4 ms·

You'd be surprised at how big the retrocomputing/retrogaming enthusiast market is. I know in the U.S. that there are several shows alone that pull in north of a

by bane 11y ago

You'd be surprised at how big the retrocomputing/retrogaming enthusiast market is. I know in the U.S. that there are several shows alone that pull in north of a thousand people. It really is mostly for the novelty/nostalgia factor. Most of the Amiga OSs run on ancient PowerPC hardware and aren't useful in a modern sense for much more than simple web browsing and IRC. While there are certainly people who make things for the various scenes and sell them, usually they're just trying to cover manufacturing cost of physical product. Software is usually freeware/opensource. The Atari 8-bit computer scene, for example, produces lots of weird custom hardware that the makers usually sell for parts + labor + shipping, but I can't recall ever hearing of license fees for a new DOS (there are many DOSs for the old 8-bits). What's particularly weird about the Amiga scene is how locked down the IP still is and how that seems to permeate the rest of the scene. It's like the IP owners think that somehow they'll suddenly come across hundreds of millions of dollars in VC money and will reignite the Amiga fire with new hardware and software that will sweep the world...if only they hold on to the licenses for 30 year old ROM images a little bit longer. Or that they'll somehow sell enough licenses to make up for millions of dollars of development investment. No joke, AmigaOS 4.1 is actually 30EUR today -- in almost 2016 -- and it only runs on bizarro PowerPC hardware that's built out of weird industrial control system motherboards or something and sold by yet other hopeless companies. [1][2][3] If they sell 1,000 licenses a year, their revenue is 30,000EUR. So I mean, Hyperion Entertainment is supposedly a company and there's probably more than one person hacking away at the OS, but there's no way they're coming close to covering costs on this. If I wasn't convinced of the earnestness of Amiga enthusiasts, I'd almost believe the entire thing is some kind of complex money laundering operation. There's even commercial software still developed and licensed: [4][5][6][7] and even an entire app store! [8] I really admire the enthusiasm and passion, but I just can't figure out the money angle or what the point is. 1 - http://www.amigaos.net/ http://www.amigaos.net/ 2 - http://www.a-eon.com/ http://www.a-eon.com/ 3 - http://www.acube-systems.biz/ http://www.acube-systems.biz/ 4 - http://www.pagestream.org/ http://www.pagestream.org/ 5 - http://www.amigaos.net/software/100/amidark-engine http://www.amigaos.net/software/100/amidark-engine 6 - http://www.hollywood-mal.com/purchase.html http://www.hollywood-mal.com/purchase.html 7 - http://www.codebench.co.uk/ http://www.codebench.co.uk/ 8 - http://www.amistore.net/ http://www.amistore.net/

sundvor 11y ago
Wow, Pagestream. Now there's a piece of software I haven't seen for a few years... I actually bought the original of that, for my own DTP projects as a teenager - on my Amiga 3000 I think it was (which had replaced a 500). PageStream was truly fantastic stuff. I managed to create quite a few newsletters and even school projects with that. Oh the good old times.. :-)
- Fjolsvith 11y ago
  Too true! I loved Pagestream, and thought MS Publisher was so clunky compared to it. I lived in Juneau, Alaska when the Amiga scene peaked and ran a 4 line BBS on my Amiga 3000. I had purchased a laser printer at the state surplus. I was given a 300mb SCSI HD by a friend who worked at an architectural firm. The HD had some bad sectors in the middle of the drive and was unusable for IBM's, but I was able to create partitions around the bad area and use the majority of the drive. Truly, the AmigaOS was revolutionary!
jarcane 11y ago
What's particularly weird about the Amiga scene is how locked down the IP still is and how that seems to permeate the rest of the scene. It's like the IP owners think that somehow they'll suddenly come across hundreds of millions of dollars in VC money and will reignite the Amiga fire with new hardware and software that will sweep the world...if only they hold on to the licenses for 30 year old ROM images a little bit longer. Or that they'll somehow sell enough licenses to make up for millions of dollars of development investment. What I always thought was really weird is, the community helps them with this. Like, the Amiga scene for some time was about the only retro scene I know of that self-policed for infringement. Regular Ami fans would take it upon themselves to scour the web for people hosting the Workbench ROMs and disks and report them, and would get very very cross about requests. It was as if they thought if they could only shut down emulation people would just start rebuying real hardware in droves just to play ancient games. You can't even practically build an actual high-end Amiga anymore like you can get up and running in WinUAE with a few clicks, because the accelerator and graphics add-on hardware is all mostly rarer than gold these days. It really is the case that there's this hardcore of really obsessive Amiga fans who're convinced they can somehow force the world to once again go Amiga. No one else is like this; there's no hardcore Risc OS fans out there waiting for the day when Acorn arises again and slays Microsoft or something. It's bizarre.

by bane 11y ago

sundvor 11y ago

Wow, Pagestream. Now there's a piece of software I haven't seen for a few years... I actually bought the original of that, for my own DTP projects as a teenager - on my Amiga 3000 I think it was (which had replaced a 500). PageStream was truly fantastic stuff. I managed to create quite a few newsletters and even school projects with that. Oh the good old times.. :-)

Fjolsvith 11y ago
Too true! I loved Pagestream, and thought MS Publisher was so clunky compared to it. I lived in Juneau, Alaska when the Amiga scene peaked and ran a 4 line BBS on my Amiga 3000. I had purchased a laser printer at the state surplus. I was given a 300mb SCSI HD by a friend who worked at an architectural firm. The HD had some bad sectors in the middle of the drive and was unusable for IBM's, but I was able to create partitions around the bad area and use the majority of the drive. Truly, the AmigaOS was revolutionary!

jarcane 11y ago

What's particularly weird about the Amiga scene is how locked down the IP still is and how that seems to permeate the rest of the scene. It's like the IP owners think that somehow they'll suddenly come across hundreds of millions of dollars in VC money and will reignite the Amiga fire with new hardware and software that will sweep the world...if only they hold on to the licenses for 30 year old ROM images a little bit longer. Or that they'll somehow sell enough licenses to make up for millions of dollars of development investment. What I always thought was really weird is, the community helps them with this. Like, the Amiga scene for some time was about the only retro scene I know of that self-policed for infringement. Regular Ami fans would take it upon themselves to scour the web for people hosting the Workbench ROMs and disks and report them, and would get very very cross about requests. It was as if they thought if they could only shut down emulation people would just start rebuying real hardware in droves just to play ancient games. You can't even practically build an actual high-end Amiga anymore like you can get up and running in WinUAE with a few clicks, because the accelerator and graphics add-on hardware is all mostly rarer than gold these days. It really is the case that there's this hardcore of really obsessive Amiga fans who're convinced they can somehow force the world to once again go Amiga. No one else is like this; there's no hardcore Risc OS fans out there waiting for the day when Acorn arises again and slays Microsoft or something. It's bizarre.