Dude, they're still shipping Amiga boxes! Yes, honest-to-god A1200s, the remaining stock from the production undertaken during the Escom ownership. There are also a few companies in the UK that offer "towered" A1200s with oodles of hardware upgrades. There's even the possibility that AI will do a limited run of A1200s and/or A1200 mobos to feed this market, allowing Amigans to have a legacy system that'll run currently available software, and with a PPC add-on, run the next-gen AmigaOS. We're still here, you're just overlooking us!
"And the new Amiga BoXeR motherboard with redesigned AA+ chipset-on-one-chip (which is FINALLY actually on the assembly lines now) would be nice to have." Cheesus H. Rice! WHERE DID YOU HEAR/READ THIS?!? I've been waiting since last freaking MAY for my shiny-new BoXeR-based Amiga clone and it's been like finding and then pulling hen's teeth to get ANY frockin' info on the mobo's status! E-mail me e-mediately (if not sooner!) about this!!! PLEASE!!!
Well, yer dead wrong on the use of Amigas (equipped with NewTek's Video Toaster) on Babylon 5 and SeaQuest. For at least the first two years of both shows, ALL special visual effects were rendered with Amiga computers. Later on, B5 at least moved on to Alpha-based machines running Lightwave, but that was due to the lack of Amiga hardware development and the increasing speed of Alpha chips. You are correct on the comparitive quality of games, for despite valiant efforts by the community, we're still about 3-5 years behind the curve. But I have to also challenge this notion of yours that the "PC" (as if there's only one of them!) was designed to be more expandable and upgradeable than the Amiga. First, as I parenthetically pointed out, it's not as if there's been only ONE "PC" design or motherboard in the last few years. There are commonalities to be sure, but nearly everyone has different specific designs. While you can argue that the PCI bus standard now eclipses the equivalent on the Amiga (Zorro III; gotta love them colorful names!), as far as getting the PCI boards to run with Windoze, well, they don't call it "Plug and Pray" for nothing. "Autoconfiguration" was a fact in the Amiga world in 1987 and still works as seamlessly as it did then. Then there's the ease of CPU swapping. I remember once swapping a 486 for a 386 on a DOS box a while ago, but I don't know if you can do that with Pentiums, and in fact I have severe doubts about being able to do that. The Amiga? Give us a few weeks and we'll be able to plug G4 PowerPC chips into our aged machines just by slipping in a new board. Are Amigas cutting-edge anymore? Of course not! Are we as down and out as you would portray us? Oh, HELL no!
How interesting that a post that starts out grousing about "TOTALLY uninformed speculation" thereafter indulges in same as freely as possible. Okay you may have had what YOU see as an ANALAGOUS situation, but what do you know EXACTLY about the ins and outs of the Amiga at Gateway? Do you work there? Have you? Do you know ANY of the insiders? Doesn't sound like it. For just one example, what business in the world would lay out $13 million just to sate an exec with a yen and not expect to get some actual economic return? Maybe they can indulge such fancies at Micro$loth, but Gateway is a fur-piece away from being a half-billion-dollar company. It's been widely reported that Gateway picked up the Amiga for the trademarks and patents in order to accumulate licensing fees. Then the Amiga faithful struck and a little light went on over Ted Waitt's head (especially since he was already looking to get out from under the vast thumb of the Wintel duopoly). Where it all went wrong from there, I don't know. Perhaps the old "Amiga curse" story isn't the falacy I'd thought. I surely can't see how or why all these fits and starts have plagued Amiga development since nearly its inception. If Gateway goes under anytime soon, then I'll guess we'll have definitive proof! Still, I wonder about the idea that there won't be ANY Amiga MCC or market for same. If we'll all remember back to March when Collas started outlining his vision for the Amiga, he never said Amiga itself would knock out machines. Rather, they'd determine a "reference" platform and leave it to third parties to produce the actual hardware. And lest we forget, Corel has already announced support for an Amiga OE compatible version of WordPerfect 8, with WordPerfect Office to follow. Granted that software is as currently vaporous as anything Amiga's been talking about to this point (save OS 3.5), but why would Corel even announce this if they didn't feel that there'd be a machine to run the app on? For that matter, why, as the recent Business Week article speculates, would they even bother to name an Internet networking OE "Amiga" without a computer system of some sort to go with it? Let's face it: the mainstream press is notoriously inaccurate about the Amiga with only a few notable exceptions (Wired). Since Petro says we're going to get an official announcement this week, let's wait till then to bemoan the Amiga's latest fate. And hell, even if what's rumored is true, how can this kill the Amiga if the already announced third-party developers follow though with their promised soft/hardware? If these companies felt it was up to them before to pursue the Classic Amiga market without Amiga, then the Boing ball will be definitively in their court if the worst occurs.
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Dude, they're still shipping Amiga boxes! Yes, honest-to-god A1200s, the remaining stock from the production undertaken during the Escom ownership. There are also a few companies in the UK that offer "towered" A1200s with oodles of hardware upgrades. There's even the possibility that AI will do a limited run of A1200s and/or A1200 mobos to feed this market, allowing Amigans to have a legacy system that'll run currently available software, and with a PPC add-on, run the next-gen AmigaOS. We're still here, you're just overlooking us!
"And the new Amiga BoXeR motherboard with redesigned AA+ chipset-on-one-chip (which is FINALLY actually on the assembly lines now) would be nice to have." Cheesus H. Rice! WHERE DID YOU HEAR/READ THIS?!? I've been waiting since last freaking MAY for my shiny-new BoXeR-based Amiga clone and it's been like finding and then pulling hen's teeth to get ANY frockin' info on the mobo's status! E-mail me e-mediately (if not sooner!) about this!!! PLEASE!!!
Well, yer dead wrong on the use of Amigas (equipped with NewTek's Video Toaster) on Babylon 5 and SeaQuest. For at least the first two years of both shows, ALL special visual effects were rendered with Amiga computers. Later on, B5 at least moved on to Alpha-based machines running Lightwave, but that was due to the lack of Amiga hardware development and the increasing speed of Alpha chips. You are correct on the comparitive quality of games, for despite valiant efforts by the community, we're still about 3-5 years behind the curve. But I have to also challenge this notion of yours that the "PC" (as if there's only one of them!) was designed to be more expandable and upgradeable than the Amiga. First, as I parenthetically pointed out, it's not as if there's been only ONE "PC" design or motherboard in the last few years. There are commonalities to be sure, but nearly everyone has different specific designs. While you can argue that the PCI bus standard now eclipses the equivalent on the Amiga (Zorro III; gotta love them colorful names!), as far as getting the PCI boards to run with Windoze, well, they don't call it "Plug and Pray" for nothing. "Autoconfiguration" was a fact in the Amiga world in 1987 and still works as seamlessly as it did then. Then there's the ease of CPU swapping. I remember once swapping a 486 for a 386 on a DOS box a while ago, but I don't know if you can do that with Pentiums, and in fact I have severe doubts about being able to do that. The Amiga? Give us a few weeks and we'll be able to plug G4 PowerPC chips into our aged machines just by slipping in a new board. Are Amigas cutting-edge anymore? Of course not! Are we as down and out as you would portray us? Oh, HELL no!
How interesting that a post that starts out grousing about "TOTALLY uninformed speculation" thereafter indulges in same as freely as possible. Okay you may have had what YOU see as an ANALAGOUS situation, but what do you know EXACTLY about the ins and outs of the Amiga at Gateway? Do you work there? Have you? Do you know ANY of the insiders? Doesn't sound like it. For just one example, what business in the world would lay out $13 million just to sate an exec with a yen and not expect to get some actual economic return? Maybe they can indulge such fancies at Micro$loth, but Gateway is a fur-piece away from being a half-billion-dollar company. It's been widely reported that Gateway picked up the Amiga for the trademarks and patents in order to accumulate licensing fees. Then the Amiga faithful struck and a little light went on over Ted Waitt's head (especially since he was already looking to get out from under the vast thumb of the Wintel duopoly). Where it all went wrong from there, I don't know. Perhaps the old "Amiga curse" story isn't the falacy I'd thought. I surely can't see how or why all these fits and starts have plagued Amiga development since nearly its inception. If Gateway goes under anytime soon, then I'll guess we'll have definitive proof! Still, I wonder about the idea that there won't be ANY Amiga MCC or market for same. If we'll all remember back to March when Collas started outlining his vision for the Amiga, he never said Amiga itself would knock out machines. Rather, they'd determine a "reference" platform and leave it to third parties to produce the actual hardware. And lest we forget, Corel has already announced support for an Amiga OE compatible version of WordPerfect 8, with WordPerfect Office to follow. Granted that software is as currently vaporous as anything Amiga's been talking about to this point (save OS 3.5), but why would Corel even announce this if they didn't feel that there'd be a machine to run the app on? For that matter, why, as the recent Business Week article speculates, would they even bother to name an Internet networking OE "Amiga" without a computer system of some sort to go with it? Let's face it: the mainstream press is notoriously inaccurate about the Amiga with only a few notable exceptions (Wired). Since Petro says we're going to get an official announcement this week, let's wait till then to bemoan the Amiga's latest fate. And hell, even if what's rumored is true, how can this kill the Amiga if the already announced third-party developers follow though with their promised soft/hardware? If these companies felt it was up to them before to pursue the Classic Amiga market without Amiga, then the Boing ball will be definitively in their court if the worst occurs.