@Mechanic

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Is this the same Dave that wanted to put AmigaOS on commodity hardware and call it Amiga? Maybe not.

Perhaps he hasn't been keeping up with AROS since it's already doing just that.

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Dammy

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Mechanic wrote: Is this the same Dave that wanted to put AmigaOS on commodity hardware and call it Amiga? Maybe not.

I wanted AmigaOS on commodity hardware, and I'd call it AmigaOS.

I mean, you don't need to be hit over the head with a clue-by-four to understand that, for practical systems that might actually grow the Amiga community, you can't sell 10-20% of the performance for 300-500% of the price. I can buy a $300 PClone that'll put that PA-Semi CPU to shame. And if I needed 100,000 of them, I could get them.

I'm not calling that an Amiga. I don't call a PC running Linux a Linux, I call it a Linux PC. This would be an AmigaOS PC. Apple did just fine turning Macintosh into Mac PC (they don't like to call it that, but that's precisely what it is).

It's simple: for any AmigaOS system that hopes to grow its market, it needs to offer something to new users. That's perhaps not something folks here think about, but that was how I looked at it at Commodore. And the fact you all are here indicates that yeah, my gang helped to build the Amiga beyond the A1000. We grew the market. And, far as I know, we never sold you on something you didn't get. The X1000, whether its AEON themselves or the fanboys, I don't know, but it's writing checks it can't possible cash.

Today, I'm not even claiming that you'd have to go x86. I recently bought a nVidia Tegra 2 based tablet computer. AmigaOS would ROCK on a device like this. Android certainly does. An ARM Cortex A9 is about as fast as an Intel Atom at the same clock speed. But toss Windows away, and even that modest GPU (which is 1000x faster at some things that the Amiga chips were) is downright snappy, even though Windows will definitely lag on a netbook, which doesn't just have an Atom core or two, but they're clocked 1.5x-2.0x as fast.

Possibly the most annoyance of all I had with the Amiga, Inc. of the 2000's was the fact they were do frackin' religious about PowerPC, rather than getting serious about CPU-independent AmigaOS. The hard work is moving off the 68K, not on to the PPC. If they had actually put together a real OS team, rather than farming it out with the PPC mandate to a video gaming company, they could have done AmigaOS for PPC, AmigaOS for x86, and AmigaOS for ARM in the time spent. I mean, seriously, the AmigaOS 4 for PPC has actually taken longer than Amiga did from scratch through at least 1.3 if not 2.0.

In short, I did not see any new Amiga hardware coming to light. And right now, the only hardware doing things the Amiga way are these FPGA-based systems, such as Natami. That's fun because, once delivered, it's still doing Amiga things the Amiga way. It's fun for the same reason that other retrocomputing projects are fun... as long as it's not too expensive. But it also has the potential to keep going, improve, evolve, drop in price, etc. as long as there's interest. That's is another essential component of a viable platform.