@andres
Quote:

andres wrote: It's not a problem of OS, CPUs or people age.

Well, currently that's what I see.

O.ses which are stack basically to the same structure. Which means: no modern features (I forgot to mention the filesystems before), no security (the recent Spectre & Meltdown scandal is fresh water for Amigans, because... they are o.s. features! ), and super-fragility (we love meditating from time to time).

PowerPC is dead, and the last models have past 10 years PCs performance.

People is aging, and even dying unfortunately. It's quite rare that someone re-joins the post-Amiga communities, increasing the number of hard core guys.

That's the inescapable reality...
Quote:

The problem is the lack (from 1994) of a real mother house who owns everything (OS, IPs, Amiga and Commodore marks), with a real budget and a clear project about it.

OK, let's say that you have all conditions, but one: what kind of "clear project" you're talking about? An example?
Quote:

You could easily sell tens or hundreds of thousands machines, in the retro and in the NG market with a real society behind some good products.

For doing what? Playing with the Worbench?

Another important point which I missed is: what kind of KILLER APPLICATIONS exist in the post-Amiga land, that justify the usage of such systems?

Someone said that the Workbench is the killer app itself. But for me it's not that much.

And continually talking about ports is senseless: I can already use such applications on other modern o.ses, with a much better experience.

So, in short: what makes sense to continue using a post-Amiga system?
Quote:

But, we all know this is very unlikely to happen, or almost impossible.

It's impossible because it's too late, and we lost the opportunities, like I've already said.

The point is that a "what-if" talk is pretty much useless: you cannot change the past.

It's better to recognize the current, real, situation, and talk about this, instead of continuing dreaming about something which will not be realized.

@andres

Quote:

You could easily sell tens or hundreds of thousands machines, in the retro and in the NG market with a real society behind some good products.

Maybe, if the price is right and if it comes out simple and cheap as a C64 DTV, But you can't do it with expensive FPGAs and a licence for the brand name could be useful.

Jens Schoenfeld wanted to go in that direction and Jerry Ellsworth too:
Quote:

This is a project I pushed to get manufactured in 2005, but was canceled due to the cost of flash, "lack of fan base" and the declining plug and play toy market.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uaDzF99a80

But maybe there will be an Retro Amiga on the Raspberry PI, something like this:
https://shop.heise.de/katalog/nespi-retro-gaming-konsolen-set-nes

--------------------------------------

But this are only retro projects, the Action replay could even start Amiga games without the usage of Kickstart, Jens owns the rights using it, so he even don't need a proper OS.

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 28-Jan-2018 at 09:17 AM.
Last edited by OneTimer1 on 28-Jan-2018 at 09:13 AM.

My next adventure into alternate (Amiga-ish) computing will employ a more classic computer design, where a bunch of chips interacted to handle many of the functions that have been integrated into todays CPUs and other highly integrated multi-function (southbridge type) chips. The design of the system will decouple processing and allow functions relegated to specialized chips/cards to operate at their maximum capacity to analyze and do what they do best with an uninterrupted massive data flow capability. The performance will not hampered by Moore's Law.

Neither will expandability be limited by todays PC standard motherboards, no matter the processor.
If AmigaOS or MorphOS ran on such a system that would be great and I would be happy to use them. If not, oh well, I'm sure the Amiga-in-a-joystick crowd would be able to support those OS'es.

I'm just one person and not very important to the success of any platform, and by platform I mean software AND hardware working in harmony, not software running on some make-do PC dictated design because as much as many keep saying that powerpc is dead the PC standard is just as dead.

And so, my computer feet are on a path to a future where innovation and compitition will decide where my finances, abilities and imagination will go. No more make-do. No more support for whatever is called The Mainstream because it just happens to work. No, none of that. I am an AMIGAN.

Jay, where ever you are, I still believe.

_________________
Tinkering with computers.

This guy cdimauro must be a very unique performing artist because his ability at stating the obvious even transcends the thread I am involved in. Only that when you actually look past the technicalities and pour a nice dose of perspective into the situation, the result, or the forest, far outweighs the details or the trees.

You have AOS4.1 and its A1 line of machines which never got the full backing of the Amiga community and were still able to get together a working hardware and software environment which managed to accomplish a lot with less than minimal resources. In the spirit of building something like the classic Amiga was built there are similarities.

You have the MorphOS camp who I'm not gonna speak for as I'm not a user. I will say that the developers and users of that camp do whatever is needed to find a way to maintain their branch of Amiga. They even try to make the leap from the Mac hardware to the A1 hardware which is not an easy task. This is the spirit of ingenuity.

You have the Aros camp which tries to do its own thing and kinda has one hand in the pc world and one hand in the Amiga world and that stuggle also mirrors the transition that Amiga went from 68k to Power.

Then you have the Vamp which takes the basic fundamental idea of the classic and tries to update it so the user base can continue to use their machines. Another project which isn't backed by a major financial or corporate power.

All of this is something an Amigan can be proud of.

When you look at everything that shaped the consumer technology world since the days of the classics, it is a marvel that all 4 still exist. It's not great and it's not bad either. The nay sayers said the X1k would be a failure and it was another step. If they listened to undertakers like cdimauro whose idea about an emulation machine was obsolete 20 years ago even what we have today wouldn't have materialized and that's exactly the difference between a technocrat and someone with a vision. Sometimes that's about the next step - not the far away future.

That next step can just as well be a step each camp takes in a horizontal way to get themselves closer to each other. Because going forward requires combining our resources and consolidating our efforts. If that means finding a compromise between all parties then so be it if it gets you to that next step, as long we remember the original Amiga wasn't equal to the sum of its parts. It was also a product which used the market and moved past it when it ceazed to exist.

Last edited by Srtest on 28-Jan-2018 at 07:20 PM.
Last edited by Srtest on 28-Jan-2018 at 07:17 PM.

@Srtest: the only horizontal step is the one towards the graveyard. It's quite evident that you ignore or don't understand the situation about such 4 factions.
They are battling from very long time and it's VERY UNLIKELY that they'll change their minds and start cooperating each other: there are too many differences in their visions of how things should go.
Only rarely there was some sort of collaboration, like for OWB/Odissey or DOpus, but that was just a coincidence / side effect of open sourcing some project. Other cases, like the Poseidon USB stack (open sourced years ago), proved the contrary.
But even if it comes the miracle that they start collaborating, now it's too late: the aggregated community is too small, and serving a couple of thousands of users/customers doesn't guarantee anything better than the current, split, situation.

Aside this, your lack of technical knowledge shows, again, that you don't understand the difference between the Amiga machines and the current ones.
Amiga introduced a powerful hardware with custom chips that allowed to offload as much work as possible from the CPU. Current post-Amiga machines struggle to reproduce the same behavior: the CPU is loaded of most of the task, and even if there are "coprocessors" available, they aren't used or aren't used at the best of their capabilities.
Amiga introduced also a innovative o.s. with multitasking, nice filesystem with long filenames and case preserving, graphic and (advanced) console interfaces to realize a better user experience, etc. etc. Current post-Amiga machines only have ports or rewrites of the same o.s., which haven't evolved much: they still have the same structure, more or less. They are improperly called "NG" (New/Next Generation), but there's substantially nothing of New/Next, since they haven't solved any of the issues and bad designs of the original o.s.. And putting a PowerPC on a PC hardware doesn't make a machine which looks like an Amiga.

It's the PC, instead, which evolved both in the hardware and software sides, and paradoxically mimics what the Amiga introduced at its time. In fact, modern PCs have several coprocessors, of different types, which help to offload A LOT the burden from the CPU(s. Yes, they have MANY cores and/or hardware threads... which are used). PC oses evolved considerably too from the DOS/Windows 1.0, offering a lot of modern features, solidity, as well as nice graphic and console interfaces which improved A LOT the user experience.

So, you continue to talk ignoring the Amiga history, as well as the PC history. Basically you are living in a parallel universe, continue dreaming of unreal & unrealistic things.

@cdimauro

Quote:

and paradoxically mimics what the Amiga introduced at its time.

sorry but expandable modular systems dedicated to perticular tasks via exposed bus interface is no invention of amiga or commodore.

@wawa: Amiga introduced such technologies in the mass market. Before that, they were only found on workstation et similar.

After the Amiga, the PC became the mainstream system introducing new technologies in the mass market.

@cdimauro

Quote:

@wawa: Amiga introduced such technologies in the mass market. Before that, they were only found on workstation et similar. After the Amiga, the PC became the mainstream system introducing new technologies in the mass market.

so you consider this workstation and not the mass market?:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer

in this respect a similarly expandable amiga system, which fairly should also be considered workstation in this context, was introduced several years later:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_2000

im certainly not trying to dimnish amiga features. but they should be considered in a bit more objective manner than it usual among the fans. therefore i wonder, why of all people its you, who posted the above.

certainly ibm pc (xt) wasnt that popular as home computer in the eighties, perhaps for lack of huge game library, but (not only imho) technically was comparable to amiga, atari st and the like.

@wawa

Quote:

certainly ibm pc (xt) wasnt that popular as home computer in the eighties, perhaps for lack of huge game library, but (not only imho) technically was comparable to amiga, atari st and the like.

The Commodore 64 was the most popular home computer of all time

The DOS PC in the '80s sucked (I hated them)... it did not come close to comparing to the likes of Amiga, Atari, C64, Macintosh, etc... It was nothing but an over-glorified typewriter/adding machine/rolodex in those days!

_________________

@Srtest

Quote:

Srtest wrote: You have the MorphOS camp who I'm not gonna speak for as I'm not a user. I will say that the developers and users of that camp do whatever is needed to find a way to maintain their branch of Amiga. They even try to make the leap from the Mac hardware to the A1 hardware which is not an easy task. This is the spirit of ingenuity.

Support for X5000 (A1 of which you probably speak) is no biggie for MorphOS. And it is no leap forward for MorphOS, just one more supported model of the many, many supported hardwares: Pegasos I & II, Efika5200B, close to all AppleG4 hardware (including the laptops), much G5 hardware, Sam460.
MorphOS' leap wil be x64, but this is not due yet. For now 3.10 is the next step which brings nice improvements and also the X5000 as new platform. But to be honest, I don't expect many registrations for X5000, maybe a few dozens.
3.10 though is overdue and the delay very unfortunate, but eventually the release is rather close.

_________________
My programs: via.bckrs.de
MorphOS user since V0.4 (2001)

The reason I sold my 060 PPC looong time ago was the lack of a good web-browser.
All this talk about custom chips etc. is as others said way past anything we could achive
today. The developers and users are very few on all camps continue to go down.

For me the only way to have some kind of future is to have hardware that can do most
of todays tasks in a satisfying way and get at least one person to maintain odyssey web browser.
For obious reasons that could not be PPC based.

I would also like to see some good plan of how to bring Amiga-Amigalike OS to a mothern level with Memory protetion and multicore support. AROS already showed that it is possible.


I

Last edited by nikosidis on 29-Jan-2018 at 02:21 PM.
Last edited by nikosidis on 29-Jan-2018 at 02:20 PM.

@AmigaMac

Quote:

it did not come close to comparing to the likes of Amiga, Atari, C64, Macintosh, etc..

i have not been discussing if ibm pc was better or worse than anything else. simply what concerns the modular hardware concept with expansion slots, its definitely been earlier than anything amiga or atari, that introduced this concept later in their high end machines.

of course one can argue that a1000 or even spectrum48k had an accessible expansion slots, though even if so, the functionality of an external slot is somewhat limited and still these constructions are later than ibm pc.

@nikosidis

Quote:

nikosidis wrote: All this talk about custom chips etc. is as others said way past anything we could achive today. The developers and users are very few on all camps continue to go down.

If you are referring to the few posts I have made in this thread, I have not mentioned 'custom chips' for any functions. I have eluded to using standard chips in innovative ways that mimic the operation of the classics. This is what several companies are working on/doing to negate Moore's Law for future demands.

The first paragraph in my post #143 is a highly modified statement by a very large and respected company that has been in business for many decades. Using the philosophy mentioned there this company is building equipment for high end research and companies like Google to name one.

If not,,,,,,,nevermind.

_________________
Tinkering with computers.

@Signal

I totaly like to idea but to me it does not seam realistic.
If someone came up with some relastic priced hardware model and figured out what how many is needed to supported the project it would at least be a good start.

Last edited by nikosidis on 29-Jan-2018 at 03:51 PM.

@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

To me it sounds like FriendUP OS could be a candidate for that. It's also open source.

This thread almost reminds me of the Phoenix Consortium "discussing" things, just with 1/100th the number of participants.

Anyway, the facts on that one are clear:
(1)Trevor is a minor investor in Friendup
(2)He recently sat next to David Pleasance while David discussed a Friendup project possibility
(3)David by shouting "NO, Absolutely NOT!" is saying that the Amiga name is toxic.

I have no horse in the race, but I think success breeds success.
Perhaps no one is thinking of "unifying" because no one sees anyone else as being successful?
This might explain the entirely new direction being taken by David Pleasance, Colin Proudfoot, Trevor in his admittedly limited involvement, and the names thrown about by David such as Dave Haynie.
In other words, let people see what you are doing and if you are successful perhaps some others will follow.

That doesn't mean AmigaOS, MorphOS, AROS, etc. are left by the wayside, it just means someone is offering a new choice without the former encumberances/baggage.

We saw something similar during CUSA days, although in their case they did not state their case and move along. They kept a strong presence on the forums using strong language, which did not endear them to many. heh.

Source Trevor's blog about Friendup
Source David's comments

#6

Last edited by number6 on 29-Jan-2018 at 05:16 PM.

_________________
This posting, in its entirety, represents solely the perspective of the author.
*Secrecy has served us so well*

@wawa
Quote:

wawa wrote: @cdimauro Quote: @wawa: Amiga introduced such technologies in the mass market. Before that, they were only found on workstation et similar. After the Amiga, the PC became the mainstream system introducing new technologies in the mass market. so you consider this workstation and not the mass market?: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer in this respect a similarly expandable amiga system, which fairly should also be considered workstation in this context, was introduced several years later: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_2000

Pay attention that having some workstation technology does NOT mean that a computer is automatically classified as "workstation". The two things are different; also logically.

In fact (using the same source): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workstation
Quote:

im certainly not trying to dimnish amiga features. but they should be considered in a bit more objective manner than it usual among the fans.

That's what I do. Is there anything non-objective in my writings?
Quote:

therefore i wonder, why of all people its you, who posted the above.

I don't know. If I've something to say... I say. And this is a forum, right?

So, I don't understanding the reason for your sentence: can you clarify?
Quote:

certainly ibm pc (xt) wasnt that popular as home computer in the eighties, perhaps for lack of huge game library, but (not only imho) technically was comparable to amiga, atari st and the like.

Technically they have a CPU, DRAM, a graphic card / display unit, "something to reproduce sound", a floppy disk, ..., an o.s. which allows to run applications.

So, yes, from THIS point-of-view they are quite comparable.

But looking at the details they are quite different (with the Atari ST being much more close to the PC). For this reason I beg to differ with your comparison.

@wawa
Quote:

wawa wrote: @AmigaMac Quote: it did not come close to comparing to the likes of Amiga, Atari, C64, Macintosh, etc.. i have not been discussing if ibm pc was better or worse than anything else. simply what concerns the modular hardware concept with expansion slots, its definitely been earlier than anything amiga or atari, that introduced this concept later in their high end machines. of course one can argue that a1000 or even spectrum48k had an accessible expansion slots, though even if so, the functionality of an external slot is somewhat limited and still these constructions are later than ibm pc.

Even the Apple II had expansion slots, and that was several years before that IBM introduced the PC.

It wasn't the presence of expansion slot(s) that made a PC or anything else a workstation.

@nikosidis

Quote:

nikosidis wrote: The developers and users are very few on all camps continue to go down.

Exactly.
Quote:

For me the only way to have some kind of future is to have hardware that can do most of todays tasks in a satisfying way and get at least one person to maintain odyssey web browser. For obious reasons that could not be PPC based.

This.
Quote:

I would also like to see some good plan of how to bring Amiga-Amigalike OS to a mothern level with Memory protetion and multicore support. AROS already showed that it is possible.

Multicore support comes with compatibilities problems.

Regarding memory protection, I haven't seen it working on AROS. Is there some experimental branch to activate it?

@thread

Since this thread seems to regurgitate all the old arguments I'll just make a post or so to see if I'm understanding the situation correctly.

1. Custom chips are expensive


2. Our CPU architectures are dead


3. Our developers are leaving


4. Browser support sucks

@number6

Francois Lionet (the developer of Amos Pro) wants to develop a new version of Amos for FriendUp. Certainly it is a interesting development and different to other OSs, difference is important for success so it "might" attract people who know nothing of Amiga. Amiga is tightly connected to home computer and gaming so depending on their goals (regarding FriendUP) the "name" would even do more harm than good. But for current community it is only of limited interest, at least for me.

@cdimauro

Quote:

Even the Apple II had expansion slots, and that was several years before that IBM introduced the PC.

right. i stand corrected. but ibm made it practically an open standard, and that made eveybody want to be ibm compatible in turn.

other than that i might have not read your paragraph in question carefully enough, tired of preceding rants. of course amiga introduced standards found in workstations at its time to a home user, most notably multitasking. i just understood you were on about expandability. sorry.

Last edited by wawa on 30-Jan-2018 at 09:37 AM.

@nikosidis

Quote:

nikosidis wrote: @Signal I totaly like to idea but to me it does not seam realistic. If someone came up with some relastic priced hardware model and figured out what how many is needed to supported the project it would at least be a good start.

I agree.

However, if the future of Amiga computing is going to be the status quo then it is dead anyway.

As for the price of new innovative Amiga-ish hardware, it will not be low cost, but just as with the classics many would somehow find the resources to buy into a future. The A1XE was not low cost but it did lead to the Sam line. The X1000 was definitely not low cost but it lead to the X5000, although not cheap it is a lower cost. Also keep in mind the A1SE/XE systems were not even supplied with AmigaOS at delivery, Linux only, and Amigans still bought into a future. The problem now is that future was 14, 15 years ago.

There are companies out there right now building systems for the future absolutely based on the system philosophy of the classic Amiga. What are we doing? Making and supporting PeeCee computers.

If we want a future then discussions of that future must be encouraged and begun.

I have purchased;
A1XE
micro A1
SAM 440
A1-X1000

And still today they are naught but development systems.

I for one will not be satisfied with the status quo. I simply can not accept this is as good as it will ever get and I should bow down and be happy. Not going to happen.

Now let's talk about a new "Amiga", before deciding it is not feasible. Remember, this is for all flavors of the OS.

_________________
Tinkering with computers.