Hello Amigans

Since the demise of C= until today, thousands of pages has been written to discuss the revival of Amiga both Hardware/Software and bringing it back to the masses.

In fact there is already one of those topics on the forum talking about small form factor PPC Amiga etc.

Guys, let us be realistic:
You can not drag history with you, Amiga was meant for the 80's era.
MS realized this late! They are struggling now to attract any new none business clients.

The only way to advance is to introduce a BRAND new Amiga OS written from scratch adapting the SPIRIT of original Ami...to compete with Android/IOS which could run on many devices.

Otherwise, just enjoy the current product line appreciating the efforts of A-EON/Acube/Hyperion and volunteer developers

Waj
P.S Don't shoot, this is my every 3 years posting

Last edited by wajdy on 17-Aug-2015 at 02:00 PM.

@wajdy

see you 2018

@wajdy

>already one of those topics on the forum talking about small form factor PPC Amiga etc.
>The only way to advance is to introduce a BRAND new Amiga OS written from scratch

I'm not 100% sure if it needs to be written from scratch.
I know the legacy is holding us back, though.

>Otherwise, just enjoy the current product line

They can co-exist as long as there is demand.

(rewritten from scratch might not have user interface like we have been used to, but it could be customizable to look and behave just like user wants)

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@wajdy

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Amiga Reincarnation

Och no not again!

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Don't shoot, this is my every 3 years posting

Welcome back!

@wajdy

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The only way to advance is to introduce a BRAND new Amiga OS written from scratch adapting the SPIRIT of original Ami...to compete with Android/IOS which could run on many devices.

There is no venture capitalist money or a desire from the community or even a phone/tablet space in the market for this. The smart phone boom has been and gone. iOS, Android and Windows Phone offer enough choice and the Windows Phone platform is struggling depsite having the Nokia Lumia hardware. A rank outsider like Jolla with their Sailfish OS has a working system today and even so with all its ex-Nokia talent it will face a monumental task of trying to compete with the big boys. Jolla are in a far better position than AmigaOS to compete in the phone/tablet arena. AmigaOS is on the desktop and really needs to be on a laptop. If there is a market then a laptop will appear eventually and will slowly help to grow the market.

In regards to a relaunch to the masses, I fail to see how rewritting the OS from scratch would achieve that. For better or worse we have AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS and that HAS to be the launchpad from which future iterations are designed and launched. It's not rock and roll but any attempt to offer an alternative in this computing environment is brave enough.

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@wajdy

There is no realistic way to resurrect the Amiga for the masses, at least in the way many here would define a resurrection.

It'd require millions to rewrite the OS so it'd be considered modern, and then it'd get to compete against either Win/Mac/Linux for the desktop, or iOS/Android for mobile. It has no chance.

A cheap PPC system, running AOS 4 -- even if we pretend it was like $200-$300 -- wouldn't appeal to a large enough base to even matter. What could it do that any tablet/phone or cheap laptop/desktop couldn't do? Not enough folks would care that it had Amiga branding nor care it had a Amiga OS that is about 10 years behind the times.

To me, the only way for any sort of Amiga revival is to go with its strengths and what could potentially appeal to a larger userbase. And at this point in time, that's nostalgia + its old game library. And that spells the retro market. Cheap ASIC gaming system + 68K AROS or OS 3 + game library could get some people interested. At least we could be talking 10K-100K+ as a potential userbase, leading to some smallscale software development + dev interest.

Last edited by Nameless on 17-Aug-2015 at 10:57 PM.
Last edited by Nameless on 17-Aug-2015 at 10:56 PM.

Mom... Olaf is making fun of me
@OlafS25 @KimmoK @pavlor @BigD @Nameless guys I enjoy reading your postings.

You are right, Amiga's ONLY strength now is the legacy, the base could be expanded in 100K as you mentioned but of course not for masses.

Waj

@wajdy

I think a revial could have happened. Even late in the game. But it's too late. Amiga was stopped, others were left to continue, that's all there is.

BTW, MS and Apple were also in the 80's. If you use an iPad are you dragging history with you by using an 80's computer brand?

But, rewriting a modern AmigaOS would be thousands of years of man work, and how would it relate the original Amiga? The Amiga was a machine, hardware and OS. An OS alone doesn't cut it. Even using OS4 as a base it needs hundreds of years of work just to bring it up to scratch.

It's like inventing a new CPU. Haven't seen this done in a while. The Chinese are engineering everything these days but I haven't seen them invent a new CPU yet. Would it be worth it? It would have to bring a lot to the table to be an Intel killer. It would be like replacing the power plug standard. It would take hundreds of years to happen.

@BigD

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AmigaOS is on the desktop and really needs to be on a laptop. If there is a market then a laptop will appear eventually and will slowly help to grow the market.

There is a market. There has been demand for decades. In fact, with OS4, there has been a laptop demand for over a decade now!

It seems silly that we have all these embedded boards with MiniITX or FlexATX form factors and no one has designed a laptop case for them. You can actually buy DIY laptop kits but they aren't really DIY in my opinion as they still have a mainboard. Seems what we need is shell we can stick a small "AmigaOne' inside of.

So, after what 20 years, we are still no closer than when we had thick PAWS. Our only choice is a Power Amiga Work Station!

@wajdy

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@Nameless

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There is no realistic way to resurrect the Amiga for the masses, at least in the way many here would define a resurrection. It'd require millions to rewrite the OS so it'd be considered modern, and then it'd get to compete against either Win/Mac/Linux for the desktop, or iOS/Android for mobile. It has no chance.

Here we go again.

He said revival not world dominance.

There are solutions already out there that could act as a host for a new OS and several very capable emulation options that could preserve legacy support.

And for the love of god, if you upgraded or replaced the OS it wouldn't be designed to run on a PPC architecture, it would be platform agnostic.

@BigD

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There is no venture capitalist money or a desire from the community or even a phone/tablet space in the market for this.

A lot of significant progress has been made in many areas of computing without a shred of funding.

We keep conveniently ignoring DragonFly BSD and yet it has continued to evolve at a much faster pace than anything we've seen from Hyperion. It's a lot easier to add 30 year old features to a modern OS than to make a 30 year old OS minimally capable.

And when funding is required it's available. Brian Bagnall managed to get over 1500 people to donate $100k to complete a book. That's not a lot of money but it shows you that markets can be created and made viable if objectives are clearly identified and results are produced.

@ne_one

I know what he said.

I think some folks here are way too optimistic as far as a revival goes, or reincarnation, or however you want to phrase it. Creating a modern OS that can compete with current operating systems would cost millions. And yes, I said compete, not dominate. It just isn't going to happen.

Now, if to some people a revival means a newer OS that attracts 1-5K people, sure, that is possible. It'd still be expensive and take years (or in Amiga-time, a decade +). It also wouldn't make any difference at all in regard to attracting developer support.

Last edited by Nameless on 19-Aug-2015 at 04:48 PM.
Last edited by Nameless on 19-Aug-2015 at 04:47 PM.

@ne_one

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We keep conveniently ignoring DragonFly BSD and yet it has continued to evolve at a much faster pace than anything we've seen from Hyperion.

Like the name, imply its BSD variant, not a AmigaOS variant.
BSD has been around for long time now, and been in active development, for a longer time then AmigaOS.

Development of BSD started 10 years before AmigaOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution

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@wajdy

Few people can actually accomplish this because most people would have to go back in time for the documentation.

You need to have the right people in the right business office to run Commodore today. The reason why these big chipmakers won was because they charged money, had government contracts for R&D, had thousands of workers, employed scientists, etc. Commodore went the other way and tried to make the computers cheaper which meant no profit except for the Amiga which meant third party providers gouged Amiga's customers which no one wants.

Someone owns the rights and will sue you.

The technology doesn't exist to make things the way they were back then. Other processes might have to be used.

The older Amiga technology like disk drives is obsolete and no one is making a video chip today unless you buy a multimedia chip to do HDMI.

The Amiga audience is 30 years older now. People have moved on to the PC or MAC. Even if you do get something going, you would have to give it away like Sun Microsystems to gain market share. Can you match the price of Microsoft when they are giving Windows 10 away for free?

Commodore didn't make money with advertising because this endeavor made them go broke. It was too hard for people for the last seven years to make an Amiga compatible because they made what they wanted and stopped.

The way forward is new hardware and new ideas but everyone seems to be blind to new development. Study how many engineers MOS technology had to make their chips and what does the Amiga community got that MOS had? Engineers? Nothing.

I'm ready to recycle my old hardware when it is time because like it or not, the past is dead. You have to find new ways to go forward.

Quote:

wajdy wrote: Hello Amigans Since the demise of C= until today, thousands of pages has been written to discuss the revival of Amiga both Hardware/Software and bringing it back to the masses. In fact there is already one of those topics on the forum talking about small form factor PPC Amiga etc. Guys, let us be realistic: You can not drag history with you, Amiga was meant for the 80's era. MS realized this late! They are struggling now to attract any new none business clients. The only way to advance is to introduce a BRAND new Amiga OS written from scratch adapting the SPIRIT of original Ami...to compete with Android/IOS which could run on many devices. Otherwise, just enjoy the current product line appreciating the efforts of A-EON/Acube/Hyperion and volunteer developers Waj P.S Don't shoot, this is my every 3 years posting

@wajdy

I kinda feel that some in the community are aiming too high, I dont think we really need or could be as big as Android / IOS / Windows / Mac or Linux without huge investments and some really revolutionary apps so where does that leave us. I think our aim in Amiga community should be a lot smaller, target smaller markets and smaller community. I'm amazed by just how big the Raspberry Pi community has gotten and how many projects, guides and resource have pop up for that in its life time. I personally quite liked how the Amiga market was back in 1998, 4 years after Commodore demise and the big markets stopped really caring for Amiga there was a lot of core Amiga software houses still going, doing what they could for the Amiga, still big shows going on, still one or two big Amiga magazine publications going, it was not a bad time and the market size of Amiga cant of been much more than a 1 million users then, if not less, I think if we could get the Amiga back to just that level I think that would be a success.

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@amigang

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I kinda feel that some in the community are aiming too high, I dont think we really need or could be as big as Android / IOS / Windows / Mac or Linux

When you look at it there are two main operating systems in the world. Windows and Unix. And under Unix I would place systems like OSX and Linux.

Windows has been a such a dominant force that it can easily survive as an OS and people will port code to it and masaage makefiles and whatever else it takes because of that.

Look at Apple. The had their own OS until they decided to dump the real Mac OS last century for OSX and it's been with us since last decade. They sandboxed the "Classic" apps. And the new OSX DOS was completely different to the previous Mac DOS. Turning Mac into just another label.

It makes me wonder, had Amiga survived, if they would have eventually dumped the OS in favor of another Unix clone. As well as architectural changes.

A lot of poeple make a point of Amiga being based on Unix. Ideas maybe, but's it's not Unix. That's like saying OSX is based on Mac as to imply it is the same thing. Worlds apart. Perhaps one thing that makes it hard to compile applications is because Amiga is not Unix or a clone.

And so on Amiga it's hard to run latest applicatiions like web browsers or office programs. The problem the Amiga has right now is not reaching outside the box, it's satisfying those of us inside the box. And it can't even do that. People can jump on the bandwagon of the NG Amiga system to get back that AmigaOS experience. Only to be disappointed because basic features in other OS like web browsing, word processing and printing don't work well and still haven't since the 68K years.

@kolla

I really don't see why compatibility was made to be a problem. If it has become a problem then it's simply down to poor planning, IMO. I'd go so far to say it's irrelevant or in the least it should be. See, OS4 was a clean break from OS3. And even now, it still lacks things from OS3, that should be replaced. They modifed the system and API to the point that normal Amiga programs couldnt't compile anymore without certain changes and extra code. And removed old functions form the new API.

I don't think compatibilty was a problem because 68K apps are emulated. There is no reason for them to impose any harm or threat. The Amiga enviroment they run under should be a simulated one that doesn't have direct contact with AmigaOS4. The simulator should be sitting in between. 68K apps can run as different tasks as they do now but the AmigaOS they run on would be in a sandbox. A simulated AmigaOS3.

ATM things like a 68K interrupt are actually emulated in supervisor mode on the host CPU. That's just crazy! And yet trapcoede ezxceptions are broken! Huh?

Again, this shouldn't be a problem, because the Classic AmigaOS should be simulated. But, it's not too late. I'm not suggesting to just dump 68K and use UAE as a sandbox instead. But I do think that an AmigaOS simulator can be implemented. This would provide a virtual Exec and whatever else to the 68K programs. Which would protect 68K programs from tampering with the real underlying AmigaOS. So things like Forbidding or Disabling are no longer a worry and can be removed/replaced in the OS4 API.

@Hypex

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A lot of poeple make a point of Amiga being based on Unix.

That’s a misconception, AmigaDOS is based on TRIPOS, TRIPOS is not exactly UNIX.

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=193

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