Amiga Inc. Reveals Further Info About Amiga OS5

Amiga Gamer writes "Amiga Inc. Acting President Bill McEwen has given an update to Amiga OS5 of sorts. In a previous interview Bill had said of OS5: "The product that we are going to ship is going to be much better than OSX from Apple". "OS 5 is ahead of schedule, and we will be making public announcements concerning the product in the 4th quarter of this year.""

All 5 amiga users jumped for joy until

[Ice Station Zebra]

They heard it won't work with their 1000's.

The Berlin Amgia Users Group has 130 members.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was at the August meeting of the Berlin Amiga Users Group. There were 130 people there. We had to move to from the pub we started at because there were too many of us! I talked to one guy there who was in the Rotterdam Amiga Users Group, and they routinely had 90 to 100 people show up to their meetings. Those are significantly larger crowds that I've ever seen at Linux user group meetings. Amiga was always big in Europe, and still is, even many years after the demise of their mainstream products.

Re:

[DECS]

Not to be rude, but there are more people in the Flat Earth Society, or who can translate Klingon to Esperanto.

I like old computers, but a few hundred people is not a market for an operating system, it's a small hobby. Apple is derided as a bit player on the Macintosh, and it has around 22 million active users of Mac OS X and thousands of developers.

SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1990s [roughlydrafted.com]
In the 80s, a new generation of graphical computers from Apple, Atari, Commodore, and NeXT--all based on th

Re:The Berlin Amgia Users Group has 130 members.

[Chelloveck]

Not to be rude, but there are more people in the Flat Earth Society, or who can translate Klingon to Esperanto.

Hey! How else do you think we're going to get good Esperanto translations of Shakespeare!?

Re:All 5 amiga users jumped for joy until

[baryon351]

"OS 5 is ahead of schedule, and we will be making public announcements concerning the product in the 4th quarter of this year."

This is the man who claimed OS4 was on schedule to be released in 1999.

The release date was eventually December 2006, just days after the last licensee allowed to produce Amiga hardware lost their license.

Anyone else up for another 7 years of "It's nearly ready, really! No, we're serious this time..."

Makes Vista seem positively normal, and makes Leopard's delays look like an overnight shipping glitch.

Re:

[smallfries]

The rest of the interview could be summarised as:

Q4) What's happening with the lawsuit?
I can't tell you because it's a legal matter

Q5..Qn) What's up with X?
See my answer to question 4.

The entire interview is just vapor.

Re:

[hawk]

>The entire interview is just vapor.

At least that proves that it's really Amiga . . :)

hawk

Re:All 5 amiga users jumped for joy until

[One Louder]

Probably because Amiga OS5 is the official operating system of the Moller Skycar.

They ARE ahead of schedule

[Anonymous Coward]

When your release date is set for the Fifth of Never, being ahead of schedule is a simple task.

Re:

[ehrichweiss]

I was seriously wondering if maybe the Amiga community(or what's left of it plus any fans, etc.) couldn't just buy out what's left of that company and then open source the OS(hardware?) so we could then adapt it to be used on today's commodity hardware. I mean even if they had OS5 available today the sales they would make from it wouldn't be enough to recoup any expenses on development of the OS and keep the company afloat. The whole Amiga bankruptcy scene was a comedy of horrors and the new Amiga, Inc. is

Yes, but...

[artemis67]

It ships with Duke Nukem Forever preinstalled.

No apostrophe on 1000s

[Anonymous Coward]

No apostrophe on 1000s. If you were to say, "The picture of my girlfriend's vagina via my 1000's GINA chip is a nice looking one" then all right. If you were to say, "The picture of my girlfriend's vagina via the other four 1000s' GINA chips is a nice looking one, too", then that, plural and possesive, is all right. "On their 1000's (sic)" is not all right. It is plural, not possesive.

Re:

[Ice Station Zebra]

'w'h'a't'e'v'e'r's

Re:

[rizzo420]

actually, the apostrophe is only mis-used if you go by newer rules of grammar. about 15-20 years ago, using the apostrophe in that case was 100% correct.

since i don't think rules of grammar should arbitrarily change, i consider it correct and use it when i write (of course that's how i'm used to writing).

also, please ignore my lack of capital letters. i hate the shift key.

Re:

[LoadWB]

Funny. I was in school 15 to 20 years ago, and I remember the rule being quite the same as today. I would be interested to see a grammar text from the day.

Re:

[rizzo420]

i suppose it could've been longer than that. the books we had when i was in school were not, in any way, new. they could've been about 5-10 years old.

Re:

[rizzo420]

i knew they changed... just wasn't sure why. thanks for the explanation.

however, i do have an issue with this part:

For a similar reason that when closing a sentence with a quote you must place the period after the endquote mark, not before it. The reasoning is that the quote marks belong only to the quote while the period belongs to the entire sentence, not just the quote. Similarly, an apostrophe now always denotes possessivity (except when you bracket a word or phrase with two of them).

putting the period outside the quotation marks is pretty recent. the norm when i learned grammar was to put them inside the end quote mark, regardless of if it was for the quote or the sentence.

and to be a bit nit-picky, the apostrophe is still used for contractions. :)

Re:

[rs79]

"They heard it won't work with their 1000's"

...yet.

Re:

[pipatron]

Three.

Hey, did that guy just say rings are cool?

[VTMarik]

Commodore is making new computers, Amiga is making a new OS, all we need now is a next-gen version of the Oregon Trail and we can successfully bring our childhoods into the 21st century.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Hey, did that guy just say rings are cool?

[MK_CSGuy]

god no! they DID make next generation versions of oregon trail, THEY SUCKED, I'm still playing the original :D

and still no girlfriend!

Thank you, thank you, i'll be here all night :)

Re:

[stoolpigeon]

Here you go [amazon.com]

I can't believe I'm saying this, but...

[lottameez]

Let me be the first to welcome our Amiga-friendly, Commodore-centric, TI-99 riding robotic overlords.

They visit our earth once more.

Re:

[An ominous Cow art]

Sounds like a great premise for a MMORPG :-).

Level 6 carpenter LFG PST

Re:

[Dogtanian]

Commodore is making new computers

Not really; the old Commodore is as dead as ever. The "Commodore(s)" making new computers are simply unrelated companies who bought the name or acquired the right to use it on their products.

Really, it's just a badge and nothing more. If you know this and still want to buy one of those "Commodore"-badged PCs, fair enough. Though personally I think it's just exploitation of geek nostalgia to pretend that it's anything more than that...

Duh!

[Burdell]

OS 5 can't be but half as good as OS X!

Re:

[blantonl]

or 2 1/2 times as good as OS/2!

But ours go to 11

[houstonbofh]

But Linux goes to 11. :)
http://www.slackware.com/announce/11.0.php [slackware.com]

Re:Duh!

[TeknoHog]

They should call it OS V.

Or System V [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[Arethan]

They should call it OS V.

Or System V.

Or Johnny 5. [imdb.com]

Re:

[canajin56]

They should call it OS V.

Or System V.

Or Johnny 5.

Or Johnny Carson [wikipedia.org]

Re:Duh!

[seanmeister]

Or Kevin Bacon, who appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, show #4299 [tv.com].

I WIN AGAIN!!!!

Re:

[ConceptJunkie]

Or maybe just 5 [wikipedia.org].

Who cares?

[hal9000(jr)]

There are three dominant OS's out there. Windows is the most dominant desktop, followed by OSX and then Linux. What is Amiga going to bring to the table?

Hell, IBM resurrecting OS/2 would make more sense.

Re:Who cares?

[Threni]

> What is Amiga going to bring to the table?

Perhaps this is the rose tinted spectacles talking, but I seem to remember Amiga games having a little more variety than today. It all seems a bit corporate now. Marketing and the quest for the next amusingly expensive generation of graphics card seems to have replaced the fun games. I've checked out a lot of the "indie" games but the trouble with them is that they're all a load of shit - more on a par with the "public domain" games of the Amiga era then its commercial ones.

Re:

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Company of Heroes is a good game. And if you don't mind graphics that seem kinda out-dated the recent Warhammer 40k RTS games are VERY good. I've been spending some time going back through the Dark Crusade campaign as all the armies.

Re:

[Constantine XVI]

Team Fortress 2 is pretty refreshing for a game once mentioned next to Duke Nukem Forever, and Portal (a game that ships next to it in the Orange Box) is one of the more original PC games I've seen.

Re:

[bigstrat2003]

Yeah, that's the rose-tinted spectacles talking. I don't know what the quality of games on the Amiga was like, but my gaming memory stretches back to the NES, and the overall quality of games hasn't really changed since then. There are some great ones, some ok ones, some awful ones. 10 years from now, people won't remember the crappy games of today, they'll just remember the good ones... and say how the games of 2007 were so much better than the games of 2017, and how gaming is going downhill.

Plenty of go

based on what?

[m2943]

There are three dominant OS's out there. Windows is the most dominant desktop, followed by OSX and then Linux.

Really? Given how many universities and businesses have deployed Linux on desktops and in research labs, Linux may well be way ahead of OS X on the desktop.

The market where OS X is clearly ahead of Linux is the home or consumer desktop. But that's different from the desktop.

Re:

[confused one]

I'll grant you, there are a lot of linux installs; and, it's difficult to generate demographic data on them because they're often generic boxes bought from Dell, HP, etc., many of which count as Windows sales.

You're forgetting that a lot of research labs and universities buy Apple iMacs or PowerMacs/Mac Pros because it's a preconfigured Unix machine. That was one of the not so talked about big wins of OS X -- It was rapidly adopted by research labs and universities who had been buying more traditional Uni

Re:

[m2943]

My point is that there are a lot of universities or labs who might be using linux or bsd on the servers but have OS X on the desktop.

And my point is that you shouldn't present guesswork as fact.

You're forgetting that a lot of research labs and universities buy Apple iMacs or PowerMacs/Mac Pros because it's a preconfigured Unix machine.

Maybe in a handful of latte sipping enclaves of North America. In the real world, most universities and research labs have never been able to afford either Macs or UNIX works

Re:

[drcagn]

What does that prove? That people search for Linux more than they do for OS X? That could simply mean that people are searching for help on their hard-to-use Linux boxes while the OS X users are quiet, using their just-works machines. That proves nothing.

Re:

[teh kurisu]

A home desktop isn't a desktop? Is that kinda like how a dwarf planet isn't a planet?

Re:

[m2943]

A home desktop isn't a desktop? Is that kinda like how a dwarf planet isn't a planet?

Come on, I'd expect better reading comprehension and logic from someone educated in UK schools... Of course, home desktops are desktops; they simply aren't the only desktops. Therefore, it is wrong to conclude from Apple's dominance over Linux in the home desktop market that it dominates Linux in the desktop market as a whole.

Look at the figures: OS X probably has between 10 and 22 million users worldwide (Apple's own figu

Re:

[teh kurisu]

I was being pedantic/flippant. I was also poking fun at the daft naming conventions of planets.

That said (if you're going to bring logic into it), I still maintain that what I said is a valid interpretation of what you said.

As for the whole Mac vs Linux market share contest, it's a pissing match. Counting purchases and downloads, I would count as two Mac users, two Windows users and who knows how many Ubuntu, Gentoo and Red Hat users. I don't think it's possible to lend any credibility to any market

Re:

[bigstrat2003]

Come on, I'd expect better reading comprehension and logic from someone educated in UK schools...

For being so smug, your reading comprehension and/or logic is rather flawed. When one says "desktop" in reference to computers, that means, in common usage, the home/consumer desktop, not all desktop computers in all environments. I believe the GP was trying to make a joke, but even if he weren't, it's your own damn fault for using ambiguous terminology. Just because you're following the technicalities of the language doesn't mean you're communicating well, you also have to consider how the language is use

Re:

[i41Overlord]

First of all, home desktops outnumber corporate desktops. Second of all, every company I've ever worked at used Windows.

Re:

[m2943]

OMFG What a passionate argument about who is the best of the losers. And by "passionate" I meant "finding some little sub-category where you come out ahead." Here's a modification of your brilliant position:

I'm not talking about "some little subcategory". I'm saying that Linux may well be on a lot more desktops overall than Macintosh.

And, no, I'm not "passionate" about it, I'm just asking people like you to stick to the facts.

Re:

[Greg_D]

In fact, I do, frequently. And I'm telling you: the standard desktops worldwide at universities and companies are Windows. Fixed. You can no more make the case for Linux proliferation at universities and companies on the desktop than you can Macs. Go into any English or print or broadcasting or art or graphic design department at any school in the country and you'll find more Macs there than any other desktop. Similarly, there's a larger percentage of Linux systems (still a very small minority) when you

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[suv4x4]

Your attitude is why we no longer have the vibrant flurry of innovation that we last saw in the late eighties and early nineties. Everyone's on Windows, save for a small, growing, minority on Mac OS X, and a few of us use the alternatives and get laughed at for doing so.

Wow, so his attitude made Microsoft the biggest software company in the world. You put too much weight on his attitude.

Amiga is laughed at, since the guy shows nothing, says nothing, and still has the chutzpah to claim his OS is better than

Re:

[Fred_A]

Wow, so his attitude made Microsoft the biggest software company in the world. You put too much weight on his attitude.

Not at all, I too have always been of the opinion that it was mostly hal9000(jr) (316943)'s fault all along. I actually wanted to testify to that effect in front of the EU a few months ago but they kicked me out. But since you put the topic on the table...

Re:

[Bert64]

If Amiga produced an OS that outshone everything else available, it would still fail and virtually no-one would use it.
Why? Because people are stuck with proprietary single-platform apps and formats, they can't switch to a better platform even if they wanted to.
If there were standards, standard ABIs so you could write once and run anywhere, with native performance (java is still sluggish), and it isn't too great a stretch to imagine since all the major vendors are x86 compatible today anyway. You really cou

Re:

[flyingfsck]

Actually, there are billions more Linux computers than Windows computers. Most Linux machines are cell-phones and routers, not desktops though.

Re:

[fm6]

What is Amiga going to bring to the table?

Nostalgia.

I'm kind of amused by all these negative comments. Not that I disagree. But a couple of years ago, a few sceptics (including me) were making similar comments on Slashdot, and Amiga fanboys were all over us, accusing of flamebaiting and fuding. Where are they now?

Re:

[Dogtanian]

Nostalgia.

Technically I'm not sure that you're right, but I agree with where you're coming from.

This is aimed at the relatively tiny group of users who have continued using the Amiga OS long after its commercial demise, people who genuinely want an updated "modern" version. In that sense, it's not nostalgia- people who wished to recreate the experience of using their A500s and run their old apps and games are more likely to use an emulator. (Particularly as many games "hit the hardware" for performance reasons and

Re:

[Frosty Piss]

What is Amiga going to bring to the table?

Duke Nukum Forever. Wanna play it? You'll have to by Amiga...

Re:

[bl8n8r]

Microsoft brought us malware
Apple brought us debt
Linux brought us stability
amiga will bring us choice

Re:

[TheRaven64]

Do you have any source for that, or are you just counting anyone who uses the Google search engine as a Linux user?

Re:Linux more prevailant than OSX

[the_womble]

Ubuntu passed the 8m mark abouut 9 months ago, based on the number of people updating from Ubuntu servers.

Note that updates can be cached, there are probably people sho do not update (for example because they have slow internet connection), and there are people who update from mirrors, so it is probably an undercount.

Ubutntu and Linux are growing, so the numbers are higher now

If Ubuntu alone has that many users it seems probable that desktop Linux is ahead of Mac OS's 20m+.

Re:

[confused one]

Interesting. Thanks for the demographic. Now I know how to put some numbers together to try to refute my management who turn a blind eye and claim "No one is running linux"

But that statistic is nearly useless.

[i41Overlord]

If you're counting how many times it's been downloaded, that doesn't tell you much. I'm a Windows user, but I've downloaded Linux a few different times. I played with it, but that doesn't make me primarily a Linux user. I'm still a Windows user, but I'd be counted as several Linux users if you just looked at download stats.

Re:

[tkw954]

I don't think the GP meant that there were 8 M downloads. He said "number of people updating". I'd assume this means 8 M unique IP addresses. And if you were just playing around you probably didn't hit the apt update servers. In this case you'd count as zero Linux users. You'd count as one user if you've used the apt repos, which probably means you use Linux enough to qualify as a user.

Re:

[JasonBee]

Ummmm...no that was me. Sorry

I will shut down my 500 Ubuntu test VMs right now.

*delete*

Re:

[Divebus]

There are more Linux users than OSX Users.

Really? Not here there aren't. [duggmirror.com] There are two photos side by side, so stitch them together to recognize the true power of the X!

Better?

[nurb432]

and no i didnt read the story.. cant get to it.

1 - what hardware does it run on, generic PC's? Generic Macs? If its still on custom hardware, its DOA at this stage of the game.
2 - software: is it all custom, or can i run Word, Acrobat, etc? If it cant run commodity software its also DOA as far as the big picture is concerned. ( X11 will help.. )

While it may be great technology, there are 100s of 'good' OS's out there that are niche markets. That doesnt make them 'better'. Even when they had a chance like Be. You just hve to have a level of compatiblity of both hardware AND software of the 2 big players to really make it and be 'better'.

Re:

[Fred_A]

Come on, if it's "much better than OSX from Apple", people will just *have* to flock to it.
I'm sure even Duke Nukem Forever will be ported to it.

I know I can't wait. It's too bad I'll have to discard all my Linux software of course, and I'll probably have to junk all of my hardware as well, but since it's "much better", this can't be helped. Gotta stay with the times.

It's so exciting to be there when this revolution in computing is about to happen, the rebirth of Amiga, wow. Who would have thought !

(whops,

from TFA: Re:Better?

[J_Omega]

So I browsed it quickly, since I became curious:

1. Posed questions about OS4 included being able to "create reliable OS4 compatible hardware," "new hardware," "OS4 capable hardware." For OS5 the question/answer was "7) What kind of hardware will OS5 be designed for?" - "OS5 scales to its host hardware, so anything from mobile phones through stbs, consoles up to servers. Initially covering software hosts Windows-D, Windows Mobile, Linux-D, Linux-E and Symbian for x86 and ARM, and possibly any high profil

Re:

[ivan256]

So they're making a GTK theme?

Summary of the interview:

[Gadzinka]

"I can't answer any of your questions due to pending litigation and NDAs, but keep the faith, Amiga is and will be the best platform, ever. Oh, and 20yrs old sources to historic versions of AmigaOS is our core intelectual property asset, so the release of them is never going to happen."

Robert

Re:

[a.ameri]

If your business model views 20 year old obsolete software as its core property, it's time to revisit that business model.

Re:

[speaker of the truth]

So I take it Mac has released their 20 year old software? No? Guess they consider it important enough to keep unreleased as well then and yet I don't see people saying they should revisit their business model.

Re:

[HardCase]

What is this "Mac" company that you speak of?

Not necessarily

[rsilvergun]

They probably just don't want the legal hassle and expense of releasing it. They'll be patents and cross licensing involved, and they'd have to vet all the code before releasing it.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Sales of the new Amiga...

[Prototerm]

...will immediately follow the release of Duke Nukem Forever and the return of Elvis in a flying saucer.

Re:

[Andrei D]

Actually, they intend to get the Amiga system sounds from Chinese Democracy [wikipedia.org], the long-awaited Guns n' Roses new album. Axl said it will be released only when he feels it's better than everything GNR did before. "It won't take long, really", said Axl Rose in an interview back in 1997. So keep your faith folks.

Re:

[cei]

I'd heard that Duke Nukem Forever was being programmed in Director CS3, once Knuth releases The Art of Computer Programming Vol IV, using a soundtrack from Chinese Democracy, and was going to be the flagship title of Amiga OS5. Oh, and Natalie Portman was going to be nude in it.

I stoped caring a long time ago.

[emj]

When BeOS came along 95 I think I understood that AmigaOS would never be good enough again. So I switched to Linux, there has never been any reason to switch back even though the Amiga workbench is still a lot better than KDE/GNOME are, and Final writer [pisle.com] kicks Open Office writers ass any day.

Amiga fanboy forever.

What -is- the situation with Hyperion?

[mccalli]

Throughout the article they allude to it, but never say what's happening. Could someone who knows please tell me what's going on between Amiga and Hyperion?

Cheers,
Ian

Re:

[Samurai Crow]

There is an ongoing lawsuit between Amiga, Inc. and Hyperion-Entertainment, VOF. The Amiga, Inc. that was chartered in Washington went belly up but never signed the insolvency papers. Hyperion has, as part of their contract, a transfer agreement similar to the one between Novell and SCO. Hyperion claims AmigaOS 4 is theirs because of the former insolvency of Amiga, Inc. Washington. On the other side of the coin, Amiga, Inc.'s name and IP rights have been bought out by another company called KMOS that ch

Smoke and mirrors

[LoadWB]

None of the questions presented here matter, even if they are serious. Amiga has produced nothing of value since OS3.9 several years ago. Bill McEwen went on the record a while back saying that he put a great deal of his own personal money into making sure that OS3.9 was released. If that is true, then that is the last act of heroism we have seen from the Amiga camp. OS4 is working but stuck in litigation. OS5 will be free from the shackles of hardware dependence, so they say. But we all know that nothing from Amiga ever materializes.

If You Can't Trust a PR guy....

[rueger]

"OS 5 is ahead of schedule, and we will be making public announcements concerning the product in the 4th quarter of this year."

So what have here is a Press release announcing that in a couple of months they'll issue a Press Release.

You know, given the dissatisfaction with Vista*, the hardware constraints associated with OS X**, and the usual limitations of Linux***, there could be a place for a new OS. Whether Amiga can make the jump though is entirely another question, one largely to be answered

Re:

[Junta]

On Vista, it's more applicable to consider the whole Windows environment. You forget that for the people who would've bought Vista, the reason was not so much it explicitly sucking, but that XP suits their needs fine and they don't see the point of going to a slightly different setup and spend money to do so when they have a working solution today. For the Windows people that took the time to evaluate it and declare that it sucks, it's generally because either drivers for Vista were lower quality than XP,

Once every blue moon an "Amiga is comming back"..

[3seas]

...article is posted to slashdot. And that began many blue moons ago.

Is it a slow news day? Did murphy firehose it up?
Is it intended to be humor or is it to expose the remaining gullible?

Seriously, the company now known as Amiga has worked very diligently
and persistently at securing its reputation as a company intent on
keeping the Amiga off the market and deceiving what ever followers it
may still have with what amount to as soap opera antics.

Now about Amiga being better than OSX.... Think about it!

You can have the best OS in the world but if there is no software
being written for it.... who is going to use it for what?

Don'tcha think someone would have heard about software developemnt
for the Amiga if it were going to be better than _____________
(fill in the blank with any reasonably used OS)

Bill McE. is financed to be a nut... How better to keep amiga off
the market and the open source clone dev (AROS) less supported and
concerned enough about Amigas legal antics to remove "Amiga" from
all mention?

There is nothing in the last 7 + years, of which the current
"ownership of Amiga IP" has done anything beneficial for classic
Amiga users, the consumers, or for the Amiga software development
market. If fact they have done just the opposite.

And as other Blue moons have passed with little to no fan fare,
so will this one.

Only the gullible would mod this down or as flamebait.

Its honesty based on the history since before gateway sold all but the patent IP.

Re:

[christurkel]

I agree. This guy has made repeated promises and broken them. Most recent? ACK controls is making our new PPC hardware for 9/07 (and this was in 5/07). 9/07 has come and gone and guess what? nothing.

This guy is a sneak oil salesman.

They are adding an interface to enable the...

[JackMeyhoff]

.. Infinite Improbability Function.

The best new feature would be...

[Jugalator]

Improved hardware independence?

So far, AmigaOS 4 is a bit like OS X being built for special hardware, just that this one lacks the hardware. :-p

I can understand if Apple doesn't want to let go of OS X like that, because they after all sell a lot of hardware this way, but isn't AmigaOS 4 is in such a horribly sorry state that Amiga Inc would only win on having it support other hardware platforms better?

Why ...?

[suv4x4]

I don't want the technical details if he can't share. I want him to give us use cases. Why would we go buy their computers and OS when I can run OSX, Windows or Linux?

Who's the target, business users, video producers, prosumers, gamers, developers, mythical moms and dads, and how will Amiga make a difference to those people compared to OSX, Windows, Linux.

I must definitely not be the target, since "Better than OSX" means precisely nil to me. OSX runs my desktop software, Windows runs it as well. Hell, Linux runs some of it. I don't just install an OS and marvel at how good it is, I run apps on it.

Amiga doesn't run anything right now, but they have a checkerboard sphere. They better have made this the best checkerboard sphere in the world ever.

Don't believe a word

[tmk]

I don't trust Bill McEwen more than Steve Ballmer.

• He announced to sponsor the new Kent Events Center with 10 million dollars - but he could not pay.
• He sued the developers of Amiga OS 4 and announced a new hardware solution - which was not delivered.
• The only product Amiga Inc has released in seven years were mobile phone versions of old Amiga games.
• ...

Good going Cowboy Neal......

[3seas]

Check out the earlier interview with the CEO of Amiga....

Notice the Date Saturday Oct 7th.....

CowboyNeal is trying to make the "2 more weeks" happen.....

If anyone could build an Amiga, it would be AMD

[tjstork]

I bought the Amiga Hardware Reference Guide before the computer was even released, read it cover to cover, many times, all about the sound, video, and other hardware, and I knew had to have this hardware. The Amiga legend was really born because of absolutely the best documentation any computer system has ever had, and, then fostered by the execution. I read the documentation. I walked into a Sears, saw the King Tut image in Deluxe Paint, and I so blown away that I literally shook in my shoes. It all came together - great documentation, beautiful hardware, and an ok operating system, in one moment, where I could see the demo, understand completely what it meant, and I had to have one. I opened up a credit card that I couldn't possibly pay for and I bought the thing. It was one of the best days of my life and I feel fortunate to have lived solely to have been there for that moment.

But, those days are gone. If anyone could make anything like Amiga, it would be AMD (Apple is more marketing than any real hardware expertise on its own) - but AMD would also have to hire not just good, but great writers, and document everything the way the Amiga was documented. You would have to have AMD rolling out with a pretty good CPU, next generation hardware, all in a consumer friendly case with a completely new operating system. Part of Amiga's appeal was that the whole thing was different. For AMD to pump that kind of money into some new consumer / geek box would almost certainly demand that it run Windows or Linux, and we already know enough about both to not really get excited over either. A souped up / updated version of BeOS is what that kind of hardware needs - really, the coolest new OS ever made, and I doubt seriously that AMD could take that risk.

But, a man can dream.

Re:If anyone could build an Amiga, it would be AMD

[NeoTron]

Indeed.

I still have an Amiga 1200. Still very much alive and kicking, and a bit riced up too (monitor adapter/flicker fixer, 68040 accelerator card giving the Amy a whole 40Mhz of Insane Demonic Superpowah - wooo - IDE doubler so I can run the internal hard drive AND attach the cdrom drive, an NE2000-compatible pcmcia network card, and AmigaDOS 3.9. Oh and I had to ditch the Commodore power supply in favour of using a PC PSU in order to power all that extra stuff, heheh). The ultimate Amiga box - if only it were 15 years ago ;) I can even dual-boot it to Debian too, though, really, it runs better with AmigaDOS 3.9 - it seems to run like molasses when booted to Debian.

I only boot it up from time to time, though, and since I moved to Japan I haven't touched it, simply because I haven't the time.

But every time I boot it up for a nostalgia trip I still to this day wish Commodore's execs and management hadn't completely managed to flush the whole concept down the drain like they did. Damn their interminable hides! I still remember the very first Amiga Demo I saw and heard shortly after I bought an Amiga (A500 at the time) - I literally could not believe what I was experiencing - you have to remember that at the time of the A500, PC's were still stuck in VGA-land, with very poor graphics and sound capabilities. The Amy just blew everything else out of the water. I can only dream now what current multimedia experiences would be like if the Amiga technology/hardware concepts were allowed to have evolved. When the Amiga went down the tubes, multimedia experience development and evolution was, in my opinion, basically stalled for at least a decade. Only now are graphics cards beginning to reach the stage where multimedia and games experience are beginning to impress me. I wonder what that experience would be like if the Amiga's hardware technology had been further developed and evolved since those halcyon days.

Regards.

Amiga OS5 will be so awsome,

[Britz]

it will be the only platform to run Duke Nukem Forever.

Amiga missing an opportunity with handhelds

[jfisherwa]

Amiga should give up on the traditional desktop for the time being. Who is going to bother?

Instead, they could develop something for an N800-style tablet device. The OS is lightweight, there are 'some' applications available already and on an 800x480 screen 4.1" screen, those old AGA games might actually look good again.

Amiga.......good old days...

[zelik]

Yes, I remember my Amiga.. I started a bit late...picked up my brother's old Amiga 1000 when he left it for the MacIIfx (I believe he paid 2k or 4k for that? wow!) and I was in love with Defender of the Crown, Marble Madness, Battlehawks 1942, etc. WOW!

Then, I upgraded to a 2000 and the 8mhz CPU just wasn't enough. I had to upgrade it with a 68030 running at *gasp* 25mhz and wow things were great. I ran a 2 phone line BBS (using C-net) with my prized USRobotics HST modem and a regular 2400 baud on the other line. Sure, it was a warez bbs but wow those were some great memories! I could multitask the BBS (with 2 users uploading/downloading/posting), write my homework using Scribble!(a wordprocessor), print my homework and have Monkey Island running at full speed while printing. No slowdown. It was amazing at the time, esp. compared to Windows (3.11? Or 3.0? Not sure, barely remember those things then).

The full screen program multitasking, which let you pull up and down a full screened program like slides, was quite amazing and powerful. The games, the sounds, all amazing. Of course, this is compared to AdLib soundcards and CGA/EGA. At the time, there was no reason to "game" with your dad's expensive PC other than the fact that it was "all that is available at home."

But now? C'mon! I soon had to let go of my Amiga when no further developments came along. When Doom came out for the PC along with Wing Commander, Strike Commander, etc., the Amiga just started to look antiquated. Sure, the multitasking element was nice, but it just lost the gaming advantage when no advances in the graphics department were forthcoming. There was just so much potential but the management just took the potential and threw it down the drain. The only graphics update I got was a ...... "Flicker fixer" which allowed me to connect a RGB PC Monitor and run things at a higher resolution without "flickering". Remember Newtek's Video Toaster [wikipedia.org]? I heard (not confirmed) that Babylon 5 space scenes were done on it. Amazing stuff I tell you!

Anyway, sorry for the nostalgia. Back to topic: Workbench (the Amiga OS) 3 looks about Windows 3.1 level still, maybe a bit better. It's pathetic. I don't know about Workbench 4 and good lord how could a BRAND NEW market untested and long development dormant OS be better than OSx? C'mon! That's like creating a new model of the DeLorean and saying "This is better than a Ferrari. Trust me!"

More progress with AROS?

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Sounds like the AROS Project is making more progress than Amiga Inc. is.

Sounds like somebody's jealous...

[SanityInAnarchy]

It's not tagged "colddayinhell" because nothing could be better than OS X.

It's tagged "colddayinhell" because Amiga is vaporware. Since Vista has actually been released, consider the new joke to be, "Amiga 5 WILL be released... and it will be bundled with Duke Nukem Forever."

Re:

[joe 155]

No idea why you've been marked as offtopic, this is exactly the problem with Amiga (well, other than the whole closed source thing they've got going on...). Say I want to buy their OS (I've gone mad and think it might be loads better than linux even though it has worse hardware support, is closed source and wouldn't run hardly any of the software I like). So I want to buy it, I need to put it on my laptop... but no.

From the interview;
"3) Is there any hope of OS4 capable hardware released in 2007?
That