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Indeed, a bet is a bet... Are you a man of honor ?

If I was in that position, I'd go ahead eat my socks, too. But only if they were red velvet with cream cheese icing.

Ha! Maybe it should be "each my breaches" (shorts)

Why, yes, the next iteration of AmigaOS will be named GLaDOS.

I've experiments to be run
There is research to be done
On the people who are
Still alive.
And believe me I am still alive...

It was a great cpu in its time (a few yeasr it would have attraced me stropngly) and today is still a nice one, ableit waaay to expensive and not really up to date.
The reason for OS4 to chose PA6T is plain and simply that it is a ppc and thus offers a big endian data type. And OS 4 is ppc/big endian only. A switch to x86/little endian for that OS is far from trivial if you want to keep backwards compability.
Diffrent to most other OSes OS4 shares structs between the OS and apps, if these dont match the same endianess you are in deep trouble. The same is true for MorphOS.
If the PA6T or any othe rppc is only a particuar choice, but generally the PA6T is a nice cpu, albeit not developed any longer and not my first choice (which Freescale 86xx or some QorIQ chip).

IMHO PA6T is supoerior to Freescale's 86xx choices. PA6T is a G5 class 64bit core, 86xx is a G4 class 32bit core. QorIQ for the moment I think also is less desirable than PA6T, though they do finally have 64bit and seem to plan a return of Altivec, so I do very much look forward to news there for something I hope will be comparable to PA6T and have a future which PA6T does not.

PA6T has a good number of SERDES for PCI-Express and other things, with more configuration options than other PPCs, and until QorIQ adds a couple more things I think PA6T is still king of PPC, and however they managed to get some chips I think it's a fantastic choice when restricted to PowerPC.

I'm no expert on the way these OSen work, so bear with me.

Would it be easier to port to say, Ultra/OpenSparc?
No royalties involved, you could run it on an FPGA board for fun...
*shrug*
It's big-endian...

Don't they have the appropriate preprocessor definitions, macros and functions that would allow them to solve the endianess issue?

I believe x86 now has extensions to load and store big-endian. It could easily be made a compiler option to simply switch the endianness. Even without the a simple runtime option, the endian could still be configured in the compilers OS description file.

Perhaps, but for once I'm going to hold back my cynicism.

The way I see it is the X1000 was always pretty much doomed as a commercial venture, there is a chance it will succeed and I hope Trevor can turn a profit and maybe even go on to develop an X500 or something (X1200 would be interesting.)

Out of all the 'icons' of the community that I've seen come and go, Trevor seems like a stand up guy, perhaps because that's all he's trying to be. He's not deluding himself in what he thinks he can achieve (unlike dear billy boy) he's just trying to keep a platform he loves alive like every other Amigan, some keep it alive by hacking existing hardware, writing new 68K software and just reliving the glory days, others like Trevor and the AROS and MorphOS teams look to the future and that's good too. Best of all though... he's being honest and upfront with the community. (again, gotta miss bill)

Personally I'm happy with Protracker and AmiBlitz on my A1200, and I'm looking forward to working on something for AROS when I've done enough research and got the thing to run properly on my laptop; but that doesn't mean I'm not happy that Trevor is taking the Amiga to new places and inviting us along for the ride. I wish him, my favourite computer and all the Amigans out there a merry drinkmas and the best of luck for the new year. Maybe we can all get along in 2011?

Off Topic:
Anyone remember Vroom? Just rediscovered this little racing gem last night. It's even made me put down F1 for the ps3 I got last week.

Yeah!

I'm not going to be using these OSen, but I'm glad they and new hw exist.

At the least, because maybe the next Hirasawa Susumu album will be more lush and intense, as he uses Amigas to compose/sequence his music. More power in the hw would allow him to not get bogged down with any speed limits and just compose.

I'm not so sure the Amiga community is _growing_...

I would say it grows fine! The Amiga Community is strong and stubborn like hell...they refused to die a long time ago!

The AmigaOne X1000 and AmigaOS is a killer combination, and shows once again that THE AMIGA IS ALIVE AND KICKING!!

And don't forget the SAM machines covers the entry level hardware. So all in all we have many different hardware options, and a high level machine in the horizon, and a GREAT operating system AmigaOS 4.1

The Amiga situation is better than ever!


long live the Amiga!

Edited 2010-12-23 07:28 UTC

>> So all in all we have many different hardware options
And this is a problem.
Amiga today (and in last 15 years) is a bunch of small groups of enthusiasts who doesn't care about the platform, but only targeted to theirs personal goals.
Instead of single future-proof hardware platform and single OS platform we have non-compatible, not future proof HW + 4 Amiga-flavour OSes.

The problem of X1000 is what it is designed as 80s platform. Put a custom XMOS chip on mobo and hope someone will find it useful. Feels so oldskool

When you cater to a community like Amiga users, putting geektastic custom chips on the mobo makes perfect sense because these are the very people who would get use out of it.

I don't see how a few programmers who would buy X1000 hardware can make something useful with this technology for these who have SAM, for example, without said chip.

Make sure you follow the context of Hondo's post: "we have many different hardware options" => "The Amiga situation is better than ever!"

Edited 2010-12-23 15:08 UTC

Think about the third-party software situation for their OS(en).
Do you really think they're not writing their own software?

Someone will hack something cool out of that chip, and hell, you can probably already do something with it on Linux, which will run on the box as well.

Actually, that's exactly what I like about it.

I think you missed the point...

I'm saying that if they got the remaining stock, possibly even a single run, that it's probably enough to meet demand.

If they made too many, it would actually hurt the future of the company!

That said, _I_ want one, but not to run Amiga OS, but there's a whole story behind that...