@ppcamiga1

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"Delving into the past can be a dangerous exercise." -hyperionmp

"I've been a supporter of "REACTION" GUI because is an Amiga OS thing." -Snuffy

"I personally prefer a vision of do'ers and makers rather than

NutsAboutAmiga Quote:

Well your problem, is that you expect standard hardware to be more impressive if it has Amiga sticker on it, well that’s not how it works.

I have come to expect standard hardware with an Amiga sticker on it to be less impressive and cost more than Windows, Mac and Linux hardware.

NutsAboutAmiga Quote:

It does not need to be better, it just need to be interesting, or something people like, if your listening on radio, next song does not need to be better than the last song, it only needs to be good song/melody. Or think of food, tacos better then apple pie?

The Amiga is a product with a price and not a song. The Amiga is like producing old mundane stripped down cars rebadged as an Amiga and sold for twice as much as modern cars. It's not good at performance, luxury or fuel economy any more but look at that shiny Amiga emblem. Sadly, the Amiga used to produce fun and unique little lightweight sports cars but the modern company decided to upscale into more mainstream car production. I love diversity but the current so called next generation Amigas are not nearly as unique in a good way as the originals.

Last edited by matthey on 02-Nov-2021 at 07:04 PM.

@matthey

The choice is to not have any improvements, because your too afraid to mess things up. Adopting modern GPU, sound chips, and modern SATA controllers etc. allows you actually buy new hardware, that is not 30 years old.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 02-Nov-2021 at 07:59 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 02-Nov-2021 at 07:17 PM.

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NutsAboutAmiga Quote:

The choice is to not have any improvements, because your too afraid to mess things up. Adopting modern GPU, sound chips, and modern SATA controllers etc. allows you actually buy new hardware, that is not 30 years old.

FPGA Amiga hardware allows to use new hardware as well. Multiple devices have upgraded sound. SATA and PCIe require SerDes which increase the cost of the FPGA but could easily be added. Modern GPUs with the best combination of performance/power and performance/price are HSA APUs which have the CPU and GPU integrated with coherent caches between them and using a shared flat memory model. All the FPGA hardware has to do is add an integrated HSA GPU to be more modern than the 15 year old PPC hardware using older graphics cards through an expansion that is becoming outdated for GPUs. I guess that's what happens when using the trailing edge of technology instead of leading edge.

My 2c:

Amiga is any computer with the following properties:

- Optimised to achieve raw performance out of the hardware it's running on, even if that means ignoring enterprise features like security, strict user access control, code signing etc.
- Designed for a single user to use for creative and entertaining endeavours
- A user experience so intuitive it's even easier than a mac yet encourages personalisation and customisation
- An operating system with a clean and simple design that invites the user to know exactly how the software fits together, exactly what is running and uses plain language to make it clear what's what
- Runs classic Amiga software one way or another even if that's just through a UAE sandbox, but ideally the software would at least run in a sort of coherence mode (ala Parallels on mac) so that it feels like an integrated experience

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Users defines Amiga.

@utri007

Quote:

Users defines Amiga.

Yes. Other platforms don't have users.

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All the way, with 68k

@Rose

At first I thought it was saying:

Just because you are unique.

Does not mean you are not utensil.

@Cheese

stop trolling and start working on aros

Quote:

bison wrote: What defines Amiga: the custom chipset, or the system software?

Legal definition:

The brand name 'Amiga' written on the case of the computer.

Historical definition:

The Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985 and built until 1996
At its core, the Amiga has a custom chipset consisting of several coprocessors, which handle audio, video and direct memory access independently of the Central Processing Unit (CPU).
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga )

Personal definition:

One of the computer I grew up with, it was a lot of fun playing with it, learning 'C' programming on it, playing around with NetBSD and there where even more thing I would not tell here because I want to stay anonymous.
Now I'm grown up, leaving the Amiga is like leaving your home forever but I will never be young and have the same experiences like I had it with this system.

@bison

Quote:

What defines Amiga: the custom chipset, or the system software?

I think you guys are asking the wrong questions, wouldn't it be better to ask for:

What would you accept (wish or dream of) as next Amiga?

@matthey

It depends.
I use original amiga 500 from Commodore.
It was great computer.
fast and with unique features.

I have original amiga 1200 from Commodore.
Amiga 1200 was not fast and unique.
Amiga 1200 was underpowered overpriced crap.
Since 1992 pc/mac/atari has better and faster graphics.
I regret I buy amiga 1200.
It was wasted money.
I should buy pc instead.
Good pc cost at that time almost the same money.

So called next generation Amigas are better Amigas than everything what Commodore produce after Amiga 500.
They have decent graphics and cost maybee two times than good pc.
For toy for developers it is not much.
They provide better value for money than AGA crap.

In December of 1992, when I purchased my Amiga 1200 HD (40MB) for $1,190 AUD, there was not an IBM compatible PC, Mac, or Atari system that could do what the A1200 did for the same price. I did also buy a memory expansion card with 68882 FPU and 2x4MB SIMMs for $699 at the same time. Memory was not Amiga specific, so it was the same price for adding 8MB to a PC.

Were IBM PC compatibles faster and had better upgrade options than a wedge keyboard case of the A1200? Yes. But all those things came at a cost. I had a couple of friends who had a 486 DX2 66MHz system, with a 2MB graphics card, and sound card, and I/O card (since PC motherboards only came with a DIN socket), and an IDE card. The machine was faster than the A1200, but it cost twice as much as an A1200, and it could only single task.

The library of creative software for the Amiga at the time was beyond what was available for Windows 3.1

All Macs were way more expensive. Always have been. Before 2009, I only ever bought used Macs. A brand new LC was more than twice the price of an A1200. And if you want to compare it to the LC II which is its contemporary, it was about twice the price of an A1200.

Macs had a good library of creative software, but all upgrades and peripherals for Macs were also more expensive than for an Amiga.

In Australia, Atari STs were really only popular with musicians, because of the built-in MIDI and the audio software library. You would see them sold in the stores selling musical instruments.

Since I wasn't made of money at the time, the best value for money was an Amiga 1200 HD.

It wasn't until 1994 that PC prices came down to what I would consider affordable. I built my first PC (Pentium 90 MHz) in late 1995, after Windows 95 came out. About 3 years after I bought the A1200. While it was excellent at playing Doom II, it was still a system which would have challenges in configuring sound drivers for certain games, joystick configuration and calibration issues, and would present IRQ conflicts for expansion boards and I/O ports.

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@agami

Maybee in Australia.
In Europe one can buy 386 SX with faster and better graphics for price of Amiga 1200.

@ppcamiga1

Really, a different Europe than the one I live in?

I recall very well how my student loan financed A1200 setup was half the price of the “cheapest PC they could find” that the family back home managed to get - and that was before the soundblaster/cdrom/multimedia kit craze, and windows 3.0 installed from floppies to a mighty 120MB hard drive.

I was not a computer guy at the time, and when I as a student was looking around for a computer, there was plenty of 386 offers, but they were all way out of budget.

Last edited by kolla on 04-Nov-2021 at 08:29 AM.

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@agami

And yet you define your user based on being here.

@ppcamiga1

You are doing the same mistake as the anti-AmigaOne crowd does in evaluating cost-effectiveness. I had an A4000 for many years. It suited my purposes until school and the net demanded otherwise. So value for money isn't a single base of evaluation. You can pay more for a machine at one point and use it in a way that makes value for money more effective than buying cheap and then needing to replace stuff and buy software which is already available from before because you already had an Amiga and because we do stuff differently, most of what you used still worked.

Last edited by Srtest on 04-Nov-2021 at 10:45 AM.
Last edited by Srtest on 04-Nov-2021 at 10:41 AM.

@thread

If you would have asked me back in the day, the unity of hardware and software would have been what defined Amiga. Having a bunch of custom chips supported by an operating system from the same place. Total integration like what Apple is doing now.

Now Amiga is so all-over-the-floor that it defies definition. What a mess. All to use some cheap off-the-shelf components in the late 90's. What a mistake that was.

@Srtest

I have nothing against classic Amiga and their users.
But restrictions to these having chipset is wrong.
I stopped using chipset in Amiga classic times.

@ppcamiga1

Quote:

In Europe one can buy 386 SX with faster and better graphics for price of Amiga 1200.

Simply not true! Commodore had a great market niche with the Amiga! The PC was catching up but people had to pay through the nose for it! Most after spending hundreds of £s then used Microsoft Works which sucked!

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ppcamiga1 Quote:

It depends. I use original amiga 500 from Commodore. It was great computer. fast and with unique features.

Yes, the Amiga had the best PC hardware in 1985.

ppcamiga1 Quote:

I have original amiga 1200 from Commodore. Amiga 1200 was not fast and unique. Amiga 1200 was underpowered overpriced crap. Since 1992 pc/mac/atari has better and faster graphics. I regret I buy amiga 1200. It was wasted money. I should buy pc instead. Good pc cost at that time almost the same money.

o The 32 bit 68EC020@14MHz is 3 to 4 times better performance than a 16 bit 68000@7MHz
o AGA with 32 bit wide chip bus and FastPage mem accesses was up to 4 times the mem bandwidth of the 16 bit OCS/ECS
o Amiga 1200s are more expandable and have held their value better than Amiga 500s

The Amiga 1200 was still competitive in performance/price at the low end of the PC market in 1992. AGA should have been out 1-2 years earlier in the Amiga 3000+ (chipset delays likely affected the Amiga 1200 too) which would have made it more competitive. While AGA was late and less competitive in 1992, it was substantially better performance than OCS/ECS. OCS/ECS only allowed 16 colors in low resolution or 4 colors in high resolution before stealing cycles from the CPU where AGA allowed 64 colors in low resolution and 16 colors in high resolution. The limitation was mostly due to chip memory bandwidth limitations (and the slow Alice circuitry on an old chip fab process).

1985: 16 bit wide ECS@7MHz - 112 MiB/s
1992: 32 bit wide AGA@14MHz - 448 or 896 MiB/s (FastPage mode can double transfer rate)
2001: 64 bit wide DDR@100MHz - 1600 MiB/s (double data rate doubles transfer rate)
2021: 64 bit wide DDR5@400MHz - 51,200 MiB/s (double data rate doubles transfer rate)

The actual Amiga memory bandwidth had to be shared (multiplexed) between 2 buses and these rates are theoretical so would not be seen in practice (perhaps old memory was even more limiting as these Amiga memory bandwidths seem high). My point is that newer memory has much higher bandwidth today and it is ignorance to think in terms of old memory bandwidths. I'm not a hardware guy so perhaps someone can shed some light on the Amiga bandwidth discrepancy.

ppcamiga1 Quote:

So called next generation Amigas are better Amigas than everything what Commodore produce after Amiga 500. They have decent graphics and cost maybe two times than good pc. For toy for developers it is not much. They provide better value for money than AGA crap.

Multiple people corrected you that the "AGA crap" was actually competitive and perhaps even cheaper than other offerings in 1992 but you admit PPC Amigas cost twice as much as the competition. While "they have descent graphics", the PPC CPUs are behind the competition in performance and falling further behind. The A1222 may be close to the integer performance of the Raspberry Pi 4 but is blown away in performance/price by more than 2 times and offers standard FPUs and SIMD units for all the cores which are functional with SMP unlike under AmigaOS 4. The Amiga 1200 in 1992 was much more competitive than any PPC AmigaOne hardware today.

Samurai_Crow Quote:

If you would have asked me back in the day, the unity of hardware and software would have been what defined Amiga. Having a bunch of custom chips supported by an operating system from the same place. Total integration like what Apple is doing now. Now Amiga is so all-over-the-floor that it defies definition. What a mess. All to use some cheap off-the-shelf components in the late 90's. What a mistake that was.

Off the shelf commodity hardware was not so much a mistake while fab processes were being updated quickly. It was expensive to create new revisions of chips to keep up with technology. It was easier for larger companies to create the best designs, pay up for the most advanced chip processes and then make them available in expansions even though more integration is more efficient for performance, power and cost. It was more important to be quick to market than to try to optimize designs. Today, the designs are getting to the point where it is difficult to improve performance and power elsewhere and die shrinks offer less advantage due to current leakage, high cost for newer processes and difficulty introducing new smaller processes. It is also cheaper to produce new designs as FPGA prices have fallen and fab services are more of a a la cart commodity service today.

Last edited by matthey on 06-Nov-2021 at 01:01 AM.