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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.
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 :)
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. Figures were "drawn" on the screen with special glyphs added to the 8 bit character set, allowing you to draw boxes around menus and the like by an ascii-art like process.
Almost nobody got CGA on the PC. Everyone opted for MDA because it was cheaper, there was't really any software that used color effectively, and monochrome monitors were cheaper and much, much sharper. On the output side graphics capable printers were very, very low quality (think 8 bit), and almost exclusively monochrome. The first kind of office printer most people got was something called a "daisy wheel" -- which produced output similar to an old-fashioned typewriter because essentially that's what it was.
So CGA for practical purposes might as well not have existed. 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. It wasn't until IBM introduced VGA as standard in its PS/2 line that color became a common feature.
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. 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.
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