Any news on the A1222?

[Paulthetall]

Anyone have any news on the A1222 where they last year sold AAA bundles for. Latest thing I can find is this: https://amigang.com/hardware-amigaone-a1222/

[ Show youtube player ]
Video = 4 years old.

Really curious to the "start classic Amiga OS" :P

Since then it has been silent...at least what I have seen and heard. Perhaps others know more? Really interesting project.

[Daedalus]

Various factors involved there - the general slowness of Amiga OS4 development, in particular there was quite a delay in developing some of the required drivers (audio IIRC was an issue, and they didn't want to launch it without fully supporting all the included hardware as the community didn't take well to that in the past). Then, when drivers were finally on the way, the board could no longer be manufactured because some of the components had been obsoleted in the meantime. Reworking the design for new parts was being done, and then the perfect storm of a semiconductor shortage and a global pandemic hit, which is where we are now. That's the vague story as I understand it anyway.

As for the boot classic OS option, I would speculate that that would let you boot straight into an emulated 3.1 environment. OS 4.1FE already comes with a full 3.1 installation and an emulation environment - currently it is used for launching non-system-friendly software, ADFs etc. from the 4.1 environment, but it's not a huge jump to imagine having it as a boot option.

[Paulthetall]

Thanks for the update Daedalus!

Hope that they come with an official update as well on their sites or here, to keep the fire burning and have something to watch out for and time frame estimates.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Paulthetall

Anyone have any news on the A1222 where they last year sold AAA bundles for. Latest thing I can find is this: https://amigang.com/hardware-amigaone-a1222/

[ Show youtube player ]
Video = 4 years old.

Really curious to the "start classic Amiga OS" :P

Since then it has been silent...at least what I have seen and heard. Perhaps others know more? Really interesting project.

Maybe someone ported Amiga OS4 to Raspberry Pi during these years and they suddenly realized what a bad idea the A1222 hardware was

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Maybe someone ported Amiga OS4 to Raspberry Pi during these years and they suddenly realized what a bad idea the A1222 hardware was

I certainly hope so - the CPUs they are using will go EOL in a few years.

If they keep up with the delays, they won't have any chips to start production with

[graffias79]

I ordered the AAA bundle on January 16, 2020 and have yet to receive a single item except a download code for PPaint (which doesn't seem to work well), Image FX, and some game demo. order status just says "Pending".

[outlawal2]

Contact Amigakit and ask them about it as I have received my AAA kit in the mail about a month ago.

[eXeler0]

Stumbled across this today, it's fairly recent news
http://www.a-eon.com/news/News_Relea...n_underway.pdf

[grelbfarlk]

It's kind of amazing that the A1222 after all of these years is as bad as it is. Some people I debated with were predicting hey even if it's like half as fast with the broken FPU and it's cheap enough, it still might be pretty good. It turns out it's pretty terrible, my XAGA A4000 from 30 years ago with parts from 20 some years ago is faster in 3D.
http://eliyahu.org/tabor/games.html

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

It's kind of amazing that the A1222 after all of these years is as bad as it is. Some people I debated with were predicting hey even if it's like half as fast with the broken FPU and it's cheap enough, it still might be pretty good. It turns out it's pretty terrible, my XAGA A4000 from 30 years ago with parts from 20 some years ago is faster in 3D.
http://eliyahu.org/tabor/games.html

Well, if you assume they spent 7 or so years on improving it, then yea, its ”terrible” but I think its more about redesigning it with new parts that are actually available and/or not hyperinflated in price due to chip shortages, covid and what not.
IMO spending any time on designing new PPC Amiga hardware would be better spent on porting Amiga OS4.x to raspberry pi ;-)

[grelbfarlk]

Well it's just amazing that the design was done years ago. I can't imagine that for $50 they couldn't have put a more compatible CPU on the motherboard. Probably more like $25. But I imagine for a gaffe like this it was more like a $10 difference. That's what makes it amazing.
It seems like they said we have long orders in for 100 units. Each will cost exactly $89.95. If it costs $1 more than that we will have to cancel our orders and spend $103.86 on them. That will reduce our profits by no less than $1391. Just wait until the drivers and emulation layer are done enough to ship it, I don't care if it takes 5 years and is slow as dirt. I'm not wasting $1391.

[eXeler0]

To put it into perspective, they started developing this board when Raspberry Pi 2 was brand new.

[matt3k]

Agree with the sentiment of creating bespoke hardware when a 15 year old PPC mac will smoke it on every level for 1/12 the cost. They should have focused on the toolset so they could add meaningful applications and functionality. AOS4.x is very stale at this point with yet another group of new coders. Even if they ever get mulitprocessor working on a discontinued piece of hardware, who really cares at this point as so many bad decisions have killed it in my eyes anyways...

In contrast the Blue Guys thought it out, planned, and were disciplined and it really paid off with a very mature solution with readily available, cheap, and powerful hardware.

[grelbfarlk]

MorphOS is fine and everything. They have as much multiprocessor support as OS4. OS4 has more modern GPU support.

A cheap and decent OS4 motherboard would have been nice. They just failed terribly at it.

[CCCP alert]

That's the thing, CPU price/performance improvement rockets along on a yearly basis so anything based on ARM/X86 that is delayed is not going to be a good idea.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

That's the thing, CPU price/performance improvement rockets along on a yearly basis so anything based on ARM/X86 that is delayed is not going to be a good idea.

That's the most nice way to put it I don't think either performance or price are really any concern to somebody buying the machine though. At least I hope not.

[matt3k]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

MorphOS is fine and everything. They have as much multiprocessor support as OS4. OS4 has more modern GPU support.

A cheap and decent OS4 motherboard would have been nice. They just failed terribly at it.

The Beta drivers released by Mark for MorphOS erased the GPU advantage of OS4.

Sure, if they would have released the 1222 years ago, sub $500 it would have made much more sense. Sorta like the Efika, a cheap entry level PPC system.

The sad irony is that no hardware released for OS4 or MorphOS is as powerful and as affordable as PPC Mac. After years of using a Powerbook 1.67 and a PowerMac 2.5 11,2 PCIe, it seems kinda silly now to me to invest in something that is less powerful and way more expensive. OS4 should have just ported to the PPC Mac 10 years ago so they could work on the OS and worry about reach goals after you had a solid solution. The reality is that you will need every drop of performance if you want to browse the web or watch HD content, so entry level doesn't do much. I guess if you want to spend $1,500 to watch 720 movies and use ibrowse to view old websites, it would be great. That is why MorphOS is so much faster, better, feature rich, and polished at this point and it can be 100% usable with many "modern" expectations with a fresh install in 5 minutes.

[matt3k]

Originally Posted by TCD

That's the most nice way to put it I don't think either performance or price are really any concern to somebody buying the machine though. At least I hope not.

I'm not so sure of that anymore, I used to spend crazy money years ago for classic hardware. Now with cost of living in the US being 3 times what it was just a few short years ago, disposable income is much harder to come by. It doesn't help that many of the past hardware releases had promises tied to them that never became reality. Not factoring in the endless lawsuits and stale state of the OS in general. It is a different time now and I would bet they don't sell that many of them. Late to the party and way overpriced...

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by matt3k

I'm not so sure of that anymore, I used to spend crazy money years ago for classic hardware. Now with cost of living in the US being 3 times what it was just a few short years ago, disposable income is much harder to come by. It doesn't help that many of the past hardware releases had promises tied to them that never became reality. Not factoring in the endless lawsuits and stale state of the OS in general. It is a different time now and I would bet they don't sell that many of them. Late to the party and way overpriced...

In 2015, instead of decided they needed to develop a budget alternative to the discontinued Sam or the hypervexpensive x5000 maybe they should have at least explored the ”how to adapt our software to run on what was becoming a world phenomenon at the time”, namely the raspberry pi. RBP2 was released in 2015 and clearly ppl could see the path where this was going over time. More and more competent hardware at a price that cant be beaten.
If they still wanted to waste money on hardware they could have created a special official Amiga branded case for the RBPi.
Imagine if the process of upgrading your NG Amiga was basically swapping out a RBPi3 for a RBPi4. ;-)

I know Im over-simplifying this and I know its not super easy to port between PPC and ARM (du to little vs bigvendian and what not) but im pretty sure they’d come up with some clever stuff by now if they started back then ;-)

[Karlos]

Everything any NG system can do that's worth a damn is written in C or some other hardware agnostic programming language and that includes the OS itself. Sticking to PPC serves no purpose.

PPC does nothing for anyone except tether them to increasingly obscure obsolete hardware. And not even obsolete in any cool way. 68K is where it's at. 68K binaries run on real silicon. Thay run in FPGA implementations. They run on UAE, Emu68, Petunia and Trance.