Submitted by The Amiga changed the computer industry. It was based on a multitasking operating system, rivaled the graphics power of some workstations and was affordable enough for home users. Unfortunately, Commodore struggled to maintain Amiga’s lead, and through a number of bizarre business decisions (refusing to license the Amiga design to Sun), went bankrupt. Read about the history of the Commodore Amiga at Low End Mac.
History of the Amiga
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Since the article is inaccurate in places I’ll just sum up the relevant parts here and correct some factual errors:
The Amiga was a computer with custom chips that were very advanced and made it a very capable computer. Its multitasking abilities helped set it aside from the cheaper Atari ST range of computers of the same era. It was wildly popular due to its large selection of games and software even though it was hardly advertised, yet Commodore still managed to run the operation into the ground in an impressive manner. Today the legacy lives on in PPC based computers and the company called Amiga Inc. is working on Amiga Anywhere which, despite its name, has nothing to do with the original Amiga systems. The operating system is being reworked by Hyperion Entertainment while hardware is being produced by third parties.
There.
Edited 2006-09-02 20:07
“The Amiga was a computer with custom chips that were very advanced and made it a very capable computer. Its multitasking abilities helped set it aside from the cheaper Atari ST range of computers of the same era. It was wildly popular”
Not so in the US, it was a bit player there.
“Today the legacy lives on in PPC based computers and the company called Amiga Inc.”
Should read: There were several attempts to resurect the Amiga, with the latest attempt being from a company called “Amiga Inc”, who after several blunders, lies and general mismanagement are now insolvent.
“The operating system is being reworked by Hyperion Entertainment while hardware is being produced by third parties.”
Should read: The operating system was being reworked by Hyperion, however due to screwups by Eyetech and Amiga Inc licencing issues, it is highly unlikely that new hardware will be produced.
Currently, the only way to experience the Amiga is through software emulation with UAE. It is likely that this will be the only way for future generations to try this once great name in computing history.
“Should read: The operating system was being reworked by Hyperion, however due to screwups by Eyetech and Amiga Inc licencing issues, it is highly unlikely that new hardware will be produced.”
Hardly.
Stay tuned for Big Bash 4 (September 16th) and Pianeta Amiga (23rd and 24th of September) for hardware news.
“Currently, the only way to experience the Amiga is through software emulation with UAE. It is likely that this will be the only way for future generations to try this once great name in computing history.”
Not exactly true. Those who bought boards when they were available are now running AmigaOS 4. Those who didn’t have had a far too long wait, though.
“Stay tuned for Big Bash 4 (September 16th)”
Yeah, just “2 more weeks” (TM) (c) (r)
Personally I’m more interested in the Pianeta Amiga announcement, so I’ll up it with a handful of extra days. Sorry that it ruins the long-running joke 8)
Big Bash should only bring news about the Amy product (and hopefully once and for all show whether they’re serious about it) while Pianeta Amiga will bring something entirely new apparently.
Not so in the US, it was a bit player there.
Are you saying the Amiga was a bit player or the ST? If you are saying Amiga was a bit player in the US that is not true. The Amiga in the states was very popular. There were several Computer shops, including Software Etc., and EB selling Amiga systems and software in the day. Far more shops sold Amiga in my city then, then they do selling Macs in this area today. There were also quite a large selection of mail order shops too.
Yeah no doubt. There were a lot more places to buy Amigas than Macs or even Atari STs. Not more than PCs though. When the clones came out, there were mom & pop shops all over where you could (and can still) buy PCs. PCs were for businesses or work use. They weren’t really multimedia machines until 1992 or so, imho, when decent games started to come out for it like Wolf3d, etc.
Atari and Commodore just didn’t know how to package computers, though. Especially when it came to building machines that could easily be upgraded. Try replacing your OCS (original graphics/sound/etc chipset) with AGA, NOT. The PCs were so much more modular, which in the end proved a huge advantage. The STs had problems because the OS was programmed to take advantage of a bug in the 68000 which didn’t exist in the later cpu chips. This created a compatibility problem, as I understand it. Same with the amiga in a way because the AGA games (and applications) were incompatible with the OCS ones. There was no abstraction from hardware in the Amiga’s primary applications – games. So any change (upgrade) in the hardware created compatibility problems.
It’s like if nVIDIA came out with a new faster graphics card where all games written for it wouldn’t work on the previous generation (not just slower). They just couldn’t grasp the concept of abstraction (like opengl or directx does). I guess those were the days when performance at all cost seemed much more important than abstraction. That trade-off proved to be fatal, IMHO.
Maybe some of my information is off. I never bought an AGA Amiga but I did know that I couldn’t run AGA games on my OCS A500. If we think MS’s blackmailing us with DirectX 10, just look at what commodore did with AGA. I’m not saying upgrades aren’t necessary, but that the upgrade process was killer – upgrade your whole damn computer, not just a video card.
Edited 2006-09-03 06:39
I never bought an AGA Amiga but I did know that I couldn’t run AGA games on my OCS A500.
You’d have difficulty running a DX10 game in DX5, too. Where Commode and Atari got it wrong was in making sure it was difficult to run an OCS or ECS game or program on an AGA machine, too.
It wasn’t difficult to run OCS or ECS games on AGA machines, the majority worked, and some could be made to work by disableing CPU caches (which was simple to do.)
If we think MS’s blackmailing us with DirectX 10, just look at what commodore did with AGA. I’m not saying upgrades aren’t necessary, but that the upgrade process was killer – upgrade your whole damn computer, not just a video card.
How is this different from, say, the PS2? It’s not like a simple upgrade gives a PS1 owner the ability to play PS2 games.
I doubt it would have been a simple matter to make AGA available to an A500. Most of the custom chips would have had to be upgraded, and the processor… it would probably have worked out cheaper to buy a new motherboard anyway. (Although I understand that a company, DCE perhaps?, did have a prototype of an upgrade board to make an A500 into an AGA machine.)
And don’t forget that the Amiga was about 7 years old when the A1200 came out. Even with a modular design, I doubt you could upgrade a 7 year old computer to play modern games!
>>Not so in the US, it was a bit player there.
>Are you saying the Amiga was a bit player or the ST? If >you are saying Amiga was a bit player in the US that is >not true. The Amiga in the states was very popular. >There were several Computer shops, including Software >Etc., and EB selling Amiga systems and software in the >day. Far more shops sold Amiga in my city then, then >they do selling Macs in this area today. There were also >quite a large selection of mail order shops too.
several Amigas were used also by “big players” like Wald Disney (a lot), NASA (all telemetric management for the Shuttle and the russian MIR station), all big american TV networks, etc..
“The Amiga in the states was very popular. There were several Computer shops, including Software Etc., and EB selling Amiga systems and software in the day. Far more shops sold Amiga in my city then, then they do selling Macs in this area today. There were also quite a large selection of mail order shops too.”
I want to amplify this just a bit. Back in the 1986-1989 time frame, there were plenty of place to buy Amiga computers in the US, from upscale department stores to speciality computer shops. There was a chain of 5 computer stores local to the Hartford, CT area that sold mostly Amiga and Commodore computers, and they certainly did well for awhile. There were also legendary computer stores, such as Memory Location out of Wellesley, MA that did great business in Amiga and related peripherals; they had the largest selection I’ve seen.
I’m of the opionion that the Amiga 1000 (I had one, and it’s still one of the best looking computers ever made) and Amiga 2000 sold reasonably well in the US, the A 500 sold better, and the others were mostly niche machines. Commodore’s biggest problem was that Irving Gould and the other chief executive there (Mendhi??? -sorry) siphoned all of the profits out of the company through executive compensation, leaving little money for R&D or even cash flow. During one time in the 80s, these guys were taking out as much in compensation as IBM executive (Lou Gerstner?). Every company needs a cash horde to survive poorly received products, and Commodore simply didn’t have one…
What’s inaccurate about the article? I liked it.
Kind of amazing how many times Commodore shot itself in the foot. I think the Tramiel culture caused Commodore to be really cheap and really conservaitve and really cocky. I wonder what he does now?
I think the Tramiel culture caused Commodore to be really cheap and really conservaitve and really cocky. I wonder what he does now?
Apparently –
… Jack Tramiel is now retired and living in Monte Sereno, California, with his wife Helen, who he married in 1947 shortly after his immigration from Poland. They have three sons : Sam (born 1950), Leonard (born 1955 or 1956), and Garry (born 1959 or 1960). The Tramiels also have several grandchildren.
Jack Tramiel is also an active member of the Anti-Defamation League. His son Sam is a Vice Chair of the ADL regional board in California.
It is rumored (though several former employees have claimed to have seen it) that Jack has a large gold and stainless steel sword from Atari’s SwordQuest contest in his living room. It was not awarded because the contest was cancelled after the company’s sale, due to an apparent lack of interest among gamers and corporate staff. …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Tramiel
Apparrently, he and his son have worked together a while. His son appeared in a Computer Cronicles episode with his father to demo the Atari ST.
Mostly some of the really rough generalizations towards the end such as Amigas not having developed to follow the PCs. Upgraded models were available and add-ons and accelerator cards upped the performance of available models. Furthermore I fail to see what Win 3.x offered that was comparable with a fully multitasking machine capable of doing video work right out of the box (but let’s not let that be the re-opening of the whole PC vs Amiga discussion at the time).
Besides that the AGA Amigas were quite successful (in Europe at least), both for gaming and serious work. The machine that preceeded them (A3000) was also quite a powerhouse and was even offered as a UNIX workstation in the form of A3000UX. These machines were more powerful than most UNIX workstations of the day. Commodore managed to shoot itself in the foot with this machine as well, but that’s a different story and has nothing to do with the machine not being seen as powerful.
The final paragraph is basically plain wrong. Yes, AmigaOS is owned by Amiga Inc. but they’re not licensing it to manufacturers whose computers are used in video production.
AmigaOS is, like I mentioned previously, being developed by Hyperion Entertainment and Amiga Anywhere (which is based in Intent and runs on various platforms) is developed by Amiga Inc. Third party manufacturers are developing hardware for AmigaOS 4 but not for video production – they are for desktop usage and the OS is not even ready to support video production since there’s currently no tv out or even video editing software available for the new platform.
Edited 2006-09-02 21:24
As an ex-Amiga enthusiast, a few things spring to mind. Virtual Memory is one. I believe that a 3rd party app was available for Amiga’s with a non-EC CPU. I also understand that VM is a standard _now_. In the 3.1 days Amiga’s did not have widespread resolution and colour depth abstraction. I seem to remember that 3rd party cards were available, and that apps could be written to use them. This, however was not a standard feature. In my mind, by the time 486DX class PC’s were affordable the Amiga was stagnant and I left the platform. I still have very fond memories though, and it will always have a special place in my heart.
Amen brother.
Actually I always thought Tramiel was the one who made Commodore grow. When he moved (had to move?) to Atari, it was the time of the C64. Amiga was financed by Atari before Commodore managed to sneak in. Then he had his own problems at Atari: the ST was nice but competing with the Amiga was really impossible at that point.
The way I see it, Commodore killed the Amiga by not realising how rapidly IBM compatible systems were evolving. Around 1992/93, when the A1200 was launched, MS-DOS based machines came equipped with Sound Blasters and VGA or SVGA. It was really way too late.
Edited 2006-09-03 08:25
“The way I see it, Commodore killed the Amiga by not realising how rapidly IBM compatible systems were evolving. Around 1992/93, when the A1200 was launched, MS-DOS based machines came equipped with Sound Blasters and VGA or SVGA. It was really way too late.”
It’s not as if they hadn’t noticed the growth in the IBM market. It is an oft cited reason for the demise of Commodore that they tried to compete in the PC markete where the competition was fierce and margins were minimal. Of course that’s just one of the reasons. Another is that the management changed too often and every time new management came in previous prestige projects were axed. I recommend digging out one of the many Dave Haynie interviews if you want to read more about that.
Comparing MS-DOS machines with Amiga 1200s is a bit misunderstood, though, in my opinion. The Amiga 1200 was designed to be a cheap entry machine like the A500 – but times were changing and people were spending more money on computers (and would continue to do so for many years really).
Comparing apples to apples you should compare it to the A3000 that came before the A1200 or the A4000 that was there for the business segment. The A3000 and A4000 both only had 8 bit audio but were expandable using Zorro 3 slots for sound cards, graphics cards and the like.
The Amiga 3000 was a monster machine when it came out. It had a built-in flicker fixer (which meant you could use the same resolutions as on the average PC at the time), SCSI 2, 68030 that was upgradeable and a fast bus for expansion. In my opinion the only home systems comparable at the time were NeXTStep machines and while their development tools were far more advanced they were somewhat lacking in the multimedia department when compared to the Amiga.
But reality is that lots of things killed Commodore. First and foremost the management’s incompetence in various areas.
I remember when people started to “build” their computers from components manufactured in Taiwan, and run DOS on them.
It was considered cool using a CLI, rather the multitasking and GUI from Amiga OS.
Today it seems really stupid, but those were the times… And we all had to wait for the industry to catch up, what a waste of years.
remember when people started to “build” their computers from components manufactured in Taiwan, and run DOS on them.
Which DOS? Apple DOS? Amiga DOS? Tramiel DOS? MS DOS? DOS is just acronym for Disk Operating System.
hey, CLI is still cool (just check in with any *nix power user, some of them going mac because of osx’s bsd core and a *sh CLI out of the box). and amiga had a very nice CLI compared to the likes of MS-DOS. and as it had a GUI and a multitasking os below, one could run multiple CLI’s at the same time
heh, i have seen more then one *nix user that use the X windowing system for one thing only, to run multiple CLI’s on screen at the same time
basicly the amiga os was what microsoft maybe got right around the time the release windows 2000.
I still have it, but it just isn’t useable for anything but old games anymore.
I love my iMac G5, but in my heart I’ll always be an Amiga guy.
If Amiga Inc. released OS4 for either Apple Macs or X86 hardware I would really consider using it.
Hold on to that A1200. It may be that a new PowerPC accelerator in development will plug into the trapdoor slot on the bottom to add AmigaOS 4 capabilities to your classic Amiga.
As for the x86, don’t hold your breath too long. There are too many endian dependancies in this “white boxed” operating system to get decent performance out of the little-endian intels. (Every other instruction executed would be a BSWAP opcode to make the Intel work like a big-endian machine.) If you don’t mind having no binary compatibility with all your old A1200 games except EUAE, then there’s AROS but that’s another story altogether.
BTW, you should get the Mac version of EUAE and run Amiga OS 3.x on that.
“Hold on to that A1200. It may be that a new PowerPC accelerator in development will plug into the trapdoor slot on the bottom to add AmigaOS 4 capabilities to your classic Amiga.”
Okay in my book the A1200 isn’t really a classic Amiga. The classics were the A1000, A500 and A2000. Okay it’s all ancient computer history now anyway.
By the time the A1200s came out, I had already written the Amigas off as a dying race. I bought a 486/33 with 4MB of ram which was a whole lot more horsepower than my A500 had, yet in many ways it was an inferior machine, except for both hardware software support. Those two being critical for what I wanted – a computer to play games, call bulletin boards, listen to music (MODs), learn hardware, etc etc..
People who never used Amigas before PCs really missed out. Well, with WinNT/2K/XP,Linux,BSDs, etc PCs now have better OS’s than AmigaDOS 1.3 was, certainly. I booted WinUAE recently into 1.2/1.3 and ghads… it was ugly! but for the time it was bleeding edge stuff.
As much as I love Linux, it’s not nearly as much fun to use as AmigaOS, and not only because there are next to no native games. A lot of things that Linux creates umpteen solutions to please a dozen different types of user for, Commode (or to be more accurate, Amiga Inc. and Metacomco) just got Right First Time.
IIRC, there are already 2 PPC accelerator boards for the a1200… one by a company claled ‘blizzard’ i think, it was a PPC and a 68k 060. And AOS4 already runs on it.
“IIRC, there are already 2 PPC accelerator boards for the a1200… one by a company claled ‘blizzard’ i think, it was a PPC and a 68k 060. And AOS4 already runs on it.”
There were several models of PPC bearing accelerators by Phase 5 – the Blizzard for the A1200’s, and the Cyberstorm for the A3000/4000, when Phase 5 died, DCE took over and screwed everyone when their boards were shown to be unstable and badly made pieces of junk.
You are unlikely to meet any long time Amiga user who bought one of these things that didn’t have a failure with them at some point…
There was at one point a G3 bearing prototype doing the rounds for the A1200, which didn’t have a 68k cpu onboard, but offered compatability through software emulation built into a rom…. It, like so many other projects was dropped.
oh ok, cool.
Another compressed “History of Amiga”, that fails to mention some of the software people that played a big role.
Don’t article writers ever tire of writing the same thing in different words, and just toss in some links for more reading, when they could could write a more complete version?
Changed the world so much that this article has to piggyback on a Mac site.
It doesn’t “have to”. There are loads of Amiga sites out there. Thankfully Low End Mac doesn’t seem to be run by 1-OS Mac (or Windows, or, dare I say it, Linux) zealots.
Thats nice 😉
Just a short remark, Amiga is the best of the best 🙂
I cant but not to wonder what Commondore was thinking when it released A500+ and A600 models. Finally when A1200 game out it was already too litle too late.
Never actually saw one, owned a company that produced packaging for third party software for it at the time. I recall thinking it was the Vamiga for a long time because of the big check mark logo thingy.
The NeXT’s had built in DSP’s, RISC processors and high resolution color monitors when the Amiga 3000 was released. They were comparable, but it was a stretch to say the Amiga exceeded the NeXT’s.
The NeXT also cost a whole hell of a lot more, didn’t they? And I don’t believe NeXT ever used a RISC processor, or had colour at the same time as the Amiga 3000. (The 68K series was used both in the original NeXTs and the Amiga, and they were CISCs.)
The NeXT Dimension used an Intel i860 RISC processor to process PostScript.
http://lowendmac.com/next/nextdimension.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I860
Edited 2006-09-03 15:24
I stand corrected.
Well, actually I’m sitting… 😉
It wasn’t really a RISC computer, since it used the 68030 as a CPU, so you’re still kind of correct. The NeXTStations were priced around $7,000, so they were out of the Amiga pricerange (though I imagine that Amiga’s used for video editing were quite a bit more expensive).
Also, NeXTs != ‘home computers’. They were workstations.
It’s on Digg now.
http://digg.com/apple/History_of_the_Amiga
“Hardly.
Stay tuned for Big Bash 4 (September 16th) and Pianeta Amiga (23rd and 24th of September) for hardware news. ”
You really are a credulous bunch. There is no hardware, there was never any hardware and never will be any hardware whilst this current lot are in charge. (I will happily apologise if this turns out to be false, however, given how many “just two more weeks” style comments that have come out of the assess that hold the Amiga IP, I’m on fairly safe ground here).
Amy… 05, you guys were promised some pics, that there would be non working demos, what did you get? Nothing.
Unless you have news of a port to pegasos, or that you’ve convinced the guy who wrote Amitholon to break out his voodoo again to do for PPC miggies what his original creation did for 68k… AmigaOS 4 is dead.
Seriously, wake up. You’re embarressing.
To other posters re the Amiga in the US. I’d always been told that there was a far bigger market in the EU and Japan then there was in the US. Seems the market in the US was bigger then I was led to believe. I stand corrected!
@ the_leander who wrote:
>>>
You really are a credulous bunch. There is no hardware, there was never any hardware and never will be any hardware whilst this current lot are in charge. (I will happily apologise if this turns out to be false, however, given how many “just two more weeks” style comments that have come out of the assess that hold the Amiga IP, I’m on fairly safe ground here).
>>>
Well, start to think the words for an historical phrase with which you should apologize.
We italian amigans are in direct contact with the developers of new hardware (they are italians too) at this site forum:
http://www.ikirsector.it
http://www.ikirsector.it/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6043
(google-translate it if you could not understand italian language)
We discussed a lot in various threads about these new hardware projects, and had lots of anticipation and clues about it all.
Seems true real solid silicon stuff!
I will visit Pianeta Amiga Show in Empoli, and then I will report to you all…
By the way just check “Pianeta Amiga” event site here:
http://www.pianetaamiga.it/eng/index.html
It plain states this:
«During the show there will be the official presentation of codename “Samantha” project. A new PPC hardware platform. More details will be available during the show.»
We italian amigans are in direct contact with the developers of new hardware (they are italians too) at this site forum:
One word: BoXeR
Untill it is available for purchase, I’ll not be making any plans for an apology.
How many prototypes have been released by various folks, only for it to be pulled because of some hitch or other at the last moment?
the_leander wrote:
>>>
One word: BoXeR
>>>
This is an old Boxer machine as released in 2001 (Only ten machines available):
http://www.amigau.com/aig/boxer.html
Sure this new Samantha hardware it could have some points in common with Boxer. I still don’t know…
But remember that in 2001 it not existed yet RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) european law.
This is a clue for you about new Amiga PPC:
http://www.soft3.net/images/firma2.jpg
UHM! RoHS complaint. This new hardware it could be sold worldwide and it will not causes pollution. A must for new market of computers!
I strongly doubt that a BOO-BOO-XER motherboard was so advanced…
I doubt also it has USB ports, PCI, AGP… UHM…!
>>>
Untill it is available for purchase, I’ll not be making any plans for an apology.
>>>
We amigans can wait.
We are trained in waiting, and from time to time new hardware came up and grants us lots of satisfactions over skeptical people and flamebaiters.
Edited 2006-09-03 21:38
“This is an old Boxer machine as released in 2001 (Only ten machines available): ”
Erm, hate to point this out, but the BoXeR never made it out of prototyping – there were endless revisions but it was never released. I can’t understand why this is so hard for you to get into your skulls….
“Sure this new Samantha hardware it could have some points in common with Boxer. I still don’t know… ”
You really don’t get it do you? Amazing. Ok, I’ll spell it out for you:
There have been many people who created prototypes for their vision of the “next generation Amiga” that never got beyond that point. BoXeR was just one of the more clever ones.
“I strongly doubt that a BOO-BOO-XER motherboard was so advanced…
I doubt also it has USB ports, PCI, AGP… UHM…! ”
…. It’s not about hardware, it was never about hardware. It’s about people announcing (sometimes with pictures, sometimes with non live shows of hardware) kit that never makes it to the production line.
I have to conclude at this point you are either retarded or…
“We amigans can wait.
We are trained in waiting, and from time to time new hardware came up and grants us lots of satisfactions over skeptical people and flamebaiters. ”
… Nevermind, you answered for me.
I’d be into an Amiga set top box. I saw some screenshots from a few years ago, and they were impressive, though a little garish.
Edited 2006-09-03 21:01
Well, I forgot to mention that the article on Apple site online review was incomplete as usual, as written by people who based all the news from Wikipedia..
It completely lacks of history of AGA (1200 and 4000 machines)
It lacks of any infos about 32 bit BUS system of Amiga, first than any PC BUS counterpart, and the relative abundance of 16bit audio cards an 24 bit graphic cards for Amiga only, believing that these cards were only available on PC machines wirh their ISA, VESA or PCI BUS.
It also stated erroneously that “Amiga” is PORTUGUESE language…
Well, sure honestly Amiga is also pronunced as is in Portugal and Brazil…
But sure Amiga computer was born in California, an USA state which originally was a former Spanish colony, and still is confining with Mexico that is an american-latin “spanish” country.
And USA southern states (California, Florida, Texas, etc.) are full of spanish native spokers people.
Sure the author of the article needs to study better the history, history of computer, Amiga history and in the end also human geography.
So will Pegasos hardware ever be supported? They have some pretty affordable boxes available, some bundled with MorphOS,I think.
“So will Pegasos hardware ever be supported? They have some pretty affordable boxes available, some bundled with MorphOS,I think.”
From the perspective of getting available hardware now, yes, it’d make a whole lot of sense to go this route, sadly, as with many things in the Amiga domain, politics gets in the way.
Due to these politics, you will probably never see a Peg2 running AmigaOS4 ever. Same goes for Efika any anything else ppc that genesi come up with.
Instead, you’ll hear promise after promise of kit that never quite materialises (Nyx, Walker, Escom “Power Amiga”, M Box, MCC, A/Box, Pre/Box, A5000, BoXeR, iWin Amy 05, Troika.) You’d think after nearly a decade of failed promises, with only failing classic hardware and EOL AmigaOne’s which never worked right to begin with (and all the associated lies and misdirections that came with those boards) that the Amiga community would wake up, but instead, you hear the mantra of “just wait”.
In the mean time, great projects (and products) like Amithlon are stopped due to a mix of politiking and lies, and in other arenas the C=One are out of the door and selling like nobody’s business…
That’s really too bad. Will there be some sort of copy protection to actively block people from using Pegaosen?
This would make for a pretty nifty Amiga box:
http://www.pegasosppc.com/homemedia.php
“That’s really too bad. Will there be some sort of copy protection to actively block people from using Pegaosen? ”
There would have to be drivers written to use the Marvel Chipset that the Peg 2 uses for starters, plus a peeling of many software patches to get around the issues associated with older Articia chipset. Then theres the fact you’d have to get it to mesh with I the different firmware, AmigaOne uses a bodge job called “Uboot” (I’ve played with it first hand, it *is* a bodge) wereas the pegasos uses an off the shelf firmware.
For Efika I believe you also have the added issue of getting AmigaOS to run on a PPC405 embedded processor.