
The A-EON Amiga X5000: An alternate universe where the Amiga platform never died - satai
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/the-a-eon-amiga-x5000-reviewed-the-beloved-amiga-meets-2017/
======
bartread
I loved my Amiga 500 and, in many ways, it's still my favourite computer of
all those I've owned, but I can't help feeling rather sad and wistful every
time I read recent Amiga announcements and articles. There's always this sense
of them trampling over my rose-tinted recollections of adolescence.

I mean, is the X5000 _really_ an Amiga? The thing with the Amiga was that in
the 1980s it was _streets_ ahead of pretty much anything else that was
available at the time, albeit only for a relatively short period. It had all
this super cool custom hardware and a great OS. Whereas the X5000 is a kind of
mid-tier desktop computer with _somewhat_ interesting hardware (a point in its
favour Amiga-wise, especially that loopy custom chip, granted) and a whopper
of a price tag.

I like the idea of a widely available computer with a different hardware
architecture and operating system than the currently available choices (which
basically boils down to PCs... and expensive PCs that run OSX) but, as the
X5000 stands, what would I _do_ with it? Where is the software? How could I do
my job with it? Where are the games (a big draw on the original Amiga)?

I hate to be a downer because I _really_ _loved_ the Amiga but, guys, it's
over. It just is. It's been over for decades. And it makes me sad but it's not
going to change without, for one thing, a much better capitalised company
behind it, as well as an end to all the trademark nonsense.

~~~
adrianmonk
_Where is the software?_

I think you just answered your own question about whether it is really an
Amiga. If you really want to relive the Amiga glory days, isn't that part of
the experience?

When I bought my Microbiotics 8-Up! card from the local Amiga dealer, they
rang my order up on an IBM PC that they used for accounting and inventory
tracking and such. I asked if they couldn't do that on an Amiga, and they
enthusiastically said they were looking forward to that "just as soon as the
software is available".

~~~
bartread
Haha - yeah, I think you nailed it there. Although in the early 90s I
certainly never lacked the software I needed: programming, games, music
making, word processing, bitmap graphics, vector drawing and CAD, ray tracing,
fractals, basic utilities, even a bit of DTP. Picked up so much stuff from
magazine cover disks back in the day (I was still at school so had very little
cash).

That being said, my requirements as a GCSE (and somewhat as an A-level) pupil
are perhaps a bit different from what they are today. In some ways they were
perhaps greater and more demanding, in others less.

------
erickhill
I long for an alternate universe where tired and stupid Amiga trademark
battles are ancient history. A universe where the Amiga OS and tech is open-
sourced and cared for by the community itself.

------
rbanffy
The "mysterious" XMOS part looks like this:

[http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xcore-200](http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xcore-200)

If it had a DDR3 interface, it'd be cool if it were the CPU. It'd be more
Amiga-like.

~~~
monocasa
> up to 32 logical cores

Wait, are there a bunch of real, independent cores on this thing, or are they
doing heavy amounts of SMT?

~~~
makomk
The specific chip in use here has two actual cores each with up to 8 hardware
threads ("logical cores" in current XMOS marketing parlance). The hardware
executes instructions from the active threads in a round-robin fashion. Due to
pipelining, there has to be at least 4 clock cycles between two instructions
from the same thread, so maximum per-thread speed is 1/4 the overall clock
speed and you can execute up to 4 threads on each core with no further
slowdown. Also, the hardware cores don't share memory and communicate only via
message passing, and the threads generally communicate in the same way. It's
an interesting architecture which no-one's really made any use of on AmigaOne
hardware for the whole 5 years it's been shipping with it.

------
amai
I think the Vampire 2 FPGA acceleration card for the Amiga 600 deserves to be
mentioned:
[https://youtu.be/8S3B8a8N83k?t=871](https://youtu.be/8S3B8a8N83k?t=871) It
seems a lot of fun and is much cheaper (250 Euros).

~~~
bartread
I've always thought stuff like this is cool, and I love the fact there's still
this fairly big retro scene around, well, not just the Amiga, but lots of old
systems. But what do people _do_ with hardware like this? I mean, after you've
set it up and played around with it, and realised it makes your machine loads
faster, what do you use it for?

~~~
erickhill
Play games, explore and use simpler software, and lots of "maker"-y things.
Using brand new WiFi 232 boards to get back onto the re-growing BBS scene is a
lot of fun, too. Everyone there is totally into it.

You use it how ever you want.

Much of what we like to do (except the internet as we know it today) is right
there. If you like retro gaming and productivity software, it retro-computing
can be a ton of fun. For many, just getting the hardware maxed out in various
ways is very rewarding.

Example: I have an Amiga 1200 that uses a 4GB CF IDE hard drive. It also has a
mild CPU upgrade. I also have an Amiga 2000 with 8GB of RAM and a torqued CPU
(25 Mhz, which is more than 3X faster than the day the computer was born) and
2GB chip RAM. That all sounds laughable, but it boots in about 14 seconds. How
about yours? If it didn't have the hard drive it would only take a couple of
seconds. And as soon as I'm looking at the desktop (Workbench) I can launch a
program off its new 4GB SCSI HD in a couple of seconds and jump right in. And
this is all off the original OS, 1.3.

It's a passion and a hobby. "What do you use it for?" I use it for fun and
entertainment, and I connect now to BBSes more than Facebook. It's just so
much more interesting.

I'll take my machine(s) over these new hybrids any day. I don't need emulation
except in a worst case scenario (like, if I'm traveling). But to each his/her
own. There's no "right way". Just your way.

FWIW I don't use the Vampire cards. I mostly use accelerators that were
available in the late 80s and early 90s.

~~~
bartread
Thanks, that's interesting. I think part of me just wishes I had the time to
tinker, but my tinkering tends to be writing new versions of old arcade games,
and that's pretty time-consuming on its own. I do often have videos like 8-Bit
Guy's stuff on in the background when I'm working - he's become one of my
favourite YouTubers, actually. I find it sort of gets me in the zone and can
be quite motivating when I don't feel like doing much.

I do like the idea of getting back into the BBS scene though. Certainly to me
that's a lot more interesting than, as you mentioned, facebook - I imagine the
people involved are a lot more self-selecting so plenty of interesting stuff
going on rather than the bland diet of shared posts on FB.

~~~
erickhill
> but my tinkering tends to be writing new versions of old arcade games, and
> that's pretty time-consuming on its own.

Well, frankly that sounds bad ass. Next to my 2000 is a mint C64. I use it
almost daily for PETSCII specific BBSes. In any case, there is still a very
interesting game dev scene for it. My most recent favorite is Bear Essentials,
by Graham Axten. You can read more about it here, if you're interested.
[https://amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=238](https://amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=238)

Disclaimer: I wrote the article, and it's my commodore shrine/site.

~~~
bartread
Haha - thanks, that's kind, but whilst it might sound bad ass what it actually
means is I spend as much time performance optimising game loading so people
don't click off the page before they've had a chance to play, or doing SEO
[1], as I do writing the games (which is by far the most fun bit).

No disclaimer needed either: I really enjoyed the Bear Essentials post, so
thanks for sharing. I found the comment about pixel perfect movement
particularly resonated with me. I find most web games, and particularly Flash
games (I used HTML/JS/CSS), fail quite badly in this sense, with
characters/sprites often feeling quite detached from the backgrounds they're
running or flying over.

[1] If I didn't do these rather soul sucking tasks nobody would ever play the
games, so whilst they're kind of a drag, this does keep my motivation to do
them reasonably high.

------
Animats
How does the protected-mode version of the OS do interprocess communication?
The original non-protected version passed pointers from one process to
another.

~~~
bartread
I have no idea in truth but, if I had to guess, I'd say that this could be
made transparent to existing applications using a decent abstraction layer in
between. You'd still pass something around that looks like a pointer, and you
could use it the same way, but the OS would know it's not really. Of course,
that's still potentially open to all kinds of abuse, not to mention a turtles-
all-the-way-down counter-argument, so it really is just a guess.

~~~
Animats
Apparently AmigaOS 4.1 (2008) doesn't have memory protection between
processes, despite what the parent article says. No good way to make it
backward compatible.[1]

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2008/09/amiga...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2008/09/amigaos41-ars/2/)

~~~
cat199
IIRC in the late pre-10 macos days, there was some kind of memory protection
retrofitted to the platform, with some kind of permissions system allowing
certain programs to break out of this when it really was required.. that could
still presumably be done.. unless e.g. there are hardware restrictions
(software expects processor to run in some 'mode', which it is not still in)..
even then, that could probably be soft-faulted to an emulation shim in a
modern full-featured CPU

~~~
Animats
The AmigaOS did, and does, interprocess communication by passing pointers
across process boundaries. Access to the transmitted data is a simple memory
access. The OS has no idea what data is supposed to be visible to the other
process.

The original MacOS didn't do that. Originally it only ran one program at a
time, with some hacks to allow "desk accessories" to steal some cycles.

The history of computing might have been quite different if the Motorola 68000
had correct instruction continuation after a memory access fault. (This was
fixed in the 68010, 3 years later.) Then an MMU would have been possible
sooner. Motorola was very late in producing a good MMU for the 68K line, and
it wasn't until 1990 that they had an on-chip MMU.

~~~
eschaton
The 68030 had a great on-chip MMU in 1987, three years after the 68020 and its
off-chip 68851 (which added a wait state).

You're thinking of the 68040, which brought the FPU on-chip as well.

------
chx
Windows S announcement and a new Amiga X ... let me drag up this
[http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom](http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom)
seven year old blog post of mine. Especially because:

> Microsoft can [...] make it so that any new app needs to be sanctioned.

which came to be true with Windows S.

The other half of my prediction where free PCs become "cool, obscure and
expensive" computers like the Amiga X series has not yet come to pass. Not
yet.

~~~
alxmdev
That's a nice post, thanks for the link. Some may point to various coding apps
available in walled gardens, but that means allowing 3rd parties to define
what the general-purpose computer is and set its limits. Who are they to say
where curiosity begins and where it should end? I want the freedom to run
native code on the CPU, and the freedom for others to easily run what I make
without jumping through any hoops.

I'd like to hear your opinions about the Raspberry Pi and other cheap computer
boards where you can load Linux and just plug in a keyboard and screen. I see
a future iteration of that as my next PC in a few years. The Raspberry Pi 3 is
good enough to run Ubuntu MATE (I was blown away), and if it had more than 1GB
of RAM I would start using it full-time today and save myself some money on
the power bill while I'm at it :-)

~~~
chx
Want to hear the doom and gloom version? All it takes is one of these to be
found in a terrorist backpack and they will be banned. Consider that 16 years
ago one guy tried to smuggle a bomb in his shoe and to this day hundreds of
millions of passengers take off their shoes in answer.

------
faragon
IMO, util someone does some kind of "qemu+wine"-like for running Amiga
applications and disk images as normal Linux desktop applications, the
periodic "new Amiga hardware" will never end :-)

~~~
_pmf_
Doesn't MAME run Amiga ROMs?

~~~
smacktoward
Well, there's UAE: [http://amiga.technology/](http://amiga.technology/)

TFA argues that the experience of running emulated software on this new
"Amiga" is substantially better than running it via UAE on
Linux/Windows/whatever, though. (For what they're charging for the new
hardware, I would say it'd better be.)

------
unicornporn
This badly needs the A1200/A500 form factor to be even worth considering. That
and a lower price. :-)

~~~
cmsj
There's a lower end motherboard in the works, "Tabor" (which will be released
as the A1222). It's still a PC form factor, but much smaller (mini ITX afair)
so it could potentially be put in an box not unlike the A1200.

I'd expect it won't be available until next year, but they've said that the
cost of the motherboard will be around 450€ which is pretty nice.

~~~
makomk
The problem with Tabor, as I understand it, is that its instruction set is not
compatible with the existing PowerPC Amiga code and hardware because for some
reason they used a chip which doesn't support the standard PowerPC floating
point instruction set at all.

------
kenjackson
Has there been a device like the Amiga since it came out? A device that was so
far ahead of the competition, yet completely overwhelmed by that competition
into obsolescence?

~~~
ZenoArrow
I'm an Amiga fan, but the X68000 was released 2 years after the A1000 and was
definitely a step up in power.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000)

For comparison, here's the Amiga port of Super Street Fighter 2:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNTcG4OvqE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNTcG4OvqE)

Here's the X68000 version:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYmQCbBpLTc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYmQCbBpLTc)

To be fair to the Amiga, there are fighting games with better graphics than
the SSF2 port, but I'd say sacrifices were probably made to improve the
gameplay speed.

~~~
kenjackson
I can't believe I never heard of this computer. Very interesting though.

