[PortuguesePilot]

Originally Posted by snoopy77

My gut feeling is that won't happen. Among the people who use the Amiga I suspect most use it to rekindle the old memories rather than hoping it will someday be competitive again.

My gut feeling also says the same thing. Even if the Apollo Team, or any other similar team, chucks out a complete-set New Amiga, it will only sell to us: hobbyists. Much like the X1000, the MiST, etc. Only hobbyists buy them (much like it was in the beginning of the microcomputer revolution. Only hobbyists bought them). I was never expecting the Amiga to become mainstream again. It just won't happen. What I wanted, though, was to see it evolve. To be in fluid evolution rather than being stagnant. The whole add-on cards are excellent products and do just that (allow for innovation and evolution) but are original-hardware dependants which, as I said before, is a no-exit road. A full system, 100% Amiga 68k compatible (OCS, ECS & AGA) with modern amenities such as SDD, USB and HDMI would revitalize the Amiga brand and push it forward at least another 30 years (which would make it 30+30=60 years for the Amiga lifespan, more than half a century). I don't know about you, but I would definitely fork up to 700€ to buy an all-new, all-modern Amiga with all the aforementioned qualities plus extra specs (68080 or whatever you want to call it, as long as 100% compatibility was maintained). It would not replace my original Amigas, which are sacred and irreplaceable, but it would allow me to think that even when those originals die out (oh, they will. nothing lasts forever), my amigaism could live on through the FPGA descendants.

Originally Posted by snoopy77

I think there is lots of people who do hope for a renaissance, but I think it is a pretty small group.

If anything the fact that the Commodore did have a fairly sudden death has perhaps helped make it the collectors machine it is today. Imagine if Commodore was still in business and pumping out 3ghz A9000's? Would those Amiga 500's and the 20 years of later machines that would have existed be worth anything more or be any more desirable than an old PC?

It's not so much a hope (if you read my previous comment carefully, you'll see that I don't think it will materialize) but rather a wish. I do wish the Amiga would live on. All-in-all, what I don't want to see is the Amiga die out. Maybe because that confronts me with my own death, perhaps? But let's not over-analise things. I agree that the Amiga's current status is, in part, due to its abrupt end. Similar to the effect of being unexpectedly dumped by a girlfriend you loved very much, it left an indelible mark on our minds and enhanced the idealization. Moreover, just like the PCs and the Macs, if the Amiga platform hadn't died, it would have since now morphed into something else altogether and - more than probably - the 68k legacy software would only be runnable via emulation (like DOS titles on current 64bit OS).
What I spoke of was something different (hence why I said that 100% compatibility with OCS/AGA machines was a must): basically it was to make an all-new (as in: without old components) Amiga, with all the new bells and whistles but with the basic core of an old Amiga. Basically, do what the Vampire 2 does with an old Amiga but without the need for an old Amiga.

Originally Posted by wawa

a 3ghz amiga might prove to bhe a bit laughable, while people would start to expect contemporary features with it and then notice all they can do with it is run 20 years software plus some minor sdl ports at the risk that some random bug brings the whole system down, along with some unsaved work.

i think we shouldnt demand too much. there are already amigalike system running on gigahertz machines. we know how they prosper. vampire fits nicely into the gap. maybe some sort of development that justifies an asic one day will take off. but it isnt thecase for now so first things first.

Granted. We shouldn't ask for too much. After all, we all have PCs or Macs for all our work-related business. Some people have even gone beyond that and use their tablets or even smartphones, bypassing computers altogether. We don't need anything else to compete with that. What I think we need, though, is to keep amigaism alive. And with static, frozen, 80-90's technology, we won't achieve that. Some of our members are savvy enough to be pouring out excellent add-on cards that allow our beloved Amigas to transcend themselves and become something else, something more, while still being - at heart - what they always have been. My proposition was to continue this trend but to make an "Amiga" from the grounds up, via FPGA, to allow it to release itself from the boundaries of the old-hardware. It would not be a real Amiga but an "Amiga" nonetheless. Wouldn't have an Amiga shell, but would propagate the amiga Ghost (yes, a purposely Ghost in the Shell reference).

I have a sense that we all think and believe the same things but maybe our time-scales aren't the same. I'm looking at the distant future, not into the next 5 to 10 years.