If hyperion releases amiga to another platform, TODAY, would it survive? [closed]

Question

If hyperion releases amiga to another platform, TODAY, would it do well enough? I'd love to develop for the amiga platform. I do miss it.

What do we need?

btw, i realize that this isn't a problem, more of a wishlist for the future of amiga.

Epicurus

It would be great but I don't think it would be taken seriously enough to be a strong contender. What platform did you have in mind? Do you think it would survive? Can I ask, what did you love about developing against the Amiga platform? I was born in the early 80s but was still fortunate enough to program against it at a young age (couldn't afford a PC). Blitz Basic and AMOS was my weapon of choice but I was a very basic hobbyist programmer back then. – Adductor

Haha, yes, I was also an avid amos-programmer at first. I then moved on to trash-m-one, which basically was assembler. I was also a hobbyist, but I did have fun being that. Maybe it was just the beginning of developing stuff, that I have so fond memories of. I'd like to see it as a competitor to linux and windows, so the same hardware as they run on. I'm certain it could catch on big, if you've seen some of the stuff that amiga os 4.0 has to offer. There certaintly is enough people like me out there, missing the hell out of the good old days. – Epicurus

Interesting article in yesterdays CodeProject Daily News if you haven't seen it already: arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/07/… – Adductor

Kudos for this! When we get amiga.stackoverflow.com alive - we'll know we are on the right path! :) – Knapp

Answer 1

Difficult question, what the Amiga scene needs is a growing critical mass. Enough developers interested in the platform to keep contributing code, and programs/applications, i.e. enough wares to make it a viable. Interesting looking at MorphOS, how that platform is coming along. Porting the operating system to many types of old PPC Apple hardware and trying to lower the cost of buying into the platform.

PPC has unquestionably had it's day, and although I know that the Amiga scene has an unwarranted distaste for anything x86 based, ARM may come to its rescue, and be alternative enough for the Amiga scene to employ. ARM market dominance of mobile and embedded devices can't be argued with, and their future in desktop/server markets will likely depend on energy efficiency concerns, the development of Internet technologies and essentially the declining importance of desktop applications.

So, to answer your question, what do we need? We need to excite developers old and new, and bring the platform into focus. Personally the only thing that would REALLY galvanize people would be an open source Amiga OS 4 port to x86. Anything other that is beating around the bush. And no, a hardware based platform is not going to succeed in the long run, most Amigans are pushing 30-40 (years old) now so it's worth bearing in mind that we aren't getting any younger! Another ten years most young university computer science graduates will be wondering what the fuss is about operating systems, as they try just run their HTML5 apps in Chrome or Firefox and don't bother going deeper than Javascript or C#. ...hang on a minute aren't we already there yet?

Infectious

I think we probably should let amiga stay dead. I just wish I could find closure ;) As of the development, I suppose we all see where we're going. And the ones that don't, never mind them. They will be dragged by the masses, kicking and screaming. – Epicurus

Closure, now that's a word! How many years did loads of us wait in agony after 1994? Whilst the Amiga IP and business got branded around like somekind of tortured creature. Yeah, a lot of bitterness came from that. – Infectious

Well, this is coming together nicely: natami.net it is not too good to be true. It's just exactly the amount of good to be true. :-) – Spurn

Well, it was too good to come true, but a part of it mutated into Vampire Amiga implementation, thanks to majsta.com – Spurn

Answer 2

I think what made the Amiga special, the excellent hardware and chipset architecture, is gone. The AmigaOS, while excellent for its time has since been superseded in capability by Mac OS X and perhaps even Windows 7 :P

I was a mega Amiga fan back in the day, and followed the AmigaOne saga out of morbid curiosity, but I won't be buying a new Amiga Machine (or OS, for that matter).

I sold my A1200 years ago to buy a mountain bike.. Though I have an (I assume) non-functional Amiga 500 somewhere around the house, probably in the closet near the 286 AT and the old broken-down powermacs :)

Selfconsequence

This. The Amiga ruled its day because its chipset meant it could run 11 layers of parallax scrolling background at 60 FPS perfectly smoothly while playing stereo music off an 880k floppy. Yes, I'm talking about Shadow of the Beast. It was impressive because the single-processor architecture of the PCs was so far behind it was amazing. – Traynor

Answer 3

I would like AROS to succeed on Netbook hardware and other PC hardware. Maybe in concert with Emumiga or some other similar solution, to seamlessly run classic Amiga applications.

There is a minimal, stripped down version of AROS compiled for 68000 included in WinUAE nowadays, so the Amiga hardware emulator can work without proprietary Kickstart ROMs. This also means hardware clones of the classic Amiga can be sold complete with a compatible OS in a legal way.

Also, I think AROS would be a neat fit for the ARM based netbooks such as Chromebook. Those will not be able to run Windows, and might as well run something exciting and fast like AROS instead of Ubuntu or something equally slow. Those netbooks are also fast enough to run Amiga programs in emulation.

Update: AROS now works on Raspberry Pi, natively!

Spurn