[matthey]

Originally Posted by wXR

I don't really get your point about obstacles. A Vampire standalone is apparently not far off, and I guess the truly crazy gentleman at A1200.net is not far off with his keyboard mechanism. Assuming those both complete, here is what you have to do:

We already have small stand alone Amiga boards available today with the FPGA Arcade and Mist. Also, iComp's Reloaded Amiga 1200 boards will be available soon and maybe before the Vampire standalone boards. Some fit in a 1200 case better than others with the Reloaded being the best fit. Most of the features you requested are available or are planned to be available. The AmigaOS/AROS options out of the box are a big question mark and obstacle to Amiga sales. AmigaOS is a patch fest and license nightmare and AROS is much slower and less compatible.

Originally Posted by wXR

As for the rest of your obstacles, they're not obstacles to shipping the above product. And you don't need that much money to do it.

Actually, my listed obstacles are obstacles to shipping products. They greatly reduce the value of the products (less features and performance with more cost) which results in less products sold. There will be existing die hard Amiga users which buy these products and a few ex-Amiga users and high end retro gamers but we are talking about the result being low thousands of active 68k classic users still. This is not enough to develop software or an OS (open source or not) as can be seen with AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS. Neither of these camps have been successful at attracting outside users and most new development comes at a snails pace from a handful of sources (which are likely unprofitable as can be seen by Hyperion's rescue). There is no way to fix this problem without increasing the number of users and that starts with selling affordable mass produced products and marketing outside of the current Amiga community. No amount of software improvements would bring in new users without affordable hardware. The Amiga is in a death spiral as the user base declines. IMO, freeing the AmigaOS or greatly improving AROS does not fix the problem by itself.

Originally Posted by wXR

I do wonder how much it would be really. I suppose the big question is the standalone Vampire. One thing about matthey's multi-system vision is that it would probably drive hardware manufacture costs down considerably, since more could be produced.

I was considering an ASIC to cost between $500,000 and $1,000,000. Some people balk at this amount but it really isn't that much money anymore. Embedded partners could help defer the cost as the CPU could be sold by itself if it was 68k compatible enough and could have a long product life. There are very talented FPGA designers (including with CPU design experience) in the Amiga community which could help reduce engineering and design costs.