Next gen Amiga

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Never knew I was a lamer, thanks for that

The OS is indeed not important. An Amiga running 68k Linux or BSD is still an Amiga, the OS doesn't change what the machine is. Commodore called their machines Amigas, so that's what Amiga is: Hardware. If that makes me a lamer, then that's fine with me.

For me it's definitely both, 68k/Custom Chips and the OS.

I think these days are a bit too much hung up on the OS part, and forgot that the Amiga classic hardware is something interesting in itself.

[jediknight]

please make some more 1200 motherboards and 4000,s that will keep everyone happy maybe designed to fit in an atx case be nice.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by jediknight

please make some more 1200 motherboards and 4000,s that will keep everyone happy maybe designed to fit in an atx case be nice.

Ok done. (By Hese) .

[swinkamor12]

It is annoying that so many people made problems, beacuse our new better amigas has not amiga chipset.
There is nothing special in amiga chipset. It is just piece of silicon.
Amiga chipset was important in amiga 500 times.
Amiga 500 has cpu slower than blitter, but commodore do not spend money on R&D and amiga 1200 has cpu faster than blitter.
Even if I buy again original amiga 1200 from commodore I will be using this amiga 1200 as amiga next gen.
Simple beacuse amiga 1200 has faster cpu than chipset, and using cpu take less time and work to code.
For more than 25 years most amiga devlopers use amigas with faster cpu than chipset.
Some people should accept that Amiga chipset is past which gone many years ago.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

It is annoying that so many people made problems, beacuse our new better amigas has not amiga chipset.
There is nothing special in amiga chipset. It is just piece of silicon.
Amiga chipset was important in amiga 500 times.
Amiga 500 has cpu slower than blitter, but commodore do not spend money on R&D and amiga 1200 has cpu faster than blitter.
Even if I buy again original amiga 1200 from commodore I will be using this amiga 1200 as amiga next gen.
Simple beacuse amiga 1200 has faster cpu than chipset, and using cpu take less time and work to code.
For more than 25 years most amiga devlopers use amigas with faster cpu than chipset.
Some people should accept that Amiga chipset is past which gone many years ago.

As if the blitter was the only element of the chipset
Yes there is something special about the chipset. You have the copper (doing the same with the cpu is an horror !), you have 4 independent audio channels each having own frequency and volume, you have fully configurable screen, you have hardware scrolling, etc.

[nexus]

lets not forget EXPANSION slots for I/O or CPU to you know EXPAND the stock config
people wanna cry original better not add anything to that stock config not even ram

[idrougge]

I wouldn't want my current Macintosh to use the same CPU and the same Quickdraw graphics system as the original 1980s Macs. Neither do I want that out of my current Amiga, because it effectively means I can't use this forum from my computer.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

It is annoying that so many people made problems, beacuse our new better amigas has not amiga chipset.
There is nothing special in amiga chipset. It is just piece of silicon.
Amiga chipset was important in amiga 500 times.
Amiga 500 has cpu slower than blitter, but commodore do not spend money on R&D and amiga 1200 has cpu faster than blitter.
Even if I buy again original amiga 1200 from commodore I will be using this amiga 1200 as amiga next gen.
Simple beacuse amiga 1200 has faster cpu than chipset, and using cpu take less time and work to code.
For more than 25 years most amiga devlopers use amigas with faster cpu than chipset.
Some people should accept that Amiga chipset is past which gone many years ago.

Was expecting your comment to be torn apart, I had made popcorn and all

I could justly reply that there's nothing in nextgen hardware that makes it an Amiga. I see no point in discussing established fact, tho.

It's just some are about the OS, and they carried on its spirit in nextgen. A lot are about all the legacy stuff and support and enjoy that. Just two different approaches to love what Commodore-Amiga did, and we know the two overlap. So...

The OS versions that can be installed on original Amigas (by running install media natively from an official AmigaOS version only) I would consider unofficial versions, but still Amiga OSes. The other versions are Amiga OS in spirit, and if you can get them running on an Amiga, great

That's how I see it.

So if you love the Amiga for the original models, you're right too As evident by mods, new expansions, games collecting, competition, talk, etc as well.

I wanted to correct you on one point: the Amiga hardware was special and undeniably so. First of all, custom chips are obviously more special than off-the-shelf "just chips". Second of all, nobody could match Amiga 1000 in 1985, and nobody could match A500 in 1987. Groundbreaking hardware and features. No competitor was even close. The many upgraded hardware models drove the development of OS updates, and they did a great job of supporting them all.

A lot of computer companies made crap and died instantly, others made 1 OS version with a 3 year life cycle and then dead. Not Commodore-Amiga.

They did great for a computer company. Sometimes we forget that somewhere in amongst the could-have-beens and what-ifs, I think. Well I don't.

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by DDNI

Trance is like Petunia in AmigaOS4 it transparently emulates a 68k instruction set to allow AmigaOS4 to run system friendly 68k programs on the PPC OS. They don’t emulate any custom Amiga chips, so any 68k programs that require them must be run with UAE. RuninUAE makes this seamless on AmigaOS4. I’m sure there’s a MorphOS equivalent launcher.

I tried Morphos last week. It is nice, but feels slightly less Amiga than AmigaOS4.1. In truth though the similarities are so close, that having the two as distinct OSes is madness.

Time to bury the hatchet and join forces.

+1

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by Photon

I wanted to correct you on one point: the Amiga hardware was special and undeniably so. First of all, custom chips are obviously more special than off-the-shelf "just chips". Second of all, nobody could match Amiga 1000 in 1985, and nobody could match A500 in 1987. Groundbreaking hardware and features. No competitor was even close. The many upgraded hardware models drove the development of OS updates, and they did a great job of supporting them all.

The answer to this thread and this post is this... You need to decide what would have happened if Commodore had not gone bust. If they had of funded Amiga correctly, what would their version of the Next Gen Amiga be like?

There was talks of the AAA and 64Bit for A5000 at that time but other than A3000 development boards that was as far as it got.
As most of you all know, funding is everything in computer development, with correct funding, anything is possible.

Amiga didn't have this and so all their superior designs never transpired. OK, so some of you at this point are thinking, hang on a minute, you also need people that know what they are doing! Not just funding. Amiga had those people, just no funding.

Also, if Amiga had of continued would they of stuck with custom chipset, or would they of designed something new to compete with Apple, IBM and Intel?

If we still had Amiga in development today and they never stopped designing, would that computer be classed as a genuine Amiga? Where do you draw the line on this? They gave us the Amiga One and X series yet still, we complain.

Even Apple have follow suit now and gone PC CPU, is it still an genuine Apple? Which if you think about it, explains a lot to us all.

Amiga in manufacture coming to an end was a good and bad thing. Good, because maybe it helped to make it more of a legend, as so many talk of the what if and maybe's. Bad, because we will never know of the real Next Gen Amiga!

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

There is nothing special in amiga chipset. It is just piece of silicon.
[...]
Some people should accept that Amiga chipset is past which gone many years ago.

Cool.
With the same rationale, then, I can say:
some people should also accept that AmigaOS is "past which gone many years ago".
There's nothing special about AmigaOS. AmigaOS was important in Amiga 500 times.
For more than 25 years most software developers use computers with faster GPU than CPU.

Buy a PC or Mac, use a modern , widely supported operating system.

etc, etc, etc.

Or you know, you can just, like, let anyone do whatever the hell they want, instead of critiquing absolutely any choice.

[jPV]

Originally Posted by MigaTech

The answer to this thread and this post is this... You need to decide what would have happened if Commodore had not gone bust. If they had of funded Amiga correctly, what would their version of the Next Gen Amiga be like?

Commodore planned to go for RISC and RTG (Hombre), and Commodore's AmigaOS 4.0 (not related to the Hyperion version) was supposed to use RTG/chunky graphics modes. So these current "NG" solutions are actually pretty much on the path Commodore set

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by MigaTech

Even Apple have follow suit now and gone PC CPU, is it still an genuine Apple? Which if you think about it, explains a lot to us all.

What they sell as an Apple Macintosh these days has nothing in common anymore with the classic Mac of 1984.

It's an Intel machine with NextStep as an OS.

It's probably a genuine Apple (and I still enjoy using my 2009 MacBook Pro with El Capitan), but it definitely has nothing to do with a classic Mac.

[jPV]

Originally Posted by Steril707

What they sell as an Apple Macintosh these days has nothing in common anymore with the classic Mac of 1984.

It's an Intel machine with NextStep as an OS.

It's probably a genuine Apple (and I still enjoy using my 2009 MacBook Pro with El Capitan), but it definitely has nothing to do with a classic Mac.

But the question is, can we still call it as "NG Mac", because we can't call our current systems as "NG Amigas" I guess we all agree what are these "classic" versions

[Daedalus]

If Commodore hadn't gone bust (and had retained the Amiga line, because they could have also simply become a generic PC manufacturer too...), they would surely have ended up in a similar position to Macs at this stage. After all, the Mac and Amiga were quite similar at a certain level (both closed 68K hardware with a custom OS closely tied to that hardware) back then. If Commodore had wanted to keep the Amiga relevant, they would have needed to go the same way and abstract the OS to run on standard hardware. Letting the OS and certain aspects of the hardware design differentiate it from the Windows PC would be about the best you could have hoped for. So, much like people still call Macs "Macs", people would call these new x86/x64-based custom machines running Amiga OS "Amigas".

Completely custom chipsets and hardware simply aren't competitive these days, and haven't been since the '90s. Commodity hardware is the only way to go in a consumer market. Ironically, PCs in more recent times take an approach that is quite reminiscent of the Amiga - the CPU offloads lots of work to other hardware, such as storage control, graphics, sound, media decoding and so on, leaving it free to work on other things. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

[AdvanceFollow]

Originally Posted by meynaf

As if the blitter was the only element of the chipset
Yes there is something special about the chipset. You have the copper (doing the same with the cpu is an horror !), you have 4 independent audio channels each having own frequency and volume, you have fully configurable screen, you have hardware scrolling, etc.

This was of course amazing in 1985. However I don't see what's special about the chipset compared to today's off the shelf GPU's, sound chips etc.

The blitter, as mentioned, was already slower than the CPU on an accelerated Amiga.
The copper - Unified Shaders on a modern GPU are so much more powerful and flexible it's not even funny.
The audio, again, impressive for 1985. Falling behind by 1992. Nowadays when I work with DAWs I just run all (arbitrary number of) channels at 24-bit, 96 KHz (could do 192 KHz but that's just overkill), no need for independent sample rates.
Hardware scrolling - Handled by the GPU these days. Not only accelerates 2D scrolling but also 3D graphics
Draggable screens with independent resolutions - Irrelevant and unnecessary in the age of fixed resolution LCD panels and nearly unlimited VRAM

Again, the features of the Amiga chipset were very impressive for the time. Today however, all parts of them have either been replicated and expanded upon, or made obsolete

Originally Posted by Akira

Cool.
With the same rationale, then, I can say:
some people should also accept that AmigaOS is "past which gone many years ago".
There's nothing special about AmigaOS. AmigaOS was important in Amiga 500 times.
For more than 25 years most software developers use computers with faster GPU than CPU.

Buy a PC or Mac, use a modern , widely supported operating system.

etc, etc, etc.

Or you know, you can just, like, let anyone do whatever the hell they want, instead of critiquing absolutely any choice.

There's actually no way to rationalize *not* using a PC or Mac in this day and age. The hardware and software are objectively superior. No one is critiquing the choices people make, but that doesn't change objective reality.
You can still have your personal and subjective reasons for using an Amiga (of any kind), such as nostalgia, it's what you feel comfortable with, curiosity, you want to be different etc.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by AdvanceFollow

However I don't see what's special about the chipset compared to today's off the shelf GPU's, sound chips etc.

You can easily code for it directly. With todays hardware you can't do that and coding becomes incredibly boring. Here is what's special.

[MigaTech]

Seems like most of us cannot make our minds up on what defines the Amiga!

Was it the chipset, was it the CPU, was it the OS or was it all of them? Come to think about it, does the ROM chip even come in to this debate?

The Amiga 1000 was where it all began and it ended with A4K. what defines both those machines and what differences can we take, in the seven years that separate them?

[swinkamor12]

Amiga chipset was past even before commodore bankruptcy.
Last time I think about sophisticated graphics operations doing by blitter in october 1992.
Since november 1992 I have access to Amiga 1200, and coding graphics operations by cpu on Amiga 1200 was easier, takes less time and work, and was less error prone.
Most other amiga developers has also similiar experience.
There is no reason to return to code for amiga chipset.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by swinkamor12

Amiga chipset was past even before commodore bankruptcy.
Last time I think about sophisticated graphics operations doing by blitter in october 1992.
Since november 1992 I have access to Amiga 1200, and coding graphics operations by cpu on Amiga 1200 was easier, takes less time and work, and was less error prone.
Most other amiga developers has also similiar experience.
There is no reason to return to code for amiga chipset.

And once again I have to recall you that the chipset is not in any manner limited to the blitter.