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.

[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.