
Call for Amiga Developers: Kickstarting PowerPC and 68k software development [pdf] - doener
http://a-eon.biz/PDF/News_Release_Developer.pdf
======
steveridout
I owned an A500 and later a pimped out A1200 (with an 80Mb hard drive!) back
in the 90s and really loved them. I learned programming using AMOS and Blitz
Basic. I dabbled with 3D modelling and rendering using Imagine. And of course
there were so many awesome games - Lemmings, Populous, Civilisation, Monkey
Island, Mega-lo-Mania, Speedball 2, Worms, Sensible Soccer, Hired Guns, the
list goes on...

But around the time Doom was released on PC, it seemed like the Amiga's
graphics performance, once so ahead of its time, had fallen far behind. I
switched to a Pentium 60 PC and apart from the occasional twang of nostalgia
have never looked back.

I'm really curious what the motivation is for those die hard Amiga fans and
hackers now, so many years later. Is it nostalgia, the community, the
technical challenge of working within the system's limitations? What is
keeping you around?

~~~
bhaak
I had an Amiga 2000 with 2 floppy drives and 3 MB of RAM and later an Amiga
1200 with a 120 MB hard drive (ha! beat you!). This setup suited me well also
after I got to the university for doing programming homework on them and using
the university Sparc machines for internet surfing. I only got a Linux machine
in 1999.

So I'm not really part of the active Amiga community but I'm following loosely
by reading [http://amiga-news.de/](http://amiga-news.de/) and listening to
BoingsWorld, a German Amiga podcast
([http://boingsworld.de/](http://boingsworld.de/)).

I think there are about 3 different groups of Amiga fans.

1\. the hardware group 2\. the emulation group 3\. the demo group

IMHO the hardware group is the one group who wants to run something Amiga-like
on their vintage (68k) or slightly vintage (PPC) hardware. Those people get a
kick out of having a useful and fast system without all the cumbersome and
inefficiencies of modern systems.

The emulation group just wants to use the old software or play the old games.
Those usually don't care about the non-68k systems as it is much easier
nowadays to emulate the old systems with one of the UAE forks.

The demo group uses whatever system they have to produce stunning demos.
Getting new cool effects out of 30 year old systems is really amazing and
shows what an incredible machine the Amiga still is.

I think A-EON mostly serves the hardware guys.

~~~
vidarh
It's even more sub-divided than that... It's really fragmented.

On the hardware side you have people that want something they will deem as
"classic enough". Basically it at least needs to be 68k, possibly with PPC
card, and various extents of modern expansions (some of which may not leave
much of the original machine in actual use...)

You also have a number of people who care about the architecture for various
reasons, but don't care about the actual hardware. There you'll find a number
of FPGA projects. There is some overlap here, though.

Then you have the PPC crowd which is split between MorphOS and OS4. OS4 users
has been A-Eons primary market given that they are selling actual new PPC
hardware (with a second design underway), though they've lately started adding
more products for classics, and have been courting MorphOS people too. MorphOS
runs on various second-hand PPC hardware.

Then as you say there's the people who are fine with emulation.

Then you have AROS, which is largely hardware agnostic (ports to ARM, PPC,
68k, x86).

Within this there really are a lot of different motivations. E.g. you find
classic users who just want to play games, but there are also hardcore classic
users who try to use classic Amigas as their main computers.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Out of interest, is Natami still a thing? Anything come of CloneA (aside from
that scan doubler that used some of its AGA implementation)?

I haven't followed Amiga developments for a while, last I remembered it
appeared the Natami project was parked due to some differences in direction,
with the project to create a new 68k FPGA CPU splitting off into a separate
project.

I noted that the Minimig AGA core reached v1.0 this year, which is good news,
is compatibility fairly good now?

[https://code.google.com/p/mist-board/](https://code.google.com/p/mist-board/)

~~~
vidarh
Who knows what's going on with Natami. Basically they've went off in different
directions, and lately the forum for the Apollo core (the 68k FPGA cpu) was
wiped. Whether that means they've given up or just decided they don't want to
talk to anyone is anyones guess... I would say that at this point any good
news from that camp will be a nice surprise rather than something anyone
should hold their breath over.

I've not kept up with the Minimig cores. I'm more interested in AROS (though I
check in on the FPGA projects now and again because I find them fun to read
about), but have had very little time for that too lately.

------
snvzz
I still use my Amiga machines, but I want nothing to do with AmigaOS4. A new
desktop proprietary OS simply makes no sense in the present world, even more
so if it only runs in special hardware.

AROS (free implementation of AmigaOS3) and Minimig (free implementation of the
hardware for FPGA) is where it's at.

~~~
rvense
AROS runs on Minimig? That's incredibly cool.

~~~
snvzz
As of a few years ago, it runs on classic Amiga hardware.

But graphics performance is poor without a graphics card.

------
weland
The vitality of the Amiga community never ceases to amaze me.

I actually headed over to A-Eon's page. I've been postponing getting one of
their systems for about three years now, for various reasons, and I finally
thought I'd say yes.

Sadly, it turns out they're all discontinued:
[http://www.a-eon.com/?page=products](http://www.a-eon.com/?page=products) .

For all the awesomeness of AmigaOS 4, the hardware continues to be sadly
elusive, as it has been ever since the demise of Commodore.

~~~
rjsw
> Sadly, it turns out they're all discontinued

You can probably blame Apple for this, the CPU was from PA Semi.

~~~
baldfat
> You can probably blame Apple for this,

Amiga fans the original Apple haters. I loved running the Mac OS emulator and
getting fast performance with a slower chip.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "Amiga fans the original Apple haters."

Probably just jealous that Apple had decent management that didn't throw away
its performance lead.

"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (quote from
former Apple exec Jean-Louis Gassée, Amazing Computing, Nov. 1996)

~~~
baldfat
Well it wasn't differences in management as much as internal Thermal Nuclear
War. Great reads to be had here [http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-
amiga/](http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/)

Apple was a big bunch of haters on anything Amiga and told big fat lies about
their own machine or the future machines that were right around the corner
that would blow away the Amiga. (If around the corner was six years than they
were not lying).

On an Amiga had a Motorola 68000 chip just like the Mac, but the emulator on
my 1 mhz 68000 would out preform System on a 2 mhz 68000 family chip.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "on my 1 mhz 68000"

Did you mean 7 MHz 68000?

~~~
baldfat
Yes 7.09 MHz My bad it was soooooo fast at the time now I laugh. I really thin
the move from anything to Amiga at the time was just leaps and bounds greater.

------
brechtm
I wonder how many Amiga users are left by now. I remember the heated
discussions (on ANN) about whether Amiga should remain on the PPC track or go
x86 (remember Amithlon?). Didn't stick around long enough, but it must've been
a shock when Apple announced they were dropping PowerPC in favor of x86. Ah
well...

~~~
ckemp1
In hindsight, by the time all those discussions happened on ANN, the platform
(as a meaningful alternative to Apple or Windows) was dead anyway. A lot of
energy was wasted on the comments section of ANN in those days that could have
been spent on more productive endeavors.

~~~
brechtm
ckemp1, as in Christian Kemp, creator of ANN.lu?

I know I wasted too much time participating in flame wars on ANN in those
days. In hindsight, I wish I had abandoned the Amiga much sooner and walk away
with with mostly good memories.

~~~
ckemp1
That's me. (As in, creator of ANN and also someone who should have walked away
sooner - although I did switch to Windows quite a few years before closing
ANN).

------
bane
The modern Amiga community is weird. I get the nostalgia kick it brings, but
there's too many differently vectored "purity" movements all concerned with
carving out their own slightly different piece of a rapidly shrinking pie.
There's what, 4-5 _different_ OS projects?

Even stranger are the commercial software projects -- for which there are
dozens. The creators will _never_ come close to even making their time back
with sales of very complex apps, so why not just release everything as Open
Source or Freeware? There's no business model in the world where it makes
sense to sell Amiga software anymore, and with the massive OS fragmentation
any given port must sell in the low dozens even for very popular titles.

It absolutely doesn't make sense and seems very self defeating for what could
be a more vibrant hobbyist platform.

------
walkingolof
If you want to see how it all ended, Dave Haynie documenting the last day of
Commodore.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI&feature=youtu.be)

------
apaprocki
If someone from IBM is watching, it would be a really fun project to try to
port some form of Amiga OS to run on POWER8. All of the POWER chips add
complex instructions to the ISA but are all fully compatible with PPC
COM(mon).

~~~
vidarh
Getting AROS to run certainly would be possible. The biggest question would be
"why", as though there's been some _very_ experimental work on SMP for AROS
and claims of work on SMP for OS4, currently all of the alternatives are still
stuck using just a single core.

------
Imago
Only the X1000 ist discontinued, the X5000 (Mainboard: Cyrus+) is coming soon
and a new lower priced A1222 (Mainboard: Tabor) is coming too.

[http://www.a-eon.com/?page=x5000](http://www.a-eon.com/?page=x5000)

Some background infos and also Pics from Cyrus Board:
[http://blog.a-eon.biz/blog/](http://blog.a-eon.biz/blog/)

------
peterkelly
_" we have created a dedicated SVN resource"_

I'm surprised to see such out-dated technology still being used today.

~~~
collyw
I know that git is the standard these days, but my guess is that the majority
of devs don't need a distibuted version control system. I personally find git
powerful, but often overly complex.

~~~
brusch64
I think git is pretty easy for easy workflows (add, commit, push). I just use
subversion for old projects, where porting them to git would not make any
sense.

------
arm
From what I can gather, it doesn’t seem like it runs on PowerPC Macs. Too bad,
I would’ve liked to try it out.

~~~
ZenoArrow
You can run MorphOS on some PPC Macs.

What's MorphOS? That's a long story. To save you the convoluted history, let's
just say it's an Amiga-like operating system from the Amiga community.

According to the FAQ on the website, MorphOS runs on 'Powerbook G4, iBook G4,
Mac mini G4, eMac, Power Mac G5, and Power Mac as well as on computers and
systems based on EFIKA, Pegasos I, Pegasos II and Sam460 mainboards.'

[http://www.morphos.de/faq](http://www.morphos.de/faq)

Here's a video of MorphOS booting on a PPC Mac:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB2pT7QiNr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB2pT7QiNr4)

------
lurkinggrue
Man, I thought I was an Amiga die hard when I gave up around 16 years ago.

