4 ms·

I love the Amiga, but this seems a little too much; for a computer that will cost € 2.299,00, consisting of 'old' hardware.

by gbraad 10y ago

mastazi 10y ago
> this seems a little too much It is. Especially considering that other m68k systems are sold for much less, such as this one which is an Atari-compatible computer and is sold for 643 Euros (560 for the motherboard and 83 for the case): http://firebee.org/fb-bin/index http://firebee.org/fb-bin/index
- cmrdporcupine 10y ago
  My FireBee is being couriered to me as we speak, I'm super excited about it. But it is kind of a different sort of thing. I think the AmigaOne is a foolish concept, but it is a far more powerful machine than the FireBee, as it is based around a high speed PowerPC board. PowerPC IMHO is a dead-end, but it seems like many in the Amiga community have tried to hitch their wagon to it. They'd be better off porting to ARM (running in big-endian mode I guess) if the OS is really worth it.
  - khazhou 10y ago
    What are you planning to do with the firebee?
    - cmrdporcupine 10y ago
      Own it :-) Nothing practical. I will probably try to do some dev work on it to improve it. Dabble in some VHDL and OS work for it.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    That's because history. 680x0 was dead, so PowerPC was intended to replace sometime in the mid 90s after Commodore became German (Escom/Amiga Technology). Dave Haynie and a couple of others were asked to help design a new platform around Power as Amiga was dated. Escom had money issues almost immediately (of course) so it never happened and Escom went bust within a year. Commodore UK's bid was planning HP RISC.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    AROS does run on ARM. As for AmigaOS 4.x I don't think Hyperion have the resources, and they're very dependent on their hardware partners bearing part of the cost. The only problem with PPC from an Amiga point of view is that most of the SOCs are targetting networking and automotive markets and similar embedded use rather than desktops (total PPC sales in terms of number of chips is still in a similar region to x86 sales; revenue per unit is way lower, though). It's not like people will buy these machines looking for top end performance, and the OS is still incredibly light weight, but if you pay for it you can still get PPC chips that perform very well. But AmigaOne's are an very expensive hobby for most people who buy them, not bought to be cost effective. More comparable to the FireBee you have a multitude of M68k accelerators and FPGA Amiga reimplementations that are much cheaper. There's been various discussions about trying to run AmigaOS or AROS on ColdFire like the FireBee too. Problem is people would expect to run their old binary-only software, and AFAIK the ColdFire can't trap all the unimplemented instruction combinations fully, so it'd require "fun" hacks (e.g. dynamic translation; I think it probably could be done reasonably easily for AmigaOS, but finding someone with both the time and the skills is another matter) so the Amiga community focus has been on FPGAs.
    - cmrdporcupine 10y ago
      Yeah ColdFire is also a dead end because Freescale isn't going to be releasing any more models and certainly not at any higher clock speeds. And it's really being made for specialized markets (automotive, ethernet switches, etc.) The FireBee is a neat hack I don't mind supporting, but if people really want hardware and emulators don't cut it, then FPGA is probably the way to go. Or switch architectures and port the OS (EmuTOS and/or AROS) + some sort of CPU translation/emulation layer for 68k stuff. It would probably have to be something big endian, so that rules out RISC-V but OpenRISC, J2 (SuperH) and OpenSPARC are some open source candidates.
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  But this is a PowerPC computer, not m68k.
  - mastazi 10y ago
    Oh, you are right, how did I miss that? So basically the Firebee (Atari compatible) is an m68k board, while most "modern" systems for Amiga OS are currently PowerPC, NOT m68k as I erroneously implied in my previous comment. BTW today I've been googling a bit and it seems that the SAM boards by ACube Systems are substantially cheaper than the X5000, so they could be a valid alternative for people on a budget wanting to run Amiga OS: https://acube-systemsbiz.serversicuro.it/shop/en/5-sam-motherboards https://acube-systemsbiz.serversicuro.it/shop/en/5-sam-mothe...
    - micheljones 10y ago
      Wii U is an 1.24GHz 3-core PowerPC cpu, with 2GB RAM, dual GPU (one of which is radeon-based), 8GB or 32GB eMMC ROM, SD slot, USB ports, HDMI video out and wifi and bluetooth. I got mine for $80 (they sell for very cheap without the gamepad). Considering it has been almost fully hacked, I think it's a good candidate for a cheap AmigaOS platform.
      - mastazi 10y ago
        Does it have an FPGA? Because AFAIK you need to emulate custom chips to run Amiga flawlessly (although I think they can also be sw-emulated, but there is a price to pay in terms of performance)
pryelluw 10y ago
Link? Thank you. :)
- chx 10y ago
  http://www.a-eon.com/?page=x5000 http://www.a-eon.com/?page=x5000

I love the Amiga, but this seems a little too much; for a computer that will cost € 2.299,00, consisting of 'old' hardware.

by gbraad 10y ago

I love the Amiga, but this seems a little too much; for a computer that will cost € 2.299,00, consisting of 'old' hardware.

mastazi 10y ago

> this seems a little too much It is. Especially considering that other m68k systems are sold for much less, such as this one which is an Atari-compatible computer and is sold for 643 Euros (560 for the motherboard and 83 for the case): http://firebee.org/fb-bin/index http://firebee.org/fb-bin/index

cmrdporcupine 10y ago
My FireBee is being couriered to me as we speak, I'm super excited about it. But it is kind of a different sort of thing. I think the AmigaOne is a foolish concept, but it is a far more powerful machine than the FireBee, as it is based around a high speed PowerPC board. PowerPC IMHO is a dead-end, but it seems like many in the Amiga community have tried to hitch their wagon to it. They'd be better off porting to ARM (running in big-endian mode I guess) if the OS is really worth it.
- khazhou 10y ago
  What are you planning to do with the firebee?
  - cmrdporcupine 10y ago
    Own it :-) Nothing practical. I will probably try to do some dev work on it to improve it. Dabble in some VHDL and OS work for it.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  That's because history. 680x0 was dead, so PowerPC was intended to replace sometime in the mid 90s after Commodore became German (Escom/Amiga Technology). Dave Haynie and a couple of others were asked to help design a new platform around Power as Amiga was dated. Escom had money issues almost immediately (of course) so it never happened and Escom went bust within a year. Commodore UK's bid was planning HP RISC.
- vidarh 10y ago
  AROS does run on ARM. As for AmigaOS 4.x I don't think Hyperion have the resources, and they're very dependent on their hardware partners bearing part of the cost. The only problem with PPC from an Amiga point of view is that most of the SOCs are targetting networking and automotive markets and similar embedded use rather than desktops (total PPC sales in terms of number of chips is still in a similar region to x86 sales; revenue per unit is way lower, though). It's not like people will buy these machines looking for top end performance, and the OS is still incredibly light weight, but if you pay for it you can still get PPC chips that perform very well. But AmigaOne's are an very expensive hobby for most people who buy them, not bought to be cost effective. More comparable to the FireBee you have a multitude of M68k accelerators and FPGA Amiga reimplementations that are much cheaper. There's been various discussions about trying to run AmigaOS or AROS on ColdFire like the FireBee too. Problem is people would expect to run their old binary-only software, and AFAIK the ColdFire can't trap all the unimplemented instruction combinations fully, so it'd require "fun" hacks (e.g. dynamic translation; I think it probably could be done reasonably easily for AmigaOS, but finding someone with both the time and the skills is another matter) so the Amiga community focus has been on FPGAs.
  - cmrdporcupine 10y ago
    Yeah ColdFire is also a dead end because Freescale isn't going to be releasing any more models and certainly not at any higher clock speeds. And it's really being made for specialized markets (automotive, ethernet switches, etc.) The FireBee is a neat hack I don't mind supporting, but if people really want hardware and emulators don't cut it, then FPGA is probably the way to go. Or switch architectures and port the OS (EmuTOS and/or AROS) + some sort of CPU translation/emulation layer for 68k stuff. It would probably have to be something big endian, so that rules out RISC-V but OpenRISC, J2 (SuperH) and OpenSPARC are some open source candidates.
LeoPanthera 10y ago
But this is a PowerPC computer, not m68k.
- mastazi 10y ago
  Oh, you are right, how did I miss that? So basically the Firebee (Atari compatible) is an m68k board, while most "modern" systems for Amiga OS are currently PowerPC, NOT m68k as I erroneously implied in my previous comment. BTW today I've been googling a bit and it seems that the SAM boards by ACube Systems are substantially cheaper than the X5000, so they could be a valid alternative for people on a budget wanting to run Amiga OS: https://acube-systemsbiz.serversicuro.it/shop/en/5-sam-motherboards https://acube-systemsbiz.serversicuro.it/shop/en/5-sam-mothe...
  - micheljones 10y ago
    Wii U is an 1.24GHz 3-core PowerPC cpu, with 2GB RAM, dual GPU (one of which is radeon-based), 8GB or 32GB eMMC ROM, SD slot, USB ports, HDMI video out and wifi and bluetooth. I got mine for $80 (they sell for very cheap without the gamepad). Considering it has been almost fully hacked, I think it's a good candidate for a cheap AmigaOS platform.
    - mastazi 10y ago
      Does it have an FPGA? Because AFAIK you need to emulate custom chips to run Amiga flawlessly (although I think they can also be sw-emulated, but there is a price to pay in terms of performance)

pryelluw 10y ago

Link? Thank you. :)

chx 10y ago
http://www.a-eon.com/?page=x5000 http://www.a-eon.com/?page=x5000