What's so great about AmigaOS?

[PWLM]

Amiga OS's compared to M$ in the 80's and 90's was far superior in relation to useability imho, but compare with what a modern computer can do, and what it is forced to do. Personally I think V!5t@ is shite, but still in it's relative infancy. XP, properly updated and treated, is a good, stable OS (I have been using it for at least 2 years without any crash that required a reinstall). Remember too that these days your PC is probably downloading, installing and keeping all sorts of crap it doesn't need. The OS itself is pretty good. I like Amiga OS, but like most of you, for nostalgic reasons only.

[exoticaga]

If the devs could get over the ppc vs amiga classic (1200 or higher) thing. And think sure we can make the amiga better giving it the abilities that todays pc have. Like play any media file. Of course it will be for those that use WinUAE unless your amiga is high end wit lots of memory and good graphics etc.

Do it for the community, keeping the amiga longevity last further. Do it like other platforms have for free public domain GNU what have you. Put it on Aminet and watch the community grow bigger as old amiga users come back to the os via WinUAE.

[RabidRabbit]

In response to Immortal A1000's comments, What I think killed Commodore was firstly the new A500 chipset and then the A600. The A600 was pretty much an A500 by my reckoning. What the big C should have done would be to go straight to the A1200. However, they should have seeded the hardware to devs at least a year beforehand so that when it did launch there was software ready for it.

Also, if they hadn't wasted all the money on the A500+ and A600 then the AGA chipset could have rocked indeed. Put more money into that and improve the OS. The AGA games for example were often no different to their ECS/OCS counterparts apart from maybe different music.

Oh well. One never knows. Maybe MS will go tits up and the AMiga will rise once again! hehehe..well, we can but hope!

[mabus]

Originally Posted by RabidRabbit

In response to Immortal A1000's comments, What I think killed Commodore was firstly the new A500 chipset and then the A600. The A600 was pretty much an A500 by my reckoning. What the big C should have done would be to go straight to the A1200. However, they should have seeded the hardware to devs at least a year beforehand so that when it did launch there was software ready for it.

Also, if they hadn't wasted all the money on the A500+ and A600 then the AGA chipset could have rocked indeed. Put more money into that and improve the OS. The AGA games for example were often no different to their ECS/OCS counterparts apart from maybe different music.

Oh well. One never knows. Maybe MS will go tits up and the AMiga will rise once again! hehehe..well, we can but hope!

There is a lot to be said for the release cycle of the Amiga computers. The A600 was pretty pointless at the time (it offered even fewer expansion options than the established A500 but with the same type of specs, just a new way of manufacturing). Why the A500+ and A600 was introduced so close together is a mystery ... They might as well not have released the A500+ and just waited a bit.

I also think the A4000 was a joke in terms of hardware, it certainly disappointed many of my friends at the time when it was introduced. It didn't have built-in SCSI (instead PIO 0 IDE! eek!) and there was no "flicker fixer", i.e native 31KHz output like on the A3000. The new manufacturing method of surface mounted technology would have saved them money (fewer returns based on the volume produced) so why didn't Commodore run with the developments they had made earlier to make a really high end machine? I would have loved to see the DSP of Amiga prototypes introduced in those days, it would have made people look twice. And who knows what kind of software could have backed that?

Never mind, just my few pence worth of thoughts on the subject

[Calgor]

@mabus

You haven't read the Rise and Fall of Commodore book or looked up Mehdi Ali have you? That will give you all the answers you need as to why A3000+ with DSP was scrapped and A4000 was so crap when released.

Anyway, I think the end was when they sacked most of the original Amiga Los Gatos team (i.e. the ones who actually did the real work and made the Amiga 1000) in 1986 when they were working on 1024x1024 gfx with 128 colours. This showed the future direction of Amiga product line management and (lack of) R&D investment. The A500 and A2000, although extremely important in market share, were just cost reduced utilisations of the R&D invested into the A1000. Let alone taking those same short-sighted decisions even further with the A500+ and A600 into a dead-end of technilogical obsolescence.

[Parsec]

I was disappointed with the Rise and Fall of Commodore book coverage of the Amiga, it felt tacked on at the end a bit and didn't go into enough detail.

From my point of view, I needed to switch to the PC because of going to uni and having course work to do that required DOS/Windows.

But in a more general way, at that time the PC finally got a GUI (poor but if you'd never seem anything else it was ok) thanks to Windows, and not long afterwards, the face of gaming changed with Wolfenstein and then Doom. At that point, 2D graphics hardware became much less important, and the CPU in the PC started to get ahead of other hardware.

It would have taken a very determined Commodore to rise up to this challenge, and there might have been a few steps in that direction, but the management either weren't committed enough, or didn't have the money to do it.


Not saying that's how it was, but that's how I saw it anyway.