which big society could you accept the help to rebirth the amiga ?

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

512 bit architecture? 64 bit "bytes"? what have you been smoking?

[Dan]

the old chipsets could be built in, as parralel chipsets to the new ones.

the old amiga chipsets would be acessed by the software if the compatibility mode is on.
so only the small part of the old amiga would be emulated, like the instruction set, kickstart,
memory management etc.

[turrican3]

myself, i still have a look to what ibm is doing, he's working on new cpus and the x86 are stopping their progression since a long time now, i mean in ghz way, they continue to make them better but more slowly than before they have just hit a thermal wall. My dream: ibm will make an incredible cpu and will look to partner for making a new computer, amiga and aeon are still there... why not ? but it's just a dream.I still continue to think that a reborn of the amiga with a big society like ibm could lead to an excitment of the the guys which were one day amiga owners and with something around 5 millions base peoples, it will be enough to relaunch the amiga.But it's just a dream.

[jbenam]

Yeah, this thread brought me back from my lurking

Anyway, a new Amiga needs to be cheap, and powerful.

Take an ARM quad-core (the cheap as peanuts chinese ones), a powerful DSP for musicians, a VPU for processing 4K videos for video specialists, a dedicate GPU for gaming... and you have a "custom chipset" of a sort, along with cheap as peanuts components.

Slap AROS on it (I can't see 4.x as a real alternative for the future of Amiga. You can't do closed development when your customer base is probably only a few thousand of users), and there you go.

Sell it for $200 as a powerful PC alternative for professionals (that's why you have a DSP and a VPU in there) and gamers alike and boom, sales everywhere!

You don't even need a lot of money to do that. I mean, you can see projects like FPGAArcade which sell roughly for the same money AND actually reach production, so I'm sure a small company could manage to do that.

Also make it easy to port Android stuff to it. You need to have software to let the devs come onboard. I'm sure nobody in here has forgot the A1000 sidecar and its ability to load PC software, right?

After that you create a less powerful version (cheap dual-core?) directed at offices, you know, one integrated in a keyboard with just a few USB ports, a mail client and office suite. You call it ARM500 and sell it for 99$. Small business and big business would be all over a cheap thin client

My 2c. It's easy, it's doable, and it would be the best chance for Amiga to return as a USEFUL, real alternative.

[britelite]

Originally Posted by jbenam

It's easy, it's doable, and it would be the best chance for Amiga to return as a USEFUL, real alternative.

But not easy and doable enough for you to do anything about it?

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by britelite

But not easy and doable enough for you to do anything about it?

No, as I always regret not taking any Electronic Engineering course
I'm just a solder-and-rework kind of guy, but I've never designed any PCB (maybe, some day...), much less an entire new platform!

Well, I thought about the idea, now somebody else needs to make it work!

[T_hairy_bootson]

So much special in one thread.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by T_hairy_bootson

So much special in one thread.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by jbenam

Yeah, this thread brought me back from my lurking

Anyway, a new Amiga needs to be cheap, and powerful.

Take an ARM quad-core (the cheap as peanuts chinese ones), a powerful DSP for musicians, a VPU for processing 4K videos for video specialists, a dedicate GPU for gaming... and you have a "custom chipset" of a sort, along with cheap as peanuts components.

Slap AROS on it (I can't see 4.x as a real alternative for the future of Amiga. You can't do closed development when your customer base is probably only a few thousand of users), and there you go.

Sell it for $200 as a powerful PC alternative for professionals (that's why you have a DSP and a VPU in there) and gamers alike and boom, sales everywhere!

You don't even need a lot of money to do that. I mean, you can see projects like FPGAArcade which sell roughly for the same money AND actually reach production, so I'm sure a small company could manage to do that.

Also make it easy to port Android stuff to it. You need to have software to let the devs come onboard. I'm sure nobody in here has forgot the A1000 sidecar and its ability to load PC software, right?

After that you create a less powerful version (cheap dual-core?) directed at offices, you know, one integrated in a keyboard with just a few USB ports, a mail client and office suite. You call it ARM500 and sell it for 99$. Small business and big business would be all over a cheap thin client

My 2c. It's easy, it's doable, and it would be the best chance for Amiga to return as a USEFUL, real alternative.

Well I think it a pretty good idea although I don't no much in hardware prices.
But if it come with the name "Amiga" and a good backward compatibility with old 68k, I'll be happy to invest some money on the company to help it get started.

You won't be microsoft with such a project but I think there is some potential in it.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Dan

think big ^^

back in time (if time exists at all) someone invented a wheel.
it was round and good.

then someone invented a bicycle. it had 2 wheels and it was better.


then a car with 4 wheels (fasterrrrrr)

and now the train count the wheels and compare the speed.

Um well I thought at first that maybe you just didn't understand computers, but now you tell us that a car goes faster than a bicycle because it has more wheels and now I don't know what to think. I suppose a space rocket has millions of wheels. Maybe we could just weld two bicycles together and cycle at 100mph. Those engineers who went to the trouble of fitting their trains out with 6000bhp traction motors must feel pretty foolish now we know that it is only the number of wheels that makes them go so fast. And if you want it to go even faster, no problem just add more carriages!

[Dan]

use your imagination to understand that.
replace wheels with bytes/bits.
remove bicycle,car and train and think of them as beeing memory module.

oh yes now it should make sense or not ?

nono its better to use existing old limiting ideas and not to invent the wheel anew.
well its the safe path to go ? a smell of sarcasmus is filling this post.

[brett71]

Frankly, I think what we need to do is not think of a "new" Amiga as having that much in common with a "Classic" Amiga. Keep in mind that Dave Haynie once was on record talking about the Hombre chipset, and how if Commodore had stayed alive, it would have been a completely new architecture and not compatible with previous Amiga models.

So, maybe we need to think more in terms of what Hombre could be in 2014? Are we talking a machine based on maybe an AMD CPU, ATI video chip, Realtek audio and/or network chip(s) baked in, essentially a PC variant, hardware-wise? Or maybe something more along the lines of an ARM-based machine or maybe something along the lines of a Raspberry Pi or CuBox with AROS or a new OS with the best concepts of AmigaOS 1.x-3.x incorporated? Or would it be something completely unique both hardware and OS?

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Dan

use your imagination to understand that.
replace wheels with bytes/bits.
remove bicycle,car and train and think of them as beeing memory module.

oh yes now it should make sense or not ?.

Dude, are you trolling? Because I'm really sorry for you if you aren't.

[turrican3]

Originally Posted by brett71

Frankly, I think what we need to do is not think of a "new" Amiga as having that much in common with a "Classic" Amiga. Keep in mind that Dave Haynie once was on record talking about the Hombre chipset, and how if Commodore had stayed alive, it would have been a completely new architecture and not compatible with previous Amiga models.

So, maybe we need to think more in terms of what Hombre could be in 2014? Are we talking a machine based on maybe an AMD CPU, ATI video card, Realtek audio or network baked in, essentially a PC variant, hardware-wise? Or maybe something more along the lines of an ARM-based machine or maybe something along the lines of a Raspberry Pi or CuBox with AROS or a new OS with the best concepts of AmigaOS 1.x-3.x incorporated? Or would it be something completely unique both hardware and OS?

you are right, if they keepthe amiga spirit and an even better workbench my answer yes, i would like the amiga still alive. But if it turns in set top box with a linux amiga anywhere, my answer is no.

[Dan]

edit: lol

[Mrs Beanbag]

I would be happy to use a new Amiga as an HTPC - small, low-power, silent - but not just a Linux box.

[brett71]

Originally Posted by turrican3

you are right, if they keepthe amiga spirit and an even better workbench my answer yes, i would like the amiga still alive. But if it turns in set top box with a linux amiga anywhere, my answer is no.

Absolutely agreed.

The Amiga Inc. attempt to "resurrect" the Amiga as a PC-clone was pitiful. I would never want to see the Amiga name and the bouncing ball or checkmark logo on a machine like that. Even though it's priced ridiculously high, I consider the X1000 more of a spiritual successor than the crappy Amiga Inc. machines. However, the price of that machine is what I think will keep it from catching on and having any chance at gaining market share beyond hardcore enthusiasts.

For me, Microsoft seems the most vulnerable right now than it's ever been before. Windows 8 has become the new Vista, and 8.1 isn't doing that much to improve perceptions. Windows Phone is DOA. XP is still alive and kicking despite Microsoft's attempts to scare people into upgrading. About the only area of their software that doesn't seem to be hurting much is their server offerings and Office. Macs have always been in a minority share, but Linux's multitude of variants are right there alongside. Could there be room for a new platform that brings together some of the best of all the others?

Just on a side note regarding Windows....I've been checking out ReactOS. For those that don't know, it's an open-source re-implementation of Windows. It looks really interesting and I hope they're able to succeed with it. At least until Microsoft sees them as a threat and tries to kill off the project.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

I would be happy to use a new Amiga as an HTPC - small, low-power, silent - but not just a Linux box.

If the hardware were something similar in size to a Raspberry Pi, but with a beefier CPU, dedicated 3D graphics chip, and more memory, but then with a modern equivalent to Kickstart (or just something more efficient than the average PC BIOS) where certain elements of the OS are built-in, and a completely written from-scratch OS (not a Linux derivative) that is tightly coded, as fast, responsive, and efficient as Workbench was on a 7Mhz A500, but with things like memory protection added and secure multi-user capabilites included, then maybe it could get some attention.

Here's a question for some of the hardware gurus...let's say this new Amiga utilized a PCI-Express x16 bus for expansion cards. If you took something like a video card for a PC, but then added a Flash ROM on it that held the Amiga driver in it, similar to how AUTOCONFIG worked, could that ROM be effectively invisible when the card is put into a PC, but then work if it was plugged into this new Amiga and shove its driver into the system at POST? This of course assumes that an expansion card could be hypothetically used in either a PC or this hypothetical Amiga.

[trydowave]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

and Atari were 'competing' with the ST series which were all kinds of bollocks in comparison.

Got to say this made me chuckle

[turrican3]

you know i would prefer a natami than a amiga pc linux mixed. Natami was a good idea too bad they had conflicts.

[brett71]

Originally Posted by turrican3

you know i would prefer a natami than a amiga pc linux mixed. Natami was a good idea too bad they had conflicts.

I agree that Natami would have been cool if they could have re-implemented AGA, and then built upon that and made SuperAGA work. I was so hoping this would come to fruition. I do think this had the chance of re-vitalizing the platform, but even so, it still wouldn't have made a huge dent in the Mac or PC market shares.

Let's hope Jens' Clone-A will still happen.