@matthey

Quote:

What OS has gained double digit market share in the last 30 years without being installed on new/original hardware? Why would any desktop hardware manufacturer want to install a noncompetitive AmigaOS on their desktop hardware, especially if they have to pay for it?

I guess that’s why A-EON contracted Varysis to make their own hardware which DID have AmigaOS installed as standard. This Apple type model IS the best for a niche OS as long as there are killer apps/reasonable price point. Even in the Mac ecosystem Apple’s killer apps have been squandered and now Apple relies on ergonomics and style over substance IMHO. The Tabor HAS to offer tangible benefits in terms of software AND OS experience. Does anyone else think that? If we just want AmigaOS as an option on Raspberry Pi and x86-64 I honestly think AmigaOS would be as dead as BeOS at that point. And to clarify, BeOS as an OS was well featured and on paper had more going for it!

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

BigD Quote:

I guess that’s why A-EON contracted Varysis to make their own hardware which DID have AmigaOS installed as standard. This Apple type model IS the best for a niche OS as long as there are killer apps/reasonable price point. Even in the Mac ecosystem Apple’s killer apps have been squandered and now Apple relies on ergonomics and style over substance IMHO. The Tabor HAS to offer tangible benefits in terms of software AND OS experience. Does anyone else think that? If we just want AmigaOS as an option on Raspberry Pi and x86-64 I honestly think AmigaOS would be as dead as BeOS at that point. And to clarify, BeOS as an OS was well featured and on paper had more going for it!

The modern version of BeOS is the free and mostly open Haiku which supports x86 and x86-64 with partial support for PPC, ARM, SPARC, 68k and RISCV64. It was designed from the beginning to have features expected for a desktop like SMP (highly multi-threaded), process isolation and memory protection (although security, multi-user support and hardware drivers are lacking). The OS is efficient, responsive and boots quickly. There is a 64 bit version of the OS available. Software includes LibreOffice, FireFox, Opera, SeaMonkey and Apache. AmigaOS 4 and AROS are behind Haiku in desktop features and modern software yet the free Haiku isn't even a blip on the radar for the desktop market. Even the mighty Linux only has a few percent of the desktop market share with a plethora of distributions and better driver support. Windows and Mac OS X dominate the market and they come installed on new mass produced hardware. The best OS in the world for the desktop installed on new mass produced hardware would likely still have single digit market share after billions of dollars of spending to get there. The desktop market is not growing like the embedded market either. The Raspberry Pi is more in the embedded market than desktop market and is cheap mass produced hardware but the AmigaOS will never be installed on it. The AmigaOS becomes more competitive with fewer resources as other OSs drop out of the competition. Low end hardware is cheaper to produce, even to mass produce, and especially when using fewer resources.

@matthey

But Raspberry Pis sold with AmigaOS installed WILL be significantly more expensive than the vanilla boards meaning uptake WILL be sluggish. How will the OS become more competitive (i.e. catch up) when profit margins will be tight and again presumably this is all on the assumption that coders will work for very little in their own time!

Why not do this when the Raspberry Pi was a new concept? Power boards are a more logical way forwards! I still can’t get beyond the fact that A-EON produce hardware and you expect them to pivot and at least break even solely with software despite presumably being primary invested in the ISA change! Why would Cloanto help? Emulation is core to their business and retro is booming! It almost a suicidal risk for the Amiga parties to gamble on breaking compatibility with legacy apps, modernise with SMP and switch to Arm! Emulation of PPC on x86-64 would probably make more sense with the skill set of Cloanto and the fact that A-EON would need to shift to a software only business model.

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

@matthey

I think we're going in circles here, so perhaps it's better to just agree to disagree.

No hard feelings by the way!

BigD Quote:

But Raspberry Pis sold with AmigaOS installed WILL be significantly more expensive than the vanilla boards meaning uptake WILL be sluggish. How will the OS become more competitive (i.e. catch up) when profit margins will be tight and again presumably this is all on the assumption that coders will work for very little in their own time!

The higher the volume of sales the lower the price AmigaOS needs to support development. The AmigaOS would need to be significantly cheaper in any market especially for a new product designed to proliferate the Amiga. Having a more open source would help also. The AmigaOS isn't valuable like gold that needs to be locked away anymore and there is a limit to what it can sell for and what developers can be paid.

BigD Quote:

Why not do this when the Raspberry Pi was a new concept?

I tried to put this together years ago as part of the Apollo Team. Gunnar was only interested in making an FPGA 68k processor for the desktop which makes about as much sense as the AmigaOS competing on the desktop. I was interested in improving code density (footprint) and making a cheap ASIC for embedded and retro markets.

BigD Quote:

Power boards are a more logical way forwards!

POWER 9 boards like the Blackbird?

Basic Blackbird Bundle (4-Core POWER 9 CPU) $1,199.99
2U Heatsink Assembly for POWER9 CPUs $75.00
16GB DDR4 ECC Registered RAM (1x 16GB) $267.00
=========================================
Basic ready for use motherboard Total: $1541.99 (power supply not included)

These would only sell for the Amiga in low volume which means the AmigaOS price would need to be high. A complete system would be around $2000 with the same problem of the Amiga not proliferating as there is now (a couple of thousand sales does not attract development). Newer POWER processors will likely be considerably more expensive and may not be usable for a high end desktop computer.

AmigaOS 3.2 for the 68k requires 2MiB of memory and it is fat compared to AmigaOS 3.1. AmigaOS 4 for the PPC requires 256MiB of memory. PPC/POWER is very fat and not desirable for low end hardware. A low end 68k Amiga SBC could be close to 1/100 of the Blackbird motherboard price with more performance and memory than most of the upgraded classic hardware still in use. The price could be low enough to be attractive to ex-Amiga and non-Amiga users. There is hope of proliferation at least with over performing inexpensive hardware.

BigD Quote:

I still can’t get beyond the fact that A-EON produce hardware and you expect them to pivot and at least break even solely with software despite presumably being primary invested in the ISA change! Why would Cloanto help? Emulation is core to their business and retro is booming! It almost a suicidal risk for the Amiga parties to gamble on breaking compatibility with legacy apps, modernise with SMP and switch to Arm! Emulation of PPC on x86-64 would probably make more sense with the skill set of Cloanto and the fact that A-EON would need to shift to a software only business model.

A-Eon has been doing R&D into how to improve the Amiga technology and proliferate the Amiga. I wouldn't call low end hardware a full pivot. SMP would be valuable for low end hardware as well. Custom hardware may allow SMP to be added more easily and could allow for more standard hardware where a wide variety of inappropriate PPC hardware for AmigaOS has caused development headaches. A-Eon has failed so far to produce hardware which is competitive and appealing to a wide enough market to proliferate and PPC is pretty much dead so they need to seriously rethink some goals. They will die anyway if they can't find success.

Cloanto owns the Amiga brand now and if they win a summary judgement then they will have control over it. There will be pressure to do something with it and there aren't very good options which will improve the Amiga brand and proliferate it. The 68k Amiga classic market is the Amiga retro market not PPC or ARM. Affordable Amiga hardware would show the Amiga is still alive and could provide some momentum for the brand.

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John 3:16

@Trekiej

I wish I had selected the single choice option.

_________________
John 3:16

@matthey

Quote:

16GB DDR4 ECC Registered RAM (1x 16GB) $267.00

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/WTWrxr/samsung-memory-m393a1g43db0cpb0
Samsung DDR4-2133 8GB ECC Registered for $39.96+
Two RAM sticks for dual-channel memory mode.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/qBBTwP/samsung-16-gb-1-x-16-gb-registered-ddr4-2666-memory-m393a2k40cb2-ctd
Samsung DDR4-2666 16GB ECC Registered for $89.99+

raptorcs is asking for super profit margins from DDR4 ECC Registered RAM modules.

Quote:

AmigaOS 4 for the PPC requires 256MiB of memory

I have booted AmigaOS 4.0 FE for classic with 128 MB fast ram with 16 MB video ram.

Last edited by Hammer on 09-Jun-2021 at 04:59 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 09-Jun-2021 at 04:25 PM.
Last edited by Hammer on 09-Jun-2021 at 04:25 PM.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@matthey

Quote:

FPGA 68k hardware has modern display device features like HDMI/DVI which displays ECS/AGA/RTG even combining them is some cases

I have sourced a cheap Dell U2410F 24 inch and Dell U2311Hb 23 inch IPS monitors with 15 kHz VGA support for my classic Amigas.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

Hammer Quote:

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/WTWrxr/samsung-memory-m393a1g43db0cpb0 Samsung DDR4-2133 8GB ECC Registered for $39.96+ Two RAM sticks for dual-channel memory mode. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/qBBTwP/samsung-16-gb-1-x-16-gb-registered-ddr4-2666-memory-m393a2k40cb2-ctd Samsung DDR4-2666 16GB ECC Registered for $89.99+ raptorcs is asking for super profit margins from DDR4 ECC Registered RAM modules.

The price was a copy and paste from a while ago and was actually a special on the Blackbird bundle which is now $2048 U.S. I expect Raptor Engineering tried to make the POWER motherboard price as low as possible to attract high end desktop and workstation users. Their profit margins on the few accessories they sell like memory are no doubt high by desktop standards as they usually sell into the higher margin server market.

Hammer Quote:

I have booted AmigaOS 4.0 FE for classic with 128 MB fast ram with 16 MB video ram.

I remember Steve Shireman demonstrating his Amiga 1200 with SRAM PCMCIA card.

Steve Shireman Quote:

I have run control software on the Amiga booting off of a battery-backed SRAM PCMCIA card without a hard drive or floppy using only 4K of the PCMCIA card to boot. Think of the PCMCIA card as replacing the hard drive in a desktop system. The only RAM overhead was about 54K, and with this I have the full color model and mouse control, and fully preemptive multitasking and of the 2 Meg of RAM that comes with the A1200, The Amiga OS has only needed less than 1 / 10,000 of the RAM available. And I know it is using a few of the OO Objects in the Kickstart, but not very many.

At the time, I was more impressed by the fast, nearly instantaneous, boot speed than the small footprint used but that was because I was already a 68k Amiga user. Now what happened to AmigaOS 4 besides fat PPC and MMU paging overhead?

Last edited by matthey on 09-Jun-2021 at 10:43 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 09-Jun-2021 at 10:40 PM.

@Trekiej

Total Votes: 173
Total Voters: 167

_________________
John 3:16