"AROS has gained lots of bugfixes and improvements in the lastest weeks. For istance, Neil Cafferkey has corrected some important bugs is his beloved AROS Installer; Nic Andrews has worked on his RTL8139 network driver; and Robert Norris has fixed file notifications, which previously broke preferences, just to name three."
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Member since:2005-06-29
It's not so much that I want underpowered and overpriced hardware, but more to do with the experience that I mentioned in my previous post.
The plug and play bit? Err,that's hardly a hardware feature - it's a software issue. Plug and play's success depends solely on the availability of drivers; if the operating system does not have the drivers installed before you insert your hardware, plug and play doesn't work.
In other words, Windows, Linux, and Max OS X probably have plug and play support a million times that of Amiga, for the simple fact that each of these (esp. Linux) have much wider default hardware support.
All the things that you mention in your post can easily be achieved with standard, off-the-shelf components - just look at the Intel Macs.
An experience that the x86 platform doesn't provide.
I've been hearing this stuff for ages now, yet nobody ever gave me a compelling reason why this obsession with clearly inferior hardware should hold the Amiga OS hostage.
Member since:2006-11-02
"An experience that the x86 platform doesn't provide."
I've been hearing this stuff for ages now, yet nobody ever gave me a compelling reason why this obsession with clearly inferior hardware should hold the Amiga OS hostage.
Perhaps it is that you're to young to understand Thom 
. I have never owned an Amiga or Atari myself, my first computer was a PC XT. However, the "clearly inferior hardware" was in its days clearly vastly superior: superior sound, superior gfx, superior CPU (well, not compared to the Atari ST which had the same 68K, but compared to the PC XT and AT). I think that the memory of having a superior machine is what the true Amiga fan still holds on to. Of course, that is nigh to impossible to achieve these days: the processor, sound chip and gfx card market isn't the wild west it was back then, there's only a few big players, and no start-up company can ever make something superior to what Intel/AMD and ATI(AMD)/nVidia are making (and as for sound, that's totally uninteresting nowadays as even AC97 provides enough for almost everyone). As a hobby OS developer, I don't like the x86 platform either, it's so uninteresting, everyone owns it, you cannot really make a difference. The 'feel' of running your OS on a different platform is just so different of having it run in Bochs or Qemu. It's the kind of magic we had in the "old days" (and perhaps I'm even too young, as I never owned a Z80, Atari 2600 or C64). But that will never return. When the PC was still progressing (in the 2nd half of the 90s), in the PC demo scene we always looked with pity to those C64 fans still holding on to that lousy machine. Today, I know exactly what they were (and still are) clinging on to.
JAL
Member since:2006-01-03
Your view s dangerously wrong. You should be voted down into oblivion. Idea that drivers are a special category of software comes from the wintel world, because of the foocked up architecture and the community. Suppliers should be required to provide appropriate support for their products - but look at the situation now: we buy their stuff then we fyuckin beg them to support their crap.
Now hail to all the power users playing latest games on wintel. Please go away, this is not for you! Wintel platforms are cheap, half-baken crap, nobody could afford them if they were really finished and supported products. I'd rather live ten years behind and pay twice as much for a decent platform than exposing myself to this nightmare. I don't need a XY GHz processor anyway, I lived with ones on 0.001 GHz and I was fine. But what choice do I have? Luckily, so called power users (gaming, apple, kde...) are driving prices of very interesting gadgets into the bottom, so there is hope...
And Thom, don't dare to remove this one!
Member since:
2007-11-22
I should have worded that sentence differently
. What I meant was that the x86 platform doesn't provide the right environment in which a new or improved AmigaOS could thrive.
It's not so much that I want underpowered and overpriced hardware, but more to do with the experience that I mentioned in my previous post. An experience that the x86 platform doesn't provide.
I think Amiga users have high expectations of what new Amiga hardware would be (or maybe that's just me) and x86 just doesn't stand up to those expectations.
Edited 2007-11-22 07:57