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People choosing to use some os instead of some other os: I'd call that freedom of choice. People hating other people for choosing differently to what they choose: fanboy.

I'd actually like to try os4, i've heard good things about it. Not in an emulator though, that would kind of kill the point a bit I think. Would it run native on any kind of mac? Or an old pII laptop?

And yeah, dopus should be installed by default on all computers :)

Even though it was always PPC oriented and could have been designed to run on Macs back when Macs were PPC, and even though x86 support would have made a lot of sense, what they wanted was a "new Amiga". "Platform" has become a very abstract term lately, but I guess they missed that trend. So it won't run on a Mac or a P2.

AROS would, though. It's probably worth trying if it's anything like OS4. Maybe it's just habits from all those years of AmigaOS use, but OS4 felt really right when I tried it.

Amiga rules. You are just jelaous.

Why do people still do this? I don't understand how there can be people who are qualified enough to design and execute on such a system and at the same time come up with this proprietary hype shit. Well, maybe there aren't, maybe that's why we never ever see these craptacular amateur contraptions in production.

Does anybody remember that Phase 5 next generation Amiga they dreamed up before they went bankrupt?

Why shouldn't people "still do this". Whats wrong with thinking outside the box, and not following the mainstream all the time. If no one did alternative things, we would still be monkeys throwing sticks at eachother.

Let enthusiasts be enthusiastic and FAIL as much as they like, whats it to you. Maybe(or most likely) this will be yet another deadend Amiga Project, but so what. Atleast its something different, and fun.

I must say, I don't see a lot of point in this kind of custom hardware unless it can do something a generic pc can't do, or it can do the same cheaper. Otherwise it's hardware for the sake of hardware. The old amigas had custom chips that did stuff the generic PCs of the time couldn't and at a much lower price.. if they'd been half a decade behind and cost double we'd never have even heard of them :)

If they'd port the OS to x86, I'd very likely have an amiga OS machine running on my desk now. Driver support could be a nightmare, but they could easily limit support to a few commonly available chipsets + other parts.

AMIGAAAAA WILL NEVER DIE!

Ahem! Aaaanyway. With there being so many companies trying to resurrect the Amiga, there will be one that will make it stick. That will only happen when people want Amigas again as much as they did before, so the hype engine will have to be brought out again. Personally I'd really love to see the Amiga happily competing with PC's and Mac's, but with the fact that normal PC's are getting pretty cheap, Amigas will need to be really cheap to get the foothold to be able to compete. But without that competition they won't get any recognition apart from hardcore fanatics who will want to spend a lot of cash on the new Amiga. The kind of people that could only just get an A500 when they first came out definitely won't be able to get the new Amigas if they're really expensive, it just won't appeal to them. So by going by all that lot, I can't see it happening in a hurry. Companies will just have to change attitudes about marketing the Amiga again.

I think it won't come back because there's no longer any real space in the market.

Nobody will buy a new computer with very little software available unless it's somehow super amazing (i.e. massively better than win7/osx/linux). That would take either some kind of crazy new invention nobody thought of before, or tons of coders working full time on the OS and tons of engineers cranking out great hardware. The first is extremely unlikely, the second would cost a ton of money.

Nobody will buy it as a games machine these days - consoles are cheap + powerful, with tons of great games already available.

Nobody will buy it unless it competes on price too - if it's cheap, it has to compete with £300 PCs on performance and software, if it's expensive it has to compete with the macs and boutique/performance pcs. That's a tough bit of competition.

Basically, they need either something really innovative that will sell itself easily (and get ripped off by a million taiwanese hardware factories within 3 months) or they keep selling to xeron :)

there already is AROS..

ah, there's a VM version of aros. I'm not convinced by aros somehow, so I'll try that out, see how it goes :)

Or unless it fills some niche, or there is sufficient hype surrounding it. (iPhone etc.)

There are a few good reasons for proprietary hardware in the Amiga's case (like avoiding PC legacy crap), but not enough to warrant a custom platform when PCs are fucking cheap and not really that bad. It's not like you still struggle with IRQ settings, DMA channels and HDD size limits anymore.

But it wouldn't really matter since even on x86 hardware it would still need software and drivers written for OS4. And although the UI is arguably better (I think so at least), the underlying operating system would probably never be able to compete with Windows 7 in any meaningful way.

So yeah, OS4 should have been a UI replacement hack for Windows. That would rock.

yep, the windoz war is long gone and won. So if there would be a place for "A new Amiga" it would be the leftover scraps that Mac,Linux & others are battling for. If it is priced at Mac level, and can do what is needed for normal use, I will go Amiga again.

even with the XMOS, which admitedly, sounds like a great toy, i think this is doomed.
* just out of curiosity: how many of its predecessors were sold? is there still a market?
* a legacy OS, what are they thinking? can't they just port linux already? who's gonna beta test? childrens diseases, anyone?
* there are more interesting niche gadgets in the pipeline: the Pandora for one.

1500 boards were produced altogether of the earlier AmigaONE boards.

Dunno how many units are actually out there that support AOS4x.

But theese platforms support it according to wikipedia:

Classic Amiga
Released (only version 4.0) for PowerPC Classic Amigas:
* BlizzardPPC equipped Amiga 1200 (A1200)
* DeveloperPPC (rare) equipped Amiga 2000 (A2000)
* CyberstormPPC equipped Amiga 3000 (A3000)
* CyberstormPPC equipped Amiga 4000 (A4000)

AmigaOne
Released for AmigaOne motherboards:
* AmigaOne-SE (A1-SE)
* AmigaOne-XE (A1-XE)
* Micro-AmigaOne (Micro-A1)
* AmigaOne X1000, a new AmigaOne computer has been announced by a company called A-Eon. Hyperion have indicated that this board will be supported by AmigaOS 4.x. The X1000 is not available at this time yet.[17]

Pegasos
Released for Pegasos systems:
* Pegasos II[18]

Samantha
Released for Sam440 systems:
* Sam440ep[19][20]
* Sam440ep-flex

Mac Mini G4
Unofficial Moana Bootloader for Sam440 4.0
* Mac Mini G4 meeting the requirements

hmmm that xmos thingie sound quite om-nom-nom :) 64k single-cycle SRAM, single-cycle context switching, 8 SW threads (in the low cost 6$ variant that will apparently go into the x1000, why not the XS1-G4 (8x4 =32 threads), I mean, it's going to be a niche product, anyways, ..!? )

wonder whether you can use that 8 threads for lock-step'd pipeline'd code..
(do stuff, send event -> (do stuff)+1 cycles per thread / per iteration ?! )

here are some pdfs: XS1 Assembly Language Manual (..is the assembly interpreted in microcode ?) , XS1-L1 64 LQFP Datasheet

all in all, the information about this chip seems a 'lil bit vague but it sure sound interesting (for example, they offer a usb-2.0-audio dev board for 149us$)

.. :) ok forget about the send event (which they say also works in single-cycle), if it's really lock step that thing would make for a nice Transputer , would it not ? :)

What about something like



With an OMAP3 inside? Some sort of screenless pandora.

thx but I do have an OMAP35x already ;) nice device and a whole different topic (the xmos is more like a rather exotic but interesting co-processor)

going back in time, have you heard of the i860 (from what I read Intel (in 1989) put the market to a test: either adopt the 486 or start with a brand new RISC ISA (we all know how the market decided but yay, aren't all current "x86" chips
just interfaces for these kind of architectures ?.?)
it was apparently also used in SGI's RealityEngine.

(and what you mine "screenless", mine has a screen XD)

mean.. ;))

interesting thing about the i860 is that it leaves the instruction scheduling/pipelining (mostly) to the compiler...reminds me of TI's DSP architectures.. :-)

NOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo!!!!! not TI VLIW DSPs ...

I don't give a damn...

I want a faster 68k accelerator board with SDRam and SATA for my Amiga 1200.

Period!