At the time all the hype surrounding the demise of the Windows XP OS was at its height & was pushing people to upgrade I decided that I would try to extend the life of my XP computer by trying out Linux. All the Linux mags kept plugging the great alternative it was to XP. So after I had read up about it and how light it was on rescources etc I bought a spare HD from CEX and put that in my trusty XP machine then installed Ubuntu Linux 15.04.

It was not a great experience. My once responsive pentium 4 machine developed what I came to term "Kick the Table" graphics. The windows jerked open and closed like as if I had kicked the table it was on and caused the effect. I thought I had not installed somthing properly but it was not until I bought a Windows 7 desktop I really understood what was happening. I tried the same distro of Linux on that and it suddenly all worked smoothly no jerking to be seen. It only then dawned on me why my older machine was behaving the way it did and that was because Linux far from being light on rescources was straining it to the limits of what it was capable of. Say what you like about windows XP it clearly did not do that.

This roundaboutly leads me to the point of what I have been thinking about for a while. After seeing the Gotek floppy emulator which can be hacked to run Amiga floppies I thought how hard would it be to upgrade the Amiga ROMs to run natively on say a four core Arm processor. Each core could then each do the tasks in a similar way to the current custom chips on an Amiga leaving one main core to do the rest. Im no expert on this but the above idea is just idle speculation on my part and no doubt there will be someone out there who actually knows and understands about these things will say that cant be done because ........!

The reason for mentioning Linux was because browsing the magazine racks I see loads about the Rasberry Pi which runs Linux and I read somewhere somebody was using it to emulate an Amiga. If my experience with Linux just running itself is anthing to go by then I dont think emulation is a great alternative to my suggestion above. If only it was being run with the Amiga ROM and no emulators involved. It would I imagine be a blindingly fast machine with incredible potential plus cheap as well.

Well thats my plan for Amiga to conquer the world- Meanwhile back in the real world!!