@kolla

Way way too many Amiga like forums already.

:)

_________________
Sent from my Quantum Computer.

@DiscreetFX

the main problem is not the number of forums but the lack of attractive products

From the ever-shiny, finely waxed varnished and polished desk of
"MEGA" RJ MICAL, Esquire, Phd
& Associates

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

How shiny is it really after all these years? I bet you have a few nicks and scratches.

_________________
Sent from my Quantum Computer.

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: CAGA may fall under fair use of Commodore and Amiga trademarks, especially if it is a non-profit organization promoting the Amiga. International Amiga User Group, Amiga Society, Amiga Format, Amiga.org, Amigaworld.net are likely examples of fair use. Some of the organizations may be for profit but do business in a different category so don't compete. There are certainly grey areas like AmigaStore.com and selling Amiga apparel with trademarked names depending on the look or font. It would be best to communicate with the trademark holder before using their trademarks and to get a lawyers opinion. CBM certainly tolerated promotions by non-competing organizations if not encouraged grass roots promotions which was about the only advertising by CBM. Michele Battilana seems reasonable but watch out for Ben Hermans who claims ownership of Amiga IP despite appearing not to have paid for it. Dropping the "Commodore" name from CAGA would reduce the potential for trademark problems.

You are correct in that the use would fall under fair use.

@ASiegel, @cgutjahr
It is allowed for a society, group, alliance, foundation, association, etc to name themselves after entities that have registered marks, without seeking permission to label themselves as such. For profit or otherwise.

The use of said registered marks is protected, and outside of derivative works would require a license agreement for permitted use. Of course, use of registered marks is possible without upfront arrangements, as it is the onus of the mark holder to exercise diligence on restricting its use.

In the case of CAGA http://www.commodorealliance.com/, they are clearly not using any of the registered marks.

Furthermore, when registering trademarks, one stipulates and industry and purpose for the mark. This is why it is possible to e.g. register a Commodore trademark for clothing company, or an Amiga trademark for a cosmetic company, within the same region, without necessarily being in contravention of the previously registered trademarks in the electronics/computing industry for the purpose of branding and promoting the sale of a line of personal and business computing devices and related firmware and software.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@CAGA

That said, while I will not be voting with my wallet in this instance, I have nothing against DP succeeding with his CAGA initiative. It would not be such a terrible thing if he could pull it off, however misguided the initiative might be given the state of affairs.

To some of you, it might feel incongruent to wish someone success, while simultaneously denying them of your portion of the crowdsourced funds required for that success. Think of me as an unregistered voter, disillusioned with the state of contemporary democracy, campaigned to give f*@& over which flavour of institutionalised corruption tastes better, because anything else is just too hard.

But you can also think of me as an investor, a role I have periodically served, and the way I see it: The numbers just don't add up.

Last edited by agami on 18-Sep-2022 at 03:13 AM.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@agami

Quote:

It is allowed for a society, group, alliance, foundation, association, etc to name themselves after entities that have registered marks, without seeking permission to label themselves as such. For profit or otherwise.

https://www.blogherald.com/guides/trademark-copyright-and-fan-sites/

Quote:

In the case of CAGA http://www.commodorealliance.com/, they are clearly not using any of the registered marks.

The website clearly uses the brand names "Commodore" and "Amiga", which are in fact registered wordmarks in Europe and North America.

Quote:

Furthermore, when registering trademarks, one stipulates and industry and purpose for the mark.

You don't say.

International Class 9 happens to cover all computer software. This does include internet websites, which, for example, explains why the Ebay mark is registered in this class.

Of course, so is "Amiga".

@cgutjahr

Quote:

He clearly states at the beginning of the video that [with] "the money that is raised, we're going to produce a website".

I must have missed that but there is no info on how and when to pay.

Quote:

1. He's calling it "Commodore Amiga Global Alliance" and wants to do business using that name - run a website, fund software and hardware projects. And - literal quote - "make this brand more relevant than the existing Commodore and Amiga brands" over the years. I'm wondering what the owners of said existing brands will think about this blatant attempt to abuse their trademarks? Good rule of thumb: If somebody's telling you about his awesome project that will change the world - we just have to beat up that other guy's wife first, but only this one time, honest: walk away.

Now would be the time for Amiga and Commodore brand owners to raise any objections. Have approached Cloanto and whoever owns Commodore for comment?

Quote:

2. He's not using Kickstarter "this time", because their fees are allegedly way too high. Or maybe it's because he's abusing registered trademarks and his project would be shut down with a single mail from the actual brand owners? Or because his last Kickstarter project kept shrinking for years after it had been successfully funded?

I have know idea and I'm not familiar with the trials and tribulation of his last kickstarter.

Quote:

3. The project's first goal is to set up a website where people can talk to each other and look shit up. Seriously, that's the project's first stated goal. A WEBSITE WHERE PEOPLE CAN TALK TO EACH OTHER AND LOOK SHIT UP. Awesome concept, I wonder why nobody ever thought of that. Definitely worth spending money on. Your money, that is. Not his. He's also not mentioning who the six (!) "incredibly qualified" webmasters are that would be building that site. And why they need money to build it, if they're such big Amiga fans. How many Amiga websites can you think of that cost money up front? Or at all, for that matter?

Having things like sites similar to Amiga History, Hall of Light and the Big Book of Amiga Hardware along with a directory of companies, services and user groups could be useful to have. Having some sort of forums or social media attached only makes sense.

The 6 webmasters are in the slides from his presentation.

[b[I]Steve Moorhouse Managing Director Albany Computer Services https://www.albany-computers.co.uk/

Derek Knaggs co-founder Flamelily IT https://www.flamelily.co.uk/

Justin Mitchell Breadbox Commodore Computer Museum

Paulo D'Urso Amiga Passione magazine

Elliot Christenson Podcaster

Dave Kirkwood https://davekirkwood.net/
[/b][/i]

I guess that more people for an invetigative journalist to contact and see what details they can get about CAGA.

Quote:

4. David Pleasance is the guy who's involved with the "Friend OS" people, who's been promoting the Italian trademark thieves selling crappy rebranded phones, who walked around for years claiming that he's working on finally getting the CD1200 manufactured. The guy who only delivered a third of what he initially promised his backers in his "Vampire to Vultures" Kickstarter, because apparently they've got "so much material now" he can sell you three books instead of just one. That guy wants you to give him your money so he can fund hardware and software projects. Unspecified hardware and software projects. It's not even clear who'd decide what to fund.

More stuff I'm au fait with.

Quote:

5. You do not want to watch an extended version of Viva Amiga. Actually, given the last time "Viva Amiga Extended Edition" was offered as bonus content was A-Eonkits "A1222 early bird" promotion, this is developing into another good rule of thumb: If you're offered Viva Amiga Extended Edition as a bonus, walk away - somebody's very desperate apparently.

I wouldn't go out of my way to get hold of it becaue I already have Viva Amiga.

Quote:

If you think that bundle's worth 35 Euros, go for it - but make sure you know how to get out of this "alliance" in time before you have to pay for another year.

I said it might represnt value to some people. Not for me because I already have his first book and Viva Amiga and a C64 game. The Amiga Alive and Kicking video is probably the only thing I'd want and I can get that for £10 if I DRM or between 99c and $4 if I want to be one of Bezos' serfs.

If you want my peronal opinion on this I think David is hopelessly over optimistic in how much interest there might be in this idea and he'll struggle to raise enough money to cover the costs asociated with the website let alone fund anything else but he's welcome to prove me wrong.

Suffice to say I wouldn't be willing to part with my money unless the website exists and look like it worh paying 50 pence a week to be a member.

@Rob

Quote:

The 6 webmasters are in the slides from his presentation.

Where can I get that presentation? I've only seen people ask for it so far, apparently it has been released now?

Quote:

Having things like sites similar to Amiga History, Hall of Light and the Big Book of Amiga Hardware along with a directory of companies, services and user groups could be useful to have.

We already have all that.

@cgutjahr

The presentation is available here:

https://youtu.be/ZED8_Lfdwuk?t=277

Have set it to start where David Pleasance announces the people involved.

_________________
Old School Game Blog
Gaming on AmigaOS 4
Void - Amiga Demo Group

I’m surprised that David wants to make yet another Amiga website since his co-author for Vulture's to Vampires already owns this site and Amiga.org.

Last edited by DiscreetFX on 18-Sep-2022 at 10:47 PM.

_________________
Sent from my Quantum Computer.

@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

So what you’re saying, is cooperation is not possible, because people like you are not willing to.

No, not at all, quite the opposite.
I just think that this "club" needs to allow all people to join, not just those willing to pay for it.

_________________
It's not the question that's the problem, it's the problem that's the question.

@kolla

Quote:

’m actually a wee bit surprised that Raspberry Pi haven’t made any pi model with a small onboard FPGA yet.

Been saying this for a long time already.
Pi-Hat FPGA for legacy chipset via AGA if desired.
Or
Mainboard breakout with PCIe and a plugin card for legacy chipset.
Or
Do it over USB3 that the Pi now has.
There are options due to the modern I/O and the standard is going to help keep development cost down.

What the Pi has going for it right now is that it's cheap, Bi-Endian support via ARM and is a standard with modern I/O performance.
Again, as others have suggested, the decision makers would need to get serios and stop looking at PPC as the way forward, which, I honestly think 90% of us already know, PPC has really no future.
Not for a mass produced, powerful and cheap way of getting users back into the platform.

_________________
It's not the question that's the problem, it's the problem that's the question.

@SHADES
Anything but the simplest approach which is using an ASIC 68k CPU. Using ARM supports ARM, Acorn Archimedes, RPi Foundation markets. Using the 68k supports and revives the 68k Amiga market.

@matthey

Only way to revive anything 68k is to make damn sure it covers all interested groups, and most 68k developers are not on Amiga explicitly. Atari has a much larger developer ratio, and with lots of crossover to Linux and BSDs. You will want these people on board as well.

And of course the retro mac crowd.

Last edited by kolla on 19-Sep-2022 at 12:33 AM.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@matthey

Quote:

"Anything but the simplest approach which is using an ASIC 68k CPU. Using ARM supports ARM, Acorn Archimedes, RPi Foundation markets. Using the 68k supports and revives the 68k Amiga market."

Possibly, recreating the 68xxx is much more complicated if you want it modern because now, there are standards in developing for the next-gen 68k instructions; cache set, FPU, MMU, will a GPU be attached, which one, logic for external I/O, all that would need to be agreed upon.
A lot of people don't agree on the way the 68080 has been organised. Someone who seriously knows chip design is going to need to be involved, and ASIC are not cheap to design and implement.

PPC wasn't 68k and yet people insisted on using this thing, regardless of the cost in creating attached logic and porting software. If that effort had been used to move to an already existing and cheap architecture, the problems on all the design stuff would be much less cost intensive.

The whole idea here is cost. If there's multi-million price tags attached with very little interest, it's really unlikely to get off the ground.

Last edited by SHADES on 19-Sep-2022 at 01:23 AM.
Last edited by SHADES on 19-Sep-2022 at 01:16 AM.
Last edited by SHADES on 19-Sep-2022 at 01:14 AM.
Last edited by SHADES on 19-Sep-2022 at 01:12 AM.

_________________
It's not the question that's the problem, it's the problem that's the question.

kolla Quote:

Only way to revive anything 68k is to make damn sure it covers all interested groups, and most 68k developers are not on Amiga explicitly. Atari has a much larger developer ratio, and with lots of crossover to Linux and BSDs. You will want these people on board as well. And of course the retro mac crowd.

MMU and FPGA capabilities for chipsets. Got it.

SHADES Quote:

Possibly, recreating the 68xxx is much more complicated if you want it modern because now, there are standards in developing for the next-gen 68k instructions; cache set, FPU, MMU, will a GPU be attached, which one, logic for external I/O, all that would need to be agreed upon. A lot of people don't agree on the way the 68080 has been organised. Someone who seriously knows chip design is going to need to be involved, and ASIC are not cheap to design and implement.

Hiring a professional experienced chief CPU architect is expensive but worth it. Developing a professional ASIC is expensive but that is the price to be competitive and customized for the needs. Production costs can then be cheap after paying up front costs.

SHADES Quote:

PPC wasn't 68k and yet people insisted on using this thing, regardless of the cost in creating attached logic and porting software. If that effort had been used to move to an already existing and cheap architecture, the problems on all the design stuff would be much less cost intensive. The whole idea here is cost. If there's multi-million price tags attached with very little interest, it's really unlikely to get off the ground.

There were millions of dollars spent on porting the AmigaOS to PPC, PPC hardware and licensing to try to build a sustainable Amiga NG platform. Millions of dollars could be spent on porting the AmigaOS to ARM to try and build another Amiga NG platform. ARM hardware is cheaper than PPC hardware (Efika was cheap though) but are people going to use it just to emulate 68k+chipset Amigas? If people want 68k Amigas, wouldn't it be better to spend the millions on 68k Amiga hardware giving better performance and compatibility? If cheap emulation on RPi is adequate then there is no new Amiga platform, no money to be made or purpose for all these NG Amiga businesses and many Amiga users will still choose FPGA hardware or antique Amiga hardware with modern addons dividing the Amiga market. At least exploring modernizing the 68k Amiga seems reasonable to me and it likely could be done in stages while starting small to keep costs down (RP2040 SoC as an example). We know the 68k CPU power can be greatly increased and up to 2 GiBs of memory can be added without problems in emulation (RISC OS ARM could only access 64MiB of memory). Chunky/RTG, HDMI output, 16 bit audio with more channels, etc enhancements are already possible to the chipset in FPGA while retaining compatibility. Some of the development is already done and tested. It's ignorant to ignore the organic technology even if it may not scale to high end desktops, workstations and servers. FPGA Amiga hardware is quite useful for retro, hobby, embedded, educational purposes right now and would be more so by drastically improving performance/price competitiveness with an ASIC.

@matthey

Quote:

Hiring a professional experienced chief CPU architect is expensive but worth it. Developing a professional ASIC is expensive but that is the price to be competitive and customized for the needs. Production costs can then be cheap after paying up front costs.

Yes, yes it is. Very expensive.
And who's going to agree on the instruction set to be implemented and GPU if on-chip? I/O? Or is that the designer's prerogative and just deal with it, whatever they choose (Gunnar syndrome)
The 68k series doesn't have modern, on-chip memory interface or PCIe etc
All of this would need to be designed for the 68K once the instruction set was "agreed" upon.
A lot of debate on that alone, currently.

Quote:

There were millions of dollars spent on porting the AmigaOS to PPC, PPC hardware and licensing to try to build a sustainable Amiga NG platform

That would need to be done again, to go back to this "new" 68K ASIC from PPC anyway.
Software is easier to change than hardware, and much cheaper, without designing ASIC, let alone, taping out multiple times after stepping fixes.

Last edited by SHADES on 19-Sep-2022 at 04:00 AM.
Last edited by SHADES on 19-Sep-2022 at 03:59 AM.
Last edited by SHADES on 19-Sep-2022 at 03:58 AM.
Last edited by SHADES on 19-Sep-2022 at 03:57 AM.

_________________
It's not the question that's the problem, it's the problem that's the question.

Or one can just drop the whole idea of new 68k ASIC, save millions that can be invested elsewhere, and instead use a solution that is provided for free and is open source and runs on the most popular series of ARM boards available. Only drawback is that it will be wee bit slower than running native - but who cares?!

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@SHADES

Quote:

And who's going to agree on the instruction set to be implemented and GPU if on-chip? I/O? Or is that the designer's prerogative and just deal with it, whatever they choose (Gunnar syndrome)

It is certainly the designer's prerogative, and of those footing the bill.
While a new and extended 68k CPU architecture should not be designed by a committee, it would be advisable for the potential project leaders to spend some time consulting with certain individuals in the existing 68k market (major stakeholders).

Which consulting insights are taken into account and to what degree, would and should be ultimately up to the designer(s) and the investor(s).


Quote:

The 68k series doesn't have modern, on-chip memory interface or PCIe etc All of this would need to be designed for the 68K once the instruction set was "agreed" upon.

These needn't be part of the first iteration of a new 68k ASIC.
The potential project runners would/should design a roadmap of SKUs taking the 68k from its current 32-bit, single-threaded/single-core, CPU only design (greater backward compatibility), through to an integrated SoC and extended to 64-bit, multi-threaded/multi-core design (greater future-proofing).

At each major phase, there could/should be opportunities to consult with select individuals in the current and new 68k market, on feature recommendations and use cases.


Throughout history, most developers have not been consulted on the CPU architecture designs. There are of course outliers; If I'm to think of a modern example, this is something that AMD does when designing APU silicon for Microsoft and Sony for their respective game consoles.

_________________
All the way, with 68k