A New Amiga Will Go On Sale In Late 2017 (theregister.co.uk)

An anonymous reader quote the Register: The world's getting a new Amiga for Christmas. Yes, that Amiga -- the seminal Commodore microcomputers that brought mouse-driven GUIs plus slick and speedy graphics to the masses from 1985 to 1996... The platform died when Commodore went bankrupt, but enthusiasm for the Amiga persisted and various clones and efforts to preserve AmigaOS continue to this day. One such effort, from Apollo Accelerators, emerged last week: the company's forthcoming "Vampire V4" can work as a standalone Amiga or an accelerator for older Amigas... There's also 512MB of RAM, 40-and-44-pin FastIDE connectors, Ethernet, a pair of USB ports and MicroSD for storage [PDF]. Micro USB gets power to the board.
A school in Michigan used the same Amiga for 30 years. Whenever it broke, they actually phoned up the high school student who original set it up in 1987 and had him come over to fix it.

Comments

Recipe...

[null etc.]

This approach is a recipe for failure.

One of the smartest people I know used to program emulators in FPGA. He programmed emulators for everything: TRS-80, TI-99/4A, Sinclair 1000, PDP-8, PDP-11, IBM zSeries, Cray, you name it. He eventually started doing contracts for major government contractors such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc., and often for $200K to $600K a pop. He was very well respected in that community, and knew how to get around most of the problems inherent in FPGA emulation.

Anyways, he was paid to do a few contracts for Amiga computers, and had the most trouble with them. Apparently, their custom, decentralized architecture introduced severe "resolution artifacts" (his words, not mine) into any emulated FPGA bus. Another huge problem was something that had to do with feedback loops introduced by eddy currents caused by some of the FPGA parallelization circuits that came about due to optimization algorithms for the silicon etching process.

At the end of the day, he was very, very close to solving all of these problems, and he went outside to walk to the local 7-11 to get a Mountain Dew to refresh his energy. He crossed the wrong basketball court, however, and some local residents started getting into a beef with him, causing a lot of trouble. Those guys were clearly up to no good. End of story, his mother was afraid he'd get into more trouble in his neighborhood (after all, Philadelphia has one of the highest homicide rates in the country), so she sent him to live with his aunt in California. He took a cab to his aunt's house when he arrived at the airport, and was inspired by a pair of dice he saw hanging from the cabbie's review mirror. He thought to himself, "Life is a gamble, why waste time solving FPGA bus problems for antiquated architectures?" and gave it up in an instant. "Smell you later, dude!" he said, and sold all of his FPGA patents the next day.

fan cults

[unixisc]

How is that different from Linux users?

Re:30 years of tech support.

[Doctor_Jest]

I think the point the AC was making was that people are still enthused about a computer that came out in 1985. (ish?) I still have my Amiga I bought used with the 512K expansion pack (with the battery removed of course.) Lots of overtime at the local car dealership washing cars for that one. :)

There is no such enthusiasm for the 8088's. Most of the support those old behemoths get are from the sheer number of them rotting in storage buildings and at the local Goodwill. The Amiga's like a vintage automobile. It's got a loyal following, a bunch of 3rd party support and enthusiasts, and a wealth of games and apps that were truly ahead of their time. Thanks to Commodore's board, the Amiga died prematurely, IMHO.

I admit, I only use Amiga through emulation these days, but I did all my college work on my A500 up until I found Slackware Linux my senior year. :)

Re:Amiga

[lucm]

The thing about Amiga owners is you can't get them to shut up about their Amiga. It's like the guy who doesn't have a TV, or the guy who rides a bike to work.

A tornado just tore a path across your city, leveling buildings and splintering concrete structures. Your home is no longer safe, subjected to countless fires, seeping sewage, wild animals and violent looters that even the National Guard can't tame, so like hundreds - thousands - of other citizens, you find yourself waiting in line to get into an emergency shelter put together haphazardly in the mold-infested gymnasium of the nearby middle school.

The line doesn't move fast, and you're worried as you see the absurdly small crate of water bottles shrinking quickly as people ahead of you greedily grab two, three or even four bottles as they walk by. You try to do the math, half-guessing, half-dreading that there won't be any water left by the time you reach the gate. You already have a debilitating headache because of dehydration; the situation is dire, the future uncertain.

Then someone puts a hand on your shoulder.

"Friend," says an older gentleman, his voice so soft, so quiet, like a cool summer breeze. "Friend," he says, "are you okay?"

There's something in his eye. A glint, a shadow, a whisper of past experiences so painful that they left a permanent mark on his soul.

"I'm okay," you reply, weakly, with a voice crackling like a pane of glass shattered by the axe of a firefighter. "I'm okay."

The kind man nods, although you can tell he's still worried.

"I'm okay," you repeat. "I just wish I could go back home, to my Amiga computer."

Re:My 3rd computer was an Amiga

[Megane]

The real, real reason that 68k isn't used anymore is that Motorola fell for the PowerPC meme. 88K was supposedly a pretty decent architecture, and they killed both at the same time. Coldfire was just the scraps of 68K for the embedded market. Apple switched architectures twice because Motorola couldn't stay interested in making high-end desktop CPUs.

The x86 instruction set was horrible, and Motorola could have used the same tricks on 68K that kept x86 going so long.

But really, the root cause reason that 68k isn't used anymore happened in 1981 or so when IBM picked the 8088. There are various legends about what happened, but the most coherent intersection of them that I have been able to deduce is that Intel wanted the 68008 (because the 8-bit bus would let them make a cheaper system), Motorola didn't want to commit to their deadline, Intel went with the 8088, and then Motorola had the 68008 out by the deadline anyhow. It surely didn't help any that at the time (as related in the DTACK-Grounded newsletter), Motorola's marketing group really only wanted to sell the 68K for $10,000+ Unix systems, and couldn't be bothered with embedded or consumer customers.