What does the Amiga community need?

[CentralPerk]

A custom and open source FastATA MKx PCB replacement for Indivision equipped A1200s.

[wiser3]

Wow! Nice responses.

A few questions.

1. Would you prefer new things aimed at:
a. low spec Amiga's (OCS, OS1.3)
b. high spec Amiga's (AGA, 030+)
c. futuristic Amiga's (Vampire)

2. If a new Amiga website was made what content could it have that current ones don't?

3. Does an Amiga related website HAVE to work in Amiga browsers? Understand that doing so could hamper the functionality and look of the website.

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by wiser3

Wow! Nice responses.

A few questions.

1. Would you prefer new things aimed at:
a. low spec Amiga's (OCS, OS1.3)
b. high spec Amiga's (AGA, 030+)
c. futuristic Amiga's (Vampire)

I think I'd divide that a bit more, actually: AGA with '020/'030 is mid-range, '040 / '060 / RTG is high spec, and then Vampire / Buffee / PiStorm are futuristic.

My vote would be to target low spec or mid-range.

2. If a new Amiga website was made what content could it have that current ones don't?

The one thing I think is missing is "Things to See and Do in Amiga Land" - an orientation guide for fans of other retro system who aren't familiar with the Amiga.
(I'd like to see such a site for each platform. As an Amiga user I'd be intrigued enough to play with Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, maybe Oric or Aquarius, or Memotech 512 in emulation but wouldn't know which software to seek out to get a feel for what each machine can do.)

3. Does an Amiga related website HAVE to work in Amiga browsers? Understand that doing so could hamper the functionality and look of the website.

I'd say no, but it does need to be reasonably lightweight and responsive - if it scrolls jerkily, makes the CPU fans spin like a jet engine and hammers the hard drive (I'm looking at you, Slack and Discord), or hides what you're reading behind some popup begging for permission to slurp your data (I'm looking at you, every commercial website on the planet that 'cares' about my privacy), it might be met with a certain degree of scorn...

[manossg]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

wave the magic wand and make all the silly copyrights disappear.

+1

[Cobe]

Originally Posted by danielktdoranie

A GPU. Something that can drop into the Denise chip socket and give us 16.7 million colors at high resolutions and output to HDMI.

The PiStorm is a game changer. You should check out that project on Github.

Just some faster(or immediate?) blitter would be nice.

And some hardware crt shader...

[tarr]

Lionheart II and Turrican IV.
Hardware specs should always be A500 1MB and A1200.
Pimped Amigas are not real Amigas, at least not for gamers.

[jasonsbeer]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

Native SATA controller. (DMA / Zorro2/3 for added bonuses.)
Worst case as a design that can be smacked on to existing cpu upgrades.

I agree with this. Alternatively, a PCIe SSD interface. Independent from a CPU upgrade.

[coldacid]

Originally Posted by wiser3

Wow! Nice responses.

A few questions.

1. Would you prefer new things aimed at:
a. low spec Amiga's (OCS, OS1.3)
b. high spec Amiga's (AGA, 030+)
c. futuristic Amiga's (Vampire)

Yes.

2. If a new Amiga website was made what content could it have that current ones don't?

Depends on what you mean by "new Amiga website".

3. Does an Amiga related website HAVE to work in Amiga browsers? Understand that doing so could hamper the functionality and look of the website.

They shouldn't HAVE to, but they really SHOULD.

[coldacid]

Oh, something the community could really use is "Open ARexx" that fulfills all the functionality of classic ARexx but can actually be worked on instead of treated as a magic binary blob. I wonder if it might be possible to take Regina or Open Object Rexx and make it work on Amiga...

[Daedalus]

Isn't Regina already running on AROS? From there it should be relatively simple to get it running on Amiga OS.

[utri007]

There a several SPI solutions for a Amiga.

We need SPI standard, like AHI or P96, but for SPI.
We need more SPI device drivers, like network card, sound cards, MP3 player, what ever is available for a SPI.

[daxb]

A year ago I had a fast look at ReginaREXX on RPi and I would say it is too different to ARexx. I think you can't run a script on the other system without changes. If so it is pointless IMO.

[acidbottle]

Some nice ideas here.

I have been looking for a database of commercial music releases that were made on the Amiga. Discogs will sometimes inform the system used but I highly doubt its comprehensive, plus you have to know the tracks anyway! They will likely be rave/techno orientated, though perhaps artists of other styles used them to, even if it was just for sequencing.

Maybe something like this exists but never found it

[coldacid]

Touching back on Regina versus ARexx, the former is open source so it's at least theoretically possible to make the changes needed to get it to act like ARexx.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by utri007

There a several SPI solutions for a Amiga.

We need SPI standard, like AHI or P96, but for SPI.
We need more SPI device drivers, like network card, sound cards, MP3 player, what ever is available for a SPI.

Does that not already exist? I know there's an I2C library that's more or less standard so any software can use any I2C hardware so long as it has a corresponding i2c.library file.

If a similar situation doesn't exist for SPI, it really should.

Originally Posted by daxb

A year ago I had a fast look at ReginaREXX on RPi and I would say it is too different to ARexx. I think you can't run a script on the other system without changes. If so it is pointless IMO.

Yeah, it would really need proper compatibility with ARexx and not just REXX to be much use. I was under the impression such modifications were in place in the AROS port already, however I see that's just listed as a goal on the AROS webpage so maybe it's not there yet (and I've no idea of the development status).

[fxgogo]

So one of the things I have noticed with the Amiga online community is that there are so many of them. I keep bumping into new ones. Which is awesome of course, and something that does not necessarily exist on other retro platforms.

So I would like to see a newcomers guide that exists on as many Amiga sites as possible. This guides data would come from a central source, so one update gets fed to all sites at once.

[amipal]

New games, new programs, new hardware, new interfaces.


Basically, if you can code, then get coding! (and always upload to Aminet)


If you can design ways to use newer input or output hardware with classic Amigas, get cracking!

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by manossg

+1

IOWs, make sure that there is certainly nobody willing to invest any money for creating software for the machine? Right, smart move.


-1

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by danielktdoranie

A GPU. Something that can drop into the Denise chip socket and give us 16.7 million colors at high resolutions and output to HDMI.

Easy -get a graphics card. All existing.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

Native SATA controller. (DMA / Zorro2/3 for added bonuses.)
Worst case as a design that can be smacked on to existing cpu upgrades.

SATA (or anything remotely as modern) can saturate the Amiga busses already easily. For fast I/O, I recommend a SCSI2SD. The storage is dirt-cheap (SD-cards) and fast enough for anything the Amiga can handle.