Submitted by Good interview with Steven Solie – this bit stood out to me: “Although Hyperion has been using serial numbers for copies of AmigaOS since 4.0, it won’t reveal sales numbers. Solie’s ‘personal guess’ is that the system has 2000-5000 users. ‘If you include all the various Amiga clones and emulators we would probably be talking about around 10000 users [in] total,’ he adds, ‘it is really difficult to judge because a majority of the users are rather quiet.'” Fascinating number – lower than I anticipated.
Please fix it guys! Thanks!
Is this the complete interview link ?
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=76807DF4-D5AB-8E56-9E10AFCDB4FDFC4…
Regards,
That seems about right to me. AmigaOS4 is a ridiculously niche platform.
That’s because it’s ridiculously niche hardware support.
If they would open it up for more PPC hardware, there would be far more installs of it if the hardware wasn’t so expensive and rare.
Maybe once they release that rumored netbook…
As someone that had access to Amigas back in the day, and old enough to remember the days when they were new, the Amiga as such, is dead.
What made the Amiga special was the hardware and operating system, specially when compared with the competition.
How beautiful it was to be able to play around with sound channels, setup memory buffers with GMA operations for really fast rendering. Everything on
a real multitasking operating system for the desktop users, unheard at the time.
I doubt anyone old enough to have developed software for the Amiga will find these new systems can be called Amiga.
What Amiga used to represent is now part of most computers with the mainstream programmable sound and graphics cards, making use of multicore.
Time to move on.
…to Haiku.
BeOS and later Haiku follow a bit the Amiga spirit, but I doubt Haiku will ever fully take off.
Still, I have lots of respect for the people that invest so much of themselves in Haiku.
Speak for yourself. I have 2 A1200’s and 2 A500’s and still use them all. Also if you take a look at the continual number of posts on Amibay and EAB you will find the Amiga is far from dead. Not sure about OS4 as I have never used it. And yes, Haiku is great. I still run BeOs Max on a old ECS K7S5A board with an Athlon 1.1 and it absolutely flies! Haiku will be going on there eventually.
I wonder how much real work you do on those systems.
A lot more than what will be done under Metro!
There I agree with you.
It doesn’t mean amiga isn’t dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrophilia
And it was a damn good deal, with great bang-per-buck. Those new “Amigas” are nowhere close to that.
For some values of “real” at least – I have some reservations about calling like that a system without memory protection (still), so depending on good behavior of apps.
They are… PCs, really. Just with large part of what actually makes PCs good (scales bringing prices down and performance up, large and mature library of software) discarded.
Multitasking on the Amiga was great though, even more if you consider the hardware specifications.
You never experienced ‘something’ slowing down what you were doing.
Even running on floppies went fine, but if you added a hard disk it was beyond great.
Guru Meditations tended to be a bit of a bummer though, really
Overall, let’s be honest, there were less practical scenarios for heavy multitasking and the software didn’t do that much …actually, I wonder if this, & generally how Amiga stagnated at some point, wasn’t related to lack of memory protection (but also to disjointed stack of libraries from various sources): making ever more complex software difficult to do, prioritizing careful tinkering just so it won’t nuke the OS while running.
And anyway, Amigas were usually used as single-tasking game machines…
I think the problem was that the Amiga was far ahead of its time. This caused Commodore to sit back and relax. When the Attack of the PC Clones came it was too late. New Amiga’s didn’t improve too much over the older models and were still lagging behind PCs specs wise.
The first Babylon 5 season (and maybe 1 or 2 more) were done on Amiga’s. They had their use and power in multi media environments.
But yes, most were used as games machines. The Amiga, before it was called Amiga and before Commodore bought it, was meant to be a games console. Also a lot of Amiga users were upgrading Commodore 64 users, who also spend a lot of time gaming. The games went for the Amiga 500 and later the 1200, serious users went for the 2000/3000/4000.
Everybody I knew also did serious stuff with it, but games came first.
(and some serious work was creating databases containing all the owned pirated games)
Mine had a PC board so it could run native MS-DOS, which I used for some serious software and… games!
I remember those PC boards! Never got to see one live though.
Mine (KCS Powerboard IIRC) should still be in my Amiga 500 I guess. At least that makes it easy to identify which of the couple Amiga 500s I have is my original one.
As I recall it was activated from the Amiga OS. In advance you could tweak some settings and then launch an application that booted the PC card.
It was quite slow video wise. VGA/256 (or was it 16?) colors was very slow, but I remember playing F-19 Stealth Fighter pretty well in 4 color mode.
Stuff like WordPerfect, dBase and Lotus 123 ran fine.
Why play F-19, when you could spend hours playing F18-Interceptor and Carrier Command?
F-18 Interceptor was a great game, but a bit, well, short. IIRC 5 missions or so? But it was great fun flying it.
Actually I prefer F-19 Stealth Fighter on the Commodore 64. The 3D world had a lot of detail. Probably the best C64 flight simulator, if you can call it that as is simulating a plane that didn’t exist officially and turned out to be the F-117. I actually bought this game and still have it somewhere.
Twin Tornado (C64) was also great flying and recently I played F-15 Strike Eagle on the C64 and bombed Libya!
I don’t think that’s a full description of what happened.
Yes, Amiga was seemingly “ahead” (particularly in so called multimedia …hell, it essentially brought it to the masses) – but it achieved it, yes, by the means of very tight hardware integration from its console heritage – hence at the cost of much harder, and more financially costly, route of improvement.
At the same time this “locked” its developers and users into that baseline (A500, 600) configuration – there were few software titles really using, requiring higher Amigas, pushing people (and hence overall Amiga market, manufacturing lines) into them.
Worse: while its whole landscape had console-like dynamics, it was without matching business model – like it was still stuck in pre-1983, pre video game crash landscape (when, ironically, Commodore was the main “aggressor” and who came out mostly on top; seems they didn’t really realize what was happening). Made worse by very widespread copying of Amiga games.
Essentially, it was probably doomed from the start – its short term strengths were also its long term weaknesses.
OTOH, the basic concept and architecture behind the PC meant it could be much more readily improved.
And its scales, oh my… look at relative areas on that graph http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ (also 6 and 10; and majority of those were undoubtedly “toy” Amigas) – there was not much Commodore could do against such onslaught, with already strong momentum even before A1000 showed up
I guess, at most, they could try to establish early on an Amiga-derived GFX & sound card as the standard for multimedia and gaming on the PC.
Maybe the main problem was how they were stuck in platform fragmentation mindset.
Yeah, and B5 had horrible CGI ;P
But BTW, seriously, Star Trek Voyager was also partly done on Amigas: ctrl+F “Amiga” in http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/cgi.htm
And funnily enough, it was a cause of CGI error in opening sequence, which stuck throughout whole series
(still, that slight error was no big deal in comparison to the boneheaded sting-in-the-eyes “artistic” error in that shot – THERE ARE NO SUCH SHADOWS IN VACUUM, NO “LIGHT TRACES” LIKE IN GASSES OR COLLOIDS …scary how nobody corrected it throughout whole series; but then, such scifi is “cargo cult”-like in nature).
Also in Sea Quest, IIRC (where at least the environment effectively hid hardware & software limitations – and it looked rather nice, even if SQ CGI was technically not better or even worse than B5)
Edited 2012-06-02 20:11 UTC
What I recall was the promise of Commodore that a new Amiga chip set was coming, but it came very late and when it did it wasn’t actually that good.
PCs started out crap and very expensive, but their prices came down and hardware upgrades became cheaper and better. It was a change from a culture where companies made their own computer and OS. I agree it became to expensive to maintain that, but it did give a computer its own unique personality I believe. It’s something PCs today lack, but they’re alive and Commodore’s dead.
Also people at work used PCs and then they wanted them at home. This too didn’t help Commodore and the Amiga.
Copying games is a bad and good thing. Most people I knew chose the Commodore 64 and later the Amiga not for it’s specs, but for the pirated games. So for Commodore it was a good thing I guess.
Most games I had were pirated, but I did buy a couple and they were the best games I had (like Ultima V).
My point exactly – it was probably hard to notably improve speed & features while keeping it compatible with those tightly integrated original chipsets while keeping timeframes and costs (especially for one manufacturer) reasonable.
…and quite open, accommodating to new developments (sure, it was a bit of an accident – IBM even wanted to regain control with PS/2 and OS/2 – but still)
Well it is a matter of software – the soul can live on under Ami emu ;p
(yeah, some people shrug at emulation for some reason …but, that is the way to go: it will be increasingly more accurate, and down the line – like, few hundred years down the line – it will be the way to experiences those, by then, old forms of art)
Anyway, really, isn’t that unique personality we remember largely about stylistic choices (in games GFX and sound, most notably) stemming from specific characteristics of (limited!) hardware?
This can be largely recreated, if there’s a will (like some modern pixelart games)
Point is, apparently not very sustainable – so maybe not that good. You have this huge number of people “locked” (in the meaning like I described) into gradually more obsolete hardware (bringing less and less profits) and hardly willing to upgrade, and the games don’t bring you profit.
While Commodore and Amiga locked themselves into that “worst of both worlds” spiral (really, reminiscent of 1983 US video game crash), somebody else (Nintendo) figured out how to ride on such style of hardware.
At my place, I don’t think it was even really possible to buy “really legal” games – except, the concept of copyright itself didn’t even apply to software until 1994 or so (and for a few more years after that it was of course mostly symbolic), you were really able to buy (in shops) only “pirate” copies. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen an original Amiga game…
Magazines had a peculiar role in all this: the “reviews” were partly composed of what you would find in manuals (controls, and so on). And large part of the rest was a walkthrough, at least for RPGs (I remember one striking example, a “review” of Ultima VIII which was basically nothing more than a walkthrough) or adventure games (especially with those, it shows IMHO how utterly flawed they usually really were – not so good as still many people remember them, rightfully cast aside)
Curiously, later on some mostly locally-made and 8bit original games did show up – for example, one of such C64 titles I have is about our national hero of sorts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Kloss
Also fond memories, that one. Though, keep in mind that buying original game also positively affects our perceptions (I’m not saying that, say, Ultima V was bad, but…)
There are several problems with emulation.
One that bugs me the most when it comes to the Commodore 64 is the keyboard layout. Whether I use a Mac or PC keyboard doesn´t matter, a C64 keyboard was much different. This makes it hard to hit the RUN/STOP + RESTORE key combination or what about typing all those graphical characters?
When using a real C64 or Amiga it isn´t just the way it looks or the software, it´s also the experience of turning it on, the way it feels, the noises it makes. It´s much cooler to load a game and hear the disk drive doing its thing. It´s instant time travel.
Now regarding pirated games. Legal games were fairly easy to buy, if you knew where to look. I had one shop, Computer Collectief (CC), in Amsterdam where you could buy a LOT of software. Other shops mostly only offered the big titles, the ones sure to sell.
I bought The Bard´s Tale at CC which I played a lot. Then I bought The Bard´s Tale II, which I didn´t play because it didn´t work. So I swapped it for another copy. This did work… until I was asked to insert the second disk, which didn´t work. They weren´t very nice, but in the end I got my money back as they were out of other copies. Oh well.
But getting hold of pirated games was even easier, because there were offered without asking. Don´t blame a poor kid for not refusing hundreds of free games his friends were playing.
But games I bought were more fun, because they included manuals that were nice to read beyond the explanation how to play. Ultima V included a cloth map.
Ultima V is the greatest RPG for the C64. Ultima VI wasn´t it, it was a light version of the Amiga one running rather poorly. Some people prefer Ultima IV, but Ultima V is the same, only 4x bigger and it included day/night + other improvements. I enjoyed the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games (from SSI) too. Their combat system was much better, but Ultima wins as a complete game.
Sadly I could only buy Ultima V and VI. I copied Ultima II from an original. I now have the first 3 on floppy, I downloaded them and transfered them to floppy and played Ultima I on a real C128 a few weeks ago.
Oh come on, large part of those are parts which WE HATED
…and were glad when we could do away with (via HDD, for some already in the times of Amiga – oh what a glorious day it was); BTW, emus can imitate the noises of FDD, I think ;p
Keyboard might be an issue, yeah – but OTOH emulation is almost exclusively about the games, most of them not really keyboard-based. Plus I can see some solutions on the horizon – for example, if what I suspect about MS plans with Metro x.0 (and Surface x.0 http://www.osnews.com/permalink?521055 http://www.osnews.com/permalink?521071 ) turns out to be true.
(generally, C64 layout was a bit deficient, I’m glad we could get used to more “normal” one; and Amiga keyboards seemed a bit shoddy, mechanically, when coming from C64)
Sure, we might be in some transitory period with those issues, one that will pass; if only because people like you will naturally die off
Overall, Mona Lisa doesn’t look now very much like when it was new… and isn’t experienced in the same way (with all the glass, guards, crowd; or, really, better on a printout or large monitor)
Granted; though I was hinting there about such http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-wine-011608.html effects which (“only” also!) significantly affect our perceptions.
Edited 2012-06-10 00:11 UTC
IMHO what made it special was the combination of software and hardware. Most people used their Amigas as game machines and games was almost exclusively hardware banging. When the coupling between hardware and software were “broken” on later systems there were no longer any reason to use Amigas instead of inexpensive x86 machines running Windows 95…
I’d rather have MorphOS but as always they screwed it up.
Without AmigaOne and AmigaOS4 we would probably have had more Pegasos and MorphOS.
Those bastards.
That didn’t really seem to help MorphOS much, with its 2-3 year old support for some surplus PPC Macs which can be had for peanuts.
(overall, http://www.osnews.com/permalink?520468 )
Last I heard about it, it was some already sort of available Chinese OEM netbook (smartbook?) …which, with AmigaOS 4 blessing, will get 2-3x price up-mark (well, would be in keeping with more recent Amiga traditions, at least)
Could this be a reliable evaluation of the amount of people across the world who will use open computing devices when everything else has acquired locked bootloaders ?
After all, the process for acquiring an AmigaOS-compatible machine is similar to the one for an Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or Pandaboard : you have to know that it exists, fiddle around in obscure websites to find it, pay money to a semi-trusted reseller without having seen the hardware yet, then fiddle around with a bare PCB (be careful with electrostatic discharges !) in order to install your OS in a hardware-specific way…
I want you to write down the permalink URL for this comment on a slip of paper, keep it in a safe, and open that safe in 20 years when your prophecy comes true.
Good insight.
I just hope we will never have to find out.
Like that at some point, when people start to actually get hit by the side effects of today’s massive hardware lockdown wave, the European commission will finally beat up Microsoft for a good reason, deal with the secure boot issue themselves, and introduce an EU-wide ban on locked bootloaders for all personal computer OEMs as a side effect. Best possible outcome, IMO.
Edited 2012-06-02 13:20 UTC
Hm, Amiga now is not so much about openness (come on, this flavour is essentially locked by design into a limited range of hardware!*), but IMHO about being a bit of a slave captured into ones own nostalgia – which makes you vulnerable to almost-extortion by some marginal companies.
So the dynamics are a bit different, I’d guess.
* And at least historically being also a bit hostile to another kind of openness, open source software (funny how most software titles which actually make it semi-useful for modern daily usage …are ports of PC OSS stuff).
Overall, I would be a bit surprised by higher range of the estimated number of users. We’re talking about a platform which for 1.5+ decade was working quite hard to make itself irrelevant, putting more and more nails into its coffin – it really seems like it was mostly about few companies riding on nostalgia of old users, to sell their silly hardware for exorbitant prices…
(you know what was the one killer feature of real Amigas? Great bang per buck)
…while “even” Macs as the platform to target would be much more sensible, if they insisted on PPC.
Then there’s Amithlon, by far the fastest Amiga at the time (and most likely still, if it continued on and could run on present PC hardware). It even offered smooth migration route, IIRC (applications, libraries compiled into x86 code running alongside 68k ones).
But no, Intel was evil, and ~”Apple chooses the superior PPC” (funny how that turned out in the end)
(yes, Amithlon had some issues with its licensing or such – but let’s be honest here, it was mostly about killing it as a competition; and anyway, OS4 was also embroiled in a legal uncertainty for a long time)
I would love to run AmigaOS4, if only to play around with… I was a heavy Amiga user back in the days, and still have an A3000, A4000 and A1200 as well as a stack of peripherals in the loft…
However, i simply cannot justify the price for brand new but obsolete hardware, to run a niche OS… The Sam boards are available from amigakit and cost just short of 800GBP, for this you get just a motherboard and 1ghz ppc cpu. The X1000 talked about in the article is a 1.8ghz dual core (with amigaos only supporting 1 core for now) and would cost upwards of 1600GBP, if there were any actually for sale.
I think a big missed opportunity for AmigaOS was the PS3, when it had OtherOS support… Modern desktop oriented versions of Linux in 256mb of ram were quite sluggish, but AmigaOS should have absolutely flown, and the hardware was widely available.
Also with a PS3, the hardware has other uses if you decide AmigaOS isn’t for you… It’s even harder to justify a purchase of expensive hardware when the only other things you can use it as is a slow unremarkable linux box.
What about a mac mini PPC?
Can’t be all that expensive.
Over-priced Apple gear sure but nowhere near the X1000?
AmigaOS would do better on a jailbroke PS3. Not only do you not have to mess with OTHEROS to run something AND can run on either the Phat or Slim, but you have full access to the RSX hardware for hardware 3D and scaling of bitmaps to HD resolutions.
I think the earlier iMacs (Powermacs in general) were, realistically, the last opportunity.
(NVM Amithlon, that I mention nearby)
Edited 2012-06-08 20:45 UTC
I understand the developer wants to be believe there are 2000-5000 users, but I think those numbers are too optimistic. Judging from activity on the most popular community and download sites, the number of OS4 users is more likely to be in the hundreds.
Commercial Amiga activity over the last decade has been about selling to existing users instead of attracting nw ones. Combine that with users going away for new hobbies or “financial reprioritizing”, and that number will tend to go down, not up.
I would have paid for the hardware to run AmigaOS 4… if this was 2001. Just like I would have been impressed with the current Haiku if this was 2003, and I would love to have MorphOS running on my G5 PowerMac if this was 2009!
Development of all these operating systems is just too damn slow! I keep waiting and waiting, the years go by, and after all the waiting, there’s more waiting to be done. Waiting for what… for the ability to run a buggy obsolete browser and nothing much else.
…that what Amiga really need, to get a lot of support are:
1. Ability to run a full HTML5 browser.
2. One good Accounting package
3. One good DAW
4. One good Video editor
5. One good photo/paint application
6. Libreoffice or openoffice support
7. Good, comprehensive media player
This will cover the needs of about 90% of the population who don’t care about games.
(I am a Amiga noob so maybe it can do some already.)
Edited 2012-06-02 15:28 UTC
Amiga brought large part of those software categories to the masses. But, since then, the world has passed it by many times over.
Let it rest already (and admire what it was in better times)
And ports of Webkit are there, Libre or Open Office would be also (likely inferior) ports of what’s available elsewhere – what’s the point / why would people suddenly jump on Amiga bandwagon?
My on-line life started on an Amiga 500, using a 2400 baud modem to connect to the Internet.
For some strange reason people who didn’t know the Amiga back then always asked if it ran WordPerfect. Which it did.
I’d love to start using an Amiga again as my main computer. Don’t have the same feeling for the 2K4 modem though.
AROS is probably the way to go (long-term, at least), if you ever find yourself feeling nostalgic.
Present Amigas (the hardware) are really PCs anyway, just choosing a bit weird CPU for no real benefit.
I find myself ever nostalgic!
The last time I tried Aros it only ran as a live cd. Of course I have real Amigas, but one day they’ll break down.
I’m sorry I bought it.
The keeper of the Amiga fort have their heads so far up their ass they mistake their (Boing!) balls for brains.
It is so far beyond them to understand that success comes from the commoditization of a platform. If you ask any of the die hards about this, they make a huffing noise and tell you they don’t need “those kind” of users. They are so full of themselves and hot air. They actually thought (think) that the X1000 could succeed. Give me a break. Will someone please put a bullet in this thing all ready!
AROS is the ONLY furture Amiga technology has left. Get with it or get lost.
The Amiga is a single processing system without memory protection, something that isn’t compatible with future (or even current) platforms. Changing the platform to support even those basic features would make it completely incompatible with Amiga OS.
The only possible real future (as in a thriving platform) went extinct when Gateway decided they wouldn’t use QNX.
Perhaps also Natami. At the very least, it’s honest about what makes something an actual Amiga; and overall it seems mostly honest with itself & its place in the world – just like AROS.
Edited 2012-06-05 22:15 UTC