I just read this over at amiga.org and thought it was a good informative read on how things worked at ainc. the truth is always good to hear, so i post a qoute for you people here that havent read this yet....

you find the orginal post here -> www.amiga.org.

Quote:

I'm the (in)famous Bolton Peck, the guy who worked there and didn't get paid for a lot of that time, then after their broken promises, sued them and won. It was kind of a pyrhic victory, as they have yet to pay me a cent. I worked there from 2000 to 2002, and was lucky enough to be there for some of the good times, when there was money, before the bad times when there wasn't. They (well mostly their CTO, Fleecy Moss) had this vision of 'write once, run anywhere' software, they wanted to extend and enhance the API of British software firm Tao's Intent/Elate virtual processor platform. It was pretty cool in some ways, it ran on a slew of host processors, but to code for it you only had to write for its' native VP or Virtual Processor. Code written this way could theoretically be run on any environment capable of running Intent. Intent was the underpinning, Elate was Tao's GUI layer. The underpinning was very dependent on host hardware and software-it couldn't even access CD drives or removable media until we made it do so. Their Elate GUI layer was, well, let's say it wouldn't give Amiga Workbench 1.0 a run for its money. Our coding department worked mightily for years to get it going, but it was just too much of a kludge to be really useful in the real world-the promised sound, 2D and 3D acceleration never saw the light of day. There were a few remarkable apps made for it, many by developer ZeoNeo, and I was the tester who was charged with testing these apps, among others. Initially I had a test lead but he left after a month or two of no money, that was in 2001. Smart guy.. Anyway, long story short, there was at one time a fair amount of investor interest in it, but then Java got so much better, and Tao's initially good Java offering couldn't keep up because it couldn't do swing. But Java got everywhere so what was the point of writing for this VP thing which, despite the cool repackage and Amiga boingball, could really only run on WinCE, other Windows flavors, and on Linux if you were lucky. Investor interest dried up, and a slew of bad management decisions caught up to Amiga. They had a sort of love-hate relationship with the 'Classic' community, who they often saw as a bunch of die-hards and crackpots. Yet, when they needed money, they'd just repackage whatever was on the slab, stick some Amiga graphics on it, and be sure it'd sell to at least 1500 of those crackpots in Classic land. The Classic community were the ONLY people who ever bought anything from Amiga. They learned that lesson way too late. No one wanted Fleecy's half baked 'Digital Environment' enough to keep dumping money into the company. When I got there in 2000, Bill McEwen told us all that 'Classic is dead. There's no money there at all in that market.' I didn't agree, and it turns out he was kind of wrong. Hyperion took on OS 4 entirely on their own, it was their idea, and they actually had to kind of goad Amiga into letting them use the name. Interestingly, there were even brief talks between MorphOS crew and Amiga to have MorphOS be the next Amiga OS. Sadly, the battle of egos on both sides crushed that idea. No one could come to a deal everyone liked. So Hyperion had to start basically from scratch, although they did have at least parts of the OS 3.1 sources. Amiga were also offered Amithlon before anyone else. I was the first to run it. It ROCKED HARD. I begged them to use it, we had a WINNER and could sell a bajillion of them. We owned all the rights to it! But sadly, Bill and Fleecy didn't want people confusing Amiga OS as we knew it with the new Digital Environment that Fleecy envisioned, so we didn't use it. It was good enough-we coulda had it in CompUSA in two months. Pre-Release CD 6 could have just gone gold as it was and been a hundred times the seller that the 'party Pack' was. I still have the Amithlon pre-release CDs. Every now and then I fire it up, it is wonderful for emulating an OS 3.1 box, and it was faster on an Athlon 900 than my Cyberstorm could ever hope to be. Boat. Missed. I have no idea how they are surviving today. I wish them well. I wish they'd pay me.

Last edited by d0c on 18-Apr-2007 at 04:28 PM.

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I was a ZX Spectrum owner....

@d0c

Interesting read! Still since I personally have no knowledge of what has happened I'd be more cautious to proclaim anything as the truth!

I guess everyone has there own perspective of things/truths but this one is probably the most plausible I've heard yet.

You would think that there must have been a more obvious promise to TAO than just a hope that one day it would work. Quote:

Their Elate GUI layer was, well, let's say it wouldn't give Amiga Workbench 1.0 a run for its money. Our coding department worked mightily for years to get it going, but it was just too much of a kludge to be really useful in the real world-the promised sound, 2D and 3D acceleration never saw the light of day.

if they couldn't get past this stage you might wonder what it is they would be working on that an OS5 could possibly make use of?

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@d0c

It sounds plausible given the events since the year 2000. They never seemed interested in Amiga OS4. Originally it was going to be Amiga DE only. When they announced Amiga DE I decided that the Amiga was dead. Their announcement of OS4 was the only thing that kept me interested.

Hans

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Join the Kea Campus - upgrade your skills; support my work; enjoy the Amiga corner.
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Quote:

Bill and Fleecy didn't want people confusing Amiga OS as we knew it with the new Digital Environment that Fleecy envisioned, so we didn't use it.

Wow - what a revelation. Someone should tell BBRV.

remember your just a bunch of die-hards and crackpots....

_________________
I was a ZX Spectrum owner....

@Hans

I read this over on Amiga.org.

I knew Bill McM was disingenuous and Fleecy prone to BS - however the stupidity and disregard for the classic community (the only people who ever bought anything from Amiga) was amazing.

I blame Fleecy. Bill may have fallen for Fleecys BS but it's a whole different league of idiocy to swallow your own BS.

Having said all that. Everything Bill said last time seems to be slowly falling into place. We can only take him at his word that 'lessons were learned' from their own mistakes. Fleecy appears to be in the background or working soley on the intent stuff.

So - like MOS taking the pragmatic approach and working with Genesi/EFIKA we might as well give Bill/Amiga Inc the benefit of doubt and wish them well/try not to undermine them.

All IMHO.

@Colin_Camper

Quote:

So - like MOS taking the pragmatic approach and working with Genesi/EFIKA we might as well give Bill/Amiga Inc the benefit of doubt and wish them well/try not to undermine them.

That sounds fair. There's an old saying: "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

The final straw for me would be if OS 4 doesn't appear on the SAM440EP. The only thing standing in its way is the license, and BMcE did say that he's looking forward to seeing OS 4 on Sam in his MP3 thing last year.

If Sam fails to get a license, it can only be due to malice on Amiga's part. We shall see!

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@Hans

I was never sold on Intent being the new AmigaOS either, it sounded as appealing as Gateway's announcement that AmigaOS would be based on Linux. At least QNX was ready to roll and shared some of the qualities of AmigaOS.

I don't give a stuff about the vapour OS5. Right now AmigaOS4 appears to be their best asset, they should be doing everything they can to make it compliant with todays standards instead of leaving it up to the community.

With regard to Clone A, they should be the ones funding Jens so he can turn it into a mass market product. It's obvious that Clone A has the potential to sell by the bucket load and it would do no end of good in terms of getting brand recognition.

But hey I'm just a crackpot. They obviously know what they're doing with their puzzle game business.

@d0c

Quote:

When I got there in 2000, Bill McEwen told us all that 'Classic is dead. There's no money there at all in that market.'

That's fine, but makes me wonder why they bothered buying the name then. They probably could have done more useful stuff with that money and called it some new name instead. Look at how so many people react to the Amiga name anyway. Slashdot laughs at each and every mention of it. Most people don't know what an Omega was anyway. They may very well have done far better with a new name that didn't have the "OS1.3" and "dead years before Commodore bankrupted" baggage perception to it. Really, what benefit did they get from the Amiga stuff? I guess a bunch of us bought SDKs, but looking at the selection on the Amiga shop, that was mostly a very short-term benefit, and comparatively little software became of it to support the DE platform as a long-term benefit. Are the 30 or so puzzle/gambling games worth the expense they paid for Amiga? Maybe it is, as we haven't seen any financial reports of course, but after some of the struggles that they've gone through, like the time they were said to only have $100 in the bank, it's hard to imagine for a lot of us. I'd be very curious to know why they thought the Amiga name was worth buying for the intention of selling some totally unrelated product.

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All glory to the Hypnotoad!

Well, I made a few responses about Amiga Inc. on here and they got censored, how unfortunate. But, I do not own this site, so it is okay. Anyways, like I have said in the past, time for us to get away from Amiga Inc.

Yogi

I doubt there will be many crackpots around to buy OS5 if Amiga Inc
would deny SAM it's licence.

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AmigaOS or MorphOS on x86 would sell orders of magnitude more than the current,
hardware-intensive solutions. And they'd go faster.-- D.Haynie

@Yogi27

Quote:

Yogi27 wrote: Well, I made a few responses about Amiga Inc. on here and they got censored, how unfortunate. But, I do not own this site, so it is okay. Anyways, like I have said in the past, time for us to get away from Amiga Inc. Yogi

Was that a long time ago? AmigaWorld is no longer the biased portal as it once was.

@Gleng

Quote:

If Sam fails to get a license, it can only be due to malice on Amiga's part. We shall see!

Not necessarily!

Amiga Inc won't license OS4 until the they come to an arrangement with Hyperion.
Bill referred to '3 attempts' to make a deal with Hyperion.

No-one here knows if these offers fell on deaf ears due to Amiga or Hyperion being unreasonable.

Therefore we don't yet know who is to blame if Sam doesn't get a license.

bty. Lets hope they do!

@Manu

Quote:

I doubt there will be many crackpots around to buy OS5 if Amiga Inc would deny SAM it's licence.

@billt

I think that back in 2000 the Amiga name still had some value in terms of multimedia and games, even if the Amiga was seriously lagging behind in development by then. Most likely they wanted to leverage that. Seven years later, it's become more and more obscure. They've waited too long to release anything.

It's the same reason that a group in China decided to create a fake version of NEC. They didn't just make fake NEC products, they faked the whole company! They were signing R&D and manufacturing contracts with people who didn't realise that they weren't the real NEC. They chose to leverage the NEC brand (illegally in this case) rather than creating their own one. Given the amount of effort involved, you'd have to ask why.



Hans

Last edited by Hans on 18-Apr-2007 at 06:50 PM.

_________________
Join the Kea Campus - upgrade your skills; support my work; enjoy the Amiga corner.
https://keasigmadelta.com/ - see more of my work

@Manu


since your so good at drawing pictures, i think you should make a few new ones :)

_________________
I was a ZX Spectrum owner....

@Manu
nice avatar! Do you have it in bigger res?

@d0c

Really interesting. Thanks for linking.

We should register a website like www.amigatruestory.com and put these thing online.... maybe we can get Amiga Inc attention?

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ikir

@billt

Quote:

That's fine, but makes me wonder why they bothered buying the name then.

Isn't that obvious? They witnessed Jim Collas (successfully) building quite a hype around the AmigaMCC and AmigaOE, so they knew it was possible to get the community (or at least big parts of it) on board - even if your actual product has nothing to do with the Amiga.

An active community is not just good for recruiting motivated 3rd party coders and exploiting existing networks ("Amino" was a member of the now defunct Phoenix consortium, just like pretty much every other company with ties to the Amiga market...), it also makes you look bigger and more important than you actually are.

And in 1999/2000, the Amiga brand was not as useless as it is now that they spent eight years on ruining it. They still got a lot of coverage from the German press for example - at least compared to other US startups that have not yet released any information on their planned products (let alone the actual products).

Add to that that Amiga International was actually still generating revenue (if we're going to believe what McEwen said in the a.org interview), and there are indeed quite some reasons to buy the brand imho.

Of course this assumes they didn't pay too much - I'm just saying the brand/IP/etc. were worth *something*, I'm not saying they were worth a lot.

@Colin_Camper

Quote:

Amiga Inc won't license OS4 until the they come to an arrangement with Hyperion.

Who says that? We know that they negotiated with AHT Europe (two years ago), ACK (one year ago) and ACube (last few weeks/months) regarding an OS4 license.

Apparently, they are willing to license OS4 - why else would they negotiate with different parties, for several years now?

Quote:

Therefore we don't yet know who is to blame if Sam doesn't get a license.

We know who invented the licensing scheme - as an afterthought, apparently. No Amiga Inc = no licensing problems.