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.<p>I mean, is the X5000 <i>really</i> an Amiga? The thing with the Amiga was that in the 1980s it was <i>streets</i> 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 <i>somewhat</i> interesting hardware (a point in its favour Amiga-wise, especially that loopy custom chip, granted) and a whopper of a price tag.<p>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 <i>do</i> 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)?<p>I hate to be a downer because I <i>really</i> <i>loved</i> 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.
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.
The "mysterious" XMOS part looks like this:<p><a href="http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xcore-200" rel="nofollow">http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xcore-200</a><p>If it had a DDR3 interface, it'd be cool if it were the CPU. It'd be more Amiga-like.
I think the Vampire 2 FPGA acceleration card for the Amiga 600 deserves to be mentioned:
<a href="https://youtu.be/8S3B8a8N83k?t=871" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/8S3B8a8N83k?t=871</a>
It seems a lot of fun and is much cheaper (250 Euros).
How does the protected-mode version of the OS do interprocess communication? The original non-protected version passed pointers from one process to another.
Windows S announcement and a new Amiga X ... let me drag up this <a href="http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom" rel="nofollow">http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom</a> seven year old blog post of mine. Especially because:<p>> Microsoft can [...] make it so that any new app needs to be sanctioned.<p>which came to be true with Windows S.<p>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.
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 :-)
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?