Next gen Amiga

[kolla]

"NG" is not about the hardware, it is about the operating system.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

Whoever actually holds the rights for OS4.1 ought to port it to Vampire.

Why? OS4.1 on Vampire would run super slow compared to running OS4.1 on just about any PowerPC that ever ran OS4. An Amiga with a Vampire card barely able to compete with old Efika that was just barely able to run MorphOS.

Look like a lot of people have totally unrealistic views on how fast Apollo Core on Vampire is and what it is capable of.

[AdvanceFollow]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

2) I still don't think these computers (running MorphOS or AROS) are Amigas. What model of Amiga are they? Amiga 5800? Amiga 12345? Some of you said it yourselves: some of these computers have a bitten Apple as a logo... How can they be an Amiga? The Amiga X5000 and the AmigaOne had the name "Amiga" in them but since they had no full backwards compatibility, I fail to see them as real Amigas. It's just as it is. Sorry. Even some Atarians say things like "the Falcon is NOT an ST", when the Falcon is much closer to an ST than the MorphOS/AROS machines are to an actual Amiga. Is it wishful-thinking to want the "next-gen" of Amigas to be fully (or almost) compatible with its previous generation? I think not. Hence my PC example as before. If they did it, why couldn't Commodore? In rigour, the "next gen" Amiga was the A3000 in a first stage followed by the A1200 and the A4000 lastly. Just as the A3000 was VERY compatible with the original Amiga (A1000), the A1200 and A4000 were also very compatible with the A3000 and A1000, so the A2400 and the A6000 (putative names) should be very compatible with the A1200 and the A4000 while still being able to churn out glide-like 3D graphics, read CD-ROMs, have large IDE/SATA hard-disks and have other contemporary (for 1995) features. One does not HAVE to exclude the other. Only with this scenario in place would the Amiga still persist. But it did not come to be. The Amiga line is, sadly, dead. These systems that run MorphOS and AROS aren't Amigas... They're just computers pretending to be Amigas.

It easily turns into a philosophical question - "What is an Amiga?".

My Windows PC running WinUAE is arguably more compatible with old Amiga software than my actual A1200, because I can load a 1.x KS, set up cycle-exact emulation of a 7 MHz 68k, the OCS chipset etc. Of course WHDLoad has fixed some of those compatibility issues, but "back in the day", there were A500 games that simply wouldn't run on my 1200, but they do run on my PC in WinUAE today.

Also, Commodore themselves were not planning backwards compatibility. Stuff like Hombre would have been a clean break from classic Amiga, just like the PowerPC stuff that was later proposed, as a result of 68k being a dead-end by the mid 1990's. The only option would have been some kind of "Amiga on a chip" solution for running old Amiga games/apps, but that is simply not necessary today due to the performance and accuracy of software emulation. Simply including an emulation layer with the OS just makes more sense than some kind of PCI board with a 68k CPU, Amiga chipset etc. because the end result is the same.

NG "Amiga" is still interesting from a "what could have been" standpoint, even if they are not "Amigas" in our version of the timeline.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by Locutus

Everyone i know from back then with a interest in it just moved over straight to Linux very quickly.

Indeed. For the OS developers, the current Amiga systems are nice play grounds _for them_, but for software developers, there are very few compelling reasons to use any of the current Amiga options.

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by knightbeat

Are you thinking of the Nyx board? It may have been sold as the A5000 if it had been released, but didn't progress to the point where it was given an official name. The Amigahistory link refers specifically to concept art created by Amiga Format mag.

Yes this is it, although stated for A3K development, if Commodore had of continued it would most definitely of paved the way for the A5K.

It was only that Commodore stopped funding the AAA that it never happened. 64BIT, AAA, 256MB, this was going to be the real Next Gen Amiga!


http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.co...uct.aspx?id=35

[Amigajay]

256MB ram!? What year do you think they had this planned for!? IF Commodore released a next gen then it would have been probably 4mb ram esp for its budget models, at a push 8mb or 16mb for desktop models

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by MigaTech

It was only that Commodore stopped funding the AAA that it never happened. 64BIT, AAA, 256MB, this was going to be the real Next Gen Amiga!

And highly questionable if it would have been any better then one of the higher end Cirrus Logic or S3 videochips from back then....

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

256MB ram!? What year do you think they had this planned for!? IF Commodore released a next gen then it would have been probably 4mb ram esp for its budget models, at a push 8mb or 16mb for desktop models

The release year is questionable but could of been late 1995 or mid 96. The 256MB would of been an optional choice for maximum memory added. The stock version would of been more like 32/64MB.

Escom would of had access to this tech, so why the F*** they never used it, is totally beyond me!

[malko]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

[...] I'm all for diversity (against the prevalence of "wintels" and now Androids too) [...]

It's funny to see that so many people are against that prevalence. Each and every has his reasons, but at the end same point of view is shared .

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

[...] if these alternatives are AmigaOS based, the better. So go on with their development. [...]

Hope it will happens one day.
But before a consensus has to be found regarding the way to go for the OS. And it's far from won as an OS has to run on... how do we call it already ?.. Ah, yes ! "hardware"...

Originally Posted by AdvanceFollow

[...] My Windows PC running WinUAE is arguably more compatible with old Amiga software than my actual A1200, because I can load a 1.x KS, set up cycle-exact emulation of a 7 MHz 68k, the OCS chipset etc. Of course WHDLoad has fixed some of those compatibility issues, but "back in the day", there were A500 games that simply wouldn't run on my 1200, but they do run on my PC in WinUAE today. [...]

Don't forget that the <whatever>UAE we use is as sustainable as our old Amiga are... Somebody has to keep the development up and running on new "platforms" (CPU/OS/etc...). So will someone still maintain it in 5-10 years ?



Personally, regarding the "classic" line, I think that Next Gen Amiga are already here (OS4, ArOS, MorphOS). But we are all so worried about what it could have been differently that we don't want to see it . A "leader" is definitively missing here !

[E-Penguin]

Originally Posted by kolla

Why? OS4.1 on Vampire would run super slow compared to running OS4.1 on just about any PowerPC that ever ran OS4

On the V2, perhaps, but V4 and standalone ought to be faster.

PPC is a dead end.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

On the V2, perhaps, but V4 and standalone ought to be faster..

Gunnar says maybe 20-30% faster - tops, maybe a little more on FPU. It's mostly just a bigger FPGA, not a much faster FPGA - and the CPU core is exactly the same.

PowerPC is a heck lot more alive than 68k - it has commercial support from rather big players in the IT and telecommunication industry - Apollo Core is a big mouthed one man show.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by MigaTech

The release year is questionable but could of been late 1995 or mid 96. The 256MB would of been an optional choice for maximum memory added. The stock version would of been more like 32/64MB.

Escom would of had access to this tech, so why the F*** they never used it, is totally beyond me!

Jeez. Back in what, 95 or 96, I paid £399 for a vanilla 1200. 2MB of Chip. How much would this monster have cost?

If they'd have released this for (a lot) more than a grand, the Amiga would have been dead as a home hobbyist machine.

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Jeez. Back in what, 95 or 96, I paid £399 for a vanilla 1200. 2MB of Chip. How much would this monster have cost?

If they'd have released this for (a lot) more than a grand, the Amiga would have been dead as a home hobbyist machine.

This was going to be an A5K which would of been much more expensive, than the stand alone A1200. I think this computer if it had of made manufacture, would of been a Beast, rather than a Monster!

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Right, so whats the best method of next gen "Amiga" on the cheap?

Is it a PowerMac G5 or is it an Aros x86 solution?

Thoughts please.

Four pages of thoughts now. Cheapest seems to be os4 on Winuae. Next cheapest seems to be aros on x86 spare parts. Still fairly cheap is morphos on mac g5.
What will you go for Galahad?

[Ian]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Right, so whats the best method of next gen "Amiga" on the cheap?

Is it a PowerMac G5 or is it an Aros x86 solution?

Thoughts please.

Buying a PS4 and pretending the UI is the route which Commodore would've gone.

[Dunny]

Take an old lappy, install FS-UAE from here. This really is the dog's danglies - and you retain huge compatibility while adding highres graphics modes and insane CPU speeds.

It's completely replaced my real miggy hardware.

[utri007]

To get NG Amiga cheap, is not a question of hardware, it is question of investment of money.

To get hardware price down, would require production of 20000 units at minium, maybe less.

For me amiga is also hardware, I wouldn't see any point to turn ON Apple Computer without MacOS.

Amigish operating systems are hobby operating systems, no more or less. Nothing woulld change that, exept some hundered millions investment for OS, hardware, marketing etc.

Dreaming some kind of comeback is delusional.

[Dunny]

For me it wasn't the hardware - it was the software and the community around it.

Workbench, CLI utils, the games, OctaMED and ProTracker, Wordworth, Lightwave, Cinema4D, PPaint and DPaint. The magazines that catered to our tastes. The compilation floppies, the bad cracks, the 40k demos, Aminet.

All of that would exist regardless of the hardware (had the hardware been powerful and cheap enough), hell - even most of the programming languages didn't particularly have to run on a 68k processor.

So for me, it was the software so emulation is fine as are PDFs of the books and mags. But that's just the level I used it at - someone who was banging the hardware would have their nostalgia take a different direction.

Dreaming of some kind of comeback is delusional

You certainly got that right.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Dunny

even most of the programming languages didn't particularly have to run on a 68k processor.

I was going to say E, but then I remembered that there are E dialects for MorphOS as well.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Steril707

I think, these days where the Amiga is more and more becoming a retro hobby, the time for those "NG"-machines is kind of over.

The reason these OSes were started for are kind of obsolete now.

I kind of like what the Vampire is trying and I see the Amigas future there..

I see the Vampire as much more of a dead end than any NG system. It's not the classic Amiga everyone here seems to love, while at the same time too weak to support ports of software from other systems. What remains is the hope that someone would make new Vampire-specific software, but the capabilities of classic systems are not what keeps developers from making new software (you, Steril, being one example), not to mention that most developers seem uninterested in Vampire.