Hi all!

Sorry if this has already been reported: ArsTechnica ran a series on the Amiga and its last installment, entitled "A history of the Amiga, part 12: Red vs. Blue" includes an interesting comment by Dave Haynie



Quote:

I wouldn't exactly say my heart was broken... I was just fed up with all the vultures and crooks trying to get a little taste of the Amiga's mouldering body before the bones turned to dust. Or something along those lines. There were too many wanna-bes fighting over a tiny little bit of possible sales, and more often than not just ripping off Amiga fans. One big strength of the Amiga experience has always been the community, the users who became nearly as passionate about their computers as they did their art, their music, their video, etc. Those are the people who really deserved better, and I didn't want to be any part of another promise to them that some idiot wasn't going to let me keep. But I never gave up on the community. Things have actually got much better lately. Kind of like the boardwalk in Asbury Park... if something on value to enough people gets bad enough, it doesn't take a whole lot to get it going back in the right direction. Trevor and A-EON didn't create the weird situation with PowerPC and Amiga, but they're the real deal, they're not trying to rip anyone off, just deliver some kind of new Amiga without going to deeply into debt. And it's a good time for it, because the originals are starting to fail. It has been decades. There are a bunch of projects, like the Vampire accelerators, the Amiga chips and other things being built in FPGAs, building classic Amigas from scratch again, in one form or another. I'm expecting an "Amy-ITX" to arrive at my house in the next few weeks. Sure, Amigas may never be a big business again. Without real ongoing OS development, it's kind of frozen in time here and there. Then again, they seem to have got multiprocessing on AROS last year... only 24 years after Randell Jesup and I tried to something abotu that at Commodore with the Gemini project. Keep the faith, -Dave Haynie

The whole article (and series) is also worth reading
Happy reading!

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Scientific Progress Goes Boing!

@tygre

thanks for showing this, It was an interesting read.

Quote:

I'm expecting an "Amy-ITX" to arrive at my house in the next few weeks.

The article is from 2018, so I suppose he's still waiting.

Last edited by MEGA_RJ_MICAL on 10-Feb-2020 at 02:16 AM.

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@tygre

https://www.amigawiki.org/doku.php?id=de:expansion:cpu:gemini

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@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

Actually, the article is 2018 as stated at the top.

Jeremy Reimer - 3/29/2018, 11:00 PM

Anyway, yeah.
The only way to know that is to ask Dave.
He also owns a Vampire, just FYI.

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@SHADES

Friend SHADES,
I never thought about this before, but reading your post I now realize that being able to say

"I OWN A VAMPIRE", "I BOUGHT A VAMPIRE", "THEY JUST SHIPPED MY VAMPIRE"

is a compelling reason to get one in itself!



IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR



Sent from my Presidential BlackBerry,
MEGA_RJ_MICAL

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CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU HEAR ME? OK FOR WORK

@tygre

Thanks.

and...

"But I never gave up on the community."

Thanks Dave.

I wish you could be part of the Amiga future R&D.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
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// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

Owning one is not so tricky, using one might be.

A V4 “standalone” is a case of huge irony, as it really cannot “stand alone”, it relies on the owner to have some other system to prepare a bootable media, as it has no means to boot from floppy or USB, nor does it have a firmware that can boot strap from FAT32 with ADF and ISO images. It is very much the dumbest FPGA Amiga around.

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@tygre

The reference to the Gemini board was interesting. Another curio in the darkest corner of the C= labs as the whole rotten behemoth made its last death dive. Chalk it down to another C= Weapon of Mass Destruction never unleashed because management prefered to play 'power struggles' rather than plan the survival and prosperous future that was required.

A3000+ with DSP
A3000UX
and now Gemini (A3000 with multiprocessor support)

... all could have been marketed and sold into niche and lucarative markets at the time of inception!

_________________
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John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@kolla

Quote:

A V4 “standalone” is a case of huge irony, as it really cannot “stand alone”, it relies on the owner to have some other system to prepare a bootable media, as it has no means to boot from floppy or USB, nor does it have a firmware that can boot strap from FAT32 with ADF and ISO images. It is very much the dumbest FPGA Amiga around.

A bit like the Raspberry Pi then

@tygre

You (and all the others) should dig a little deeper in the thread you linked to:

Quote:

Merlancia It was a heady time, and the dotcom mania attracted both legitimate and dubious investors. One example of the latter was Ryan Czerwinski, who claimed to be 40 years old, a Ph.D., and the president of Merlancia Industries. He arranged meetings with Amiga Inc. and even hired legendary Commodore engineer Dave Haynie to work on new Amiga PowerPC hardware. It turned out in the end that Czerwinski was a teenager living with his mother, and Merlancia was just a bunch of ideas in his head. Haynie, who was now owed $55,000 for his consulting work, was left scarred by the experience. After the failed PIOS startup and now the Merlancia debacle, his heart was broken. He would never work on Amiga-related technologies again.

By Jeremy Reimer

Quote:

I wouldn't exactly say my heart was broken... I was just fed up with all the vultures and crooks trying to get a little taste of the Amiga's mouldering body before the bones turned to dust. Or something along those lines. ...

Answer by Dave Haynie

@amyren

Quote:

A bit like the Raspberry Pi then

A raspberry pi can bootstrap from fat32 and also pxe-boot.
V4 can not.

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@OneTimer1

Wow, never knew about that one. So many dodgy people have been active in this market over time (referring to this Ryan chap). It's a wonder there are ANY of us left supporting ANY of it.

Cheers,
Rude!

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2017 Camaro 2SS

@kolla

Quote:

kolla wrote: @amyren Quote: A bit like the Raspberry Pi then A raspberry pi can bootstrap from fat32 and also pxe-boot. V4 can not.

It also costs a tenth of a Vampire.

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See them on http://retro.furinkan.org/

Quote:

V4 “standalone” is a case of huge irony, as it really cannot “stand alone”, it relies on the owner to have some other system to prepare a bootable media, as it has no means to boot from floppy or USB, nor does it have a firmware that can boot strap from FAT32 with ADF and ISO images. It is very much the dumbest FPGA Amiga around.

Well you would still need another system to prepare a FAT32 partition on a USB stick with ADF/ISO images or whatever. It's no less "standalone" than an A500 for example. Without any prepared, bootable media, all the A500 does is display that floppy disk on the screen all day...

Last edited by AdvancedFollower on 12-Feb-2020 at 10:21 AM.

@AdvancedFollower

With V4 you need to prepare a compatible disk/card with RDB and Amiga file system, no less. That’s a rather big step up compared to just throwing some ADF files on a random SD card you bough cheap in a store.

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@AdvancedFollower

And the A500 (and all other Amiga systems) came with OS on floppy, ready to boot, or other boot media. If the V4 at least was able to boot ADFs from a FAT32 USB stick, a lot of hassle could be avoided and one could install OS to CF/IDE drive directly on the V4.

It should not be impossible to ship V4 with AROS preinstalled and direct access to USB storage, AROS comes with Poseidon.

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@kolla

Quote:

@amyren Quote: A bit like the Raspberry Pi then A raspberry pi can bootstrap from fat32 and also pxe-boot. V4 can not.

I dont think network boot was possible on the first versions of the pi "standalone" either.

Anyway, still the most common way of getting started with a pi is to download an image and use another computer to write it to a SD card.

Using coffin it is a simlar process before you are ready to boot up, according to the r54 readme.

@Thread

It's not as if Vampires will be anything other than a manufacture on demand cottage industry. I was at an Amiga meet recently where an Vampire A500 V2 just sat there on sale all day with no takers! I like the idea of the V1200 but maybe the standalone hasn't been configured correctly for mass market sales.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@kolla

you are right ;)

a plane can fly

V4 not