@Nameless

Not 3K, the state price was half that, it was "north of £1500.' But you are right 1.5K is still a large amount of money at those specs.

Quote:

For 3K, a person could get an iMac (which is also a bit overpriced), a PC desktop and a laptop. And probably have money leftover to buy a 32" LCD TV, as well.

@persia

$3,000 USD = 1,877 GBP so he may not be too far off.

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Dammy

@Rose

Quote:

There won't be new users if all that platform haves is ports of programs which run faster on other platforms for 1/10th of price.

That was one of the points I was trying to make. I do hope the new system is seen as worthy to port new s/w to it. As always, time will tell.

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Hate tends to make you look stupid...

Excellent and fairly accurate overview of the situation.

Following the demise of Commodore, a number of Amiga suitors advocated moving to a platform agnostic approach to the OS. This is precisely what has happened with everyone else in the industry and the one area where the Amiga has steadfastly refused to budge.

There is a litany of excuses why AmigaOS must remain tied to proprietary hardware, none of which make a shred of sense.

I respect the effort invested in the "new" hardware but the time and money would have been better spent reengineering the software so that it can run on affordable and inexpensive hardware.

@damocles

Don't know, his location is "unknown." Could be 2.6 million (Iranian Tomans). We can only guess what his "3K" means.

@persia

I was referring to 3000 US dollars. Sorry if I didn't specify.

Perhaps the final price will be cheaper, but was just commenting on a ballpark figure of what I read the price would be.

@Nameless

My impression is that some of the ceases they spent a lot of cash developing hardware that already existed as Freescale reference designs, I'm taking about QorIQ chips, also embedded planet has motherboards that might be used.

Anyway AmigaONE-X1000 will be a nice upgrade from AmigaONE-XE.

Supporting Apple hardware does not keep hardware vendors alive, I agree whit how Hyperion/ACube/A-EON does it.

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@ne_one

Please excuse the following as I am sure it has been rehashed here many times, but I haven't kept updated or read this forum as often as most here have.

But why was PPC chosen as the CPU of choice by both MorphOS and OS4?

For MorphOS, I think it was because some of its code was originally designed by bPlan or some company that made PPC boards?

And for OS4, it went back to Amiga Inc, who only gave them a license for PPC systems?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm just trying to recall what I may have read in years past.

I know about that whole lawsuit thing with A Inc and Hyperion, but does Hyperion have a license now to port OS4 to other systems? It's one of those things where I just assumed they had the rights to do so, but was wondering if they even are allowed to.

I'm just trying to understand the reason for sticking to PPC. For MorphOS, I can understand it a little bit, as based on their sales, they are pretty much equivalent to a shareware author selling their software online. They probably don't have the manpower/money to convert to another platform.

And the same could be said for Hyperion too, but if they have the manpower/money to put together the X1000, couldn't they have alternatively just used that money to convert OS4 to a different platform, be it x86 or Arm?

Or is the OS4 code so strongly tied into PPC, it's pretty much impossible to disasociate at this point?

Last edited by Nameless on 28-Jun-2011 at 06:01 PM.
Last edited by Nameless on 28-Jun-2011 at 05:55 PM.
Last edited by Nameless on 28-Jun-2011 at 05:53 PM.

@ne_one

Quote:

ne_one wrote: There is a litany of excuses why AmigaOS must remain tied to proprietary hardware, none of which make a shred of sense. I respect the effort invested in the "new" hardware but the time and money would have been better spent reengineering the software so that it can run on affordable and inexpensive hardware.

How about porting to the one you are using now?

And when that's done I'll send them the specs for the one under my desk.

Oh, and I did see a nice one on ebay that will need attention also.

Anybody else?

@Nameless

Quote:

And the same could be said for Hyperion too, but if they have the manpower/money to put together the X1000, couldn't they have alternatively just used that money to convert OS4 to a different platform, be it x86 or Arm?

To be more precise: Hyperion doesn't (seem) to have that money, but Trevor Dickinison and a friend (A-Eon). So you might ask him, why he didn't gave the money to Hyperion to port OS4 to whatever *not*-PPC- platform. And I (we) still don't know whether the licence "agreement" with Amiga Inc. still holds a "tied-to-PPC-passus" or not.

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X1000|II/G4|440ep|2000/060|2000/040|1000

@Nameless

Nameless quote:
Quote:

And for OS4, it went back to Amiga Inc, who only gave them a license for PPC systems?

HyperionMP quote:
Quote:

Then there are some legal issues like some licences being tied to PPC only.

Nameless quote:
Quote:

does Hyperion have a license now to port OS4 to other systems?

HyperionMP quote:
Quote:

All of this could be worked around however given sufficient funding. E.g. an ARM/X-Scale version of AmigaOS 4.x is perfectly possible.

Nameless quote:
Quote:

but if they have the manpower/money to put together the X1000, couldn't they have alternatively just used that money to convert OS4 to a different platform, be it x86 or Arm?

Answered above.

Nameless quote:
Quote:

Or is the OS4 code so strongly tied into PPC, it's pretty much impossible to dissociate at this point?

Again, somewhat answered above.

I'll let MorphOS answer for themselves, but you can read a current discussion here

source

#6

Last edited by number6 on 28-Jun-2011 at 06:25 PM.

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

@cha05e90

I was always baffled by the curious quotes on how much time and money it would take to port OS4 or MorphOS on some other ISA... Why? because...

AROS IA32
AROS x64
AROS PPC
AROS ARM
AROS 68K

All done on a "shoestring" budget, so to speak. And by a few people at most...

Last edited by WolfToTheMoon on 28-Jun-2011 at 06:16 PM.
Last edited by WolfToTheMoon on 28-Jun-2011 at 06:11 PM.

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@WolfToTheMoon

A really good point, and I didn't consider that.

I think some of the OS4 68K emulation code is tied strongly to PPC, but other than that, I would have thought they coded the OS so it'd be somewhat chip agnostic. But again, just guessing as to reasons.

I see no reason, besides perhaps legal ones, why they couldn't have chosen x86. And yeah, you have so many flavors of x86 it's a pain to code for all. But they didn't need to.

Pick an x86 system, code OS4 for it, and that's the new X1000. It'd have to be cheaper than 3000 dollars, unless they were using the most expensive Alienware models out there (and even then, I think it's less).

@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

WolfToTheMoon wrote: because... AROS IA32 AROS x64 AROS PPC AROS ARM AROS 68K All done on a "shoestring" budget, so to speak. And by a few people at most...

There you go. An Amiga OS on cusa equipment.

Problem solved.

Now, if you want AmigaOS (4+) on x86 just have someone take 1/30th of their advertising budget
and pay to have it ported. Or, should it be free, like Windows?

@WolfToTheMoon

Hmm - maybe because OS4.x isn't open source and/or nobody is willing to work on a port without payment? Nevertheless: Support AROS if you like to run it on whatever hardware you prefer. In the meantime I really like to use my MorphOS and AmigaOS setups on dead/dead end hardware.

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X1000|II/G4|440ep|2000/060|2000/040|1000

@cha05e90

Oh! You stubborn little...................

@Nameless

Quote:

But why was PPC chosen as the CPU of choice by both MorphOS and OS4?

MorphOS development was started on PowerPC Amigas in late 90s when phase5 was still alive making PPC accelerators for Amiga. From OS developer POV there was advantage that you could mix original 68k AmigaOS components and new PPC native MorphOS components. Just by writing small Exec kernel you could have fully working OS with full Internet and USB support. Then just replace components one by one.

Easy and practical. Especially when one had developed for PPC for years already.

Quote:

And for OS4, it went back to Amiga Inc, who only gave them a license for PPC systems?

The license is only an excuse. Amiga Inc. was never interested to PPC or x86 or anything hardware related. Hyperion wanted to port AmigaOS to PPC and it is only reason why license was "restricted" to PPC. Amiga Inc was already going on x86 platform back then making their unsuccessful Amiga Anywhere. Amiga Inc never wanted anything from the OS.

However anti-PC sentiment was very strong in Amiga community ten years ago. And of course PPC situation was much better back then.

Quote:

They probably don't have the manpower/money to convert to another platform.

Question is really is it worth of it. PPC is big endian platform allowing easy integration of old Amiga software to modern (in Amiga terms) PPC native operating system. With little endian systems that integration would be lost although it was more relevant ten years ago than it is today.

Last edited by itix on 28-Jun-2011 at 07:06 PM.

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@Nameless

Quote:

And the same could be said for Hyperion too, but if they have the manpower/money to put together the X1000, couldn't they have alternatively just used that money to convert OS4 to a different platform, be it x86 or Arm?

The X1000 is produced by Varisys, and A-eon Technology is paying for it. Hyperion 'only' ports OS4 to it.

Kind regards,

Dennis

@itix

Thanks for posting the MorphOS response.

As to:
Quote:

The license is only an excuse.

If you read my quote from Hyperion management, it seems to read quite contrary.
Do you know something about the contract that I don't know?

#6

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@Mechanic

The argument about the wide range of commodity hardware doesn't hold water, I humbly suggest. You don't have to support any and every model of PC, or even try to. You could just support one or two boards, then sell AmigaOne-branded complete systems built around them.

The situation would be similar to now - i.e., you would have to buy specific hardware to run AmigaOS - but the board would be a mass produced one that had been selected for an OS port, rather than an expensive custom one, so you would have a much more competitively priced product (cheaper, faster).

The only loss (and I recognise it's a loss ) is that you lose the feeling of having a unique rig. You've just got a rare OS running on normal hardware. But it's not binary. It's not like we have to use PPC *or* support literally every Wintel model on the market.

Heck, with the current market size, you could even buy three hundred cheap-but-durable laptops all the same model, port the OS to that particular model, slap an AmigaOne sticker on it (and add a whopping hundred quid per unit for the porting effort) and try to sell all of the laptops. Even with a hundred quid on top of the laptop price, that would be a very competitively-priced product in Amiga land.

Do I think that's the way forward? Not sure. I love my Sam. The combination of custom hardware and rare OS is intoxicating. But I'm open to ideas.

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