Hyperion Promises An AmigaOS Netbook 258
An anonymous reader writes with a report that an employee of Hyperion Entertainment has disclosed (but not officially announced) that there is a new portable computer with the Amiga name on it in the works, quoting: "Supposedly, the new netbook Amiga is will be 'sourced in a special configuration from an OEM.' The manufacturer in question is, just like the price tag, the launch date and the hardware specifications, currently unknown paving the way for further speculation and rumors. The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985."
AmigaOS (Score:4, Informative)
For those who didn't read TFA, it states the netbook in question will be running AmigaOS.
(When I read the summary, I'd assumed someone had bought the trademark and was going to slap it on a Windows 7 Starter Edition laptop)
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There would be more fans if it wasn't for decades of mismanagement and false hope. If the Amiga had become a retro platform the moment Commodore died I think there would be a lot more active users today.
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Last time, it used a Motorola 68000, but this time, they should have it running on the PPC.
Later they can transition to Intel x86 and the circle will be complete.
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Otherwise, they don't meet KPI and teams lose their bonuses.
It's boni.
BZZT! I'm sorry. That answer is incorrect. [wiktionary.org]
The GP had it right, and X gets the square.
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Despite ARM having pretty aggressively filled the 'consumer-visible stuff that isn't x86' market(not quite sure why they cleaned up so hard; but they did), there are still plenty of PPC SoCs around that
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The talk is somewhere around 500 dollars but I'd be happy with 600 or so. I'm still running an Amiga 3000 but it's 20 years old now. I bought it when 286 powered peecee's were the rage and it ran circles around them plus it actually multi-tasked easily. I look at it now and it's amazing what it can do on that old hardware. So far ahead of it's time and mismanaged by idiots like medhi ali and irving gould was Commodore Business Machines. A billion dollars to zero in 5 years.
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Indeed, I suggest watching The Deathbed Vigil [google.com], a documentary about the last day at Commodore. It explains how they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Reading this piece [mozillazine.org] also explains some things. It's disturbing, they had some truly good tech, all destroyed by the absolute incompetence of those at the very top.
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I remember a skit about ali and gould playing golf. They're talking about the company wondering what it is they sell. One asks the other about it, "what is it we sell again?" and he replies "computers", to which he says "oh, so how are those doing?" The small shareholders actually had to hire a private detective to discover where the shareholder meetings were being held so that they could attend to give them hell about what morons they were. You gotta love it. They ran Jack Tramiel off which I kind of
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Looking at the Applied Micro parts that prior Hyperion-supported PPC boards have used, their own dev boards(hopelessly ill-suited to desktop work, for want of RAM and a video controller; but with JTAG and suchlike dev goodies) seem to run ~$1,000 in quantities of one, even for the ones with relatively weak CPUs(the 333-800MHz single core stuff).
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There may well be some nostalgia-gouging going on; but low-volume PPC boards fast enough to not be a complete joke on the desktop are likely just not that cheap.
At this point in history they should be using an emulator on standard hardware. No really.
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The writing has been on the wall for PowerPC since before Apple jumped to Intel, but Hyperion and some of the Amiga community still want to believe.
There are still a few PPC iDevices that remain popular. [wikipedia.org]
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I suspect the "AmigaOS" will just be a slightly customized version of Android, ChromeOS, or some other non-Windows OS. They're just trying to wring some nostalgia value out of the name. Some company was doing this with the Commodore 64 a few years ago, selling a "Commodore 64" that was nothing more than a custom case around a conventional Windows computer.
Meh, its just a name (Score:2)
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AmigaOS is still somewhat of a toy operating system though, considering that at is core is Disk Operating System (not unlike the various x86 DOSes)
Oy! AmigaOS is completely unrelated to MS-DOS/PC-DOS/etc. The only thing they have in common is that they were both used in the 80's and 90's.
albeit one that supports preemptive multitasking, but only cooperative memory protection.
"cooperative memory protection"? You mean "no memory protection".
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In related news... (Score:2)
Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary? (Score:2)
Re:Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does it really bring anything to the table now? (Score:2)
Where does it stand on the Malware front? On one hand I'd think it would let users ride ROFL-Copters over the virus writers. On the other hand it might be really vulnerable to 2012's exploit methods.
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Sadly, I don't believe that AmigaOS has anything to offer, anymore. The multitasking, graphics, and audio, were so far ahead that they smoked everything else out there, at the time. When a technology is so good it embarrasses everyone else, then it won't be long before everyone else has it, or something comparable. No one likes to be embarrassed.
AmigaOS did prepare me for UNIX, though. It was so very much like single-user mode, you can't help but think that it was modeled after it. That may be why I fell in
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Also my opinion.. I loved the Amiga.. about 20 to 15 years ago. It's part of my youth. Whilst cleaning up my basement yesterday even still found a box full of Amiga Format magazines - still don't want to throw them away, reading back some gamereviews brought back good memories.. I even still have the last AF issue upstairs between my collection of books.
But the Amiga nowadays as a system ? It's nostalgia, but not something I would invest/waste time on anymore.
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Why is this bad? Harder for companies to use DRM.
That's not a bad thing at all.
Hyperion ? Thats the only hyperion i know : (Score:2)
and i assure you, if it was out as a board game, i might have considered playing it.
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Well... It is a sewage treatment plant in Los Angeles... Complete with a special surf spot known as "shit pipe".
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Just Wow (Score:3)
From Wikipedia:
Hyperion Entertainment was founded in February 1999 after Belgian lawyer Benjamin Hermans wondered why no one had ever tried to license PC games to do Amiga ports.
Because very few people really want to play PC games on AmigaOS?
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So you have a profitable company that has been around for 11+ years doing what?
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no one said they were profitable, they probably float by on subsidies much like Uwe Boll, where they get a "nice try" check for failing.
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They actually managed to make a little money at it. It's a niche market but hey, it's a market.
Agnus, Denise and Paula made the Amiga Amiga (Score:2, Insightful)
Everything since has been just a name.
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You forgot Gary.
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More stupidity (Score:5, Informative)
Amiga inc since it left Gateway has been a complete mess. Marketing a name and products, but offering nothing but rip offs, shambles and diabolical product plans.
Hyperion, peddlers of junk and broken software. Originally the two pitched up with a third entity, Eyetech and produced the Amiga One platform. A broken junk pile of crap unworthy of being unleashed on the poor unsuspecting public. The broken hardware all backed by a warranty system designed to be malignant and to rip people off because they were 'developer' boards.
Hyperion have failed to deliver a proper product, and its riddled with issues. Its carried on leaking with its foul stench across a very short list of PPC equipment, and now apparently you'll too be 'lucky' to be offered a new 'Netbook'. They are the only member of the original three still trying to peddle this garbage and primarily each time they find some new victim-able hardware they can hang their hat on, they start making pronouncements.
I have no idea how this 'news' got pitched as being tech news of any kind on Slashdot. Whoever thought it was worth posting as an item_is_wrong.
The standing advice remains. Steer clear of anything from this bunch of cowboys.
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I was not an Amiga fan back in the day, but I have followed the story of Amiga on "x" hardware for quite some time now, and you bring up an interesting point:
Mainly, I keep hearing about the resurrection of Amiga, but have yet to see anything ever shipped, much less a review or a place to purchase this new "Amiga".
Do you, or anyone else out there in Slashdotland, have any practical experience with anything of the "new" Amigas?
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Yes, I have one. It's a Sam440ep-flex board, currently running AmigaOS 4.1 update 3.
It's not very fast (I can watch a DVD on it, but that's about the most CPU-intense thing I can do) and as you can imagine, getting software for 'modern' computer tasks can be a pain. (There's a good web browser, but no Twitter clients, for instance.)
On the other hand, other than sheer number-crunching tasks it feels pretty fast when I'm using it. AmigaOS was always very responsive on slow hardware.
But mostly, I use it becaus
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I'm astonished at your reaction. I was one of the purchasers of the 1st run of the AmigaOne and has been THE computer I have used these many years. It has never needed repair. It was been upgraded on two separate occasions.
Mark me at the complete antipodes of your experience. Do you have hands on experience?
Fond memories (Score:4, Insightful)
I loved my Amiga 500. In it's day, it was so incredibly powerful with it's hardware-accelerated GUI, sound hardware, and rich OS API. Incredible to think that the core of the OS was written in a matter of weeks by a British student.
But there is nothing special about it any more, save fond memories. Everyone has hardware acceleration and a GUI nowadays, even the cheapest of smartphones and netbooks.
The OS was not complete, and missed many features we now take for granted. There's no point itemizing the details, because they don't matter. Suffice to say that the glory days of the OS are lost in the sands of time. The world has moved on.
This new machine will either be running a completely different or seriously upgraded OS. If that new OS provides POSIX APIs and other interfaces that are important, it might see a new community of ported software. But if it's the old Amiga OS API, why would anyone want to develop for a proprietary OS with zero market share?
Wind is filling in the footprints that the Amiga trod in the sands of time. Soon there will be nothing left but dunes. All that's left is a brand name.
Amiga History References (Score:2)
I found a couple of very nice write-ups on the history of the Amiga out there:
The History of the Amiga [amigahistory.co.uk]
AmigaOS - Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
The Amiga 500 was released to the public at the January 1987 Consumer Electronics Show. The Macintosh 128K was released to the public January 1984. Just in case anyone thought I wouldn't give credit to the first commercialization of Xerox PARC's research.
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I have to agree. I was a real Amiga fanboi in the day. Frankly that is what cured me of being a fanboi. The Amiga was so much better than the PC of the day and yet it couldn't get any traction. Heck the Atari ST was also better than the PC of the day but also floundered.
Only the Mac held on with it's large margins and much better marketing.
I wrote an early Virus Checker for the Amiga as well as the AREXX bindings for TDI Modual-2 "terrible compiler btw".
This is just like a Zombie Amiga... Well it is the rig
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Really? Here all these years I thought it was a UK Master's thesis project.
I'm glad you mentioned his name. The original reason I was searching the Amiga history pages was to try and remember his name so I could give him a little credit and maybe find out what he's doing today.
Could someone please mod parent up so people know who the creative mastermind behind the OS was?
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A friend of mine corrected some misunderstandings on Facebook.
AmigaDOS was actually based on a Motorola 68000 port of an earlier effort called TRIPOS [wikipedia.org].
TRIPOS was originally developed started in 1976 at the University of Cambridge in the UK. The M68000 port that became AmigaDOS was at the University of Bath, also in the UK.
So if Carl Sassenrath was born in California, he must have been a student in the UK.
Once you start down the rabbit hole of computing history, you soon realize that no matter how c
No thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently said on another story's comments that brands are important because you can tell known good stuff from bad, but that some just abuse the fame of a brand (which got to where it was by being great) to produce overpriced crap.
The new Amiga is one of those cases.
Go on, how much will this Atom based netbook be... £1500? No thanks. Frankly, shove it.
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300 pounds!!! Jesus. That's not luggable by anybody except the incredible hulk.
ok (Score:2)
What problem is this solving?
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The problem is that the hard core Amagia users that never let go AND (this is the important part) still want their system in a modern world need to have their wallets relieved from that stress.
Listen I love my retro computers, they are great machines that still manage to do amazing things. But I am not under an Illusion that a totally different arch, with 3rd party developed software is the real thing. Amiga PPC is.
Why not rebrand AROS and throw it on there? (Score:2)
I'm not saying a netbook with an obscure OS would sell, but at least all they would have to do is slap some Amiga logos on there and push the product out, rather than resurrect software that is long-dead.
68xxxx CPU? (Score:2)
If not, its not really a "portable Amiga". Instead its yet another PC running a remake of a classic OS with a microscopic market.
( and of course it isn't... )
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Amiga never left the 68xxxx series. Atari tried once with the transputer.
And while with the 'port' of either OS to x68 ( or via emulation ) you can get the 'feel' of them, part of what made these machines what they were was the hardware. Sure it runs tons faster, but its still not the same, its still PC.
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It's time for Hyperion to Stop. (Score:2)
Enough already. It's time to stop dragging the Amiga name down. Open source the OS and free it. Quit trying to revive it as a competitive proprietary OS. It should have been freed back in the 90's, it's past time now.
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It's not an open source version of AmigaOS. It's a reimplementation of the Amiga API's sort of. There's no Amiga codebase in it. Basically they're writing something that works like the Amiga OS on X86. It's cool but it's a work in progress with no end in sight.
Let it die already. (Score:2)
I was an Amiga user from 1989-95. I accepted that the Amiga platform died in the mid 90's and moved onto Window and from there to OS X.
The Amiga platform was amazing for its time but we are now in the 2010's. Nobody except crazy nut jobs want to use 20 year old technology. Let the Amiga platform rest in peace.
I was part of a local Amiga user group that had the developers behind "Amoeba Invaders" and I hosted the user meetings after the local Amiga dealer went out of business. Move on people. It is dead. It
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Nobody except crazy nut jobs want to use 20 year old technology.
Ummm.... I thought this was a nerd-site, not a site for "what is the best way to do your spreadsheet / home movie authoring / etc.".
What's the harm tinkering with technology, be it dead, buried, cold, still barely breathing or a rising star?
If popularity dictates what your hobbies are we are going to live in a very, very dull world. I don't know what plans for this machine mentioned in the article are - I don't really care if it succeeds or not, but it is news for nerds. Although I agree that Amiga news and
About 20 years too late (Score:2)
Oh well.
Amiga and Emulation (Linux.) (Score:2)
Boutique Computer systems like the Atari ST, Amiga, and Sharp X68000 are some of the most insufferable tasks one can undergo as far as emulation goes.
I will say this now. The Amiga and Atari ST were fine products for their time, but now, their only usefulness is as gaming consoles. The games they had that were unique to their platform and superior ports produced really were a sight to see, and have withstood the test of time in this era of retro-gaming revival.
Atari ST Emulation is tolerable under Windows a
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I think you're over-egging the situation a little.
Even back in the early Pentium / DOS days, UAE was a perfectly capable emulation, able to play just about any mainstream game you threw at it. Hell, they sold it on disks with thousands of commercial ADF's and even Gremlin used it on their CD releases of their Amiga games for PC.
WinUAE took some time to get to the same state, mainly because of system requirements, but it was there. Sure there are a million and one arcane configurations of the top-end Amiga
There was never a portable Amiga. (Score:2)
> The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.
This sentence is confusing. Is it trying to say that the A1000 was portable? Because I had one and I can assure you that it was not.
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yeah the summary is funny since a500 was way more portable..
Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
OK- not bashing amiga- nor praising it.
I just simply want to know- why- and for what motivation there is for "yet another OS".
I know the OS has a long and glorious history- but it will essentially be like starting from scratch in this day and age. With the market already saturated with Windows, Apple, and many flavours of Linux- do we really need another OS?
Is there some niche that Amiga can hold that none of the other OS do well at the moment? There are no 21st century applications written (that I know of) for the Amiga- so initially choice of software will be decades old- or a meagre line-up from Amiga themselves.
Does Amiga have some "trick-up-their-sleaves" that we don't know about- or is this purely a nostalgia product?
If it can run Windows apps or Mac apps or Linux apps- or maybe a combination- maybe it will stand a chance.
I have no beed with Amiga- or any ill-feeling towards them- but I simply can't see the purpose of it- can someone enlighten me please and tell me why I would want or need an Amiga?
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That's really the reason. It's for nostalgia and geek fun mostly. Owning an Amiga was always an expensive hobby. I paid 2 or 3 times the prices for stuff for my Amiga than my friends did for their peecee's. They always oohed and ahhed over how amazing it was but few people wanted to spend the money to own one. They were happy enough with windows since their was plenty of software available for it, mostly games that they wanted. All the big Amiga titles got ported to the peecee to start with and then l
Magic times (Score:3)
Exactly, brother. Exactly. The Amiga made me love computers.
I'll never forget the first day I had my 500 hooked up. I ran the demo that drew boxes. Then ran another copy, then another, then another...had dozens of them up. You could watch the OS switch attention between dozens of them. I was amazed. My previous machine was a C64. The leap was magical, amazing...I would simply watch the Amiga run demos and be blown away.
Learning m68k assembly...aaah. I'll still say it is the most beautiful and e
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.
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Is that not a sufficient reason?
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Oh come on man. I loved the workbench but be real. It's 2011.
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That's your opinion. I hate window behavior in OSX, I hate the dock, I hate the menus being at the top of the screen instead of in the windows, and I hate the pager/multiplexer system, I prefer sloppy focus and I love semi-transparent terminals. While I still prefer GNOME 2 I'd take GNOME 3 Shell any day over OSX.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Our hatred goes back farther than that, friend. Walled gardens are inimical to the nerd ethic and those precede Google's entry into the "mobile space", to use your business media parlance. But we bide our time...
Like the old saying goes, we know if we wait long enough we'll see the body of our enemy floating down the river.
Well, not literally...
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It's not going to happen. Windows is running on momentum, OS X on style, and Linux on Freedom and Excellence. The Amiga just has Nostalgia. OS 4 isn't anywhere close to being able to compete with a modern OS.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really understand why anyone is trying to resurrect a proprietary platform that died out eons ago and that even most geeks didn't buy back during its heyday. [..] Nobody cared about the Amiga back then and even fewer people care now.
Oh Jeez, not this **** again! Look, I know it's hard to believe, but the US market is not the be all and end all, nor is it always reflective of the rest of the world.
Sure, it didn't sell well in Buttf***, Illinois, but the Amiga enjoyed *massive* mainstream success in Europe in the late-80s and early-90s.
That said, though it was amazing and ahead of its time 20-25 years ago, the Amiga is way too long gone to serve any meaningful purpose in bringing back now. Things have long moved on.
But to be honest, this product is really aimed at the obessive hardcore Amiga fanbase, not Joe Public, and that's where it makes business sense (if it does)- a very niche market.
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No, the Amiga was hugely successful, so it's just ignorant to say that nobody cared about it back then. The computer market in Europe was vastly different from the USA, systems that seem obscure to you were mainstream to them.
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systems that seem obscure to you were mainstream to them.
So the European computer buyers were all hipsters?
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Not exactly- but different products made it big there than in the US.
I know kids my generation in the US grew up mainly with Atari and some a Commodore 64. In the UK, for example- not many people had an Atari- and the Commodore was only one of many computer platforms.
Almost everyone I knew had a Spectrum of some kind.
Spectrums are fairly obscure in the US- but then- we (for the most part) didn't have Atari game consoles instead... our computers were our game consoles.
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It's just the biggest single market in the world.
I suspect that would be EU.
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I'm going to guess you weren't around in the 80's when the Amiga was huge? I was. It was the system that made many of the SF/fantasy/cartoon tv shows possible to produce on a weekly basis. It got bought by the thousands for modelling and raytracing, and with the Video Toaster ushered in a whole new era of graphics capabilities that FORCED everyone else in the market to compete. It was the fastest horse in the race, and suddenly everyone else making bank on "traditional" text-based DOS number crunchers, or e
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I'm going to guess you weren't around in the 80's when the Amiga was huge?
In some ways you still have a US-centric view. *You* mean "huge" in terms of relative video industry importance in the US.
My point was that the Amiga was "huge" in actual *mass market*, pure-numbers, "every teenager in his bedroom and his dog owns one" terms in Europe.
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No, it was very popular, and sold very well. It was ruined by spectacularly, probably criminally incompetent management. If you've spent _any_ time here on Slashdot, you would have heard many tales of great engineering ruined by stupid managers, well the Amiga saga wrote the textbook on that. Tragic.
I still fire up my A1200 now and again.... and if I hadn't killed my SX32 card for the CD32 I'd have it plugged into the TV right now.
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It's just the biggest single market in the world. Nothing important there.
Strawman. I didn't claim that the US market wasn't significant, I said it "wasn't the be all and end all". And your other fallacy lies in assuming that because the US is a major *single* market, the Amiga can't be a success regardless of how much it sells on other markets.
And this depends how one defines a "market". Europe as a whole was- and is- in the same ballpark.
The Amiga did not sell well enough anywhere
The fact that it was manufactured for almost a decade shows that it must have sold "well enough". Actually, it sold significantly better tha
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The Amiga *was* really popular in Europe. In around 1990 or so, if you had a modern personal computer in your home, it was most likely an Amiga or an Atari ST, the IBM compatibles were far too expensive for most people and had very poor graphics capabilities.
It died out because the PC got a lot cheaper and gained all the things that the Amiga had, but that wasn't until around 1994-1995 when the PC finally had what the Amiga had for years.
(I have no horse in this race, I never owned an Amiga back in the day.
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So, if Hyperion - or anyone - can push out some portable 'Miggy goodness, I'm all in.
I might be wrong, but AFAIK these "new" Amigas AFAIK aren't directly compatible with old Amiga software, and definitely not anything that comes close to hitting the hardware directly. They don't run the 68K, they are (again AFAICT) just custom machines that run a new version of the Amiga OS.
AFAICT they're aimed at the tiny hardcore who never gave up the faith even when it meant moving away from the original Amiga hardware.
But given that any need for "classic" Amiga OS compatibility in a new OS has been
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AmigaOS 4.1 does a pretty good job of running old Amiga software. It has a 68k emulator built in much like the early PPC MacOS.
There are a bunch of old games that don't work, but there are a bunch that do, too. Basically, if it'll run on a 68K Amiga that had aftermarket graphics and sound cards, it'll work on a PowerPC running AOS 4.
There's actually a fairly high demand for classic Amiga app support; while the people who buy this sort of thing are certainly not Diehard Amiga Purists, we do want to run our o
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where are the apps?
Here [os4depot.net].
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Not the same thing by a very long stretch. Linux is freely distributable, doesn't require overpriced esoteric hardware, and has tons of software available.
Apparently it's a 400MHz PPC Limebook (Score:2, Informative)
It's a 400MHz PPC Limebook as per: http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=34459&forum=33&start=140&viewmode=flat&order=0#634010 [amigaworld.net]
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As a huge Amiga fan 'back in the day', it's sad seeing its corpse being desecrated with such regularity. It died. We have to accept it.
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