English Amiga Board - View Single Post

PortuguesePilot · 18 March 2018, 15:42

I really look at this differently, it seems. For me, when you have to "emulate" the chipset, then it's no longer a real "Amiga". Oh, so the OS is inherited from the Amiga? Cool. But the machine it runs on is not an Amiga. Sorry. I know, the current PC's aren't XT compatible either, and they're still PCs, but talk about the huge gap in between and the evolution that was beneath it all. It went sort-of smoothly from XT to AT(x86) to x64, all with minor incompatibilities with the immediate predecessors. The jump from 68k to PPC or x86 (with MorphOS and AROS respectively) was much harder, more immediate and "broke" a lot more things. And - yes I'll admit it - I can still taste the bitterness in my mouth that was left with Commodore's demise. The whole Escom and Gateway ordeal and the apparent "curse" that fell upon the Amiga. I still remember that I wanted it to be a valid alternative to "Wintels" and Macs. I wanted the Amiga to live on but with full backwards compatibility. For it to happen, 68060 would have to been used on A4000s and the next-gen (real usage of the expression here, IMO) Amigas would have to have a custom chipset that incorporated - on hardware - full legacy 68k+OCS/ECS/AGA compatibility while moving forward to 3D Acceleration and Gigahertz processor speeds. What I mean was: my first multimedia PC - bought right after I knew the Amiga was dead - was a full-fledged i80486DX2@66MHz with a VESA SVGA graphic card, a Sound Blaster 16 sound card, a 6 button 15-pin joypad and a 15" CRT monitor. State-of-the-art for a home PC at the time. I could still run Rick Dangerous in it because it was 100% compatible with the previous two iterations of the PC-AT standards (namely the 286 and the 386). This is what we needed on the Amiga front. Sadly, it never happened. Commodore tried to go the console route before it went bust with an obsolete and under-performing console that would never stand a chance against a SEGA Saturn, much less the ubiquitous Sony Playstation (which was an absolute game changer). By the time (1996 and onwards) top-tier PCs were already equipped with 3Dfx cards... Remember those? The "Amiga" line could only have survived as a true-Amiga IF it had evolved as I (and many others like me, back then) wanted. But it was never meant to be.

Understand better why I said what I said above?

IMO: Amiga OS-derived running on PPC or x86 processors? Yeah, neat and all... but they're not Amigas. To me they just feel like a desperate attempt to keep something remotely linked to the Amiga floating aimlessly, and it was done at the wrong time and by the wrong means. Sorry.

18 March 2018, 15:42	#15
PortuguesePilot Global Moderator Join Date: May 2013 Location: Setúbal, Portugal Posts: 609	I really look at this differently, it seems. For me, when you have to "emulate" the chipset, then it's no longer a real "Amiga". Oh, so the OS is inherited from the Amiga? Cool. But the machine it runs on is not an Amiga. Sorry. I know, the current PC's aren't XT compatible either, and they're still PCs, but talk about the huge gap in between and the evolution that was beneath it all. It went sort-of smoothly from XT to AT(x86) to x64, all with minor incompatibilities with the immediate predecessors. The jump from 68k to PPC or x86 (with MorphOS and AROS respectively) was much harder, more immediate and "broke" a lot more things. And - yes I'll admit it - I can still taste the bitterness in my mouth that was left with Commodore's demise. The whole Escom and Gateway ordeal and the apparent "curse" that fell upon the Amiga. I still remember that I wanted it to be a valid alternative to "Wintels" and Macs. I wanted the Amiga to live on but with full backwards compatibility. For it to happen, 68060 would have to been used on A4000s and the next-gen (real usage of the expression here, IMO) Amigas would have to have a custom chipset that incorporated - on hardware - full legacy 68k+OCS/ECS/AGA compatibility while moving forward to 3D Acceleration and Gigahertz processor speeds. What I mean was: my first multimedia PC - bought right after I knew the Amiga was dead - was a full-fledged i80486DX2@66MHz with a VESA SVGA graphic card, a Sound Blaster 16 sound card, a 6 button 15-pin joypad and a 15" CRT monitor. State-of-the-art for a home PC at the time. I could still run Rick Dangerous in it because it was 100% compatible with the previous two iterations of the PC-AT standards (namely the 286 and the 386). This is what we needed on the Amiga front. Sadly, it never happened. Commodore tried to go the console route before it went bust with an obsolete and under-performing console that would never stand a chance against a SEGA Saturn, much less the ubiquitous Sony Playstation (which was an absolute game changer). By the time (1996 and onwards) top-tier PCs were already equipped with 3Dfx cards... Remember those? The "Amiga" line could only have survived as a true-Amiga IF it had evolved as I (and many others like me, back then) wanted. But it was never meant to be. Understand better why I said what I said above? IMO: Amiga OS-derived running on PPC or x86 processors? Yeah, neat and all... but they're not Amigas. To me they just feel like a desperate attempt to keep something remotely linked to the Amiga floating aimlessly, and it was done at the wrong time and by the wrong means. Sorry.