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A New Amiga Arrives On the Scene -- the A-EON Amiga X5000 (arstechnica.com)
dryriver writes: It is 2017 and the long dead Amiga platform has suddenly been resurrected. The new Amiga X5000 costs about $1,800 and is an exotic mix of PC parts and completely new custom chips, including "Xena," an XMOS 16-core programmable 32-bit 500 MHz coprocessor that can be configured by software to act as any type of custom chip imaginable. It is connected to a special "Xorro" slot that has the same physical connection as a PCIe x8 expansion card, but it is dedicated to adding more Xena chips as desired. Amiga X5000 can run all legacy Amiga software, including software written for later PowerPC Amigas. It boots from a U-Boot BIOS. The OS is AmigaOS 4.1, but the X5000 can also boot into MorphOS or Linux. The test system used by Ars came with a ATI Radeon R9 270X video card.
...I say let it die already! Fuck, it's literally over a decade since anybody genuinely gave a shit about a new Amiga. My old accelerated A1200 went in the dumpster way back. Seriously, how small a fucking niche do you have to be targetting to still be trying to resurrect the Miggy? Nothing like this is genuinely an Amiga anyway, it's more of an emulator platform; "For games, which usually bypassed the operating system and hit the classic Amiga hardware directly, Hyperion and A-EON have released a tool called RunInUAE, which lets you run .ADF files (the Amiga Disk Format for imaging old 3.5” floppy disks) in a customizable Amiga emulator, which includes all the old ROM and Workbench images for classic Amigas such as the 500 and 1200." I don't see the point.
In addition to PP, this thing has been kicking around for what... 5 years now?
If they can get the bare motherboard+cpu under 500 dollars with a quad-core I might splurge on one if it has open hardware documentation, but as an 1800 dollar 'amiga experience' package... I think I'd just fleabay myself a real amiga.
We have made a decision, concerning both A-EON and AmigaKit. The decision we made is grounded in our experience during the last 8 months in regards to both companies. As a result we have made the choice to no longer support A-EON or AmigaKit in any way, shape or form.
We are still here and "may" be carrying more stuff soon. However no more X5000 or A1222 or, frankly anything produced from either company. AOTL Donations is going on a temporary hold so we can refocus now that we are not supporting A-EON or AmigaKit.
from http://amigaonthelake.com/
I am not sure of what occurred in the past 8 months, but judging by the fact that their sole US reseller is calling it quits, it doesn't bode well for them as an expensive and desktop oriented product (Seriously, who wants an Amiga in BLACK TOWER aesthetic?) Also, the UK supplier wants 1400 GBP for the bare dual core board. For that much you might as well just buy a Late model PCIe Quad Mac G5, install UAE on it and call it a day :)
That's an interesting product that I had never heard of. As a result of this post, I spent 40 minutes reading about THEIR products.
I'm a gonna have to change these before I go out!!
But can it yodel?
We seem to be stuck in this nostalgia cycle. Trying to regain the spark of wonder of our youth. But it is time to realize things are different now, there has been a lot of progress however not all of it made the same set of trade offs we wanted but overall what we have now is better. We just don't realize the reason why when things were better when you were a kid is because your parents isolated you from the problems of the day. That Apple ][, Amega, Atari, Comadore 64, Amstrad... that you got as a kid meant saving up for weeks deciding to not get something thay wanted for themselves.
So now we are making such sacrifices and we keep going back to what we wanted as a kid, remakes and reboots of old tv shows and movies, trying to bring back the retro tech. We are using our skills and brain power to go backwards. And this is a bad thing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Surely it's from the more-money-than-sense-dept?
The AmigaOne X-series has been available for years now (and it has been more or less dead for years outside the hardcore AmigaOS circles due to the price). This is just the latest version.
I've been an Amiga user for almost 30 years now and I'd love to have one, but not at that lolprice.
what else is there to say?
From the Ars article :
and the PC managed just four colors and monotone beeps
Huh ? Nope.
Yes, Amiga's capabilities were incredibly impressive (closer to an expensive arcade machine, than to home computer) (though they came at a price).
But PCs weren't as shitty as that.
By 1985, when then Amiga was launched, PC had a little bit more capabilities than that :
- The original PC (1981)'s CGA card can also output 16 colours (but at a lower resolution of 160x200, and required a bit of hacking(*), so it wasn't much used. Though Sierra Online massively used it on the CGA composite-output of all their games back then).
- The PCjr (1984)'s CGA+ card had 16 colors mode (320x200).
- The Tandy PC (1984)'s TGA card 16 colors mode too (320x200)
- The IBM's own EGA (1984, again) managed 16 colours at various resolution
So the PC was beyond 4 colors. Although, yes, Amiga's 32 with fully programmable palette (and even more hackability) where much more impressive.
Regarding sound :
- The original PC Speaker is PWM (Pulse-Width momdulation capable). So it can in theory play digitized sounds.
In practice, it doesn't have DMA, so it's the main CPU's job to push the samples one by one, so usually it's not possible to do much at the same time.
(And given the low memory, it wasn't even possible to have more than the speech in RAM)
Thus it was mostly used to do speech synthesis in small tools, and only for the title screen music in games. (I only have the 1987's example of Mach3, I can't manage to find a 1985 contemporary example).
- The PCjr and Tandy started a boom of special audio devices.
Their was rather simple (multiple channels - 4 - of beeps and boops, with volume control - making also software controller sound envelope usable by some games).
But it paved the way to later introduction of better audio (1987's adlib, creative music system, ibm music feature, etc.)
- (of notice: Roland was also making a MIDI interface since 1984 - the MPU-PC. But back then that one was exclusively used for professional music.
It was only the arrival of Roland's MT-32 in 1987 that sparked the massive use in games starting in 1988 by - again - Sierra).
So please, the PC's beeps and boops weren't motone - it was either speech (with static screen) or the first arrival of multi channel beeps and sound envelopes.
But yeah, Amigas, having a dedicated chip able to handle 4 channels of digital audio while leaving the main CPU free was an incredible jump forward in sound capabilites, only reached on PC with arrival of Gravis UltraSound and SoundBlaster AWE 32 (and until that, previously emulated with software mixing on older Sound Blasters).
Note:
All the above (recently arrived IBM PC's EGA, and IBM PCjr, etc.) where a bit expensive machines.
(The PCjr was negatively compared to contemporary 8bit home computers like C64)
But given the crazy expensive Amiga's introductory price, it's a valid comparison.
---
(*) That's with the official hacks published by IBM back then.
Of course modern demo maker have found way to take the original IBM PC hardware To infinity and beyond
(thousands of colors by creatively hacking the composite output).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Can it boot PowerPC OS9 9.2.2 or OS 10.4.11?
why is the 1990's style giant IBM PC box still popular, when a modern computer fits in your pocket?
What a pity Apple discontinued OS X Leopard some years ago.
Add in the ability to add an Intel processor and the XENA emulate all the Mac ROMs; as well as run Windows. Then you might just have a machine with wider appeal, especially if you could get better than Mac Pro perfomance at 2/3 or less cost.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I've met people who spare no expense when it comes to collecting every last oddball computer made over the last 30+ years. It's a legit and pretty cool bobby. This is definitely a fly-by-night, single faint blip on the radar, oddball computer. While I can't think of a single practical use for this machine, I imagine it will make its way into the personal computer museums of a few folks.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
A ZX Spectrum revived with an embedded tape recorder?
a lot compared to a PC and the PC didn't come down until years later (when the P166 MMX got released. I remember it because it killed off what little was left of the Amiga & Atari ST market when you could suddenly get a P166 MMX with 16 megs of ram for around $999).
There's an amazing video on youtube of a 286 gaming PC being put through it's paces. It's impressive as heck what it could do until you realize there's about $5k of hardware there compared to a $1k Amiga.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
...but I loved it because at the time (in the late 80's) it really was better, especially for graphics and multitasking capability than all the competition, upto and including PCs.
In short the original was forward-looking and broke new ground. It also had a great community around it. This new Amiga brings nothing new, is twice as expensive and half as powerful as a good PC, and the AMiga community is effectively dead. Even I can't see any point to buying this, especially at this crazy price.
If you really wanna run old Amiga games. just dowload UAE for free. If you miss that computer community mentality, go to the Linux world where it is thriving, not Amiga.
Just like the Lamborghini Countach, Amiga should be left to the good memories of 80's history, where they will remain the icons of their day, not dug up and re-experienced again where it quickly becomes disappointingly obvious that yesterday's heroes don't even do their jobs half as well as todays mass-market products.
Unlike the anonymous pant-shitters, we know how to exact retribution. Here, in the real world. With crowbars and blowtorches.
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
..unfortunately introducing a new desktop platform at this point is like introducing a new way to manufacture candles. They're fighting the last war. These days the most common use of a desktop is to access your browser, your email and your office suite (and that's assuming you're not already using a web based office suite and email client). Pretty much any desktop will do. (Come to think of it, I haven't used a desktop in over a decade, is there going to be a laptop version?)
The point is, the action isn't on the desktop anymore. It's hard to see how yet another platform can offer a compelling enough advantage to persuade anyone to move off of what they've already got. Especially at the price they're charging. It might have some features that make it practical for some niche market, but if so I'm not seeing what they are.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Criticisms about these being pointless or impractical miss the point, in my opinion. These aren't for the general user wanting to browse the web and check Facebook, they're for hackers. They're for the same kind of geek that has an oscilloscope and a signal generator and a Raspberry Pi and breadboards: someone who likes to explore tech for its own sake. Somebody who wants to write new code for that custom Xena chip. Somebody who wants to explore off the beaten track. Seems cool, to me.
The Xena chip sounds quite interesting, and I can think of a lot of uses for it, especially with the ability to add more of them. Problem is, I don't think it sounds like $1,800 worth of "interesting". If there were some kind of guarantee that Xena would be well supported and that parts would remain available for a while, it'd make it more appealing. As it is, I don't have a lot of confidence that the company will be around for the long term. Also, it would help if their forum link went to a site with a cert that actually matched the site name.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
BIOS remains resident after you boot and its routines can be called by an operating system as a Basic Input-Output System. U-Boot initializes a minimal number of things, loads a kernel, ramdisk and dtb, and jumps into the kernel. Once the kernel is loaded it can't access any routines from U-Boot (nor would it want to).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'd much rather buy a PCIe card with a bunch of Xenas on, (i.e. for hardware emulation at speed, think augmented MAME) than buy an Amiga.
That's an option too. A PC with a number of Xenas might be quite useful, but I just don't see people lining up for a new Amiga, especially at that price.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
There's more to CGA than that too. When used with a composite video output games could exploit the namesake of NTSC (that is Never Twice the Same Colour) to create artefacts that actually produced quite fantastic graphics (compared to 4 colour CGA)
Yup, one of the official methods to get more colors relied on the NTSC color clash.
This one was massively used by Sierra Online (lots of their CGA games used 16 colors on NTSC composite out - nearly all of the AGI text adventure game did)
The other one (working with RGB monitors too) and more or less officially documented, relied on the text mode.
The CGA is switched in 80x25 mode (640x200 pixels).
Text lines are compressed vertically until each caracter line covers only 1 or 2 pixels. (displaying 100 or 200 text of lines per screen - at least the top of each line as only the top 1 or 2 pixels of each caracter cell are display).
There are too characters in the table - 221 and 222 - that are half block. e.g.: the left half of the caracter cell is foreground, the right half of the cell is background.
By playing with that one can make a 160x100 (more frequently, because square pixels) or 160x200 (highest resolution, but single page) with colors.
(Technically it's 80x100 or 80x200 text modes, with each cell split in 2 halfs one with the foreground the other with the background color of the char cell).
with a wide range of colours in 320x240 mode with 16 possible colours on the screen at once out of a palate of 64 possible colours (in 4 groups)
BTW: it's 320x200, that the most vertical scanline you could output backthen.
This time, the technique is to turn on the 640x200 monochrome CGA mode.
BUT to activate the colour output on the composite output (can be make-shift hacked by setting a specific border colours which will be interpreted as the NTSC color burst), so a composite monitor will interpret it as color signal.
Then output specific black-white pattern (on-off pixels) on the monochrome screen, they will be interpreted by the NTSC as colors. That more or less gives 16 colors to play with. (but at a 160 horizontal resolution)
That's how nearly all AGI text adventure games of Sierra did work.
Alternative consisted of using the various palettes of 320x200 4 colors CGA, and the horizontal bluring of colors. (remember : NTSC offers only 160 horizontal color resolution), you have 16 ways to combine two 4 colors neight boors in composite mode, giving you 16 colors.
With a different set of 16 colors, depending on the CGA color palette selected.
The only problem is single pixels with contrast got blurred which made reading text very difficult in these modes.
Blur brought the resolution down to 160x200. but this "blur" is where the "color mixing" enabling 16 colours comes from.
Sierra solved it by having a 160x200 16 color playfield, but use only monochrome (black-on white) text to increase readability, and do all the critical text-only steps (like inventory management) in monochrome texte-mode instead of graphics.
Then, there's the modern "8088mph" demo.
It combines both above approaches.
It creates a 80x200 text modes, and use all possible patterns (including also the alternating pixels patterns, "!!" ascii character, etc.) together with all possible foreground/background colors combination, to create thousands of different outputs on a composite monitor.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Someone old enough to remember the original PC here. CGA was not a standard feature; the base model (which most people had) used something called MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter), which supported text output only without any pixel-addressable graphics. {...} Almost nobody got CGA on the PC.
Fun because on this side of the ocean, CGA was quite widespread, and as soon as EGA was realeased by IBM, we started also seeing it here around.
(Maybe differences in buying power between countries ?)
The thing which *was* rarer here was composite output : local colors standards where PAL and SECAM (depending on country, but most TV where dual standard).
Not that many TV monitors did support NTSC too, meaning that TV-output wasn't trivial with the CGA's composite out.
So most often it was either monochrome monitors or expensive RGB monitors.
When Lotus 1-2-3 came along, the need for plotting drove the adoption of a proprietary monochrome graphics technology called "Hercules Graphics Adapter", which was much, much more popular than CGA ever was.
My father's business did use Hecrules graphic cars because of that plotting (though Hercules had hardware-assisted emulation of CGA, rendering the low-resolution 320x200 4 colors as high resolution halftones to simulat grayscale levels).
Our schools was CGA (some with even expensive color RGB monitors), then rather early EGA.
As a side note, even then sound wasn't a standard feature on personal computers. The most they could do was beep. You had to add a proprietary sound card to get anything more.
Nope. Again : the PC speaker had PWM capabilities.
It wasn't used in *games* (At least not before Access on much more powerful computers), because the PC Speaker didn't have DMA, and the CPU needed to push samples manually in software.
But it was used in a few novelty tools (small DOS program wich could synthetize speech by stringing together pre-recorded words).
And a few games used it for music during title screen (when the CPU isn't busy by the game itself).
But yes, PC sound only really started taking of in 1987 with the apparition with sound cards (AdLib, CMS, IBM MF, etc.)
(Though not everything was proprietary. In 1984 already the PC could do the openstandard MIDI with a specific card. But it didn't get used in games until MT-32 become popular, again by Sierra Online, starting with SCI text games, first used by King's Quest IV )
This is why Macintosh became common in schools. As a developer you could count on every Mac having the same set of very rudimentary capabilities. As a school administrator, you just unboxed the thing and fed it floppies; there was no opening the case and installing optional boards that had to have their address and interrupt vectors chosen by the user and configured by jumpers.
Different countries, different situation. Here around IBM PC were nearly as popular.
Probably because of the reputation of the magic "three letters".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
PC's were as shitty as that...
Worse than Amiga ? yes.
But not as bad as described.
Again, PCs contemporary to the Amiga where able to 16 colors palette (still less than Amiga's 32 colours, but more than the 4 reported by Ars).
On my A1000 I could listen to mods, while copying files, and writing a term paper at the same time all in a graphical, full-color windowed user interface. No stuttering between windows and apps.
Which has more to do with the very nice AmigaOS with very nice support for multi-tasking.
Meanwhile on PCs (contemporary processor : Intel 286 on PC/AT) you had to use DOS (single-tasking) or Windows (not that brillant ad multi-tasking).
Though CPU helped a bit :
motorola 68k 32bits/16bits hybrid featured in Amiga were quite a beast.
You had to wait until the 386sx to get similar capabilities (and no OS that good at multi-tasking).
And depending on the video mode the Amiga was capable of 32,64, or 4096 colors. Orders of magnitude more than the PC.
Yes, the first generation of Amiga was able to do 32 colors (out of a large palette)
Yes, that was better than the PC.
I'm just signaling that the PC was already at 16 colors, not 4 colors as mentionned by ars.
All of this changed fairly quickly once soundblaster came along as well as the video card manufacturers stepped up there game.
Note that regarding digital audio playback, soundblaster only really added DMA to the mix. Still the capability to play a single digital channel (as the original PC speaker did), but entirely automatically, without the main CPU needing to work much.
(Also, additionally it had full AdLib compatibility for multiple synth voices).
Feature parity with Amiga (capability to play multiple digital channels) only came with Gravis Ultra Sound / Sound Blaster 32 AWE.
Before that, digital audio was mixed in software.
(e.g.: all modplayer on PC)
but given the ever increasing power in PC CPUs, that was acually doable.
Once windows 95 and 3-d video cards emerged 10 years later, the Amiga's fate was sealed.
I would think it came a little bit earlier.
Amiga could count on its co-processors, PC tended to count on the raw processing power.
Amiga could easily do flat shaded 3D thanks to its coprocessor (which could offload the drawing of polygons).
On the other hand, the power CPU found on PC could do textured environment.
Thus enabling easily 3D games such as wolfenstein 3D and then Doom,
or games with pre-rendered 3D models like Commander (there were attemps at ports of WC on Amiga, but with sucky performance).
Now move further to Quake and it starts to be beyond the reach of the contemporary amiga.
As soon as game designers decided to push 3D beyond the classic flat shaded polygons, strong CPUs were required.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q
It's possible to do everything you mentioned, but reality was different in 1985. Minimum hardware requirements for most games was still an 8088 PC @ 4.77Mhz (mediocre performance, 8-bit bus), and the slower IBM PCjr (no DMA chip to do RAM refresh). 286 PCs weren't yet cheap, and the new 386 CPU was super expensive (it was a huge improvement over the 80286).
I think most PCjr games used stock 160x200x16 resolution (320x200x16 required extra RAM). Tandy 1000 users sadly got same PCjr graphics, 16-color CGA (TV/composite) effective resolution is still 160x200. On digital monitors, CGA was 320x200x4 (using ugliest color presets in the galaxy), 320x200x2 or 640x200x2.
EGA cards were initially expensive, hi-rez required VRAM upgrade and pricier monitors. Also, EGA 64-color palette made PC games look like NES, while Amiga games looked like Sega Genesis with their 4,096 color palette.
PC speaker digital audio: volume was too low, extremely distorted. Digger is the only pre-1986 game I can remember doing that.
And, the PC graphics capabilities were: No sprites (other than blinking text cursor), no hardware blitting, slow video I/O (latches), no copper chip (to change video settings at any horizontal interrupt), and no video interrupts (which would have avoided the infamous Turbo button and insane CGA snow).
A similar argument could have been made when Linux first came along and yet here we are complaining about another competitor to the "establishment". It just comes down to the fact that people don't like change, even if it's better in the long term.
With Hitler in charge retards like you would be off to the camps for death/experiments.
Always thought the Amiga was a zombie. Itttttt's baaaaack! (Show girl turning her head completely around)
Contrary to the article, Amiga On the Lake is NO LONGER a reseller of A-EON products as indicated here.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.