Amiga Inc. announces new hardware

[Demon Cleaner]

Amiga Inc., the company that purchased the rights to the Amiga line of computers back in 1999, has risen from its perpetual slumber to announce a new line of PowerPC-based computers that will run Amiga OS. The first machine will be a "consumer-level" system that will run at around $500, to be followed up with a more powerful system for $1,500. Manufacturing information, availability, and detailed specifications are promised to follow next week.Read on here. (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070424-amiga-inc-announces-new-hardware.html)

[Harrison]

Very interesting announcement. Lets hope that they do manage to actually complete this project and get a real working new Amiga line into production. I will definitely be interested in purchasing the more powerful system if it has decent specs and is able to run other PowerPC OS's alongside OS4, such as MorphOS and Linux.

[Ghost]

Okay, sound stupid here but a company is actually making a new Amiga?

[TiredOfLife]

Several companies will be making new Amigas if the reports are to be believed.
Well todays the day for one of them.
Ack Controls say there would be further info today.
Amiga Inc said they were in talks with two companies.
Ack are obviously one of them.
They said the other isn't Troika.
Acube have gone into partnership with Hyperion who are in dispute with Amiga Inc so I can't imagine they are the other one.
Maybe Elbox?
They claimed the Shark would be produced when OS4.0 was released.

[AlexJ]

For me though, the Amiga was mainly all about the games, and I just can't see developers doing anything with any new Amiga platform that comes out. Developing a game these days seems to cost at least $1million, would any developer be willing to take that risk on a platform. No games being made means no buyers for the hardware, no buyers for the hardware means no games being made.

Then there's the hardware cost to get a competitive games machine. It will be more gaming PC price than gaming console price because it won't be subsidised by licencing the games. How many people are going to choose the Amiga over the similarly priced gaming PC, with thousands of recent games already available for the latter?

I do wish that they'd just let the Amiga go, you get the feeling that anything they do release will not be up to the competition and will tarnish the Amiga name.

[Harrison]

It is hard to know in this day and age where any new Amiga should be positioned, or which market it should aim for. I do think that in the current marketplace it would be instant suicide to try and pitch a new Amiga as a gaming platform. The current PC market is too strong for any competing platform to compete against it, and the new generation of games consoles are far in advance of anything a new platform could hope to achieve.

Also look at Commodore's own attempts at pitching a gaming only Amiga to the market. The CD32 was far from a big hit outside of the existing Amiga user base at the time.

I do understand your point of view Alex. Most people do remember the Amiga as a computer platform that built its name on its superior gaming ability and a leader of the gaming market. But equally it did serve a lot of people as a platform for more serious productivity based applications, as well as being the main force in driving the Demo Scene forward.

The big thing with any new Amiga will be that it is based on the PPC processor. Now that Apple have ditched in in favour of Intel chips the PPC market has shrunk. There are many fans of PPC CPUs so they might start to take an interest in the new Amiga as a platform to invest in.

Personally I think the only way the Amiga would really stand a chance of selling and doing well as an enthusiasts platform would be to go open source. If they opened up OS4 to an open source market it would quickly catch on as an alternative to Linux and I know which I would prefer to use.

Imagine if they did make the Amiga Open Source. You could guarantee many would flock to the OS as they could easily code new applications and utilities for it and continue to develop the core OS. In addition, as with Linux, going open source should attract more network related development, hopefully resulting eventually in small and stable server environments running on AmigaOS. Now that would be cool.

[AlexJ]

If AmigaOS was made open source though, it wouldn't take long for it to be ported to x86 which wouldn't require Amiga Inc. hardware.

There only option then would to become like RedHat and simply offer technical support etc. at a cost

[Harrison]

Very true, but personally I see making Amiga OS open source and following the same business model as Red Hat and other similar developers is really the only way Amiga OS could regain a presence in the computing world today.

[Yanni Oblivion]

In theory, with the way the PS3 works, they could make a version of the Amiga OS compatible with a USB keyboard and mouse available for the PS3. I just can't see any practical use for doing so.

[Harrison]

Well, many people seem to be finding it useful to be able to run Linux on the PS3, so being able to run a version of Amiga OS on the PS3 wouldn't really be that much different.

It could have practical uses given development. Amiga OS is very small and light on resource requirements so could work very nicely as a media centre OS for the PS3, linking to other computers on the network to stream content for example.

[Submeg]

The problem is, the open source thing has been done. The mainstream is MS. There just isnt room for Amiga...they need something, something to catch buyers attention.

[Harrison]

The obvious market is a portable OS, and this is something that has been mentioned and even worked on in the past (and I'm sure one of the companies still has plans for this). The Amiga OS is very lightweight, requiring not many resources to run and it is very stable. It's the perfect OS to adapt and develop for a portable platform and as has been tried in the past, set top boxes or media centres.

The problem was that when it was tried in the past the market wasn't ready for either as the technology wasn't mature enough. Now finally the marketplace is ready. The HD revolution is finally taking hold now that digital tv is finally starting to fully replace analogue, and people are actively looking for streaming and media devices to go into their home entertainment systems.

And also the portable device market is far more advanced than it was in the 90's. Look at the PDAs we now have available such as the iPAQ or consoles like the PSP. The technology is available for a truly portable Amiga to be realised.

[Submeg]

Oh yea, portable Amiga based OS is cool, I have nothing against that. But Im talking as a competitor to MS and Linux (Mac's arent comeptition...the only reason they are still breathing is because of iPod...lol) It really needs an edge to grab ahold in the market. For example, even if the OS was different and the operating system was different, still being able to open word documents would be cool.

[TiredOfLife]

You can open Word documents with an Amiga now.
I don't think there is anything that you can edit and save as Word though.

[Harrison]

When I used to use an Amiga as my main system I used to be able to open, edit and save Word .doc files for my college and university work. Some of the applications I had could open and handle the files directly. Not all features and codes in a complex Word document were supported, but all of the major ones that I needed were. I also used to use excel files on an Amiga too without a problem.

Are there any datatypes on the Amiga for Office documents? I seem to remember I may of had one for .doc files.

[AlexJ]

Remember that the .doc format itself is being phased out in favour of the XML based .docx (used in MS Word 2007) and .odt (used by OpenOffice, KOffice and Google Docs).

Both these formats are open (in the sense that the specification is, and supposedly always will be freely available to anyone that wants) so that should make it easier for Amiga office software to be compatible.

Of course there are a lot of people using Office 2003 and older at the moment, but these new formats will start to become more common place.

[Harrison]

In recent years more file formats have become open source. One of the first commercial file formats to do this was from Macromedia with the Flash SWF format. They were smart though and didn't release anything relating to the actual development format .fla though which was a good way (at the time) from completely stopping Adobe from competing on a level with Flash, or smaller companies and freeware developers from creating products that could compete with Flash. Obviously that's all changed now because Adobe just took the other route in the end and bought out Macromedia and therefore got the code for the Flash format anyway.

I'm not sure how long it will take for new file formats such as docx to take off and become commonplace. The problem is that these files are most used in business, and it is common practice to send files to other people in a format that can be commonly read by anyone. This means that it has to be the most basic form of format that can be read by any version of Word since Word 97 as you would be surprised how many people and companies are still using a version so old, or even older.

Thinking back on it, I don't actually think I used the Word .doc format when I was editing a file on both an Amiga and PC. I'm sure I used the much more primative .rtf format and I'm sure it was because we had to sometimes use Macs! :(

[TiredOfLife]

I did have something that viewed Excel files but have long since lost it.
There is also a viewer for Powerpoint but it os OS4.0 only.

[AlexJ]

Convertor plug-ins (that do both read and write) are already available from MS for Word 2000,XP and 2003 so that could speed up docx take-up.

As for SWF, you're not exactly correct. The specification for SWF is freely available provided you sign an agreement before reading it. As part of the agreement you aren't disallowed from 'implementing software that plays the format'. Hence why they're having to use a clean-room approach to create the open source Gnash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash) SWF player.

[Harrison]

Really? That's changed then. When Macromedia first took over Flash and launched Flash 3 they released the specifications of SWF as an open source format. A number of companies including Adobe quickly released their own competing software that supported the format but never managed to match it. The positive effect was that a lot of creative software does now support exporting projects to swf format. I find this most useful with Illustrator and 3DSMax as I can output files created in those packages and then load them directly into Flash. Although I do tend to export from 3DSMax as illustrator files more as it retains more information.

Maybe this changed when Adobe took over the company. They have never been one to like sharing.

[Submeg]

Thinking back on it, I don't actually think I used the Word .doc format when I was editing a file on both an Amiga and PC. I'm sure I used the much more primative .rtf format and I'm sure it was because we had to sometimes use Macs! :(

I send you my sympathy Harrison, you pour soul, can you show us, with this chart, where the Mac touched you? :unsure:

I am running office 07 and its a bitch because I always have to save in .doc, but I cant use the equation editor unless Im in .docx Gah!:mad:

[AlexJ]

Really? That's changed then. When Macromedia first took over Flash and launched Flash 3 they released the specifications of SWF as an open source format. A number of companies including Adobe quickly released their own competing software that supported the format but never managed to match it. The positive effect was that a lot of creative software does now support exporting projects to swf format. I find this most useful with Illustrator and 3DSMax as I can output files created in those packages and then load them directly into Flash. Although I do tend to export from 3DSMax as illustrator files more as it retains more information.

Maybe this changed when Adobe took over the company. They have never been one to like sharing.

The licence agreement still refers to Macromedia so I assume it's was brought in pre-Adobe.

With regard to Adobe not being one to share, three letters: PDF. With the exception of HTML, I can't think of an open format that's more widely used today.

[Harrison]

PDF is an exception I agree. But they did create the PDF format with the intention of sharing the format and trying to make it a standard print based transport format from the start. Something that I think it has achieved quite well, especially since the internet increased in popularity over the past 8 years.

[AlexJ]

PDF is an exception I agree. But they did create the PDF format with the intention of sharing the format and trying to make it a standard print based transport format from the start. Something that I think it has achieved quite well, especially since the internet increased in popularity over the past 8 years.

What else have Adobe got? PSD is intended as an internal Photoshop file format not intended for distributing (and PS will quite happily export to any other image format). TIFF is not used that much any more. Can't really think of any other major Adobe formats.

[Submeg]

TIFF was done by Adobe? I never knew that

[AlexJ]

TIFF was done by Adobe? I never knew that

Well it was originally done by Aldus, who were bought by Adobe around 1995. So Adobe now control the format.

[Harrison]

The illustrator format .ai is a major format Adobe also control. Many other products can export to the illustrator format which is extremely useful for vector based work. Not sure how the licensing for that format works for third party products using it though. In the past I've had mapping companies supply me with OS maps in ai format which has saved a lot of time and work. Equally exporting from 3D applications in the format is great for Flash and illustrator work.

What else. Well since they purchased Macromedia they attained all of there formats. An application I use a lot is Macromedia Director and the DXR format, also exported as the shockwave dcr format for the web is, while probably not common to many, widely used in the industry. It can be used for completely interactive multimedia presentations, or interactive multimedia such as games, physics based 3D and many more things. Architects use shockwave quite a lot.

Adobe also have a large range of software such as Indesign that is fast becoming the main desktop publishing appication and leaving Quark far behind. It's own file format is therefore becoming more important and other application such as QuarkXpress may soon need to be able to import it (instead of Indesgn importing from quark!).

There are many other examples too.

[Submeg]

Whoa that is quite impressive! Never knew there was that much!

[AlexJ]

The illustrator format .ai is a major format Adobe also control. Many other products can export to the illustrator format which is extremely useful for vector based work. Not sure how the licensing for that format works for third party products using it though. In the past I've had mapping companies supply me with OS maps in ai format which has saved a lot of time and work.

Very true, but there is already an open vector format in SVG (which again is XML-based). Having not used Adobe Illustrator, I can't say by how much .ai is superior to .svg

[Harrison]

That is true. But as with many file formats, illustrator has been around for so long that the file format has a lot of third party support built into many other applications that have equally been around for a long time. And so it's userbase is very large and will be hard to esily replace the format with anything newer.

And this is equally true of many other formats too. Although the move to xml formats is a great idea, to unify standards and try to make everything standardised, I do think the older legacy/proprietary formats originally created for specific applications will remain with us for many years to come and live alongside the newer formats. Too many people are still using specific older software to be able to suddenly abandon them. Just look at the support still built into many applications for ancient formats such as lotus 123 and that hasn't been the standard since the DOS era.

But I am in full support for standardising formats. Having a single file type for each type of data would make life so much easier. Look at bitmap image formats for one. I would like to see png fully replace gif as it can do so much more and always tends to result in smaller file sizes, but png is still not fully supported by all browsers yet (IE) so gif can still not be abandoned. This is equally true of many other formats.

[AlexJ]

Yeah, the ability to read and write legacy formats is important, and as we found recently with the pp compressed files, when you can't easily open old files it's annoying. The move to day-to-day use of the newer formats though will happen at some point, where applications start saving by default in the new format, and many users won't know any different.

[Submeg]

Sure I get your point Harrison, but the thing is there are benefits over certain types. For example, say I was saving an image. Working in paint (of course) I would need to save it as BMP, if I wanted to modify it again, without it going blurry. If I was to stick it staight on the web, I would use JPEG if I was to create an animation file, GIF. But I see what you are saying about PNG....I use that, so much smaller than JPEG and I cant see the difference

[AlexJ]

Sure I get your point Harrison, but the thing is there are benefits over certain types. For example, say I was saving an image. Working in paint (of course) I would need to save it as BMP, if I wanted to modify it again, without it going blurry. If I was to stick it staight on the web, I would use JPEG if I was to create an animation file, GIF. But I see what you are saying about PNG....I use that, so much smaller than JPEG and I cant see the difference

PNG is lossless - it won't lose any quality compared to the original BMP. GIF is also lossless but limited to 256 colours. JPEG on the other hand is lossy.

The basic rule of thumb is PNG for diagrams (which are 'simple' enough for PNG compression to be effective) and JPG for photos (as two pixels are rarely the same in a photograph).

[Submeg]

But if you were to reopen a PNG in paint, would all the pixels have defined colour edges or do the colours blur together?

[Harrison]

Actually that is a misunderstood thing about PNG. It actually supports both lossless and lossy formats, and allows the saving of up to 256 colour lossless images with transparency, or up to full colour 24bit which can support both lossless and lossy image compression, all within the single format. Therefore it is really the only format that would be needed for anything online if only it was supported by every browser.

The only other formats that are then needed would be the applications own format as this is always required for the original artwork to hold the unflattened version of the original image.

The worst format has to be BMP. It doesn't offer any benefits and the file sizes are huge. BMP is a format I never touch. And TIFF very rarely either unless for print work that requires hires imagery that will be sent to a printing bureau.

[Submeg]

So you can use PNG to edit single pixels? Never knew that

[Harrison]

But if you were to reopen a PNG in paint, would all the pixels have defined colour edges or do the colours blur together?

It would depend what options you used when saving the images, but if you saved the png in a 256 colour (or less) lossless format then no degradation compression is used and it is very much the same as using a gif, but with smaller file sizes. Each pixel is saved as is.

A lot of the template graphics used on both the forum and the main site are in png format.

[Submeg]

Learn something everyday :)

[AlexJ]

Actually that is a misunderstood thing about PNG. It actually supports both lossless and lossy formats, and allows the saving of up to 256 colour lossless images with transparency, or up to full colour 24bit lossy images, all within the single format. Therefore it is really the only format that would be needed for anything online if only it was supported by every browser.

Really? I thought (and from experience have always found) it to be a lossless compression at both 256 and 24bit.

Edit: Just checked it's Wikipedia page - no mention of it being lossy. Also did a test - a 1.17MB 24bit BMP file, shrunk to a 129KB 24bit PNG file. The same BMP file when added to a zip file compressed to 115KB (zip of course is lossless compression). Therefore as there is less that 15KB difference, I believe that PNG is also lossless.

Edit2: I'm now convinced you're wrong Harrison! I found the official specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-Rationale.html) for PNG. Quote: "There is no lossy compression in PNG. Existing formats such as JFIF already handle lossy compression well. Furthermore, available lossy compression methods (e.g., JPEG) are far from foolproof --- a poor choice of quality level can ruin an image. To avoid user confusion and unintentional loss of information, we feel it is best to keep lossy and lossless formats strictly separate."

[Harrison]

I think that all commercial applications do only support the lossless part of PNG, where 8bit PNG saves a colour palette and references it per pixel, and 24bit PNG saves 3bits per pixel to save the exact colour data on a pixel for pixel basis. Lossy compression is supported as being possible with the PNG format but hasn't been implemented outside of research.

I also forgot to mention that PNG also supports alpha channels which is a huge advantage of both gif and jpg as you can save a true 8bit alpha channel that can be used as a mask for varialbe transparency when used with another image. This is great for gradiant shadows often seen in web graphics. Sadly this isn't used much as IE doesn't support this at all and will cause a broken image error when tried.

Another cool feature of PNG is variable compression within a single file. PNG contains five compression filters and a different one can be associated with each pixel line of an image. This is a great feature as lines with a lot of differing colour data will compress differently to only with hardly any changes such as sky or a solid area of colour.