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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
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.
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.
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
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.
That's really the reason. It's for nostalgia and geek fun mostly. Owning an Amiga was always an expensive hobby. I paid 2 or 3 times the prices for stuff for my Amiga than my friends did for their peecee's. They always oohed and ahhed over how amazing it was but few people wanted to spend the money to own one. They were happy enough with windows since their was plenty of software available for it, mostly games that they wanted. All the big Amiga titles got ported to the peecee to start with and then later as the hardware started to slip behind and windows became more of a real operating system than the buggy crap it once was the games started coming out on peecee's first then ported to Amiga. It's hard to explain to people now just how bad the peecee was back then. I had been spoiled by my Amiga and I couldn't understand why people bought the clones when they crashed continuously, couldn't multi-task and had shitty sound and laughable graphics and animation. I now know why but I still would have done the same thing. The Amiga is why I enjoyed computing and if it hadn't been available I probably would have done without until 95 or so. As it was I hung on to the Amiga until 99 when I finally broke down, bought a used dual PII/333 server and installed linux on it. It was tough for a year or so but I couldn't go back, the hardware was just too slow to do the things I wanted. I still boot the A3k occasionally just to remember how much fun it was.
As others said, preemptive multitasking was one of the reasons that Amiga was so far ahead. The other piece was that it had separate audio and video processors. Today, PCs and Macs both have multitasking and dedicated Video and audio processors. As much as I love the Amiga, the PC caught up to it with Windows95 + Voodoo + Soundblaster.
It's not going to happen. Windows is running on momentum, OS X on style, and Linux on Freedom and Excellence. The Amiga just has Nostalgia. OS 4 isn't anywhere close to being able to compete with a modern OS.
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. [..] Nobody cared about the Amiga back then and even fewer people care now.
Oh Jeez, not this **** again! Look, I know it's hard to believe, but the US market is not the be all and end all, nor is it always reflective of the rest of the world.
Sure, it didn't sell well in Buttf***, Illinois, but the Amiga enjoyed *massive* mainstream success in Europe in the late-80s and early-90s.
That said, though it was amazing and ahead of its time 20-25 years ago, the Amiga is way too long gone to serve any meaningful purpose in bringing back now. Things have long moved on.
But to be honest, this product is really aimed at the obessive hardcore Amiga fanbase, not Joe Public, and that's where it makes business sense (if it does)- a very niche market.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
And the fact that some folks are willing to pay 2 grand to run AmigaOS over OSX bothers you.....why exactly? hell i knew a guy that would pay frankly crazy money for authentic 70s bell bottoms in his size, why? because he REALLY liked bell bottoms and thought they were worth the money to him.
And that's capitalism 101 friend, if there are enough folks willing to pay the cost (I bet even at 2 grand those guys ain't making much of anything off of those simply due to the fact they are buying in such low quantities) to keep those guys afloat and it makes them happy? Good for them. I have a customer that is having me keep an eye out for a Commodore 128 and i'm sure he'll end up paying more than a new PC to get it, why? Because he LIKED his 128 and misses it.
If there are enough folks out there that miss Amiga enough to keep a little shop open selling new Amigas personally i'm all for it, I wish them nothing but luck. our whole system is based on finding a market and making a profit by serving it, sure they won't get rich but if they can pay their bills and make a few bucks why not? Hell there is a bunch that sells cassette players for PCs, if there is a market and a little money to be made somebody will make it, why not a classic OS company?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The problem is that the hard core Amagia users that never let go AND (this is the important part) still want their system in a modern world need to have their wallets relieved from that stress.
Listen I love my retro computers, they are great machines that still manage to do amazing things. But I am not under an Illusion that a totally different arch, with 3rd party developed software is the real thing. Amiga PPC is.
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
Our hatred goes back farther than that, friend. Walled gardens are inimical to the nerd ethic and those precede Google's entry into the "mobile space", to use your business media parlance. But we bide our time...
Like the old saying goes, we know if we wait long enough we'll see the body of our enemy floating down the river.
Well, not literally...
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
As a huge Amiga fan 'back in the day', it's sad seeing its corpse being desecrated with such regularity. It died. We have to accept it.
where are the apps?
Here.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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