@Nameless

Seems a pretty fair question, which I suspect will get different responses from different people.

Personally I think the potential is there. From a user perspective the AmigaOS ways of doing things (AmigaOS3.x/4.x, AROS, and MOS), minus a few current technical "shortcomings" I honestly think is something that people other than ourselves could enjoy given exposure. It's what keeps a lot of us here I suspect. Nice, clean, simple. Easily (and logically) customisable, the system doesnt get in the way, datatypes, nice and responsive, and so on and so forth.

I absolutely believe its a "saleable" product, although whether that's literal (ie. for money) in my opinon comes down to the price of entry (for reasons I stated in earlier posts).

In regards to the gap between OS4.x and AROS I cant really comment as Ive not used AROS on ppc, nor have I used OS4.x in a fair while, but on x86 I find it a little rough around the edges compared to mos (although raw speed of x86 smooths some of this and adds a few of its own advantages), so I cant imagaine it being drastically behind depending on exactly what is supported in PPC AROS ports. Probably a bit slower than OS4.x though as AROS probably isnt as optimised in some ways.

All I can say is that I will never buy overpriced, underpowered hardware just to have something "different" from the guts of what a PC or Mac uses. This being different is very important to Trevor and other OS4 / next Gen guys but it doesn't really matter to me. I would consider Amiga OS 4.X if it ran on hardware I had readily available, like an older intel based PC. I have no interest in chasing down obscure niche hardware, just to be different. The OS should make the experience different.

Hmm... Even then I am not sure if I would buy it. I am more of a classic Amiga guy myself.

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@illy5603

Interesting point of view.

I would never spend a thousand dollars for a video card.But I would spend it on a PPC motherboard that ran Amiga OS 4.x then get a video card for less than two hundred dollars.
And I would never spend more than 500 dollars for an x86 cpu based machine .

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@Spectre660

Quote:

Spectre660 wrote: @illy5603 Interesting point of view. I would never spend a thousand dollars for a video card.But I would spend it on a PPC motherboard that ran Amiga OS 4.x then get a video card for less than two hundred dollars. And I would never spend more than 500 dollars for an x86 cpu based machine .

If Amiga OS4.X ran on intel based hardware it would make the license fee for the OS seem like a great deal and would probably encourage more casual users to give it a go. If they could slap it on some spare pentium box they upgraded from long ago, why not?. I have two such systems sitting around my house, one of them is even a netbook! (Oooh imagine that!)

The problem is now that you have to buy super expensive hardware that is slower than most hand me down Intel PC's, *AND* the operating system. I just don't understand why the Amiga identity is still clinging to hardware. Linux and Mac users got over it, we can too. My favorite Amiga environment is actually emulated classic "Amikit" via winUAE. It doesn't care what hardware I am running it on.

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@illy5603

It's a shame PPC plus the supported set of OS4 hardware can't be emulated on x86 at decent speed; it might bring a whole new bunch of folks to OS4 and presumably MorphOS. It would surely bring a few new folks knocking if they could run it on commidity hardware that way.

Lawrence

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@illy5603

If you look at the situation with full driver support for PPC NG systems then you will see why it would be difficulty for Hyperion to manage drivers on standard X86 machines.

Trevor said that it cost over US$400,000 to develop the X1000. He said that a custom
x86 would cost more.

It would probably cost over US$ 3,500,000 to port Amiga OS 4 to X86 as well.

The chance to move ahead is with Amiga NG multicore support for PPC and new lower cost multicore PPC hardware for all NG Amiga camps.

For people who wont put any money in to any hardware or software component of the Amiga NG ecosystem (Amiga OS 4.x,MorphOS or Aros) expect to get out of it what you put in.

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@Spectre660

Quote:

It would probably cost over US$ 3,500,000 to port Amiga OS 4 to X86 as well.

I have to ask... why would it be so much?

If Aros can port to different platforms, relying on a handful of volunteers (and within a reasonable amount of time, I should also add), why would it cost a fortune porting AOS to x86? They can use off the shelf parts for any 'custom' x86 machine, or just go the CUSA route, pick a premade PC, put an 'Amiga' engraving on it, and then port AOS to that specific machine.

I still wonder if it'd all be moot, however.

Say they did port AOS to a custom x86 machine, sold it for what here would be considered a reasonable amount... say $800-$1000. Would they get 50K people to buy it, and also use AOS as their primary OS?

They'd have to primarily rely on current or former Amiga people as their customer base, as I don't see such a system getting much interest outside of the Amiga community (you could look at CUSA as an example, in a way). I'm just wondering if there are enough Amiga people left to even get close to 50K. I mentioned in an earlier post, pretend AOS was given away free to current x86 owners.... would they get 50K users, and if so, how, if AROS can't do it? They may get 50K+ installs, but to form a software customer base, they need more than that -- they need people to use it as their primary OS.

@Spectre660

That it is so expensive is because certain parties involved make a "business" from it. But when you want to create a market you must invest in it, trying to make money in a shrinking market (melking the cow without really investing) is no strategy that has future.

@Nameless

I used some figures from Dave Haynie on the manpower he would have needed to do it in about 2 years .

Quote:

I have to ask... why would it be so much?

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@Spectre660

When you have a small and steady shrinking market and you want to change that you must either invest in new products that attract buyers or give it up. (Or go on on a low level with minimum investment that does not change the trend but your costs are covered by the low earnings. That is what I think Hyperion is doing now)

@Spectre660

Is AOS coded in such a way that's it's super difficult to port to different chipsets? Does it have a lot of PPC assembly? I don't quite get how it'd be so expensive, unless the code is so tightly bound to the PPC architecture that it would require huge rewrites.

@Nameless

It may have been that the PPC port from 68k was done in such a ASM focused way as to make subsequent ports just as hard (I understand OS3.1 had ALOT of 68k asm in it, hence the PPC port took so long).

But you have to question the sanity of digging yourself the same hole *again* instead of learning from your mistakes. I think it's more likely that "x86 port" means porting to any arbitary x86 platform, not some specific intel chipset with a specific board. I bloody hope it means that, otherwise OS4 really *is* written in ASM, which is a form of OS suicide.

3.5M$ would pay for 58 programmer years at 60K/$year.

Lawrence

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@Thread

Currently 60% voted for this Option:

"Encourage hardware manufacturers to launch super low cost, entry level AmigaOS compatible hardware"

Well there is (and there was) always enough cheap PPC hardware, but AOS4 was not ported for it.

Maybe you should ask Hyperion for a port to cheap old PPC Macs, hardware was always available, but the OS was not.

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AmigaONE. Haha. Just because you can put label on it does not make it Amiga.

I borrowed this comments from here (#27 & #28):
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=38873&forum=2&start=20&order=0

@Nameless


http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=33564&forum=25&start=120&viewmode=flat&order=0#610305

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@Spectre660

But when you have a small market with only a couple of hundred active user you cannot calculate this way. Either you give a boost by investing in it with the hope to earn it later or the programmer work on base of sales (taking the risk). Or you simply give up. Or you do only minimal investment in it melking it as long as possible without bigger investments.

@Arko

This poll proves a cheap proprietary laptop for AmigaOS is needed. A rebadged Limebook would do the job - if they are still being made .

Only the X1000 and Sam have been given AmigaOne branding in order to protect and aid the Hyperion business model. Piracy protection is easy as only a limited number of hardware platforms will run AmigaOS, it also makes it easier to write drivers etc.

The thing is that the PPC Macs are no longer being made so to create a future for AmigaOS, new machines have to be developed and sold. If there was no Amiga specific hardware and just AmigaOS for x86 then I think AmigaOS would go the same way as BeOS.

As an Amiga user you have to invest in AmigaOS and you have to want to use it, I don't see many 'Amiga Forever' people buying AmigaOS x86 even if it was available. I bought a copy of Windows XP for my Mac because there is a specific x86 program I want to run not because I want to use Windows XP, For most people the OS isn't the killer app. People like iOS and OS X but most are fine with Windows because that's were the majority of PROGRAMS are and they can do their banking on it, and they can buy compatible peripherals from PC World etc.

Get some good programs on AmigaOS and some more people will come. Sadly, the opportunity to get AmigaOS on smart phones has passed, as has the tablet craze. Maybe this can only ever be a community with a glass ceiling of 50,000 users

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

Thanks for the followup posts on my cost questions. It also occurred to me... does Hyperion even have all the AOS source code themselves? Or did they farm out huge chucks of it to different developers, with each group still retaining the source code? if so, it could be a major pain to port, even if they wanted to.

@BigD

Quote:

BigD wrote: @Arko This poll proves a cheap proprietary laptop for AmigaOS is needed. A rebadged Limebook would do the job - if they are still being made .

The 512x chip family is not intended for use in a normal computer and the e300/400 is a bit underpowered for today's demand to say the least. The 400MHz e300 is good for some things, but it will not attract too many ppl from outside. It's just too little.

Quote:

The thing is that the PPC Macs are no longer being made so to create a future for AmigaOS, new machines have to be developed and sold. If there was no Amiga specific hardware and just AmigaOS for x86 then I think AmigaOS would go the same way as BeOS.

The G4 Powermac is still sold by Apple - although at a pretty steep price. http://store.apple.com/ca_edu_107689/product/M8642C/A
But for those necessarily needing a non used machine there's supply.

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MorphOS user since V0.4 (2001)

Port to ARM-64/Project Denver.

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Amiga Mart in Micro Mart, Geekology 4M@, and other places
A1000, A2000, A1500 A500, CDTV, A500+, A600, A4000, A1200, CD32, AT A1200HD, A1-XE

@SvenHarvey

The key step has to be multicore support under AmigaOS powerpc.
Once you have this then dualcore and quad core designs can become your low and mid level hardware base. even the same motherboard design could work for both.
If AmigaOS cant go multicore then it has no way of getting the boost from any modern cpu.End Game.

Quote:

SvenHarvey wrote: Port to ARM-64/Project Denver.

Last edited by Spectre660 on 24-Oct-2012 at 12:31 AM.

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