New Amiga Hardware?

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by rothers

Not worth the risk in my opinion.

Indeed. To those who insist the demand is there I invite you to invest your own money to make the products happen. If you are not willing to do that then you do not have much cause to complain about there being no new products.

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by plasmab

Indeed. To those who insist the demand is there I invite you to invest your own money to make the products happen. If you are not willing to do that then you do not have much cause to complain about there being no new products.

I did want to invest in your product! Yet when I informed you of the "Fire Storm Project" , you turned me down flat! OK, so there was no obligation on your part, you are entitled to decide what you like. Only you just didn't seem interested at all.

You know your stuff and clearly all that is involved in development and sales, this is more than most do. Which incidentally, is another reason why I needed you for the Fire Storm Project, not just your designs.

If you want my honest opinion, I think you deserve something more than you have got from your TF series. You worked hard and have given so much, to so many. Going down in Amiga history maybe all the praise you need! Yet if there was just a slight chance of making something more from it, wouldn't you want to be involved?

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by MigaTech

I did want to invest in your product! Yet when I informed you of the "Fire Storm Project" , you turned me down flat! OK, so there was no obligation on your part, you are entitled to decide what you like. Only you just didn't seem interested at all.

You know your stuff and clearly all that is involved in development and sales, this is more than most do. Which incidentally, is another reason why I needed you for the Fire Storm Project, not just your designs.

If you want my honest opinion, I think you deserve something more than you have got from your TF series. You worked hard and have given so much, to so many. Going down in Amiga history maybe all the praise you need! Yet if there was just a slight chance of making something more from it, wouldn't you want to be involved?

Urm. I am really the wrong person to approach for this. This is my hobby. I am honestly not good enough at it to make real money out of it. I do not do requests because i think it gets peoples hopes up. Similarly I dont do patreon etc because then there is a pressure to deliver. I think that that pressure would kill the passion and I'd probably stop doing anything at all.

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by plasmab

Urm. I am really the wrong person to approach for this. This is my hobby. I am honestly not good enough at it to make real money out of it. I do not do requests because i think it gets peoples hopes up. Similarly I dont do patreon etc because then there is a pressure to deliver. I think that that pressure would kill the passion and I'd probably stop doing anything at all.

That's a better explanation than last time I asked you!

Anyways, I fully understand where you are coming from on this, so thanks for explaining.

[sneckburger]

Individual Computers have updated their website on the Indivision ECS that has been out of stock for some time now. Say they are working a newer version to be released Late summer 2018!

Any ideas what changes are going to be made? will it still work on the A604n?

[demolition]

Even more interesting (to me): Will it have HDMI output with proper 50 Hz support?

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by plasmab

Indeed. To those who insist the demand is there I invite you to invest your own money to make the products happen. If you are not willing to do that then you do not have much cause to complain about there being no new products.

I'll be very happy to invest some money on a brand new classic Amiga hardware or in a company that will intend to do it. Not just as a customer but as an (little) investor if there was such a project.

In fact, I just don't understand how is it possible to considers that there isn't any demand.

1 / A1200.net raised 2*100 000€ to make brand new cases for A500/A1200. Not even a complete keyboard. Just plain plastic cases for people that already have a functionnal Amiga.

2 / a brand new Speccy, which sold pretty much like the Amiga in his lifetime, was kickstarted and produced last year (250 000€ were raised. Or was it pounds ?). And I'm pretty sure that the Amiga is far more known / sought among retro players nowaday because of its legacy in the VG history. Everything Amiga related have an ever growing price on the net and I'm not sure this is because hardcore Amiga users are becoming richer.

4 / you sold 3/400 units of an extension that implie to have a CD32. You ca'nt make more niche market than that yet you sold hundred of them. In fact, I'm really impressed by the sales figures because CD32 isn't by far the most common of Amiga model, the TF328 is an handcrafted product without any advertising that you have to order on little konwns internet website except for the hardcore base of Amiga users and it is not even mandatory to run the vast majority of CD32 games. (I'm won't be surprised if 90% of CD32 owners are even aware of its existence).

5 / What people are wanting in this retro wave isn't something that recquire you to be a soldering or an hardware/software master. Just something plug and play, with a good retro design, slightly modernized (they don't even care if it is emulated or real new old hardware).
Everybody can buy a Raspberry, put hundreds of games and emulator on it and plays till the end of time. Yet peoples rushed on the NES/SNES mini editions which is more expansive and with just 20/30 games.
They bought a case with an emulator inside. They didn't care to know if hardware had anything related to NES or SNES.
Oh yes, this is Nintendo, but we aren't speaking about selling 6 millions units of a New Amiga. Even 0,1% of this market would be profitable.

The only thing that can refrain to do such a project, is the possibility that the retro wave bubble bursts.

[hth313]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

2 / a brand new Speccy, which sold pretty much like the Amiga in his lifetime, was kickstarted and produced last year (250 000€ were raised. Or was it pounds ?). And I'm pretty sure that the Amiga is far more known / sought among retro players nowaday because of its legacy in the VG history. Everything Amiga related have an ever growing price on the net and I'm not sure this is because hardcore Amiga users are becoming richer.

It is always nice to provide links. Now I googled a bit and found the ZX Spectrum Next which I guess is what you are thinking about? I had no idea about this project, but it looks really cool (though looking at the videos made my head hurt a bit because of the "music"). I was even tempted to get one, but they are sold out at the moment.

For the Z80 I would actually prefer a good modern (small) CP/M box. Maybe that already exists? I have no idea, I am apparently not aware of much that goes around...

And they raised £723,390 (out of pledged £250,000 goal)!

Links
https://www.specnext.com/
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...xt/description

[sokolovic]

This is what I was speaking about.
And thanks you for making my point.
Sold out with more than 750 000€ raised on kickstarter.
Still some says that there isn't a market for a brand new classic Amiga.
This is a mistery for me.

[Daedalus]

The Amiga examples you give are for people who are interested specifically in the original hardware, and while they might also be interested in a new reproduction, that isn't guaranteed. What price point do you think would work, and for how many people? The Amiga is a vastly more complicated machine to emulate than a Spectrum, and requires much more powerful hardware and software as a result, which will push the price far higher than the Spectrum Next. If you want the new Amiga to have a similar case to the originals, you will need to get that custom made, and the Kickstarter you're talking about is a very good starting point: €90, just for a case. And that's without getting a custom keyboard and keycaps made, and without putting a single electronic part inside.

Then you've got the licencing - of course, you'll need to licence the OS, and if you want to include games with it, you'll have to get licences for them too, and especially compared to the Mini-SNES, that will be trickier and more expensive than you might think.

So yes, there might be demand, but is it enough at the high price such units would cost to work? Maybe not.

[hth313]

If you take the price of the Spectrum and double it, you get around $550-$600. I think around $500 is the limit to sell well. Above that, well, there will be buyers but I suspect it will drop off fast.

I can see many hurdles here, but I do not think the OS will be a big one, just buy a bulk of licenses from Cloanto, easy money for them and it should not become too expensive. Games may be a bit troublesome, but I suspect there is good knowledge around as we have that issue today anyway whatever emulation or hardware solution we are using.

The biggest issue is the price, and as you say, it will be a lot more expensive than the Spectrum.

But with some luck we will get Vampire standalone that can be put into a standard box. Then hook up your favourite keyboard, mouse and monitor to it. That would at least work for me, is that not good enough?

[gururise]

Would love to see an ITX based Amiga that was cheap and mass produced (similar to Amy-ITX); however, with the following:

1. 68030+
2. 256 MB RAM
3. AGA

Perhaps #1 & 3 could be emulated on an FGPA, so we end up with something like MISTer; however in an ITX form factor.

[gururise]

Originally Posted by gururise

Would love to see an ITX based Amiga that was cheap and mass produced (similar to Amy-ITX); however, with the following:

1. 68030+
2. 256 MB RAM
3. AGA

Perhaps #1 & 3 could be emulated on an FGPA, so we end up with something like MISTer; however in an ITX form factor.

Would be really cool if we could get some PCI + Zorro III slots on the motherboard as well. So to recap:

* ITX Motherboard
* FPGA emulating 68030+ and AGA Chipset
* 256MB RAM+
* PCI + Zorro III slots for Amiga card compatibility.

[E-Penguin]

Isn't that pretty much MIST and derivatives?

Seeing how good emulation is these days; how about an interface board for an off-the-shelf ITX board, offering various Amiga i/o ports & slots, and the rest is done in winuae.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

Seeing how good emulation is these days; how about an interface board for an off-the-shelf ITX board, offering various Amiga i/o ports & slots, and the rest is done in winuae.

You need an FPGA solution to support the various ports and in particular the Zorro slots. WinUAE (or any other UAE) is not timing-accurate so it could only work with timing-insensitive ports like the joy ports. Windows (or a regular Linux) is not a realtime OS, so you don't have any guarantee that your process will be able to respond in time.
This is where FPGAs are useful. Here you control everything basically down to hardware-level so in theory you could almost make a 1:1 copy of all the digital parts of a genuine Amiga, provided you have the chip schematics or are able to create them through reverse engineering. You have the entire FPGA to yourself and do not have to fight the OS or other processes for CPU time.

[esel]

Originally Posted by gururise

Would love to see an ITX based Amiga that was cheap and mass produced (similar to Amy-ITX); however, with the following:

1. 68030+
2. 256 MB RAM
3. AGA

Perhaps #1 & 3 could be emulated on an FGPA, so we end up with something like MISTer; however in an ITX form factor.

cool, but please with a real cpu. a 68060 would be great.

[Lord Aga]

Yes. A couple of hundreds of 060s should be easy to find.

[esel]

i dont think that they will sell hundreds.. but you can use 040 as you can get them easy.