AP Quote:

Other question: Would it more "Amiga" for you if a computer is just called "Amiga" regardless of the OS? Like the "Amiga mini" from CommodoreUSA? Then put a sticker on your Linux-box and be happy, for me this isn´t the definition of an Amiga.

You are turning Amiga branding into a philosophical judgment instead of a legal question of who can use Amiga branding.

AP Quote:

What I am saying is: This is nitpicking and I am tired to hear this from AmigaOS4-haters over and over. It´s like: "I don´t like AmigaOS4 and dedicated hardware. But no matter what you say, take this: It´s not "Amiga" anyway!"

Here you don't like other people's philosophical judgment that AmigaOne/AmigaOS 4 hardware "isn't the definition of an Amiga".

AP Quote:

This is your opinion. Historical it is. And even not: For me is hardware designed to run AmigaOS4 of course an Amiga-computer these days. Even if Commodore survived a modern Amiga wouldn't have fancy custom-chips these days. I assume they would have taken the Apple-route. The constant feature of Apple-computers/Macs is the OS and of course this is also true for "Amiga" this days.

Today, Apple is using custom hardware like the Amiga but more integrated which is the direction CBM was headed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1

CBM was more vertically integrated by also being able to fab their own chips with the acquisition of MOS but any advantage was quickly lost as they didn't upgrade their technology and it may have become a liability by the time they went bankrupt. Today, it makes more sense to be fabless as the forge services have become highly competitive specialized commodity services. Apple is designing their own advanced processor cores which CBM considered with licensing of the 68k for a cost reduced single chip Amiga SoC and PA-RISC SIMD unit modifications for the Hombre GPU. The copper and blitter were primitive processors in comparison and the 6502 processor acquired with MOS was only moderately more advanced. I have every reason to believe CBM could have moved more into CPU and GPU core design had management wanted to and prioritized it.

Last edited by matthey on 30-Oct-2021 at 08:02 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 30-Oct-2021 at 07:50 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 30-Oct-2021 at 07:47 PM.

@matthey: The/my point is still that the "AmigaONE"-brand was historical an official "Amiga"-brand. At the moment it's the only brand which can be used for AOS4-computers, that's true.

But this can chance very fast wehen Amiga Corp. is winning the court case and decided to work together with A-EON (which is most likely).

All the rest is philosophical indeed.

And of course my AmigaONE X500 is an Amiga for me.

Last edited by AP on 30-Oct-2021 at 08:00 PM.

_________________
AmigaOne X5000/40, 2.2 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, Radeon R9 280X, M-Audio Revolution 5.1, 240 GB SSD

@AP

Quote:

For me is hardware designed to run AmigaOS4 of course an Amiga-computer these days.

In private conversations, I did refer to my SAM as "my Amiga" of course - just like you do.

But you're the one who introduced the term "official" into the conversation ("official Amiga computer") and that's just hilarious. "Officially", you can't call it an Amiga - period.

"Officially", it's using a brand name that stands for complete failure since 2001. A brand name not even Aeonkit wants to use anymore. A brand name that's been used for 20 years to sell overpriced crap to us - because said crap was allegedly "designed for AmigaOS" (it wasn't - all of the boards ran Linux first).

@cgutjahr

Quote:

cgutjahr wrote: @AP (...) But you're the one who introduced the term "official" into the conversation ("official Amiga computer") and that's just hilarious. "Officially", you can't call it an Amiga - period.

As I said before: Nitpicking. "AmigaOne" was the official brand/term for "new" Amiga computers from Amiga Inc., wasn't it? Also period. That was my point.

So beside philosophical reasons I am even official "allowed" to call my computer "AmigaOne". Which contains the term "Amiga" or not? I don't see much of a difference between "Amiga 4000" and "AmigaONE" (regarding name/trademark). AmigaInc. decided to do no space between "Amiga" and the additional term. So what? It was trendy these days (iMac, anyone?). And the license they gave to Hyperion (who gave a sub-licence to A-EON) is still valid till today (yes, I am aware of the court case).

Would it better for you when Amiga Inc. would have chosen "Amiga 8000" or just "Amiga" for their new generation of Amiga-computers? I really don't get your point (beside the fact you'd don't like AmigaOS4 and related hardware).

Last edited by AP on 30-Oct-2021 at 09:09 PM.
Last edited by AP on 30-Oct-2021 at 09:06 PM.

_________________
AmigaOne X5000/40, 2.2 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, Radeon R9 280X, M-Audio Revolution 5.1, 240 GB SSD

Please pass the pancakes and syrup.

@AP

Quote:

So beside philosophical reasons I am even official "allowed" to call my computer "AmigaOne".

I'm not sure you can, A-EON dropped that brand from all their websites (and deleted all their old PRs from the web) long before you bought your X5000.

@cgutjahr:
Quote:

I'm not sure you can, A-EON dropped that brand from all their websites (and deleted all their old PRs from the web) long before you bought your X5000.

As my computer boots with a firmware boot- screen with a big "AmigaOne X5000" on it I assume I can.

There are also entries in some U-Boot-menues with the brand.

And you know that Trevor still holds the rights for "AmigaOne". In his latest interview/speeches (AmiWest for example) he points out that the "AmigaOne"-brand is still valid for the X5000.

Why they choose to drop the brand from their websites (with every other sign from Hyperion) is another question.

Last edited by AP on 31-Oct-2021 at 06:30 AM.

_________________
AmigaOne X5000/40, 2.2 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, Radeon R9 280X, M-Audio Revolution 5.1, 240 GB SSD

@cgutjahr

Quote:

A brand name not even Aeonkit wants to use anymore.

Quote:

A-EON dropped that brand from all their websites (and deleted all their old PRs from the web) long before you bought your X5000.

I understand this was done in order to avoid possible legal conflicts with the unpredictable Hermans, not because they want to dissociate themselves from the brand.

But I agree that "Amiga" and "failure" could easily be taken as synonoms.

_________________
The Rear Window blog

AmigaOne X5000/020 @ 2GHz / 4GB RAM / Radeon RX 560 / ESI Juli@ / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition
SAM440ep-flex @ 667MHz / 1GB RAM / Radeon 9250 / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition

@cgutjahr

My Amiga (One) deserve more to name Amiga than my old Amiga 1200 from Commodore.
So no problem with calling it Amiga even it has no custom chips.

@ppcamiga1

The whole point of this argument is 2 fold:

1. To go about a certain origin with Amiga's custom chips. Saying you either work through that or you're a derivative.
2. Likewise, Amiga as an origin is put against its rivals horse power and then evidently, it has less to do with those chips and more with its 68k processor not being sufficient.

The contradictory nature of these arguments is apparent: There is an original Amiga with a superior custom chip design which is also inferior as it happens to be according to various benchmarks of "real world". So what it is? Is Amiga original via its custom chips but not via its original enabler processor? You have those who still vouch of the tech of that line of processors. So you it's more about the argument than what constructs a real Amiga, since the functions of the software can in fact be done using different hardware and translated. Immediacy can be judged based on metrics which are measurable.

Another thing of course is the Amiga's original uses. There are those here who always challenge OS4 based on it not having a feature or allows usage in a way that makes it superior based on that aspect - something the original Amiga had. Meaning the pros of using OS4 are simply doing stuff with it, which was also a part of the original intent. The things is, the original design appealed in a context that is ignored in these discussions. When you go outside of it, sometimes what makes a thing work and be more than one would assume about it, is what limits it after some time has passed. Enabling a feature and its elaborate usage is a contradiction in itself because enabling in current times means creating for what is to come but sometimes angling towards that means you don't have a practical pathway right now to allows you to achieve what you want.

@Srtest

I have original Amiga 1200 from Commodore.
Biggest flaw of Amiga 1200 was it has no chunky pixels.
In 256 or more colors everything can be done faster on cpu than on chipset.
AGA not speedup but slowdown Amiga 1200.
I'm happy I do not have to use chipset anymore in Amiga.

Quote:

ppcamiga1 wrote: So no problem with calling it Amiga even it has no custom chips.

You can also call it Dracolina or Lorraine, no one will sue you unless you sell it under a wrong name.

Custom chips are slow for anything useful, lacks chunky and 16/24 bit screens support so for current software they are completely unusable.
Fortunately AmigaOS has grown and with OS4/MOS we can use modern video card for gfx acceleration in 2d and 3d modes, but also modern sound cards, network chipsets, usb ports, etc...

As already said by others todays PC, but especially Macs with new M! lineup, represents what Amiga could has been today, looking at hardware side.
All they lacks instead AmigaOS and all its features who have distinguished our loved system in past years.

So IMHO Amiga can be any modern system where software and hardware are well connected using AmigaOS based kernel (ExecNG) with intuition, libraries and devices as we known.

I still haven't understand what prevents AEON to use Raptor Power systems ad base of next AmigaOS

Last edited by Fl@sh on 31-Oct-2021 at 06:13 PM.

_________________
Pegasos II G4@1GHz 2GB Radeon 9250 256MB
AmigaOS4.1 fe - MorphOS - Debian 9 Jessie

Srtest Quote:

The whole point of this argument is 2 fold: 1. To go about a certain origin with Amiga's custom chips. Saying you either work through that or you're a derivative. 2. Likewise, Amiga as an origin is put against its rivals horse power and then evidently, it has less to do with those chips and more with its 68k processor not being sufficient. The contradictory nature of these arguments is apparent: There is an original Amiga with a superior custom chip design which is also inferior as it happens to be according to various benchmarks of "real world". So what it is? Is Amiga original via its custom chips but not via its original enabler processor? You have those who still vouch of the tech of that line of processors. So you it's more about the argument than what constructs a real Amiga, since the functions of the software can in fact be done using different hardware and translated. Immediacy can be judged based on metrics which are measurable.

I see no dichotomy. The Amiga custom chips were the best affordable PC custom chips in the world in 1985 despite using an older NMOS and chip fab process. It was necessary to keep the price low enough so a family would buy a computer instead of a car. Evolutionary change rarely comes from niche market products and the same applies to PCs. The 68000 design was not the highest performance affordable CPU which could be used in a PC. The 68000 was released in 1979 and was a quick to market microcoded design instead of a highly optimized design. The special part about it was the ISA which allowed a full 32 bit upgrade path and the flat memory model. The 68020 was available in 1984 but again would have up priced the Amiga and may have delayed the release. The original Amiga hardware generally outperformed the post 8 bit generation of computers like the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST and IBM AT while being cheaper than most (good performance/price). Despite the superiority of the Amiga hardware, Jay Miner started working on and practically completed the Amiga Ranger chipset which was rejected by CBM as too expensive while the Amiga 2000 design was chosen for the high end with only minor chipset upgrades. Ranger would have increased chip memory to 2MiB and doubled the memory bandwidth allowing resolutions of up to 1024x1024 and up to 128 colors without HAM while increasing graphics performance in 1987. The problem was not the custom chip route but that the engineers had a better vision for where the Amiga needed to go than upper management, time and time again. CBM had the resources and engineers to keep the Amiga technology competitive but they failed to do so. With Jay "father of the Amiga" Miner and Chuck "father of the 6502" Pedal, CBM failed to make significant enough upgrades to the Amiga technology that the Amiga fell behind by the late 1980s and Moore's Law left them in the dust as chip fab technology increased to full throttle. The best commodity hardware designs were mass produced and using them piecemeal via expansion was better than designing more efficient and integrated designs. As Moore's Law is coming to an end due to approaching the limits at the atomic level of chip fabrication, the pendulum is swinging back the other way. In any case, the Amiga chipset often compared favorably to commodity hardware via expansion for several years. It can't be fairly compared to hardware which is using a significantly newer chip fabrication technology and newer memory any more than CPUs can.

I voted yes in the poll that Amiga custom chips are not needed for a real Amiga. This is due to my belief that a real Amiga in name is a choice of the owner of the brand. An Apple Macintosh would certainly be a Macintosh without their custom chip SoCs today if Apple chose a different route but it is my opinion that the pendulum has swung back in the favor of custom chips which is why Apple saw advantages and chose to become more vertically integrated by designing their own chips. It's wasn't the cheapest route to become a fabless designer but then again the $278 million acquisition of P.A. Semi looks cheap today if the Intel $2 billion offer to buy SiFive is true. I would rather invest in a fabless semiconductor hardware design business than a software OS design business.

Srtest Quote:

Another thing of course is the Amiga's original uses. There are those here who always challenge OS4 based on it not having a feature or allows usage in a way that makes it superior based on that aspect - something the original Amiga had. Meaning the pros of using OS4 are simply doing stuff with it, which was also a part of the original intent. The things is, the original design appealed in a context that is ignored in these discussions. When you go outside of it, sometimes what makes a thing work and be more than one would assume about it, is what limits it after some time has passed. Enabling a feature and its elaborate usage is a contradiction in itself because enabling in current times means creating for what is to come but sometimes angling towards that means you don't have a practical pathway right now to allows you to achieve what you want.

I have little doubt that AmigaOS 4 has increased general purpose functionality and has synergies with higher performance hardware. The problem for AmigaOS 4 on PPC is that competitors offer the same or more functionality with better performance/price. At the same time, the advantage of retro gaming provided by custom chips and which likely appeals to millions of potential customers is ignored. If there are millions of potential customers then this should allow mass production to provide a more competitive performance/price instead of high priced niche market AmigaOne products.

Fl@sh Quote:

Custom chips are slow for anything useful, lacks chunky and 16/24 bit screens support so for current software they are completely unusable. Fortunately AmigaOS has grown and with OS4/MOS we can use modern video card for gfx acceleration in 2d and 3d modes, but also modern sound cards, network chipsets, usb ports, etc...

Modern Amiga custom chip implementations in FPGA are fast and offer chunky support despite FPGA limitations. There is little 3D hardware support but many 3D cores are available for license and gfx cards could be supported through hardware expansion while Amiga custom chip compatibility is maintained. There is also the possibility of an organic 3D design which offers more flexibility in case a new 3D standard with ray tracing capabilities was wanted for example.

Fl@sh Quote:

As already said by others todays PC, but especially Macs with new M! lineup, represents what Amiga could has been today, looking at hardware side. All they lacks instead AmigaOS and all its features who have distinguished our loved system in past years.

SoCs are quite common today and not just from Apple. They are even used in AmigaOne hardware. The question is whether to use a design created by someone else for the advantage of their products or design your own with advantages for your products.

Fl@sh Quote:

So IMHO Amiga can be any modern system where software and hardware are well connected using AmigaOS based kernel (ExecNG) with intuition, libraries and devices as we known.

Hardware on diverse systems needs many drivers often of dubious quality or the Amiga could go back to standard hardware with a few highly optimized drivers.

Fl@sh Quote:

I still haven't understand what prevents AEON to use Raptor Power systems ad base of next AmigaOS

The advantage of the AmigaOS supporting POWER is greatly diminished by lack of SMP support, which likely requires breaking AmigaOne PPC compatibility to add. The price of the hardware would be higher than the AmigaOne X5000 while offering only a moderate performance advantage using a single core. Furthermore, the next generation of POWER hardware changed directions and is likely to be significantly more expensive making a roadmap for the future difficult.

@matthey

There has never been such a thing like a "ranger chipset". It was the granpa of the Buster chip, but people keep attributing superpowers to a funny name.

I need to remind you that it was finally found in 2015. Dale Luck had one sitting in his cellar.

https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/prototype-found-amiga-ranger

Chris Collins was then allowed to take a full photo session of the babe and shared the info
https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=69487.0

Quoting from the above, to keep it short:
"I spoke to Dale about the Ranger and the idea there was a new chipset is bogus. This was a new mechanical design (case) and the ability to have multiple expansion cards (zorro cards). The image Brian posted is of a case mockup that was for thermal testing of the mechanical design. It would be great if we could get the wikipedia article on this subject corrected (there was no "Ranger Chipset".....well the Zorro autoconfig logic doesnt really count."

More photos, Hope Chris does not get mad at me:
https://chrisxyz.smugmug.com/Geeky/Amiga/Amiga-backdropped/i-CJzJxS6

Please let's stop telling a weird tale of a chipset forged with pixie dust and dragon blood :)

As for the question itself, Jay Miner and the gang at Hi-Toro designed a chipset, not an OS. They could not care less about having one, as they wanted to create a game machine. That's why, like it or not, the chipset defines what is the Amiga.

The OS was just an addition that Commodore decided to rush as they repurposed a game console hardware to be a multimedia computer.

This, my friends, is history, not opinions.

IridiumFX Quote:

There has never been such a thing like a "ranger chipset". It was the granpa of the Buster chip, but people keep attributing superpowers to a funny name.

Not true according to Jay Miner.

Jay Miner Quote:

In spite of very limited manpower, we managed to finish the 1.2 software release; and designed a revised set of custom chips for the next generation of Amiga computers. ... Commodore now has a high resolution chip set of Amiga chips that I worked on when we were with Amiga in Los Gatos. These chips use video ram and can produce a very high resolution ten twenty four display along with the present Amiga display simultaneously. They increase the display address range to two megabytes. These chips are completed and tested and only require a computer and memory to hold them together. I'd like everyone to know that Amiga in Los Gatos designed these chips! These improved Amiga chips can use a new type of ram called video ram. The new type of ram - video ram - is a giant step in computer improvement because it frees up the bottleneck into memory caused by competition between the computer itself and the memory fetchers required for the high resolution display. Imagine having a gigantic parallel output port thousands of bit wide just for video. You wouldn't have to access it very often to dump a lot of memory data to a video picture. The way it works is the video data for the high resolution display is dumped from memory into a large parallel to serial shift register right on the video ram chips. This outputs hundreds of picture bits - pixels - in one memory cycle, leaving 99% of the memory bandwidth for the computer. This is critically important for very high resolution multibitplane colour displays. Video ram can also be used for other things than video. It can provide a very fast path to hardware parallel processors; such as blitter and all kinds of I/O such as audio, hard disk and networking ports. Special purpose multiport chips like the video ram will continue to evolve and we will see multishift register ports for dumping many of these datatype bidirectionally and simultaneously. So keep your eye on video ram and on the next generation of Amiga computers that will probably use it.

Amiga User International - Jay Miner the 'Father of the Amiga' (June 1988)
https://web.archive.org/web/20071023140350/http://www.amigau.com/aig/jayinterview1.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20030506234259/http://amigau.com/aig/jayinterview2.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20030507002636/http://amigau.com/aig/jayinterview3.jpg

Jay had rather specific information on his last Amiga chipset design. The dual ported video ram not only doubles the memory bandwidth but it allows two sources to use the memory in parallel.

IridiumFX Quote:

As for the question itself, Jay Miner and the gang at Hi-Toro designed a chipset, not an OS. They could not care less about having one, as they wanted to create a game machine. That's why, like it or not, the chipset defines what is the Amiga. The OS was just an addition that Commodore decided to rush as they repurposed a game console hardware to be a multimedia computer.

Jay Miner's Amiga gang (Hi-Toro and then CBM Los Gatos group) created up to AmigaOS 1.2 as mentioned above and it had more functionality than most game machine OSs of that time. Jay had every intention of designing a personal computer.

Jay Miner Quote:

I had wanted for years to build a super personal computer based around the Motorola sixty-eight thousand micro processor. ... My goal was to produce a low cost computer that could do good aeroplane simulations. ... I drew several sketches for the outside of the computer showing a large IBM style box with lots of card slots and a large IBM keyboard.

The doctor investors were originally after a game machine. Dave Morse worked toward that goal but Jay was designing a computer which could be cut down to a game machine. When the bottom dropped out of the game machine market, it was Jay's vision of a personal computer which likely saved the company. I believe Jay had every intention of creating a general purpose multimedia personal computer from the beginning. He was fortunate that Carl Sassenrath tossed aside the primitive Atari OS specs to create the AmigaOS which complimented the multimedia Amiga hardware. It was the combination of the AmigaOS and Amiga custom hardware which made the Amiga special.

IridiumFX Quote:

This, my friends, is history, not opinions.

Maybe you should read what the people who wrote the history had to say.

Last edited by matthey on 31-Oct-2021 at 11:08 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 31-Oct-2021 at 10:58 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 31-Oct-2021 at 10:54 PM.

@IridiumFX

Quote:

This, my friends, is history, not opinions.

Yes, history.
Therefore it can't be:
Quote:

hat's why, like it or not, the chipset defines what is the Amiga.

Rather:
The chipset(s) defined what was the Amiga.

Also, from Wikipedia:
Quote:

There, they [Hi-Toro team] started to create a new 68000-based games console, codenamed Lorraine, that could be upgraded to a full-fledged computer.

Jay Miner, and quite possibly a large portion of the team, would not have cared about an OS. Why would they, they're hardware engineers after all.

But not even Jay could have denied that in order for a "Lorraine" console to be expanded into a full-fledged computer, it would've required an OS. All the Commodore purchase (bailout) did, is prioritize the computer part of the equation, and accelerate the need for the OS.

No one does, or at least no one should, remember Commodore as some benevolent savior of Hi-Toro/Amiga. I think it was partially the opportunity to rapidly get a creative PC to market to compete with Apple's Macintosh, but my cynical side thinks that for Commodore's upper management it was more about kicking Atari in the proverbial nuts.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@IridiumFX

Quote:

That's why, like it or not, the chipset defines what is the Amiga.

This sounds like a another poll.

What defines Amiga: chipset of software?

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@agami

Quote:

Jay Miner, and quite possibly a large portion of the team, would not have cared about an OS.

This is true, as evidenced by my signature below.

Last edited by bison on 01-Nov-2021 at 02:41 AM.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner