Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Tue 13th Jul 2004 21:56 UTC
After personal computers arrived in the 1970's they went through a series of revolutionary changes delivered by a series of different platforms. It's been over a decade since we've seen anything truly revolutionary, will we see a revolution again? I believe we could not only see revolution again, we could build it today.
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Amiga Inc in partnership with Tao have an offerring that automatically compiles intermediate code to different OSs and chipsets called AmigaAnywhere. It also is capable of scaling its display from PDAs to desktops. The Intent system, as it is called, was created by game programmers who were sick of porting from the Atari ST and Amiga and wanted a system to make it easy. After an initial and possibly early release it is undergoing further development and will be re-released with more powerful APIs which will hopefully give this promising dev kit a shot in the ARM for crossplatform development. I'm looking forward to it.
The once touted roadmap(silence of late) for the AmigaOS(v5) would feature this portability by having the OS written entirely in intermediate code. OK, Intent sounds like Java but it will turn various popular languages into IL, kinda like .NET but for all processors and OSs. You need to purchase a player though.
Incidentally, if you don't know, a PPC powered AmigaOne is in development, so there will be a new PPC based platform and PPC based OS(AmigaOS4) on the block. The specs aren't much to write home about at the moment unfortunately, but I consider this STEP ONE to greater things and more powerful chipsets. One of the draws of the microA1 is its small size as the motherboard will be microITX standard(17cm by 17cm). This PPC AmigaOS(v4) has a 68k emulator for old apps. It is apparently more than a port of 68k AmigaOS v3.9. Its small footprint both in Hardware and OS will make it ideal for broadband enabled set-top boxes that distribute content via wireless, and there is sure to be a media kit like environment that it will leverage to play movies and MP3s. I am quite excited by this, and it will HOPEFULLY see the Amgia return as the king of media.
I am sure there are many project featuring FPGAs(?). One that I know about is the Commodore ONE project(OK..now called C-ONE due to naming disputes) that aims to reconfigure itself to various ancient CPU architectures like the 6502 or Z80 for instance. Apparently it can change on the fly too. It features a SID chip. Google it for more info.