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Originally Posted by Akira
I am here because I love 68k Amiga and I have plenty of them that work just fine. I don't need a new compatible machine. I have enough Amigas. Future reliability is mentioned? I can maybe see that, but that doesn't seem to be Apollo or Vampire. So why force them to? I thought there was also Minimig and FPGA Arcade with aims nearer to compatibility I believe.
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The Apollo Core has the wrong future (hyper optimized for affordable FPGA today only). The Minimig, FPGA Arcade and Mist have no future (they are retro only with no upgrade path).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Akira
So a project started a way and was veered another way. So what? Make your own if you are so affected. Support a project more suited to your vision and goals. WHat's teh point of destructive comments!
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My comments are not destructive but sometimes the truth is painful. I was contacted by Gunnar of the Apollo Team and asked to take part in his project. We at one time had a somewhat similar vision but Gunnar's vision changed. He became obsessed with performance in an affordable FPGA. I learned enough to be able to see the potential of the 68k and his mistakes. I wish there was a project to take us all the way instead of half the way but most of the Amiga community doesn't even understand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Akira
Vampire I see now as a chance to do something new. You say "lose a portion of the compatibility and you lose a portion of the Amiga community"? Isn't that already what "Amiga NG" is? All the PPC stuff? Again, keeping the thought that PPC Amiga, Amiga NG, whatchamacallit, is all part of the same word as 68K Amiga or even Vampire future, is ridiculous. They are not. They are not compatible, they don't crossover, people interested in one are usually not interested in the other.
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At one time, further developing the 68k would have been very difficult and expensive. PPC was one of the better choices then as it was big endian and supported as an upgrade path by Motorola. AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS didn't change that much when they were ported which is why they have most of the same limitations as AmigaOS 3. They did lose part of the Amiga user base as they became less compatible (they are both decently compatible so far with 68k AmigaOS friendly executables). They can drop the limitations and move further from their foundation as they port to ARM or x86_64 trying to replace users they lose along the way or they could also come back to the 68k and develop it properly and end the Amiga fragmentation. I am considering the PPC AmigaOS as part of the Amiga family but it is not as compatible as I like and PPC is unattractive today. Amiga users are voting as customers are choosing the Vampire over the NG systems. Does this mean Gunnar has it all right and I'm wrong? Not at all. He has no clue how many customers he is missing out on if he had an FPU, backward AmigaOS compatibility which didn't need patching, better compiler support, better documentation, etc. He has no clue how popular a standalone Amiga that costs half as much as the Vampire accelerator would be either but that is highly unlikely to happen with Gunnar's plan for the future. Be warned if you were hoping for an FPGA upgrade path and buy the Vampire for what it offers today only.