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I recently said on another story's comments that brands are important because you can tell known good stuff from bad, but that some just abuse the fame of a brand (which got to where it was by being great) to produce overpriced crap.
The new Amiga is one of those cases.
Go on, how much will this Atom based netbook be... £1500? No thanks. Frankly, shove it.
I found a couple of very nice write-ups on the history of the Amiga out there:
The History of the Amiga
AmigaOS - Wikipedia
The Amiga 500 was released to the public at the January 1987 Consumer Electronics Show. The Macintosh 128K was released to the public January 1984. Just in case anyone thought I wouldn't give credit to the first commercialization of Xerox PARC's research.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Carl Sassenrath was born in California, not in Britain.
Amiga PPC's are not compatible with the original ones
What problem is this solving?
AmigaOS has already been cloned and improved, and the driver support doesn't seem half bad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS
I'm not saying a netbook with an obscure OS would sell, but at least all they would have to do is slap some Amiga logos on there and push the product out, rather than resurrect software that is long-dead.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
If not, its not really a "portable Amiga". Instead its yet another PC running a remake of a classic OS with a microscopic market.
( and of course it isn't... )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Enough already. It's time to stop dragging the Amiga name down. Open source the OS and free it. Quit trying to revive it as a competitive proprietary OS. It should have been freed back in the 90's, it's past time now.
Power PC with a custom rom and dreadfully slow in this day and age, probally will cost 2 grand, as we have seen before in PPC Amiga's... which are non functional with the real deal amiagas.
Gee, where do I sign up to be fucked over?
No wonder the computing world despises the Amiga and its tiny number of loser fanboys.
I'm just glad that Amiga enthusiasts are finally able to leave the basement, untethered by the power socket, able to enter the world and see the sun, and spread their wisdom among us...
...on second thought, I've changed my mind. Kill this thing with fire, and lots of it.
A related forum post says it's estimated to be between $300 and $500. As far as I know Atom isn't supported by AmigaOS.
No, the Amiga was hugely successful, so it's just ignorant to say that nobody cared about it back then. The computer market in Europe was vastly different from the USA, systems that seem obscure to you were mainstream to them.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I was an Amiga user from 1989-95. I accepted that the Amiga platform died in the mid 90's and moved onto Window and from there to OS X.
The Amiga platform was amazing for its time but we are now in the 2010's. Nobody except crazy nut jobs want to use 20 year old technology. Let the Amiga platform rest in peace.
I was part of a local Amiga user group that had the developers behind "Amoeba Invaders" and I hosted the user meetings after the local Amiga dealer went out of business. Move on people. It is dead. It is really dead and not just pining for the fjords.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It won't be an netbook "Amiga" as Hyperion does not have a license for the "Amiga" name for hardware. Hyperion can only use "AmigaOne" as it's official name for it's hardware series. The only company that has an official license to call their hardware Commodore Amiga is http://www.commodore.net/ who are using a customized Mint OS distro.
There has been a open source version of AmigaOs in development since the late 1990s and it has several distro like: http://www.icarosdesktop.org/ AROS runs on x86, x86_64, PPC, M68000 and ARM (hosted).
It's a 400MHz PPC Limebook as per: http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=34459&forum=33&start=140&viewmode=flat&order=0#634010
systems that seem obscure to you were mainstream to them.
So the European computer buyers were all hipsters?
Exactly, brother. Exactly. The Amiga made me love computers.
I'll never forget the first day I had my 500 hooked up. I ran the demo that drew boxes. Then ran another copy, then another, then another...had dozens of them up. You could watch the OS switch attention between dozens of them. I was amazed. My previous machine was a C64. The leap was magical, amazing...I would simply watch the Amiga run demos and be blown away.
Learning m68k assembly...aaah. I'll still say it is the most beautiful and elegant machine code out there. Reads almost like english. It was beautiful.
I hacked the 86 pin port on the side of my A500 and installed a GVPII card. Put a 120 meg hard drive in there and 4 megs of memory. It was my first serious hard hack. Worked like a champ too.
Being an Amiga person back in the early days was a time of pure magic. Nothing since has even come close. I've got an i7 2600k with 8 gigs of memory and a 300 dollar graphics card. It came with a graphics demo of islands in an ocean of water, and it looks perfect. And for some reason it's just not as impressive.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It's just the biggest single market in the world.
I suspect that would be EU.
This is something that sounds interesting.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Where does it stand on the Malware front? On one hand I'd think it would let users ride ROFL-Copters over the virus writers. On the other hand it might be really vulnerable to 2012's exploit methods.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm going to guess you weren't around in the 80's when the Amiga was huge? I was. It was the system that made many of the SF/fantasy/cartoon tv shows possible to produce on a weekly basis. It got bought by the thousands for modelling and raytracing, and with the Video Toaster ushered in a whole new era of graphics capabilities that FORCED everyone else in the market to compete. It was the fastest horse in the race, and suddenly everyone else making bank on "traditional" text-based DOS number crunchers, or exotic SGI graphics workstations, was in danger of losing their business (and homes) because of some upstart that came out of nowhere.
Don't assume that marketing and management failures were caused by technical weakness. Most people bought the system IN SPITE of it being made by Commodore.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
Oh well.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Boutique Computer systems like the Atari ST, Amiga, and Sharp X68000 are some of the most insufferable tasks one can undergo as far as emulation goes.
I will say this now. The Amiga and Atari ST were fine products for their time, but now, their only usefulness is as gaming consoles. The games they had that were unique to their platform and superior ports produced really were a sight to see, and have withstood the test of time in this era of retro-gaming revival.
Atari ST Emulation is tolerable under Windows and Linux.
Amiga emulation is absolutely insufferable, especially under Linux where the emulators just seem to get worse with every port produced. Even under Windows, Amiga emulation is a complicated abysmal mess, with dozens of archane rom versions, Disk insertion and image issues, and emulation bugs.
The gaming library from the Amiga era is the only thing it has going for it, and is why Amiga programmers should do their best to make Amiga games fully playable on Linux platforms.
I'll wait for NATAMI.
> The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.
This sentence is confusing. Is it trying to say that the A1000 was portable? Because I had one and I can assure you that it was not.
egypt urnash minimal art.
No, it was very popular, and sold very well. It was ruined by spectacularly, probably criminally incompetent management. If you've spent _any_ time here on Slashdot, you would have heard many tales of great engineering ruined by stupid managers, well the Amiga saga wrote the textbook on that. Tragic.
I still fire up my A1200 now and again.... and if I hadn't killed my SX32 card for the CD32 I'd have it plugged into the TV right now.
sustainable living
How is being a single-user OS good? When I first got XP and was showing it to my wife, she actually liked the fact that every member of the family could have different accounts and profiles, so that aspect of NT (and Linux, BSD and the other unixes) has by now more or less come to be accepted.
I like the fact that drivers are in the Drivers folder, commands are in the Commands folder and so on, but it sounds like a mess if one were to want to uninstall anything. Instead of just uninstalling say, Myst, one would have to go to the libraries folder and look for all myst libraries and delete them, and do the same everywhere else.
The thing I heard is that Amiga's scripting language REXX was awesome, and it later moved to OS/2. That too was a rather good OS, and complaints about its overusage of memory was misplaced, given that NT far exceeded it when it XP replaced the Win95 family.
Which brings to mind an idea. How many of you have heard of OSFree? It's an FOSS version of OS/w, where they take the L4 microkernel, put the Presentation Manager personality on top of it, so that they have an OS/2 that is lightweight, but preserves all the advantages that OS/2 had. Since it's on a widely ported microkernel, this OS/2 would also be portable to any CPU architecture that L4 exists on, not just x86. And it wouldn't be a nightmare like IBM's Workplace OS attempt was.
Similarly, the Hyperion people could do something similar - take a microkernel, maybe L4, and then port the Amiga UI to it as a personality (just like Presentation Manager in the above example). After that, target netbooks, but instead of restricting netbooks to Atoms or Nanos, use other processors as well - ARM, MIPS and PPC. That way, they can have boxes that just run their OS (although some people will run them w/ some Linux or another), but in which case, the Amiga OS won't be behind all modern OSs in terms of capability, since it'll be able to incorporate and use all services available in modern OSs.
Well, as ONE of "them", let me give you an inventory:
2- A1000s
2- A2000s
3- A500s
1- A600
1- A4000
1- CDTV
With the exception of the A600, which I'm in the process of re-capping, ALL of them work just fine. In fact, I used the trusty A4K to backup all my floppies to CD. Out of ~5-600 floppies, I only had about 8 that wouldn't read. How many PC-formatted AOL floppies can say that?
So, why would I still run an ancient system(s)? There are things these babies can do that STILL haven't been replicated, even in Linux on modern hardware. I still can't find a decent DTP that works as well (or efficiently) as PageStream 2.22 (it'll even output to Gerber for billboard-sized vinyl signs!). The only reason I keep a Windows box around is for running IrfanView - I haven't found anything that compares to it.
So, if Hyperion - or anyone - can push out some portable 'Miggy goodness, I'm all in. ...and don't get me started on all my 8-bitters.
Hyperion does not have the Licence nameing a product "Amiga". They only managed to get a licence for the name "AmigaONE" through a lawsuit. This will never be the first Amiga laptop, it will just be an AmigaOne Laptop.
And for the AmigaOS, you can get AROS, a AmigaOS API comnpatible OS for free and install it on a 300$ x86 Netbook with more power and more possibilities. Or you can get an used Mac G4 laptop and buay MorphOS the Amiga like OS from a longtime competitor with higher stability and performance.
The thing about the Amiga - one of the things that sunk the platform - was that no new version of the Amiga was compatible w/ the old one. That was something whose importance Amiga's management and marketing never figured out. Even if one is a complete Amiga fan, one can't appreciate having to start from scratch again when he gets a new Amiga, and not being able to install existing software on the new platform. If you can't leverage any of your past purchases, how much sense does it make to support that platform, when every other platform out there - PCs, Macs, even Unixes - did a better job supporting their predecessors? (Yeah, I'm aware that today, win64 breaks some compatibility w/ win 16 and doesn't go back all the way, but there is a difference b/w breaking compatibility after several generations, vs breaking compatibility b/w successive ones)
"The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced"
In which way was the Amiga 1000 portable in any other way than other non fixated object like toasters, anchovies and cupboards are?
Wrong! My 19 year old Amiga 4000 runs both the original AmigaOs 3.0 (as well as 3.1, 3.5 and 3.9) and it also runs the very latest AmigaOS 4.1.
Where are you getting your information, you could not be more wrong. I can run a lot of my original AmigaOS 1.3 software on my new install of the recently released AmigaOS 4.1.
Recently released? Then that's a new policy, and a non-Commodore one at that, where a new AmigaOS has to be compatible w/ something Amiga, since Commodore is not around. But w/ Commodore, from one generation to another, the various OSs were not compatible w/ each other - that's one of the main reasons Amiga failed. Yeah, now OSs from Hyperion or anyone else who makes AmigaOS clones would be expected to be compatible, so that they can have some credibility of running original Amiga software. But did your AmigaOS 2.x or 3.x support your 1.3 software, assuming you had those successors?
I think they were partially compatible. Plenty of application software that was written "correctly" was compatible across OS versions, but many games were not because they directly accessed hardware and used OS routines from the ROMs which they expected to be memory-mapped in certain locations. There was a big aftermarket for putting older OS ROMs into newer machines with external switches in order to run legacy games.
Again, You are completely wrong, where are you getting this mis-information? AmigaOS has always had forward compatability. Not Commodores policy, can you point me to a link that says that Commodore wanted to ditch compatability with each OS release. Yes, AmigaOS2.x did indeed support the vast majority of 1.3 software. And there were very few instances of software working on 2.0 but not on 3.x. And now with AmigaOS 4.x it will run most of the 3.x stuff. Sure there were a few examples of software that would not work on new versions of the OS, but that's the case with all operating systems. And the Amiga did not fail, Commodore did :-)
OK- not bashing amiga- nor praising it.
I just simply want to know- why- and for what motivation there is for "yet another OS".
I know the OS has a long and glorious history- but it will essentially be like starting from scratch in this day and age. With the market already saturated with Windows, Apple, and many flavours of Linux- do we really need another OS?
Is there some niche that Amiga can hold that none of the other OS do well at the moment? There are no 21st century applications written (that I know of) for the Amiga- so initially choice of software will be decades old- or a meagre line-up from Amiga themselves.
Does Amiga have some "trick-up-their-sleaves" that we don't know about- or is this purely a nostalgia product?
If it can run Windows apps or Mac apps or Linux apps- or maybe a combination- maybe it will stand a chance.
I have no beed with Amiga- or any ill-feeling towards them- but I simply can't see the purpose of it- can someone enlighten me please and tell me why I would want or need an Amiga?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It's just the biggest single market in the world. Nothing important there.
Strawman. I didn't claim that the US market wasn't significant, I said it "wasn't the be all and end all". And your other fallacy lies in assuming that because the US is a major *single* market, the Amiga can't be a success regardless of how much it sells on other markets.
And this depends how one defines a "market". Europe as a whole was- and is- in the same ballpark.
The Amiga did not sell well enough anywhere
The fact that it was manufactured for almost a decade shows that it must have sold "well enough". Actually, it sold significantly better than "well enough", but whatever...
and it died.
Eventually, yes- just like the original PlayStation or NES, which no longer have any mainstream support. By your logic this means that they were flops too.
I'm pretty sure that was exactly my point
Go back and read what you wrote then- you made two distinct points:-
(a) That the Amiga was a supposed flop even in its heyday (transparently wrong and the part that was disagreed with) and
(b) That it's long dead and there's no real purpose to bringing it back now.
Problem is that some idiots tend to get the wrong end of the stick and assume that disagreement with part of their argument means you disagree with all of it. My response was clarification and expansion on this front.
But to be honest, this product is really aimed at the obessive hardcore Amiga fanbase
All three of them
Funny thing is, if the rest of your response hadn't been so trollish in intent, I'd probably have found this a humorous (but reasonable) exaggeration of the current situation.
Yep- you're right. These machines are aimed at (what I assume is) a very tiny proportion of obsessive hobbyists who never let go and are still interested in a "new" Amiga hardware and OS (*). Not remotely mass-market by x86 standards, but obviously enough for some people to figure there's money to be made.
Personally, I don't see the point as the new models are neither fish nor foul. AFAIK the new machines aren't directly hardware compatible with the old Amigas- just the Amiga OS- and the OS itself has probably been long superseded.
As I said, they're niche products aimed at obsessive hobbyists. Actually, IMHO they're more intended to *exploit* such hobbyists... but it's their money.
(*) As opposed to the "retro" Amiga market, which I assume is a somewhat different demographic
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I'm going to guess you weren't around in the 80's when the Amiga was huge?
In some ways you still have a US-centric view. *You* mean "huge" in terms of relative video industry importance in the US.
My point was that the Amiga was "huge" in actual *mass market*, pure-numbers, "every teenager in his bedroom and his dog owns one" terms in Europe.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
So, if Hyperion - or anyone - can push out some portable 'Miggy goodness, I'm all in.
I might be wrong, but AFAIK these "new" Amigas AFAIK aren't directly compatible with old Amiga software, and definitely not anything that comes close to hitting the hardware directly. They don't run the 68K, they are (again AFAICT) just custom machines that run a new version of the Amiga OS.
AFAICT they're aimed at the tiny hardcore who never gave up the faith even when it meant moving away from the original Amiga hardware.
But given that any need for "classic" Amiga OS compatibility in a new OS has been rendered irrelevant by the sands of time (any software of industry note likely being well over 15 years old, and having been long migrated-away from) and I doubt the updated AmigaOS is that great by modern standards given that it basically wasn't upgraded for well over a decade and was already getting long in the tooth before then.
Seriously, it was fantastic in its day, but that day was 20+ years ago and a different era. Things have moved on- let it go.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Not exactly- but different products made it big there than in the US.
I know kids my generation in the US grew up mainly with Atari and some a Commodore 64. In the UK, for example- not many people had an Atari- and the Commodore was only one of many computer platforms.
Almost everyone I knew had a Spectrum of some kind.
Spectrums are fairly obscure in the US- but then- we (for the most part) didn't have Atari game consoles instead... our computers were our game consoles.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
AmigaOS 4.1 does a pretty good job of running old Amiga software. It has a 68k emulator built in much like the early PPC MacOS.
There are a bunch of old games that don't work, but there are a bunch that do, too. Basically, if it'll run on a 68K Amiga that had aftermarket graphics and sound cards, it'll work on a PowerPC running AOS 4.
There's actually a fairly high demand for classic Amiga app support; while the people who buy this sort of thing are certainly not Diehard Amiga Purists, we do want to run our old crap, too!
The Amiga *was* really popular in Europe. In around 1990 or so, if you had a modern personal computer in your home, it was most likely an Amiga or an Atari ST, the IBM compatibles were far too expensive for most people and had very poor graphics capabilities.
It died out because the PC got a lot cheaper and gained all the things that the Amiga had, but that wasn't until around 1994-1995 when the PC finally had what the Amiga had for years.
(I have no horse in this race, I never owned an Amiga back in the day. I managed to get a clearance deal on an 80386 in 1990 or so. I was more interested in trying to get something that would run something Unixy in 1991, rather than graphics).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
There's actually a fairly high demand for classic Amiga app support; while the people who buy this sort of thing are certainly not Diehard Amiga Purists, we do want to run our old crap, too!
I suspect that you'd have to be pretty diehard to actually buy a new non-PC computer that has no prospect of mainstream success or use, pay an inflated price for it, and learn to use it, just to use your old apps under some marginally more modern hardware! And is the "need" to run your old software actually enough to warrant buying a new computer to run on? I suspect that *technically* it would be quite feasible- and probably more sensible- to run it under some sort of Windows emulation layer.
:-)
I think I'd be right in guessing that any business that ever relied on the Amiga would have long, *long* (like 15 years ago) been forced to migrate away from the system- even if reluctantly- to the point that Amiga compatibility is almost utterly irrelevant to anyone except, er... "diehard hobbyists". Sorry
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
There's a subset of Diehard Amiga Purists who refuse to use anything past Workbench 3.1, on Commodore-produced hardware (a few might deign to use QuikPak-produced 4000 T/68060s, but not many.)
But pretty much anyone interested in AmigaOS as a hobby is going to want to run at least *some* old stuff.
Up through about 2000 every story of a new restart for Amiga caught my interest - I loved the Amiga and it had a ton of amazing games. This article kind of caught my interest, but it is going to run AmigaOS4 (or Linux - why bother? I have a ton of x64 Linux boxes and PPC Linux sucks for playing media) - with no provision for backwards compatibility. I would buy one if I could make use of old software I have kicking around, but it can't do that (probably won't be able to read the disks - probably won't even have a floppy drive), and the UI is still stuck in the early '90s.
If I bought one, what would I get? AmigaOS on a generic PPC (nothing particularly special about the hardware) running an OS which has much of the look and feel of the original Amiga (which today is dated), but totally incompatible (even through Petunia). Sure, I can use UAE to run original Amiga software, but my PCs can do that just as easily. What's the appeal? If it were a turnkey, backwards-compatible (including floppy drive) Amiga, I would probably buy one, but not if I need to jump through the same hoops as I need to on my PCs.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Yet another arrogant slashdot memeber that knows nothing about history. The only computer that was more succesfull when it came to sales number was the c64. Even the a1200 when it came out in 93 just before commodore collapsed sold so many units that the factories could not keep up with demand here in Europe.
It died because of some really bad business decisions.
I write this by the way on my acube system running Amiga OS 4.1. ;P
I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but according to Jeremy Reimer's research, the Amiga didn't sell all that well. They sold about 4 million computers between 1985 and 1995, about 1/5 the number of Macs sold. At its peak year in 1991, Amiga sold half as many units as Macs.
http://www.jeremyreimer.com/postman/node/329
oh you mean your 4000 with a 68k CPU? no fucking shit it still runs original OS, its still using a 68K cpu with is not Power PC
I'm an Amiga user. According to this forum:
I'm an obsessive because I like using an Amiga more.
My hardware is all broken, and the OS is broken (despite the fact they work just fine thankyouverymuch)
AmigaOS should die a death because it's not the same as it was in 1994, despite the fact I enjoy using it.
Nobody wants AmigaOS any more except for the "3 fans", Which is strange given the amount of people on the forums.
I use AmigaOS because I *enjoy* it. Not because I'm an obsessive compulsive geek with a social disorder that means I can't let something go just because the parent company dies.
I hope people can respect this for what it is - AmigaOS is my hobby. I enjoy its responsiveness, I enjoy programming for a minority platform which is clean, simple and easy to code for. I enjoy using it. I enjoy keeping up with people developing the OS. I enjoy having an OS that's free of DRM and such nonsense. I enjoy using a platform that's efficient with its limited hardware.
I enjoy using my Amiga. Is that so wrong? And even if it is, I'll still carry on using it because I enjoy it....
The EU compared to the US is really rather close in size. It's just asinine for the GP to write off the EU (and everything non-US) as not mattering at all. I think he is also wrong about the popularity of the Amiga in the US.
I'm getting THREE of them!!!!!
This netbook is a cheap and great way for old Amiga users that liked using AmigaOS to try how much AmigaOS have advanced through the years. It's aimed at current Amiga users and old Amiga users as well. Amiga world needs more software developers and every single person counts.
I really can't understand the absolute rubbish that's being posted here and the really nasty vitriolic comments by people who obviously haven't researched anything beyond the headline statement. AmigaOS is, these days, a hobby OS. However, it's been (and is still being) improved massively from the old days of Commodore. Enough to keep a good few AOS fans wanting to see it prosper and move forward some more. And enough to keep a lot of those fans wanting better hardware to run it on. As it's inevitably going to have a small user base, it's going to cost more than the equivalent in Intel (x86) hardware. AOS fans realise that and a good few of them (us) are prepared to pay for it. After all, if no-one buys it, the dream dies. One of the most requested pieces of hardware is a netbook or laptop - so Hyperion, who have put their money into the Amiga OS - have sourced one. Again, compared to a piece of x86 hardware, it's going to cost a bit more and will be a bit slower. Amiga OS being quite a nippy piece of software will most likely perform more than adequately, in terms of speeds, on this. The high end hardware that's coming out, the AmigaOne X1000 is very costly but this time has been designed by a top class company, Varisys. It will be a dual core PPC computer. Again, the OS will perform well on this hardware. One of the things people often remark at is how nimbly the operating system and software packages perform, compared to other OS's running on many times faster hardware. Yes, to start with it will only use one of the cores, but that will come in the near future. There is, indeed, new software being written still for this OS (and even for m68K Amiga OS) The point is, Amiga enthusiasts are willing to pay for the hardware and software to keep their (our) platform alive, and, regardless of the points of view of those of you who can't understand why, that will keep on happening. There are enthusiasts of other platforms who are also willing to pay good money to see their chosen OS prosper. What's it got to do with those who don't like these alternative platforms what people do with their own money?
Seriously, it was fantastic in its day, but that day was 20+ years ago and a different era. Things have moved on- let it go.
Yeah sure, now we have Gnome 3 and Unity.
"And yet it still died. Must not have really been all that popular in "Buttf***" Europe either."
At one point Commodore Germany called in stock from other parts of Europe, including other countries where Amiga's were selling well.
How,- I don't know. Why? Because the American HQ hadn't ordered enough custom chips since Amigas weren't selling well in North America by then, & therefore manufacturing couldn't meet worldwide demand.
Eventually demand was tapering off but Amigas sold long after Commodore had been pulled to bits. Then at some point supply was chopped off & I guess that frustrates those who then CAN'T buy what they want. Some still want to buy an updated Amiga system. I'd rather see better more Amiga-like Free/Opensource systems & wish Amiga IP rights-holders would let go. If it wasn't nailed to that perch it would 'ave ....
Urgh, what the hell is that mess? Lots of graphs where it's unclear which markets they're meant to refer to, and a mass of badly-formatted text.
The fact that the ZX Spectrum sold almost as many *units* worldwide as the Apple but doesn't appear on any of the graphs make me suspicious. Maybe they just missed it out... in which case, the graphs are still crap.
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