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

As an Amiga fan...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Re:As an Amiga fan...

[amigabill]

>> it's literally over a decade since anybody genuinely gave a shit about a new Amiga.

Well, enough people gave enough of a *#^%@ to make a new computer...

Enjoy your emulator. Let others enjoy their new computer. Why is this worth being so angry about?

Followup quote:

[Anonymous Coward]

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 :)

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.

Re:Capabilities?

[sheramil]

I'm almost certain that when I first read that article a few days ago, it said the coprocessor was named "Xenu". I remember thinking "Wow. The Scientologists aren't going to be happy about that."

Contemporary PC capabilites

[DrYak]

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).

Re:Contemporary PC capabilites

[hey!]

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.

Re:What's next?

[minus9]

Nope, with an SD card. You'll need to supply your own tape recorder:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1835143999/zx-spectrum-next