SHADES Quote:

Even Trevor has acknowledged that there is a desire to move to ARM now, it was at one of the shows. I don't remember which one, however he didn't seem too happy about it. More of a "here we go again" direction change sigh.

I recall watching the same video. Trevor did not seem enthused by the suggestion of ARM. ARM makes sense in some ways like cheap hardware and AArch64 architecture similarities to the PPC architecture. However, there may be more negatives than positives, especially for Trevor. Trevor is interested in desktop Amiga like hardware where ARM hardware is still inferior to x86-64 hardware. AROS and MorphOS have large head starts on higher performance x86-64 hardware with better PCIe support which is preferable for the desktop. AROS x86-64 is already 64-bit and closer to SMP than AmigaOS 4. The cheapest x86-64 SBC hardware is only down to about $150 USD but this is cheap enough for desktop purposes and outperforms PPC Amiga1 hardware and most ARM hardware. AmigaOS 4 on x86-64 will likely not be able to dominate while playing catch up with AROS and MorphOS and the cost of porting AmigaOS 4 to x86-64 will likely add to the system cost pushing the price above AROS x86-64 systems at least. The result is more Amiga market division with 68k AmigaOS 3, PPC AmigaOS 4, x86-64 AmigaOS 4, AROS x86-64. AROS 68k, MorphOS x86-64 and MorphOS PPC. There is barely native AROS ARM support so ARM would introduce more architectural division with 68k AmigaOS 3, PPC AmigaOS 4, ARM AmigaOS 4, AROS x86-64. AROS 68k, MorphOS x86-64 and MorphOS PPC. Some people think more porting targets and architectural support is better but is it better to have strong united support on a few or even one architecture or divided weak support on many?

Even with cheap ARM hardware like the RPi, A-Eon and Hyperion cost overhead would likely make an AmigaOS 4 RPi system many times more expensive. THEA500 Mini and A600GS systems are already several times higher price that a RPi system and they mostly use free open source software. The value is not in the cheap ARM hardware but rather in intangibles if it exists at all. The real desire of such systems is for 68k compatibility, performance and modern features which emulation on ARM is poor at delivering and where ARM would not be competitive if more modern 68k Amiga hardware existed. ARM AArch64 hardware has no innate low cost advantage but seems so relative to bloated and baggage ridden x86-64 hardware. The 68k architecture is smaller and less bloated than AArch64 and has several cost advantages over AArch64. The strength of the Amiga lies in the standard unifying 68k AmigaOS system which is the base of so called Amiga NG systems using emulation. Emulation is not cost competitive and real mass produced 68k Amiga hardware may be possible. The problem for Trevor is that it may not initially be desktop class hardware and A-Eon and Hyperion may become superfluous in purpose. Significant investment is needed to create a 68k ASIC SoC but A-Eon produced large expensive motherboards are outdated and Hyperion is more of a parasite increasing AmigaOS costs than a benefit. Ben chose the route of a con man and has associated the Amiga with corruption. He should be removed to increase Amiga business prospects and investment. Trevor created the monster and knows he is bad but so far has been unwilling to destroy him (actually Ben destroying himself with the consequences of his actions). I see Michele as the good guy being the leader that Trevor should have been long ago.

SHADES Quote:

That being said, "using ancient and handicapped PPC CPUs with tiny hardware production for outrageous prices." You couldn't be more correct. You aren't growing any further while this fact remains. No one other than wealthy enthusits are going to consider this and that resource grows smaller, daily.

Developers usually aren't wealthy enthusiasts. Every once in awhile a wealthy enthusiast is a developer but their numbers are small. There is also the question of how long wealthy enthusiasts support more and more antiquated PPC hardware when they can buy whatever high end hardware they want.

Hypex Quote:

This question is hard to answer in the modern age as the modern Amiga scene is fairly broad. Regardless of acknowledging it the modern scene goes beyond 68K. And has widened since the late 90's when Amiga was just 68K and simple. But I'll pick one example: Tabor. This was a good idea. Bring out an OS4 machine as cheap as possible but powerful enough to compete with existing OS4 hardware. Unfortunately, it failed. It's released now but it failed to meet its purpose. In some ways it's like an A600, where it cost more than an A500, where the idea was a cheaper A300 being produced. The questionable CPU choice caused incompatibility and needed an emulator (ridiculous in itself) which added both time and extra costs. Down the track parts became rare and expensive before a stable production run. By the time it did come out it had become too expensive to serve its purpose. On top of this there were more delays with boards being sent out. And those early customers receiving boards late. I use this as an example because it was a good idea at the time to broaden the OS4 market and be more practical in pricing. I spoke to Amiga people who were really interested in it and some only knew 68K. So it was good opportunity. But in the end it was ruined. It was almost a decade late. They stuffed it up.

Well written. The Amiga 300/600 and Tabor/A1222 are indeed similar cost reduction debacles that started as good ideas that went bad. The A1222 project was started in concurrency with the X5000 project. Likely due to the bastard PPC CPU selection, the AmigaOS required 3-4 years to adapt to the A1222 hardware. There is a huge advantage to producing hardware compatible with existing software which Trevor found out the hard way. COVID caused the price of CPUs to increase by 4 times which gave Trevor a chance to unload the CPUs, likely for around the price he paid for them. He may have had to eat the price of motherboards and AmigaOS 4 support for the A1222 but many components were changed for the A1222+ so likely were not bought yet. He doubled down on what he had to have realized was already a mistake, throwing good money after bad. The following video is where he talks about the info above.

Amiga 37 - Live Stream
https://youtu.be/XHrm8XA59yw?t=16177

The SoC/CPU selections for Efika and Sam were better low end PPC choices but perhaps not desktop enough for Trevor or did he want to dominate the Amiga1 market using perpetual worldwide Amiga IP sub-licenses conveniently obtained from Ben? What was the price for obtaining the sub-licenses and who funded the acquisition of the Amiga IP licenses in the first place through coercion of a financially distressed Amiga Inc.? Who can read the following e-mail transaction between Ben and Bill and not believe the 2009 settlement agreement written by Ben was coerced?

https://docs.google.com/file/d/1kSIJR_3xeJbDfnBS2ZmcsgMZV82OXuTq/edit Quote:

Hi Bill, It appears you stepped down as CEO and president or whatever titles you were holding at Amiga Inc. In the process you let the Amiga US trademarks expire. I had to retain a specialized law-firm to refile the trademarks. Which cost quite a bit of money and is blatant violation of the settlement agreement between the Amiga Parties and Hyperion. They pointed me to some friendly litigators over in Seattle who are experts at tracking down former execs and officers of companies and dragging them in to court (in whatever state they are hiding). I assume you rather avoid that expense and annoyance. Your EU trademarks are still valid. If you sign them over to Hyperion, we can avoid this unpleasantness. You know representation is going to cost you whatever happens. Please confirm you agree to sign over the Amiga held EU trademarks in Europe to Hyperion within the next 3 business days or we will file a claim against both the defunct Amiga entity and yourself personally. I can't give you more time because we are up against a statute of limitation so we are not going to take chances. Fair warning Bill. You save a lot of hassle and money in return for something you walked away from. Please do reply. You know I am not the one to talk big and then not follow up on my actions. I trust you will see the extremely reasonable nature of my proposal. Otherwise the gloves come off. ... Bill, First of all, thank you for that. Secondly, you did have that power until recently so if this does not pan out, all bets are off. You can communicate that to the former directors as well. We already spent well over lOK USD on this matter retaining both speciaised IP and specialised bankruptcy firms. We intend to recover that amount even it means going after whomever decided to allow these trademarks to lapse and decided to not even inform us of the current status of the company nor the risk of the trademarks lapsing. We will have our pound of flesh one way or another.

I don't understand how anyone can support someone as toxic and criminal as Ben. He is not helping the Amiga and neither are the people supporting him.

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: SHADES Quote: Even Trevor has acknowledged that there is a desire to move to ARM now, it was at one of the shows. I don't remember which one, however he didn't seem too happy about it. More of a "here we go again" direction change sigh. I recall watching the same video. Trevor did not seem enthused by the suggestion of ARM.

Yuh, because the guy gets off on big-box computing for the elites. And the only ones making limited runs of big-box ARM64 are Apple.
In that interview (on record) he stated that he would hate for Amiga to become a PC. News flash! A-EON X systems are PCs.

Many of us lived through that feeling of superiority with our Amigas in the late '80s and early '90s toward the owners of higher priced and less capable Macs and DOS PCs. We were all a lot younger then and more naive. Most of us grew out of it, though people like Trevor and ppcamiga1 appear to not have.

Trevor likes feeling like he's in on the world's best kept secret. He likes that he can afford expensive dual-socket Power 9 boards and us plebs can't. ARM doesn't fit into that narrative.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@vox

The Tabor, or A1222 as they call it now, looks about twice as much as it should be. Either way it really is too much. 20 years ago now; the Pegasos 1 was $600AU and A1/SE also $600AU (G3), Pegasos 2 $1,000AU and A1/XE $1,400 (G4). An A1222 from AmigaKit France, which seems the only place to buy also under the confusing guise of AAA Technology, is about $1,700AU. For the board only.

The X5000 would be better, but also strangely, unlike the Pegasos 2 and XE G4 it lacks AltiVec. Rarely would I use it specifically, but I like to labour the point, and OS4 would be optimised to make use of it.

OS4.2 was overshooting the mark really. An alleged free upgrade for those entering the beta program, only to be old that oh you need to pay extra for the free 4.2 upgrade, which a decade later is still pending. OS4.1 Final is the closest there was to OS4.2. In included a few 4.2 features like the shell and I forget what else.

Timberwolf was probably a bad idea, as it was expecting a one man team to port a huge program written by thousands of people to OS4, and keep it updated That's too unrealistic. Gone is the time of iBrowse when one man could write a browser. What we got was a demo. Right now Odyssey is the go. Sure, it breaks easily, because it becomes obsolete quickly. So, it becomes annoying, but overshadowed by how slow it loads on my X1000 now. I don't know about Libre as it disappeared and I can run it on Linux anyway. Some things aren't as straightforward as in Wordworth, such as auto dates, and it always changes styles or size in a way I can't figure out how to fix. So you can have it! I can run Wordworth on OS4 where it acts normal and doesn't do weird stuff all over the place.

I think ARM would be the next step. Pending for years. ARM took over from where PPC should have been. It's taken a while for it to feature on Amiga boards and even more for 68K code able to hook into native ARM like a PowerARM setup. But, 68K lasted 10 years, PPC lifespan was really 10 years also, so it should be on ARM now. If we grant PPC time by allowing it 1995 to 2015, then Amiga should have gone ARM 10 years ago. Funny as it happens, this is is where Apple is at, so it makes sense for Amiga/OS4 to once again be a trailblazer after Apple and follow their CPU choice.

However, I think we need better than some fruity sort of Pi. We really need a desktop solution. ARM is making inroads into that. It might even make sense looking at server boards again. Right now, AI has taken over and strangely, previously headerless servers are now running graphic cards! They might still be running as headlerless but they have the expansion slots. OTOH a Pi board tends to lack SATA and PCIe. We need better than SD card storage and inbuilt graphics with no expansion. The PiStorm manages to provide a Pi RTG driver but it doesn't mean OS4 will have an RTG driver with Warp3D out of the box.

@BigD

That's funny. I recently did use Clean up on my OS4 Workbench. As always, it took me three menu operations to get it done just like in the old days. And it still wasn't right, the the labels were off alignment, it wasn't straight. Some things never change!

Alan Redhouse was staple of the Amiga market. I think what ruined it was changing the original plan for a PPC A1200 accelerator to bridge the old to the new. I was looking forward to plugging in a PPC board into my A1200, using OS4 with a real Amiga keyboard, and breathing into it new life.

Instead no, they did backsies. Allegedly they (Escena) couldn't get the accelerator to work, even though a BlizzardPPC had the ground work for a working example, so what went wrong? And then decided to produce this off the shelf MAI Teron PPC server board as a stand alone solution. Which it self had problems. That and foreign UBoot firmware, which was strange as Amigas didn't use any firmware except Kickstart, hurt adoption of it into the Amiga market. I tend to think, had Alan Redhouse had the chance, he would have been better off buying a stock of Pegasos 1 and 2 boards, then relabelling them as AmigaOne boards, and selling them at a slightly higher price. The Pegasos was a better board and they fixed problems with VIA chips the A1 suffered from. As per my last post it was also cheaper. I should have bought one! Could have used it to run OS4 years down the track.

@agami

Quote:

News flash! A-EON X systems are PCs.

Why is that? Because the OS4 boards can only run a single CPU with a single core on a single user OS[4] so therefore are only a single personal computer?

@amigang

Quote:

So I think not having AmgaOS legal messed cleaned up and allowing the community / companies to use AmigaOS in its projects. Prefect example is the Vampire Team and Amigakit, having to side step the Os and use AROS. Now this might not be any one companies fault, but I do think its a shame and a missed opportunity to not unite developers more and make it just easier to support the official OS. But this is a small missed opportunity thank to AROS.

Sorry, I miss the logic behind this whole sentence, if there is any.

You're sad because there is no chance to use AmigaOS in 3rd party projects, because of legal status and companies surrounding AmigaOS, and you blame the only possible alternative as the culprit?

Sorry if I am rude: are you silly?

@matthey

Quote:

SHADES Quote: Even Trevor has acknowledged that there is a desire to move to ARM now, it was at one of the shows. I don't remember which one, however he didn't seem too happy about it. More of a "here we go again" direction change sigh. I recall watching the same video. Trevor did not seem enthused by the suggestion of ARM. ARM makes sense in some ways like cheap hardware and AArch64 architecture similarities to the PPC architecture. However, there may be more negatives than positives, especially for Trevor. Trevor is interested in desktop Amiga like hardware where ARM hardware is still inferior to x86-64 hardware. AROS and MorphOS have large head starts on higher performance x86-64 hardware with better PCIe support which is preferable for the desktop. AROS x86-64 is already 64-bit and closer to SMP than AmigaOS 4. The cheapest x86-64 SBC hardware is only down to about $150 USD but this is cheap enough for desktop purposes and outperforms PPC Amiga1 hardware and most ARM hardware. AmigaOS 4 on x86-64 will likely not be able to dominate while playing catch up with AROS and MorphOS and the cost of porting AmigaOS 4 to x86-64 will likely add to the system cost pushing the price above AROS x86-64 systems at least.

Real issue is no amingan seems capable of foresight. We always reason about what "it was" and what "it is", whilist a real leader would try to figure out how "it will be", which is the real deal when you project to release a new product. It must work well in the future, when iot will be released.

YESTERDAY PPC would have seemed the right choice since even Apple took this route, but as soon as X86-64 went in the business THAT was the train to jump on. ARM presented itself as a good architecture to build mobile devices and embeeded devices on, while PPC struggled to keep its own space alive: most PPC devoted companies understood ARM was the new kid on the block to bet on, and switched to it. This happened 10 years ago, however did you all remember CPU discussions here at the time, and in the meanwhile till today?

ARM has always been an extremely EFFICIENT architecure and TODAY it's now trying to catch up x68-64's performance. But someone here STILL look at at ARM as "energy saving, but not powerful enough" ignoring latest achievements by Apple and Snapdragon. If there is an architecture which would be fine for an hypotetical Amiga machine, that's ARM for sure. Unless you're trying to convince me that there are things done by pricey AmigaONE machines that any cheap tablet or a smartphone wouldn't be able to do.

Guess what will be good TOMORROW?

Other problem is there's no tomorrow for this platform. And there's even no "modern amiga scene" at all, just a bunch of old people pathetically deluding themselves and losing their precious time, trying to keep their world domination dreams alive. We came from a 7-million machines market sold during Commodore era (which is, per se, a tiny market compared to the Wintel one, and even compared to C64 market), then we reduced to a few (2? 3?) thousands users of AmigaOS4/MOS/AROS solutions, to the current few hundreds still following this site. And we just succeded in blaming and fighting ourselves in the meanwhile, every time looking for the new white knight bringing the Amiga flag in his left hand who would have saved the platform from the obliterance. Even I, who always considered myself a patient guy, got sick of all this.

Neverthless, from time to time I get back here to read again and again and again the same foolness. I wonder why I still do it.

@paolone

Quote:

We came from a 7-million machines market sold during Commodore era (which is, per se, a tiny market compared to the Wintel one, and even compared to C64 market), then we reduced to a few (2? 3?) thousands users of AmigaOS4/MOS/AROS solutions, to the current few hundreds still following this site. And we just succeded in blaming and fighting ourselves in the meanwhile, every time looking for the new white knight bringing the Amiga flag in his left hand who would have saved the platform from the obliterance. Even I, who always considered myself a patient guy, got sick of all this.

Worse than the above is that THEA500 Mini has successfully expanded the user base by tens of thousands but we all assume they'll only be used as display pieces and turn a blind eye! We don't support or sell them at Amiga/retro shows or welcome in the new users in any way shape or form that I can see! Our own cottage industry companies get jealous of the RGL profits and reinvent the wheel in a way that no longer appeals the masses and the momentum dissipates while the Amigans stay in their elitist bubble!

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

THEA500Mini was the greatest missed opportunity in the recent years. It sold tens of thousands units that returned a zero impact on the platform (which btw proves that neither AOS 3.x, 4.x or MorphOS need to go mainstream to advance). Unfortunately you can't force RGL to actually care about the community expansion and bring devs and/or port new games or fund any AOS deritive. It's just business. They milked it and moved on to the next retro system. If/when they revisit Amiga market with some full scale Amiga model, perhaps it would be nicer to cooperate with existing Amiga companies and take advantage/license some of the current solutions.

_________________

@Cool_amigaN

Quote:

They milked it and moved on to the next retro system. If/when they revisit Amiga market with some full scale Amiga model, perhaps it would be nicer to cooperate with existing Amiga companies and take advantage/license some of the current solutions.

Complete rubbish! They licensed the Kickstart Roms from Cloanto and WHDLoad. They also paid the likes of Team-17 and Rebellion Developments Limited for the bundled games. While they were nervous about the soft-modding scene allowing side loading of Workbench and other emulators (due to possible returns if the hacks were to the firmware which isn't the case with AMiNIMiga and Pandory) they haven't completely locked the system down with subsequent firmware updates! RGL's marketing/publishing partners Plaion/Koch Media have attended and sponsored Amiga user group meetings. I'm sure they will do so again when the Amiga Maxi is launched!

They did not fail in raising the profile of the Amiga! However, we did fail by not using it as a springboard to get our children, nephews, nieces, friends, milkmen, postmen and candle stick makers to give it a go! I have to assume we love this club to stay a cliquey elitist boys club?! That is the only explanation I can come to. Put your money where you mouth is and buy the Mini for a loved one this Christmas! Why not? We're not getting any younger and if we do actually view this machine as being of benefit to the world rather than just a nostalgic trip down memory lane for us to hear a floppy disk drive loading or to play a level of SWIV on a Quickshot joystick (sore finger alert) then that's the way to perpetuate this! It sure as hell is a lot saner than buying your loved ones a £700+ PS5 Pro IMHO!

Last edited by BigD on 13-Sep-2024 at 05:02 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 13-Sep-2024 at 05:00 PM.

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

agami Quote:

Yuh, because the guy gets off on big-box computing for the elites. And the only ones making limited runs of big-box ARM64 are Apple. In that interview (on record) he stated that he would hate for Amiga to become a PC. News flash! A-EON X systems are PCs.

Maybe the Amiga1 is just Trevor's ego trip but it could be because of his narrow vision too. Yes, it is off the shelf commodity hardware even though PPC and Xorro are supposed to differentiate it from x86-64 PC hardware. The result is similar as Amiga innovation and compatibility was killed and replaced with commodity hardware. As long as the Amiga is a desktop computer with PCI(e) slots and Boing Ball stickers it should suffice his narrow vision. The Apple Mac semi-successfully changed architectures to PPC so the narrow vision wasn't all fantasy in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Mac was about the interface/GUI but the Amiga was about the hardware (and OS) which we loved even though it was mistreated by CBM. The CBM/Amiga market was low cost personal computers for the masses while Macs were upscale personal computers for the classes. Escom/AT also had visions of turning the Amiga into a Mac with the Walker prototype. Ironically, Apple was losing Mac market share with PPC in the mid-1990s and almost went bankrupt in 1997. It was not the desktop that changed Apple's prospects but the iPod and then iPhone which did not use fat PPC.

agami Quote:

Many of us lived through that feeling of superiority with our Amigas in the late '80s and early '90s toward the owners of higher priced and less capable Macs and DOS PCs. We were all a lot younger then and more naive. Most of us grew out of it, though people like Trevor and ppcamiga1 appear to not have. Trevor likes feeling like he's in on the world's best kept secret. He likes that he can afford expensive dual-socket Power 9 boards and us plebs can't. ARM doesn't fit into that narrative.

So Trevor has a superiority complex to go with his ego trip? However he is analyzed it doesn't look good. Another lrving Gould investor type with Irving and Trevor now having a lost Amiga decade each. At least Irving knew when to throw in the towel while Trevor would obliviously add a 2nd lost Amiga decade.

Hypex Quote:

I think ARM would be the next step. Pending for years. ARM took over from where PPC should have been. It's taken a while for it to feature on Amiga boards and even more for 68K code able to hook into native ARM like a PowerARM setup. But, 68K lasted 10 years, PPC lifespan was really 10 years also, so it should be on ARM now. If we grant PPC time by allowing it 1995 to 2015, then Amiga should have gone ARM 10 years ago. Funny as it happens, this is is where Apple is at, so it makes sense for Amiga/OS4 to once again be a trailblazer after Apple and follow their CPU choice.

The 68k architecture was a powerhouse for far more than 10 years. The 68k came out in 1979 about 6 years before the Amiga. It created the MPU workstation market and 16/32-bit embedded markets where it was #1, the latter of which for about 20 years. It was only #1 in the workstation market and #2 in the desktop market for roughly 10 years each. The 68k was still outselling PPC into at least the late 1990s.

https://websrv.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/mpr/MPR/19980126/120102.pdf Quote:

Motorola Stays on Top; Other Players Double Worldwide volume in 32-bit embedded microprocessors surpassed 180 million units, as Figure 1 shows. Of that total, three architectures—68K, MIPS, and SuperH—accounted for 80% of shipments in 1997. All the top vendors maintained their relative positions, although in some cases the gaps between players narrowed. ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC won the biggest advances in terms of multiples. The first two more than doubled from 1996 to 1997, growing by 129% and 138%, respectively. MIPS also enjoyed the biggest unit increase, shipping 24.8 million more chips and CPU cores than it did the previous year. PowerPC is still in startup mode, multiplying from half a million in 1996 to about 3.9 million in 1997. Motorola’s 79.3 million units put it on top, as usual. Its 68K line has been the embedded 32-bit volume leader since it created the category.As the figure shows, sales of 68K chips were about equal to worldwide sales of PCs. Taken together, that’s one new 32-bit microprocessor for every man, woman, and child living in the United States. The company declined to break out its sales among 68K families (680x0, 683xx, and ColdFire) but suggested that ColdFire played a much more important role than in previous years. Given that ColdFire accounted for only about 1 million units in 1996, that trend is unsurprising. Although MIPS grew by a larger percentage, 68K shipments increased by almost as many units: 24 million for 68K versus almost 25 million for MIPS. Thus, MIPS and 68K sales trends have similar slopes, but the 68K line would be higher up on the graph. For Motorola, 24 million units represents a more modest—though undeniably healthy—44% increase. ... PowerPC Now More Embedded Than Ever With combined volumes of about 3.5 million units, IBM and Motorola shipped more PowerPC chips into embedded systems than into Macintoshes. In 1996, embedded shipments accounted for just 10% of all PowerPC volume; now, they are about half. In part, that’s due to declining sales of Macintosh, but it’s mainly from a sevenfold increase in embedded sales. PowerPC is strong in TV set-top boxes and communications gear.Motorola’s long-awaited design win with Ford (see MPR 3/25/92, p. 4) has yet to enter production. ... Many Vendors Have Found Niches, Some Not Yet The past year brought good news for both vendors and customers. Volumes rose, power consumption fell, and prices remained stable. The 68K maintained its dominant position, largely through the inertia of entrenched design wins but also with new ASIC-based designs with ColdFire cores. MIPS had an undeniably good year, more than doubling over the previous year yet again. At this rate, MIPS could topple the 68K from the volume throne in just two to three years. Maintaining that rate, though, may be nearly impossible. Much of the architecture’s success is tied to two systems that will soon peak in sales. Even though MIPS is broadening its base into new markets, none seems likely to repeat the successes of the PlayStation and N64. Handheld PCs, printers, and WebTVs just don’t have the volume potential the game systems had. Digital cameras may be the closest thing to a hit consumer product in 1998, but MIPS is ill-represented in that application. Like the i960, MIPS may follow its top-RISC title with a long plateau.

The 68k embedded MPU volumes in 1997 were still greater than PC desktop volumes and MIPS volumes with the PS1 and N64 consoles. The more successful PS2 came in 2000 and the 68k likely maintained #1 in the 32-bit MPU market until at least that time. SuperH actually took over #1 for a time which I'm not sure MIPS did due to fragmentation and unlicensed MIPS implementations which are mentioned in the article. PPC was still in "startup mode" in 1997 with Apple Mac losing desktop market share and all PPC MPU volumes (desktop+embedded) being less than 10% of 68k volumes.

If you want to pull a Trevor tunnel vision and only look at the desktop we have the following.

68k 1984-1996 (~12 years)
PPC 1994-2005 (~11 years)

PPC was over on the desktop in 2005 when Apple switched architectures. I don't count PPC Amiga1 hardware negligible volumes as desktop. The Amiga1 PPC CPUs changed from desktop to embedded SoCs after 2005. CBM also primarily used embedded 68k CPUs for the borderline desktop market and CBM planned to create a 68k Amiga SoC but they failed to integrate and enhance the Amiga fast enough to survive.

Hypex Quote:

However, I think we need better than some fruity sort of Pi. We really need a desktop solution. ARM is making inroads into that. It might even make sense looking at server boards again. Right now, AI has taken over and strangely, previously headerless servers are now running graphic cards! They might still be running as headlerless but they have the expansion slots. OTOH a Pi board tends to lack SATA and PCIe. We need better than SD card storage and inbuilt graphics with no expansion. The PiStorm manages to provide a Pi RTG driver but it doesn't mean OS4 will have an RTG driver with Warp3D out of the box.

Integration is the way to make hardware cheap. Jay Miner knew it and made the Amiga but CBM f*ed it up. Integration still has the advantage. The problem is that low power low end 3D GPUs are used in embedded SoCs but better GPUs can be used and integrated GPUs have a performance advantage as well as a cost advantage. The RPi is using commodity smart phone SoCs where power is more important than performance. It is possible to develop custom SoCs with whatever PPA tradeoffs are desired as long as the SoC has enough volume to be mass produced. Much of the IP is available to license to do it. RPi Foundation/Limited is already designing their own custom SoCs with the $1 USD RP2040 which has sold in the millions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP2040

The SoC doesn't even have a GPU or display output and uses more transistors than a 68060+AA+. They are obviously aiming for a different embedded market target than a 68k Amiga SoC with a powerful GPU but that is fine because the embedded market is huge and varied. The 68k market in 1997 was still #1 for 32-bit MPUs and increasing at a healthy 44% showing how fast the embedded market was growing then. Now think how big that market is today with growth like that. CBM was perfectly positioned to produce RPi like hardware before the RPi but they committed financial suicide through incompetence instead. Motorola was also incompetent for trying to replace the 68k market with fat PPC causing them to lose it to SuperH and then ARM. PPC was bad for Motorola, bad for Apple and bad for the Amiga.

paolone Quote:

Real issue is no amigan seems capable of foresight. We always reason about what "it was" and what "it is", whilst a real leader would try to figure out how "it will be", which is the real deal when you project to release a new product. It must work well in the future, when it will be released.

There are only two people in a position to decide how "it will be" for the Amiga future. They are Michele and Trevor. Ben may have some say if he can keep Hyperion out of bankruptcy but he is going to need a better excuse than e-cigarettes. I expect he loses Hyperion and is out of the Amiga picture but he may be able to drag out delays for months.

paolone Quote:

YESTERDAY PPC would have seemed the right choice since even Apple took this route, but as soon as X86-64 went in the business THAT was the train to jump on. ARM presented itself as a good architecture to build mobile devices and embeeded devices on, while PPC struggled to keep its own space alive: most PPC devoted companies understood ARM was the new kid on the block to bet on, and switched to it. This happened 10 years ago, however did you all remember CPU discussions here at the time, and in the meanwhile till today?

Follow Apple PPC Mac desktop into bankruptcy? The iPod and iPhone using ARM saved Apple. Low power was needed for battery powered devices back then and x86 couldn't scale down that low. ARM had just as much trouble scaling up though which is why PPC held the high end embedded niche of communications and automotive markets for over a decade. The 68k actually scaled down lower than PPC with ColdFire and the 68060 scaled up in performance further than ARM without excessively high clock speeds which are bad for embedded use. Weak ARM didn't have the integer performance/MHz equivalent of a 1994 68060 until the also 8-stage in-order 2011 Cortex-A7 (the 2005 Cortex-A8 surpassed the 68060 performance with a less practical for embedded use 13-stage in-order pipeline).

paolone Quote:

ARM has always been an extremely EFFICIENT architecture and TODAY it's now trying to catch up x68-64's performance. But someone here STILL look at at ARM as "energy saving, but not powerful enough" ignoring latest achievements by Apple and Snapdragon. If there is an architecture which would be fine for an hypothetical Amiga machine, that's ARM for sure. Unless you're trying to convince me that there are things done by pricey AmigaONE machines that any cheap tablet or a smartphone wouldn't be able to do.

Which ARM architecture, original, Thumb, Thumb2 or AArch64? The original ARM architecture and cores were weak. ARM2 had descent performance because of optimizations accessing memory that didn't scale well and required expensive memory. The cores were small and simple allowing easy pipelining and caches for performance. There were only about 14 GP registers which saved power and area but reduced performance compared to RISC architectures with more than double the GP registers. Code density was similar to the RISC architectures with more than double the registers as most instructions wasted encoding space for conditional/predicated execution. Performance efficiency (performance/MHz) and power efficiency (performance/W) were poor but price efficiency was good (performance/$). The biggest advantages were low power and low sleep power due to the small simple architecture and cores. PPC and AArch64 are almost the opposite for efficiencies, advantages and disadvantages although AArch64 is an improvement on PPC in most performance metrics.

paolone Quote:

Guess what will be good TOMORROW?

Dependence on a proprietary architecture and commodity chips means someone else controls what is supposedly good tomorrow. Control of the architecture and chip fabrication means it is not necessary to guess what is supposedly good tomorrow. RISC-V is free but weak like the original ARM architecture while AArch64 is more powerful but dependent on ARM. Interestingly, x86-64 is powerful while dependence is on AMD and/or Intel. Intel is in financial trouble and was forced to suspend their dividend but AMD appears to be healthy. The other option is none of the above which can avoid margins/royalties but may increase development costs.

paolone Quote:

Other problem is there's no tomorrow for this platform. And there's even no "modern amiga scene" at all, just a bunch of old people pathetically deluding themselves and losing their precious time, trying to keep their world domination dreams alive. We came from a 7-million machines market sold during Commodore era (which is, per se, a tiny market compared to the Wintel one, and even compared to C64 market), then we reduced to a few (2? 3?) thousands users of AmigaOS4/MOS/AROS solutions, to the current few hundreds still following this site. And we just succeded in blaming and fighting ourselves in the meanwhile, every time looking for the new white knight bringing the Amiga flag in his left hand who would have saved the platform from the obliterance. Even I, who always considered myself a patient guy, got sick of all this. Neverthless, from time to time I get back here to read again and again and again the same foolness. I wonder why I still do it.

Hope lives eternal. What is dead can never die.

Cool_amigaN Quote:

THEA500Mini was the greatest missed opportunity in the recent years. It sold tens of thousands units that returned a zero impact on the platform (which btw proves that neither AOS 3.x, 4.x or MorphOS need to go mainstream to advance). Unfortunately you can't force RGL to actually care about the community expansion and bring devs and/or port new games or fund any AOS deritive. It's just business. They milked it and moved on to the next retro system. If/when they revisit Amiga market with some full scale Amiga model, perhaps it would be nicer to cooperate with existing Amiga companies and take advantage/license some of the current solutions.

I believe Retro Games Limited tried to be respectful to the Amiga and retro games developers. They are retro gaming fans but it is a micro business and the Amiga market has road block IP squatters. They wanted better than emulation.

https://metro.co.uk/2022/04/08/a500-mini-amiga-console-interview-thats-our-passion-for-commodore-16427365/ Quote:

GC: How difficult was this to do on a technical level, because I’m sure I’ve heard that the Amiga is actually quite hard to emulate. Have you got the original chip in there or is this all emulated? DM: I’ll turn the clock back again to 2004. We managed to rebuild the entire chipset of a C64 on one chip. And when I say we, I mean there’s a genius called Jeri Ellsworth who is a lone woman who lives out in Portland, Oregon who’s an absolute genius. And I spent quite a lot of time with her. We redesigned how we wanted the chip to work, and she got it running on one chip; that is utterly unique for one person to be able to do, the job she did is normally the job of an entire fabrication factory. We weren’t able to replicate that for the Amiga, Jeri’s off doing other marvellous things in AR and VR. We looked at doing it again but to create a bespoke solution for it would’ve been prohibitively expensive, so it is an emulation.

The IP squatters are Amiga show stoppers. The Natami was also a promising project killed by all the road blocks but the developers are passionate Amiga fans too. The road blocks must remain as THEA500 Mini with all the handicaps of poor ARM emulation, no AmigaOS, non working keyboard, no internet, etc. is likely outselling the AmigaNOne by more than 10 to 1. How much AmigaNOne hardware would sell if there was a fully functional and semi-modern 68k Amiga available again instead of a nostalgic toy?

@matthey

Quote:

I expect he loses Hyperion and is out of the Amiga picture but he may be able to drag out delays for months.

I believe you spelled "decades" incorrectly here.

Regardless of topic, sometimes when there is nothing left for combatants to "win" the only motivational force remaining is revenge.

#6

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This posting, in its entirety, represents solely the perspective of the author.
*Secrecy has served us so well*

#6 Quote:

I believe you spelled "decades" incorrectly here.

lol

#6 Quote:

Regardless of topic, sometimes when there is nothing left for combatants to "win" the only motivational force remaining is revenge.

Revenge is all that Ben can win. Hyperion doesn't have a sustainable business and Ben has burned too many bridges to have options. Ben's hate may overlook that the punishment he is receiving is not revenge but karma. I can imagine the conversation leading to the purchase of the Amiga IP from Amiga Inc.

MB: I would like to buy the Amiga IP.
AI directors: That would be a lot of trouble. What do you want with it?
MB: I want to consolidate the Amiga IP and restore the Amiga.
AI directors: But what about that threatening opportunistic lawyer Hermans?
MB: I must recover what he stole which likely means a fight.
AI directors: You will fight him? Will you indemnify us against further claims and lawsuits too?
MB: Yes.
AI directors: Sold! Pending a stockholder vote of course.

@matthey

imo an odd response given your often stated support for Mike.

Why would you assume my comment "sometimes when there is nothing left for combatants to "win" the only motivational force remaining is revenge." would apply to Mike?


Quote:

Ben's hate may overlook that the punishment he is receiving is not revenge but karma

#6

_________________
This posting, in its entirety, represents solely the perspective of the author.
*Secrecy has served us so well*

@Hypex

@Hypex

Uboot is weird, UNTIL you meet CFE :DDD

Yup, Tabor is extremally expensive for a bit improved SAM460

OS 4.2 wasnt free, all X1000 buyers paid extra for it and got OS 4.1.6 beta,
paying for OS 4.1FE, enhancer and separate drivers, just to have to change gfx card
and then get to loose 3D under Linux. And that even didn`t get full OpenGL/3D for
all RadeonHD cards, multicore and several other OS 4.2 promised features.

So there I blame Trevor for false marketing

See his enthusiastic interviews of the time
http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwdickinson_en.php
https://www.exec.pl/article.jsp?nid=189&Amiga_present_and_future:_interview_with_Trevor_Dickinson

Even AEON Ubuntu x1000 was paid Linux for just drivers insertation, it has proven
x1000 is capable machine with Libre and PPC Firefox ports that can do productive
work, only if OS supports it. Only time I fully used machine and quite enjoyed it ended
with modding more modern PPC Linux with MATE ...

(see your x1000 manual and bill, it will tell you you own OS 4.2 once its released :D

On ARM: porting to most modern PiStorm would be the key, like MOS survived with PPC Macs

@amigami

NG Amigas are personal computers? Yes, since we finally have SATA, PCI and PCI=E bus, DDR memory slots as standard, only problem is few drivers to support sound cards, SSD functions, graphic cards. Situation would be more tolerable if somehow MorphOS, OS3, OS4 and AROS drivers merged to one usable base, then fractioned (as with OS functions and software too). You have very peculiar PC where e.g. FPGA on SAMs isn`t OS supported yet even today, or onboard network and second CPU on x1000-x5000 or dual core G5.

So PC where OS is constantly in beta to targetted hardware, unlike e.g. Apple where such approach brought optimizations and performance.

Last edited by vox on 14-Sep-2024 at 06:10 PM.

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OS 3.x AROS and MOS supporter, fi di good, nothing fi di unprofessionalism. Learn it harder way!
SinclairQL and WII U lover :D
YT http://www.youtube.com/user/rasvoja

@matthey
On AmigaMini
Haha, loved hell they went trough trying to license Commodore name and Amiga name and OS

Under circumstances they did best possible.

Love our legal hell exponation

Quote:

So that’s who our license agreement is with, in short. The name itself, Commodore, is now owned by, I believe, a robotic Hoover manufacturer; the chicken head logo, three different companies claim exclusive and 100% ownership of it – none of which can provide any form of providence, legally. They’re basically trademark sitters. So, in answer to your question, Commodore itself probably doesn’t have any one home any longer. The interesting bits, the bits that make the Amiga, the Commodore 64, the VIC-20, etcetera, work are 100% percent owned by Cloanto Corporation in Italy. GC: That was a hell of an answer!

_________________
OS 3.x AROS and MOS supporter, fi di good, nothing fi di unprofessionalism. Learn it harder way!
SinclairQL and WII U lover :D
YT http://www.youtube.com/user/rasvoja

#6 Quote:

imo an odd response given your often stated support for Mike. Why would you assume my comment "sometimes when there is nothing left for combatants to "win" the only motivational force remaining is revenge." would apply to Mike?

Karma is not about revenge. It's just receiving back what was given. Reaping what is sown. The consequences of not doing to others as you would have them do to you.

Amiga Inc. directors, stockholders and former employees were not only abused by Ben but they were still threatened by him. The natural response is to defend yourself and/or let someone else defend for you. Cloanto was also threatened by Ben due to encroachment of licensed Amiga IP with more and more liberal interpretations of agreements. Ben created mutual enemies trying to defend themselves and has received the karma from what he had sown.

Some things are worth fighting for. Ben fights because of anger and hate. Michele fights to defend himself but also has a higher purpose for the Amiga. Some AmigaOS 4 users here see Ben/Hyperion as liberators of AmigaOS 4 from incompetent and bad Amiga Inc. Michele helping them out may be seen as a bad guy also. Trevor the likely secret financier of this big mess just sits on the side lines with his tunnel vision leadership pretending nothing is happening. He may receive some karma when the battles are finally over too.

vox Quote:

On AmigaMini Haha, loved hell they went trough trying to license Commodore name and Amiga name and OS Under circumstances they did best possible. Love our legal hell explanation Quote: So that’s who our license agreement is with, in short. The name itself, Commodore, is now owned by, I believe, a robotic Hoover manufacturer; the chicken head logo, three different companies claim exclusive and 100% ownership of it – none of which can provide any form of providence, legally. They’re basically trademark sitters. So, in answer to your question, Commodore itself probably doesn’t have any one home any longer. The interesting bits, the bits that make the Amiga, the Commodore 64, the VIC-20, etcetera, work are 100% percent owned by Cloanto Corporation in Italy. GC: That was a hell of an answer!

The RGL interview (https://metro.co.uk/2022/04/08/a500-mini-amiga-console-interview-thats-our-passion-for-commodore-16427365/) is really good. RGL performed legal due diligence before signing licenses with Cloanto for CBM/Amiga IP and they are the most professional business that has shown interest in the Amiga in many years. Michele has since bought the Amiga IP from Amiga Inc. Amiga Corporation with so much CBM/Amiga IP is a big threat to the Amiga IP squatters even though Michele generously offered to let Hyperion keep the stolen AmigaOS 4. PPC AmigaOS 4 is dead and businesses that would depend solely on it like Hyperion would be unsustainable which is why Hyperion backed out of the settlement agreement even desperately choosing potential bankruptcy instead. It is probably good that Ben turned down the deal as Amiga Corporation is likely to obtain most of AmigaOS 4 for next to nothing (receipts for AmigaOS 4 payment and ownership of the base AmigaOS should limit potential buyers from the bankruptcy liquidator). Trevor would be a fool to try to buy AmigaOS 4 or bail out Hyperion again.

@matthey

I dont see Trevor as bad person per se, he tried to get wheels turning on both hardware and software front, and some solutions are quite good (like short lived clockport sound card for A600 and A1200 or software side of A600GS or short lived AmiKit XE triple boot laptop).

I agree much bigger problem is Hyperion - on user side not honoring their promises, laging updates, not fixing bugs, outsourcing work (most recent example is CFE not being updated because sources are lost). I can say OS4 is quite advanced to OS 3.1 but not taken much more forward software wise.

Since OS4 ecosystem was constantly locked in perpetum of short avail and expensive hardware (with Moana port as lost opportunity) and not fully developed OS-drivers for existing board, OS 3.2 and backporting to m68k is Hyperions lifeline. Like now backporting their game catalogue to OS3 :D

I have good experience with Amiga Forever and few Cloantos Amiga releases.

Hopefully legal hell has to be resolved at some point :D Sadly lost time cannot be recouped. Hope new owner will have some sense of direction with name IP and OS and will be able to move on and not make too commercial licensing (Amiga pancakes, Hot Amiga girls :DDD

What I like with Cloantos presentations is not promising too much, and delivering promised.

_________________
OS 3.x AROS and MOS supporter, fi di good, nothing fi di unprofessionalism. Learn it harder way!
SinclairQL and WII U lover :D
YT http://www.youtube.com/user/rasvoja

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: [...] The IP squatters are Amiga show stoppers. The Natami was also a promising project killed by all the road blocks but the developers are passionate Amiga fans too. The road blocks must remain as THEA500 Mini with all the handicaps of poor ARM emulation, no AmigaOS, non working keyboard, no internet, etc. is likely outselling the AmigaNOne by more than 10 to 1. How much AmigaNOne hardware would sell if there was a fully functional and semi-modern 68k Amiga available again instead of a nostalgic toy?

Heh, 10 to 1? Make it 100 to 1 to be more accurate. But still, this just further highlights and strengths my original point: despite it's huge financial and commercial success, it returned zero impact to the active Amiga market/eco-system sadly. Or to state it otherwise: the AmigaOne which sold 99% less times, produced software 99% more. I still believe that RGL didn't / don't want to really dip into the Amiga, as I can't understand how they couldn't strike a deal for AOS 3.2 which was available a whole year before the A500 mini release. Especially given the fact that they did license the original kickstart roms. Therefore, the only logical assuption is that they licensed only the bare minimum in order to have a plug and play console built for clearly nostalgic audience. Which again, is totally fair from a business pov but is also a reminder that managing a (successfull) product in the Amiga/retro market from strictly bussiness perspective doesn't really mean that the product will actually help advance the platform.

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