This interview gives some more insight regarding Amiga`s imminent PDA adventures. Note that soon you will be able to use this PDA content and other AmigaDE software transparently with AmigaDE players on both Linux and Windows based platforms. How well such players will sell remains to be seen. Here`s a rather positive quote from John Harris (well known games designer of games like Frogger, Jawbreaker and Mouseattack) regarding his work for Amiga: “It literally revitalized my life!”
AmigaDE Players for Linux and Windows
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Looking at the screenshots found at those links you will see some nice but simple puzzle games, a tetris clone and an arkanoid clone. However I have seen some amazing titles in develoment which look better than the ones currently available on the Gameboy Advance. It should be noted however that playability and appealing figures are more important for a successful gaming device and Nintendo has some excellent development teams and off course the rights to some of the best known videogame figures. But note that these AmigaDE games have a resolution of 240×320 (the gameboy advance has a lower 240×160 resolution). Obviously you will be doing more on these PDAs than playing some splendid looking games.
Apart from games there are a number of usefull applications available and under development for the AmigaDE. Like for instance mediaplayers, small utilities and programs like scribble (for handwriting recognition) and the most efficient Java virtual Machine currently available on the market today.
There are also several different AmigaDE user interfaces for different target devices, but remember that the AmigaDE players for Linux and Windows are meant to be as transparent to the user as possible, so that it will look just like any ordinary Windows or Linux application.
$20 to play Tetris?
I guess some of the applications that come freely with the player are just some simple examples. The idea is that you can buy an AmigaDE application and use it binary identical on Zaurus/iPaq PDAs, 3G cell phones, STBs, Webtablets, Linux, AmigaOne or whatever other AmigaDE enabled device. I should add that the performance on end-user devices has to been seen to be believed!
Last year Bill McEwen already demonstrated how it works. He demonstrated an open sourced (non PDA) Arkanoid clone running on both Windows and Linux while booting from the same diskette. The actual game-code was binary identical. He also showed the crowd an AmigaDE version of Photogenics by Idruna Software (http://www.idruna.com/), it performed just as well as any natively written application on both Linux and Windows and off course these were binary identical. So the AmigaDE perdormance doesn`t seem to suffer too much from the bloated operating systems running underneath.
A show report can be found here: http://www.ansonic.com.au/craigd/cd01023a.htm
In this era of free players, eg all the macromedia plugins, acrobat, etc, I can’t see too many people paying that for the player
its less of a player , more of a virtual computer , allowing u to run the same app on all your platforms , this will save you money and the dev teams money , cuz they will only have to build on app for all