Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 2nd Jun 2012 02:21 UTC, submitted by rohan_p
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.
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RE[2]: LOWER than you expected?
by moondevil on Sat 2nd Jun 2012 07:25
in reply to "RE: LOWER than you expected?"
Member since:2005-07-08
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.
RE[3]: LOWER than you expected?
by Tim Locke on Sat 2nd Jun 2012 09:32
in reply to "RE[2]: LOWER than you expected?"
Member since:2006-03-23
RE[3]: LOWER than you expected?
by Sauron on Sat 2nd Jun 2012 12:47
in reply to "RE[2]: LOWER than you expected?"
Member since:2005-08-02
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.
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.
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.
RE[3]: LOWER than you expected?
by zima on Sat 2nd Jun 2012 17:35
in reply to "RE[2]: LOWER than you expected?"
Member since:2005-07-06
What made the Amiga special was the hardware and operating system, specially when compared with the competition.
And it was a damn good deal, with great bang-per-buck. Those new "Amigas" are nowhere close to that.
Everything on a real multitasking operating system for the desktop users, unheard at the time.
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.
I doubt anyone old enough to have developed software for the Amiga will find these new systems can be called Amiga.
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.
RE[3]: LOWER than you expected?
by Megol on Sun 3rd Jun 2012 18:31
in reply to "RE[2]: LOWER than you expected?"
Member since:2011-04-11
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...
RE[2]: LOWER than you expected?
by aliquis on Sat 2nd Jun 2012 13:48
in reply to "RE: LOWER than you expected?"
Member since:2005-07-23
RE[2]: LOWER than you expected?
by zima on Sat 2nd Jun 2012 18:52
in reply to "RE: LOWER than you expected?"
Member since:2005-07-06
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.
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 )
Maybe once they release that rumored netbook...
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)
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2006-01-10
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...