I suspect quite a few people had the opportunity to watch Trevor Dickinson's talk at the recent Amiga Ireland event - if you haven't listened to the podcast or watched the video I highly recommend them both.

One of the most interesting tidbits Trevor mentioned is that he chatted with some of the original players who were involved in the development of the Amiga and the consensus was that relaunching the platform would require about $10 million in today's market.

Was anyone able to pull Trevor aside and find out what the scope of that hypothetical relaunch would include?

He does mention that it would not be on the same scale as the original introduction but it would be interesting to know what they considered to be within the realm of a relanch - ie. new OS, new hardware, promotion etc.

I don't know what exactly Trevor means, but I think that a relaunch project should start with a society able to:

- rebuy all the pieces (Commodore, Amiga and related remaining marks, OS and sources)
- have a small but full-time development team
- considering OS migration to x86/ARM

To make money, probabily you should focus both on retrocomputing products as well as NGs. A lot of work, and quite a lot of money to do this (maybe 10 millions, no idea). An exciting but risky bet.

Last edited by andres on 05-Feb-2017 at 09:14 AM.
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A1200/020+68882 - 6 MB RAM - AmigaOS 3.0

Home Recording Audio

@ne_one

Very interesting

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retired

Not sure how popular this idea will be, but in my opinion any genuine relaunch attempt should pretty much scrap what has been done on the current NG systems and go the Apple route of using more modern existing technology and building an Amiga style user space on top.

Personally I love the OS as it is, but its just too outdated and too hard to implement modern features people just assume an OS should/will have as standard today. The current OS has no chance of moving beyond the realm of hobby for a few thousand people. Heck, its well short of even Windows XP, and even has some catching up to do on Windows 98.

I'm actually happy to keep using it as the hobby system it is, but it simply has no chance of being commercially viable without a complete overhaul. In this day and age people expect a lot more than 80's/'90's throwbacks with a few modern features. They also won't accept low spec (at best, and here I'm referring to x5000 even) hardware for thousands of dollars.

@ne_one

prize will be proibitive .... the only one who can do this is not trevor but a joint with some rich china man.
Trevor + China rich man + a developer squad of 200 ppl for close all the things needed by the os.
plus will need a partnership with amd and or nvidia for have full optimized drivers
but first of all will need to know what architecture will be need ... PPCel, x64, or ARM64

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Relaunch what ? The trademark ? It seems both the hardware and the OS are in active development right now. So what's a relaunch ?

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@ne_one

Real interesting...however I think that will be good if Trevor itself will participate to that thread to clarify the statement...

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Simone"Tuxedo"Monsignori, Perugia, ITALY.

@Tuxedo

Cool and fun idea but I kinda took the comment to mean something that at best was a light conversation on a napkin at a hotel bar... if it was actually more than that I'm intrigued. I will have to give the speech another listen.

Anyway, if you listen to Trevor on YouTube, you can find the answer.
Substantially, he says that to have a solid business plan of a small relaunch (even to involve other investors), you should first reunite all the IPs. Wich is actually not viable, because the owners of the various IPs dramatically raise the price when you show interest about them.

Last edited by andres on 05-Feb-2017 at 01:41 PM.

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A1200/020+68882 - 6 MB RAM - AmigaOS 3.0

Home Recording Audio

@andres

Amiga.Inc + Amiga.com - last price $20 million.

@fishy_fis

What you are describing is pretty much the (failed and failed again) Anubis-project.

But what would be the (commercial) point of such a venture ?

Where would it position itself between Win,OSX and Linux ?

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@adam239

I think that's the same as what they were asking for when Bill P approached them years ago. They were supposed to have paid $5 million at the end of 1999 and that included the remaining stock of A1200s and royalty free access to patents Gateway held onto but have since expired. In 17 years of ownership they haven't added any IP of any value.

@Leo

Leo wrote:
Quote:

Relaunch what ? The trademark ? It seems both the hardware and the OS are in active development right now. So what's a relaunch ?

Agreed. The idea of a relaunch would need to be clarified. AmigaOS has become the be all and end all of NG hardware selling points rather worryingly. Unless there is an ARM based hardware launch coupled with ImageFX, Aladdin, Personal Paint, Bars and Pipes and everything elso A-EON bought software wise bundled together with an up to date Odessey Web Browser or TimbleWolf I can't see it making a big enough splash. Lightwave? Deluxe Paint buy out or EA deal? Amiga VR? Amiga drones? Amiga driverless Uber service?

Last edited by BigD on 06-Feb-2017 at 02:34 AM.

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
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@Kronos

Its all hypothetical, but taken from the perspective of actually having money to invest (unlike Anubis/ARIX).
Regardless, its much more viable than the current "NG" options, which was the point. People en masse expect certain functionality and features these days that the current systems can't offer.
A genuine relaunch attempt (the thread topic) would need to position itself and compete somehow against Windows, Linux, and Mac OS regardless of the path taken.
My point was simply that a toy/hobby OS has no chance to move beyond the realm the "NG" systems are currently in.

And just to clarify again, I personally very much enjoy AmigaOS and derivatives as they are. The developers are doing a great job in making them quite usable systems.
They're just not viable beyond a small niche, enthusiast audience.

Wouldnt it be great if in te hobby realm there was a way to take these £4 super computers, and have a nice simple human biased OS on them so instead of having to constantly hammer induvidual bits in like its the 1950s, you can run self hosted programming languages, enviroments etc, and instead of needing WiFi, smartphone, PC or all the support stuff, all you do is plug in a keyboard and a two wire video out.

Heard about the guy who is having a new yorkshire accent speech replacement? Pity about narrator.device version 2 that supports dialects, hasnt been worked on since the 90s.

Amiga philosophy is so desperately needed, its why things like FTDI EVE display list GUI generators are being produced and sold.

Stop trying to compete with the Gigabuck guys when you dont stand a chance. Dont compete, but move back into the gaping chasm that has been left oozing between 256 byte ram microcontrollers and gigabyte ram Pi for more than the last decade.

Why take a meg of on board ram for USB drivers when a few dollars offload chip handles it all, and another chip handles TCPIP etc.

Amiga is all about Cooperative Offload.

PCs are all about Competative Offload, when you can. Otherwise the GUI would be coded in GPU.

Remember when you put an FPU in your Amiga, and you changed the Math libraries to FPU versions, and all the software accelerated without having to be recompiled?

I might have fought with my Amigas over the years, but I was far more productive on them than I ever was on the PCs since.

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The older and more respected a scientist is, the longer it takes to prove him wrong.

@ne_one

Like the saying goes... "If there is a will, there is a way"!

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I haven't seen a thread this full of delusion(s) in quite a while.....

@ne_one

Quote:

ne_one wrote: relaunching the platform would require about $10 million in today's market.

Relaunch it with what?

The Aeonkit Amigaone systems? They are what scared the last few people away!

OS4 is a coma patient that takes an occasional breath of air once in a while, and like the rest of the "NG" OS's it fell miles short of ever becoming the true "NG" OS that would have been required for a true NG relaunch.

MorphOS is the only one going for true NG, but they are not interested in the Amiga brand (and true NG means cutting some cords to the Amiga compatibility anyways, so...)

If not NG, then what? Retro for nostalgics?

Vampire? While being kind of cool tech wise, with ambitions and passion that is kind of cute, it will have no real purpose. It falls even shorter of that "NG" that never happened, so it won't neither be an NG machine, nor a real retro machine. And they are pretty much being hand soldered by a dude in some basement, one at a time, prices are sci-fi high, and are they even a real company issuing a trustworthy warranty, paying VAT, taxes, social fees, having the product CE branded, etc? It's a hobby for a select few.

The upcoming Commodore A1200 Reloaded might catch some interest from outside, attracting some nostalgic "home returners" though.

But come on, for anyone to invest $10.000.000 for a product launch, they probably like to be guaranteed a credible return profit of at least 3-10x that much for it to be worth the risk.

Is the potential really that high with any of the above mentioned product offerings?

No, of course not.

@adam239

Quote:

adam239 wrote: @andres Amiga.Inc + Amiga.com - last price $20 million.

Remove at least two zeros from that figure...

I had Godaddy estimating a realistic offer for the amiga.com domain. They thought $1,268 - $3,269 was realistic.

And that was many years ago.

The name and domain is dead since long.

@ne_one

The problem is in the 80's when the Amiga came out common computers were pretty much crap to what we have now days. So it brought new features in. I made up this saying. Through limitations comes innovation. And the Amiga did that.

But what could an Amiga prove these days or do? Another problem is Windows. It hasn't gone away. Apple have done well to replace the Wintel box with an iPad. And people are using those pads as a main machine. Even if it can't run "real" [Windows] software. So a modern Amiga would also need to be a pad.

What about hardware? Let's assume there won't be any alt hardware anymore. Even the AmigaOne machines these days don't cut it. Are they pulling our chain when they claim a machine designed for AmigaOS lacks hardware drivers for AmigaOS? And that isn't even going into the problem of dated pre-desktop class CPU or high prices. So say it's going to be an AMD64 based computer with a customed UEFI to keep us happy. Like a modern Apple Mac but easier to run Linux on and dual boot. It's the closest we can still get to being Intel Outside.

So we are also going to copy Apple and dump the AmigaOS. Let's say we build the new OS on top of Linux. Yes on top of is a dirty WinDOS phrase but we haven't got much choice now. So we do that. Incorporating all those OS5 Amiga object ideas and what not. And all the fancy stuff we should have now. And then some. Lets' also say it features a classic Amiga emulator integrated right in. And a compatibilty layer so OS3 and OS4 apps can also run as well as be compiled out of the box. And native Linux software simply works or can be compiled as is. You can even stick Windows or Mac on a custom screen. We're doing well.

We have new Amiga desktops and laptops. Amiga Touch pads. Amiga Touch smart phones. Now we just need a full host of software and apps. We also need an OS that beats Windows and Mac hands down.

Before that last one it was sounding like the CommodoreOS Amiga x86 machines that sadly died along with it's producer.

So we have here. Standard PC hardware. Amiga customisations. Full set of software. A Windows and Mac beating AmigaOS. Nah.... not gonna happen.

Last edited by Hypex on 06-Feb-2017 at 09:52 AM.