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dhr wrote: Once in a while there are mass-market retro-gaming releases. Atari 2600 in a joystick, NES, C=64. I wonder if Amiga would be possible. Guess: technically, yes; Legally: very hard; marketing: too specialized? At what price-point would, say, 10,000 people be willing to buy it?

Commodore tried to license the 68k to cost reduce the Amiga (single chip SoC) before it went bankrupt. Jeri Ellsworth was working on a single chip Amiga circa 2003.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=202&v=5uaDzF99a80

Later came the MiniMig around 2005 which spawned many FPGA projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimig

Jens Schoenfeld was working on the Clone-A circa 2006.

http://www.totalamiga.org/files/TA25_JensIviewExtract.pdf

Today we have multiple FPGA devices with flexible simulation of CPUs and custom chips including FPGA Arcade, MiST, MiSTer, Vampire standalone (offshoot of the Natami project), Chameleon (offshoot of the Clone-A) and FleaFPGA. The FleaFPGA was available for only $45 U.S. but not very well advertised. Amiga users want more powerful hardware than affordable FPGA simulating of the 68k CPU can provide and supplies of existing 68k chips are dwindling limiting quantity production. The Apollo Core is an attempt to provide better 68k performance by hyper-optimizing for an FPGA. The FPGA Arcade guys are working on ARM emulation of the 68k for better performance which places them closer to and in competition with UAE emulation. The lowest unit cost and highest performance could be achieved with a custom 68k SoC ASIC but that would require mass production and significant investment. A product like a combination of an Amiga 68k Raspberry Pi with an FPGA for custom chips to simulate retro 68k computers (Amiga, Atari ST, Mac 68k) and consoles (Sega Genesis, NeoGeo, CD32, x68000) could appeal to a less "specialized" target customer base and sell well with a price in the $50 to $100 U.S. range but involves significant risks. The current Amiga legal situation is a disaster but that could change with the financial failure of Hyperion.

@matthey

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The current Amiga legal situation is a disaster but that could change with the financial failure of Hyperion.

Yeah, here's hoping that AmigaOS fails so that we can get a gimmicky computer in a joystick one Christmas

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BigD wrote: The IBM PC was far more entrenched in the US than it was in Europe by 1985. Also, Americans really fell in love with consoles in a big way and for some reason pretty much idolise the NES! In Europe it was late to market and an overpriced waste of time in the late 80s when it had a presence in WHSmiths etc in the UK. Different markets I guess. The A500 never really found the C64 niche in America as they had the NES in 1985 as opposed to 1987 here and so the C64 was replaced in many homes by NES machines rather than Amigas!! Business users saw the Amiga as a big box of graphical tricks that had no place in business where green and black screens should suffice!!!

The PC did gain momentum quickly in the U.S. Many people wanted their computer to give them a business or educational advantage and the Amiga failed miserably at both of these markets. I tried to tell my dad that colorful bit mapped graphics and C were the future for business too when he thought a monochrome console and COBOL were all that was needed (like Bill Gates thinking 640kB of memory was all that would ever be needed). I knew an Amiga user who sold his Amiga 1000 to get better Pascal support, ironically, but the lack of hard drive support played a part as well. He was well aware of the Amiga specs as I told a teacher who had recently bought an EGA PC that my Amiga had 4096 colors and stereo sound which he acknowledged to the surprise of the teacher.

NES was popular because it was cheap and the games were catchy and polished. My younger family members and their friends had more respect for my impressive Amiga but it was expensive and lacked good software in some areas. The Amiga had too many poor quality games and games which failed to work on upgraded hardware like mine. There were few stores which sold the Amiga where the NES and PCs were available practically everywhere.

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For a forward thinking country they had no vision for multitasking or graphics. In many ways it's the iPod/iPhone mentality. They were originally inferior machines specification wise to MiniDisc players / Samsung Android phones respectively but if they 'just work' and the marketing is good then people (and especially Americans) are prepared to pay more for less. Remember that first generation iPods would have a brief pause of silence between each track and were using vastly lower quality audio files than the MiniDisc players of the time. iPhones still to this day do not have the ability to take SD cards and yet people are surprised when their phones fill up or their iCloud account is hacked

Apple hardware has tended to be good quality where the cheapest products usually win here. Apple fans played a role in the success of early non computer products. They tend to be wealthier individuals where Amiga users were generally poorer. It is a big advantage to have good profit margins.

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BigD wrote: Yeah, here's hoping that AmigaOS fails so that we can get a gimmicky computer in a joystick one Christmas

You assume the worst but I don't see how the Amiga situation can get much worse. Hyperion has practically ceased Amiga development and didn't pay the AmigaOS 3.1.4 developers. I don't think they are profitable or have any plan to make them profitable. It looks like they are on life support and the situation is unsustainable. I don't see how it can get much worse from rock bottom. Anyone still interested in the Amiga at this point probably wants a better future. Worst case is that the new owners won't have the finances to do anything but at least they will likely be more open minded about licensing and deals than Hyperion.

@matthey

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least they will likely be more open minded about licensing and deals than Hyperion.

What amazing licensing deals are you thinking of? Ones like Amiga Inc sponsoring the Kent Arena or Commodore Gaming putting Commodore logos on the side of PC Gaming cases? Are those 'high points' better than what Hyperion has achieved?

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@matthey

AmigaOS3.1.4 is what should happened back in 2000, when Hagge and Partner worked on AmigaOS3.5 / 3.9 but it ended up as patch work, now we have OS3.1.4 but lack large file support, and is sort useless for DVD ISO images or disk images for emulators and torrent files.

Now yet again we have to wait for 3.1.5 or 3.1.6 or what ever Hyperion will call the next OS3.1 update. it nice to see there is progress on Classic AmigaOS some thing that really has not happened with where fuzzy contracts and deals that Hyperion made when they got into business with Amiga Inc.

So getting the legal stuff sorted out, is important, if Hyperion fails it fall back on distributors and who is only interested in AmigaOS as part of there emulation package, nothing will be done or improved. so it can go from bad to a lot worse, really.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 21-Dec-2018 at 12:08 AM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 20-Dec-2018 at 11:45 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 20-Dec-2018 at 11:38 PM.

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@amigasociety

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amigasociety wrote: Yeh I am in USA and for professional use, the Atari and Amiga and other non PC non Mac platforms seemed to have never become real, in my opinion, for professional use.

The Amiga had some niche professional users in the US. There were plenty of videographers using it, either with Toasters or Genlocks. There were animators as well. I even knew a guy who used A3000s to do the display ads for his newspaper and a 2000 to manage the classified ads.

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@g0blin

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I'm reading David Pleasance book these days and, from that perspective, it seems to me that most american users actually abandoned the Amiga even before Commodore demise.

This strikes me, an American, as correct. I bought my first Amiga in 1991 I think, an Amiga 500. I bought it used, because (a) I was poor, and (b) the previous owner wanted to get a "real" machine, i.e., an IBM PC-compatible. I spent the next couple of years trying rather fruitlessly to promote the Amiga, even though it did everything I needed and more. I was telecommuting with a research lab where I had an internship, but no one cared. For games they had Nintendo, which cost a lot less and had abundant games, and for school or work they had PC compatibles, which didn't actually cost that much more than an Amiga. By the early 90s the only Amiga stuff I could find in a DC-area computer shop were Amiga World and Compute! magazines. -- Maybe an RKM, too.

Amiga really did do pretty well in the US for a couple of years, at least as a games machine. I knew quite a few people who had one. One of the problems, which has been only hinted at by others, is that Commodore released several successive OS updates that broke compatibility with games. You could buy ROM switchers to move you from 1.3 back to 1.2, and later from 2.1 back to 1.3 or 1.2, so that you could play older games. I remember obtaining Joan of Arc, I think it was, which worked fine on 1.2, maybe on 1.3, but definitely not on 2.1 or later, because I never managed to get it to run. I think it's still sitting in my dad's garage.

Compare that with Microsoft and IBM and the compatible makers. They made sure that you could run that important business software on all their machines, even when you upgraded hardware or OS. An American looking at that situation could hardly be faulted for concluding that their money was better invested in a machine whose software would still be useful 5-10 years down the road.

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@BigD

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The A500 never really found the C64 niche in America as they had the NES in 1985 as opposed to 1987 here and so the C64 was replaced in many homes by NES machines rather than Amigas!!

The saturation of C64's probably hurt the A500 anyway, especially since everyone's favorite games wouldn't run on the A500.

Quote:

Business users saw the Amiga as a big box of graphical tricks that had no place in business where green and black screens should suffice!!!

Green and black screens did in fact suffice for what they needed. In particular, the Amiga didn't run the software they needed. That's a pretty rational decision, regardless of whether we like it.

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For a forward thinking country they had no vision for multitasking or graphics.

Sure, they only invented the Video Toaster. Multitasking and graphics were quite common in the universities, where it was actually needed. A friend of mine once complained that fractals were good only for dragging Sun workstations to a halt when someone wanted to impress his girlfriend with a pseudo-psychedelic picture. A lot of people were simply being practical.

In summer 1992 I worked at a tech company that produced re-badged tape drives. All their development work was done on PCs, because that's where the software was. If they'd wanted to use Amigas, they'd have to have developed and debugged all their software in-house.

My dad hated the IBM PC business; he was a huge fan of the 6809 CPU and still likes to brag how his TRS-80 CoCo could run circles around the 8086 PC. But when he went into business for himself doing embedded electronics, he didn't work with a 6809-based machine, because all the software and hardware he needed was on PC's. I suppose you could condemn him and others for "lack of vision" because they didn't fall down and worship your toy computer, but at least he didn't go begging people to help pay his bills.

The older I get, the more I think that even if Commodore had been well-run, it didn't stand a chance in the end, because of software. Spectacular, cutting-edge hardware is pointless if there is no useful software for it, and "useful" is an inherently relative criterion.

Last edited by simplex on 21-Dec-2018 at 03:43 AM.
Last edited by simplex on 21-Dec-2018 at 03:42 AM.

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@anyone who cares

Quote:

Sure, they only invented the Video Toaster.

In looking up something about this, I learned for the first time that the guy who designed the Video Toaster was, according to Wikipedia (and Therefore It Must Be True(TM)), Dana Carvey's brother. You know, the Dana Carvey of "Wayne's World", the George H. W. "Nah gah doot" Bush impression, the Church Lady, etc. on SNL.

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@simplex

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You know, the Dana Carvey of "Wayne's World"

That's epic! A great bit of Christmas trivia!

Software is a weird relative selling point for both the PC and the Amiga. For home use I think the Amiga was more than capable and C= UK home computer bundles capitalised on this with the likes of Wordsworth, Photogenics and Deluxe Paint etc alongside a few bundled games. When the PC took off, in the UK a number of households were sold Microsoft Works! Horrible mess of a product that was not useful at all compared to Amiga software of the time. There was nothing equivalent to the GraphicsPublisher included in TurboPrint until PowerPoint and Word got a graphical crop function IMHO.

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@BigD

There were much more applications and games developed for PC than for Amiga, unfortunately amiga market was much smaller, many user were childs with not much money and no interest to buy something, on PC people copied too but there were still enough buyers. Additionally the amiga hardware was not competitive anymore so most amiga games in 90s were simple ports with worse graphics. AGA was improvement but too little too late. And people knew PCs from work so as PC hardware became cheaper they bought PCs and not Amigas.

@OlafS25

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And people knew PCs from work so as PC hardware became cheaper they bought PCs and not Amigas.

I am obviously aware of that but in my experience most UK families bought a cheap mid-90s Windows 95 machine with MS Works bundled and couldn't achieve half the things I could with my Amiga. Excluding the ability to surf the internet, the PC was not a great machine for home use in the 90s.

_________________
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@BigD

I never used Works myself, it was a cheap "MS Office for poor". Windows 95 had its limitations (partly because based on DOS) but it was not that bad. It might be that you were experienced amiga user and more productive than many others with your specific software but we talk about early 90s now. On gaming 3D Ego Shooter were most popular and amiga was not competitive anymore because most amiga users were reluctant or not able to invest in better hardware. I think around 1992 A500 with 2 discs (without any extensions or hard disc) was still standard so if you want to sell software (expecially games) your program had to work on that configuration. The PC was far ahead there already. A1200 and A4000 were nice machines (I owned both, A4000 with graphic card) but they were too late and only able to get on a similar level as PC but not ahead of PC like amiga was in the 80s. Most games were written on and for PCs and standard was VGA so to make amiga games you either had to scale down the graphics (what looked ugly) or do special graphics (what created additional costs) on a amiga market who was obviously going down. And applications needed better hardware mostly and only a minority of amiga users had such a configuration so development was not profitable. And even on graphics amiga looked old so there was no incentive anymore to create specific amiga software like in the mid 80s.

Last edited by OlafS25 on 21-Dec-2018 at 11:41 AM.

@OlafS25

True, but if given the right investment in R&D / Moore's law applying to Commodore in an alternative universe / the bringing to market of Ranger custom chips and or the A3000+ with DSP then the Amiga COULD have kept pace or exceeded the improvements on the IBM PC. I still maintain the PC was NOT a good home computer until Windows XP was released.

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@simplex

Quote:

In looking up something about this, I learned for the first time that the guy who designed the Video Toaster was, according to Wikipedia (and Therefore It Must Be True(TM)), Dana Carvey's brother. You know, the Dana Carvey of "Wayne's World", the George H. W. "Nah gah doot" Bush impression, the Church Lady, etc. on SNL.

That's why in one of the movies... I forget if it was 1 or 2... You see Dana Carvey wearing a Video Toaster T-shirt.

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@amigasociety, BigD, simplex

Thanks for your replies. I found them very informative and they helped me to shed some more lights about things I always wondered but never had a chance to prove.

Have a nice day

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@JimS

Probably the second? The one with Kim Basinger? She was trying to seduce him and force him to kill her husband.....
My favourite line was ... [Kim]"I'll be frank" ... [Dana]"Ooookay ... can I still be Garth?"

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@g0blin

@AmigaBlitter

I haven't completely left Amiga as I still cling on to a bit of hope that something amazing will happen. Sad thing is that hope is hanging by a very fine thread and my A1 and classics are all sitting idle.

In the mean time Linux is keeping me going as every need I have is catered for in one easy place and not just for free either. I will pay for something worth having, usually games but I have payed for Turboprint which is a throw back to the Amiga. The free CUP's drivers for my printer only partially worked.

I have to suffer Windows10 in work and I really mean suffer, I find it horrendous to work with something I was happy to tell Microsoft when they asked what I thought of it.

@g0blin

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g0blin wrote: Probably the second? The one with Kim Basinger? She was trying to seduce him and force him to kill her husband.....

Yes, it was the second one.... Kill for Kim..... definitely.

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