5 ms·

Every time an Amiga article comes up, I say the same thing. I want to put together a dream team and reboot it. :D Imagine if the Ferrari brand died and nobody u

Every time an Amiga article comes up, I say the same thing. I want to put together a dream team and reboot it. :D Imagine if the Ferrari brand died and nobody used it ever again...that is how I feel about the Amiga. [Edit: to be clear, I am aware of the existing stuff...what I would like to see is the Amiga used to reimagine what a computer is - new hardware, new OS, new "web browser" (that ditches current conventions) ... I am aware this is a pipe dream :) ]

unixhero 7y ago
Vampire V4 SA (coming 2019/Q3) ------ There is a new Amiga being developed. It is an accelerator board with a brand new 68080 processor. The thing is, it being FPGA, it actually doesn't need to be hosted in an actual Amiga any more. Therefore they are planning to make a standalone, essentially new Amiga. The Apollo 68080 Accelerator - New Amiga: http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=products http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=products Also. This is what Amigas can do in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh2nqjQzLWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh2nqjQzLWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d75fqJOInIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d75fqJOInIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc
- ezy 7y ago
  That is not a new "Amiga", that's just a nostalgic upgrade to an old Amiga computer. A new "Amiga" would be something completely different than the old Amiga (which has long been surpassed by PCs with high-end graphics cards) or the current software/hardware model of a PC (which could be improved in many ways if you decided not to be a slave to current hardware and software standards). I'm not sure what that means, really, because creating something new and useful is a hard (but not impossible) task. It really does take commitment in these days of software that is POSIX everywhere and (graphics) hardware that is sometimes interesting and high performance, but very buggy and effectively, probably intentionally, undocumented.
  - unixhero 7y ago
    >That is not a new "Amiga", that's just a nostalgic upgrade to an old Amiga computer. It's a standalone board that runs Amiga Firmware and boots the Amiga OS. As such it is a new Amiga.
tombert 7y ago
I mean, Amiga is still around...kinda? You can buy a copy of AmigaOS and run it on PowerPC hardware. There's also AROS, which isn't "true" Amiga, but is mostly source-compatible and definitely "feels" very Amiga-ey. Honestly, though, now would probably be about the time for Amiga to make a bit of a comeback; with the advent of really awesome web applications, the actual operating system is becoming increasingly irrelevant to most users. If we could get the two big browsers out there (Firefox and Chrome) to make decent ports to AmigaOS/AROS, then I could conceivably some of my non-tech friends using it without even fully realizing it. Sadly, though, I think that's too little too late; non-technical people seem happy enough with their Chromebooks, and technical people will be hampered by the lack of software available for Amiga on current computers.
- jacobush 7y ago
  AROS is even binary compatible - you can now download an emulator and put Motorola 68000 AROS on it, no need to hunt for old ROMs.
cturner 7y ago
From a previous discussion in the spirit of your comment, songseed.org/dinghy There were some limitations with systems of that era that a design reboot should overcome: security, access to tcpip.
- gavanwoolery 7y ago
  very cool, I like their design principles!
richardjdare 7y ago
Ah, I think about this often. Although I moved from the Amiga to PC in 1996, I've never felt at home on other platforms. I consider myself an Amiga exile :) So far, I've settled on a few principles for my new Amiga: - No x86. The x86 platform is like a boring, ugly dude who has taken steroids and growth hormone for 20 years. He's bigger and stronger than everyone else, but he's still boring and ugly. The new Amiga should be as fun to code in asm as the 68000 was. - Multimedia as first class citizen. None of this '70s character-mode fetishism you get in the Unix world :) On the Amiga, everything knew you had a graphics chip, hardware sprites and stereo sound. - Good hardware integration. Imagine that your GPU was as accessible as your CPU, that you didn't need to install a ton of crap from Nvidia just to program it. I used to experiment with the Amiga gfx hardware in assembly language, from Basic, in a couple of pages of code. I miss how accessible the full power of my computer was. I'd have to spend some more time thinking about the OS. On one hand, it would need modernization with regard to security, networking, Unicode, USB etc. On the other hand it was a lot more ergonomic than Linux, with hardly any historical cruft, and I'd never want to lose that. The closest thing I've found to the "Amiga feeling" was when I was experimenting with a Playstation 2 emulator, and spent some time reading the hardware docs. It had a similar setup of exotic graphics chips hanging off a fat DMA system. However, the Amiga was far more than a straight games console, and its custom hardware was more abstract and flexible than you'd find in most consoles. (Compare the Amiga to the supremely powerful, but rigid Sharp X68000 for example)
- gavanwoolery 7y ago
  I share your thoughts on this. :)

unixhero 7y ago

Vampire V4 SA (coming 2019/Q3) ------ There is a new Amiga being developed. It is an accelerator board with a brand new 68080 processor. The thing is, it being FPGA, it actually doesn't need to be hosted in an actual Amiga any more. Therefore they are planning to make a standalone, essentially new Amiga. The Apollo 68080 Accelerator - New Amiga: http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=products http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=products Also. This is what Amigas can do in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh2nqjQzLWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh2nqjQzLWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d75fqJOInIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d75fqJOInIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc

ezy 7y ago
That is not a new "Amiga", that's just a nostalgic upgrade to an old Amiga computer. A new "Amiga" would be something completely different than the old Amiga (which has long been surpassed by PCs with high-end graphics cards) or the current software/hardware model of a PC (which could be improved in many ways if you decided not to be a slave to current hardware and software standards). I'm not sure what that means, really, because creating something new and useful is a hard (but not impossible) task. It really does take commitment in these days of software that is POSIX everywhere and (graphics) hardware that is sometimes interesting and high performance, but very buggy and effectively, probably intentionally, undocumented.
- unixhero 7y ago
  >That is not a new "Amiga", that's just a nostalgic upgrade to an old Amiga computer. It's a standalone board that runs Amiga Firmware and boots the Amiga OS. As such it is a new Amiga.

tombert 7y ago

I mean, Amiga is still around...kinda? You can buy a copy of AmigaOS and run it on PowerPC hardware. There's also AROS, which isn't "true" Amiga, but is mostly source-compatible and definitely "feels" very Amiga-ey. Honestly, though, now would probably be about the time for Amiga to make a bit of a comeback; with the advent of really awesome web applications, the actual operating system is becoming increasingly irrelevant to most users. If we could get the two big browsers out there (Firefox and Chrome) to make decent ports to AmigaOS/AROS, then I could conceivably some of my non-tech friends using it without even fully realizing it. Sadly, though, I think that's too little too late; non-technical people seem happy enough with their Chromebooks, and technical people will be hampered by the lack of software available for Amiga on current computers.

jacobush 7y ago
AROS is even binary compatible - you can now download an emulator and put Motorola 68000 AROS on it, no need to hunt for old ROMs.

cturner 7y ago

From a previous discussion in the spirit of your comment, songseed.org/dinghy There were some limitations with systems of that era that a design reboot should overcome: security, access to tcpip.

gavanwoolery 7y ago
very cool, I like their design principles!

richardjdare 7y ago

Ah, I think about this often. Although I moved from the Amiga to PC in 1996, I've never felt at home on other platforms. I consider myself an Amiga exile :) So far, I've settled on a few principles for my new Amiga: - No x86. The x86 platform is like a boring, ugly dude who has taken steroids and growth hormone for 20 years. He's bigger and stronger than everyone else, but he's still boring and ugly. The new Amiga should be as fun to code in asm as the 68000 was. - Multimedia as first class citizen. None of this '70s character-mode fetishism you get in the Unix world :) On the Amiga, everything knew you had a graphics chip, hardware sprites and stereo sound. - Good hardware integration. Imagine that your GPU was as accessible as your CPU, that you didn't need to install a ton of crap from Nvidia just to program it. I used to experiment with the Amiga gfx hardware in assembly language, from Basic, in a couple of pages of code. I miss how accessible the full power of my computer was. I'd have to spend some more time thinking about the OS. On one hand, it would need modernization with regard to security, networking, Unicode, USB etc. On the other hand it was a lot more ergonomic than Linux, with hardly any historical cruft, and I'd never want to lose that. The closest thing I've found to the "Amiga feeling" was when I was experimenting with a Playstation 2 emulator, and spent some time reading the hardware docs. It had a similar setup of exotic graphics chips hanging off a fat DMA system. However, the Amiga was far more than a straight games console, and its custom hardware was more abstract and flexible than you'd find in most consoles. (Compare the Amiga to the supremely powerful, but rigid Sharp X68000 for example)

gavanwoolery 7y ago
I share your thoughts on this. :)