Joined: 18-Apr-2003 Posts: 3035
From: Yorkshire Dales, United Knigdom
@Fransexy
Quote:
Funny and ironic words from a men that designed the PIOS One (a mere PC with a PowerPC cpu) and wanted it to be the next gen AmigaOS compatible machine
Which also never got anywhere near as far as ACube have managed with 2 released systems under their belt so far in a time that is much, much harder to be successful.
Everyone's opinion is subjective. I am sure there are lots of people that will see the fact that OS4/MOS or AROS runs on a machine is continuation enough of the 'Amiganess' value.
True - I would prefer Natami style custom hardware too - but not having it is not the end of the 'Amiganess' of a machine and any sensible strategy would realise the cost of doing custom hardware 'right' and so would only build that into the mid - long term of any range of new machines. Any come back would have to start with PC commodity parts in order to build up te cash to be able to even begin to contemplate custom hardware.
Not ironic to me. The PIOS-One would have been primarily a Mac-compatible, competing in the mainstream on speed and price. 14 years ago. That business case was destroyed by Steve Jobs. What's incredible is that the reinvigorating of the Amiga-scene in 2011 apparently rests on a PIOS-Two.
Funny and ironic words from a men that designed the PIOS One (a mere PC with a PowerPC cpu) and wanted it to be the next gen AmigaOS compatible machine
No, it was a quad PPC CPU mobo and he and Andy were working CAOS which, IIRC, ended up in their Met@Box STB.
Joined: 4-Jan-2010 Posts: 580
From: London, UK (ex-pat; originally from Norway)
@Fransexy
I think the difference is that then he saw that as a possibly viable mainstream platform, while today Natami vs. X1000 is a question of deciding between two decidedly niche platform and subjectively judging which one is the "most" Amiga.
If he's not (any more) bothered about getting a day-to-day computing platform that's narrowing the gap towards "required" minimum performance for most people for their main computer, then it's not surprising that he prefers the Natami. But the X1000 *is* trying to narrow the gap and retain some "Amiga-ish" properties within the constraints of very severe financial constraints, and that of course massively limits it in other respects.
Funny and ironic words from a men that designed the PIOS One (a mere PC with a PowerPC cpu) and wanted it to be the next gen AmigaOS compatible machine
You do know that he worked in a little company called Commodore?
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He is one of the last living among the ones who knows anything about Amiga more than all of us together. So, i take his words as the words from the Holy Bible.
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You're not just a PC with a PowerPC CPU and some VGA chip
Quote:
X1000 thing...[...]..... not that interesting
Funny and ironic words from a man that designed the PIOS One (a mere PC with a PowerPC cpu) and wanted it to be the next gen AmigaOS compatible machine
A couple of things. For one, the world was very different in 1996-1997. The PowerPC had not yet been given its death sentence.
And while I used PC technology (like the BeBox... "parts of the PC gene pool"), it wasn't just an off-the-shelf PC with a PPC core. For one, as in the latter Amigas, the PIOS One was based on a CPU card architecture. So you could have one PPC, or four... and yeah, we did have a four processor card in development (real hardware, I may even have one around here somewhere). Or an x86, or even a 68K, if there was some reason for it. The module connection was via the PCI bus.
On the main board, sure, regular PC things were there. And other stuff. I had a very high quality on-board audio section and audio I/O connector for up to about 8 channels via an fairly low cost external box.
And it wasn't necessarily The Next Amiga. We wanted that, but that would have required real AmigaOS. We did try to negotiate for a license, but unfortunately, the AmigaOS was in limbo for too long. So we moved on, and planned to support BeOS, Linux, and MacOS. I personally met with the Apple CHRP team in Cupertino, which was the final thing that lead our decision to support MacOS. This also lead to a re-design, and ultimately killed the project, after Apple nixed MacOS licensing later that year. Anyway, that's the story.
And that was 14 years ago. It's not uncommon for the wisdom of a decade and a half ago to be counted as foolishness today.
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