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.

Comments

Nostalgia is not a good thing.

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Nostalgia is not a good thing.

[William Baric]

I was an adult when I bought my Amiga 1000. Your idea that "nostalgia" is because we were isolated by our parents from the problems of the day is pure nonsense.

Re:Nostalgia is not a good thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if we try and do something *completely different* we would still require some kind of GUI system with windows, menus, pop-up dialogs, scroll bars, buttons, radio buttons. To support 3D graphics, we need some kind of drawing surface, and custom widgets to support access to the 3D hardware (EGL, WGL, GLX). Then we would need audio and video codecs, the 3D API's, OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, DirectX. It would also have to support commodity hardware from $10 keyboards at Walmart to $500 gaming keyboards as well as HD monitors and network adapters. That would require TCP/IP and sockets. Users would want web browsers, word processors and spreadsheets as well as Email.

By the time all that is done, we've either reinvented Windows or Linux.

Re:Nostalgia is not a good thing.

[Kjella]

I think all or at least most of us have this idealized desire for simpler lives and simpler times, up to a point. For example I recently went camping and there's a certain charm to the crackle of a fire instead of turning up the central heating. Does it really mean I'd like to chop my own firewood and use a wood stove all winter long? Not really. Where we went now there was very weak cell phone coverage but actually I consider the lack of it to be positive, then people have gone camping and the rest of the world is out of touch, we can't reach them and they can't reach us. Which would be a bad thing if there's some kind of real emergency, but some of my friends freak if they're out of touch. Or worse yet, their kids don't have their cell phone despite we all grew up without one.

Playing the C64 is of course reliving some good memories from the past. But it's also sort of a reminder that it didn't take super high-end photo realistic graphics, sound, AI or whatever to have fun. But at the end of the day I'd rather watch a BluRay than a DVD or VHS. It's fun as long as you're doing just the fun parts, just like say medieval reenactments put on the show and splendor. Not the unclean water, food poisoning, rats and pests, infections and plagues, all the peasants and servants slaving all day long to support the relatively little glamour there was. We cherry pick, I mean I can play an Amish for a while but if I get really sick then I want to get to a 2017 hospital to see a 2017 doctor.

And that's why I think it's pretty harmless, we want to relive certain aspects but we don't really want to go back. My job would be practically impossible with 1980s tech, it just didn't exist. What was out there was paper records, there was no network infrastructure to collect it and even if there was we'd barely have the processing power without vast halls of computers at our disposal. I'm not a fool about what we have today. At the same time, I realize society now so specialized that my skills are an increasingly narrow slice where other people make sure everything else around me is operational. I understand the people who want to say buy a little farm and feel like this is my flour, my eggs, my meat... mine just magically appears in the grocery store.