[News] Amiga + Retro Computing 2002, first impressions | ANN.lu |
Posted on 07-Dec-2002 19:27 GMT by Diermar Eilert (Edited on 2002-12-08 02:55:19 GMT by Christophe Decanini) | 230 comments View flat View list |
It took place in a large congress room in Aachen's Eurogress. At 16:00, it was pretty crowded in terms of visitors ...
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Just a few words about the Amiga Retro event today, I've been there for an hour or so this afternoon:
It took place in a large congress room in Aachen's Eurogress. At 16:00, it was pretty crowded in terms of visitors, maybe 100-200 people, but pretty empty in terms of dealers. If you mentally subtract Thendic, who took up 50% of the space, the whole affair would have fitted into a grocery store. Well, I guess that reflects the state of the market.
I saw one Amiga One. Maybe there were more, I didn't look hard. The one I saw didn't do anything to get exited about (a pc-style box, obviously no AmigaOS 4, bulky mainboard).
The Thendic people were at the center of attention, having something exiting to show. I don't know how many Pegasos boxes they had with them, but there were lots of them for trial. Morphos looks great, their Ambient workbench is visually stunning. A large amount of money must have gone into the direction of designers, the icons are all ultra-professional, 3D, 24bit, raytraced. If you are ever going to write software for Morphos and plan to have equally good icons, you have your work laid out for you ;-) The overall design reminds me of NeXt. Nevertheless, everything is still quite basic in terms of operating systems: I didn't see a file manager or other things I would expect with an OS. For example, an equally well-designed "Start" bar would have been nice.
Unfortunately, their boxes only had PPC native software installed or I was too dumb to find regular 68K software. I've tried for twenty minutes to find a bug, cause a crash etc. but no luck: Morphos looks fine to me with that selection of software. I would have rather testet it with "normal" software though.
Some Pegaos boxes were open, you could see the April fix and the small mainboard. It's a micro-atx-sized board, you probably have to see it to realize how small it is. If mainboards were sold on optical merits, the Amiga One would be dead. I don't understand why Tendic choose a big aluminium case for it: yes, it looks nice but if you have such a small mainboard, why not advertise the possibilities of small dimensions ?
Conclusion: Pegasos/Morphos is much more advanced than I though before. If it's all pure PPC, the worst is clearly over for them. They seem to have a nice usable small OS. What's left for them to do is to provide more "middleware" to get rid of the basic feel. I mean the small tools that normally ship with an OS: file manager, calculators, whatever. Nothing complicated.
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Amiga + Retro Computing 2002, first impressions : Comment 205 of 230 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Christian Kemp on 09-Dec-2002 11:05 GMT | In reply to Comment 203 (Mike Bouma): > Claims of that any problems may have been caused by messing with
> configuration files or file deletions.
I wasn't claiming that, just saying that people could really do anything to these machines, and as such it is far more likely that any problems will appear than if there had been one person demoing on a projector, for example.
You have to admit that it is far more honest this way, rather than just having someone showing you the stuff that works and that might have been tested ten times beforehand in exactly the same sequence and omitting anything that might cause trouble.
> An OS is never really "completed". And yes MorphOS has been in the lead, even
> before AmigaOS4 was started. But AmigaOS4 isn't that far behind anymore in my
> opinion.
Yes, but does it run native on PPC? Has there been any testing of AmigaOS4 running native on PPC? Have third-party programs been tested on a native PPC version of AmigaOS4? All of this is crucial IMHO, and there might be many bugs that only surface at that moment, and that take a long time to fix. Feel free to correct me if this is already being done, or has been done already, but it is my impression that this is not yet the case.
> I can buy a Windows box as well, and use Amithlon or various versions of UAE.
> Just accept that MorphOS approach isn't my presonal preference, this because
> of the reasons I stated earlier. The reason why I do use those named
> emulators is simply because I already own a PC and so do alot of other
> people.
I own a PC too, and I don't see myself using a Pegasos or AmigaOne as my main machine just yet. However, a lot of the recent talk has been about the relative merits and progress of the two competing systems (software- and hardware-wise), and that's where our opinions are diverging more and more.
> > I don't recall us exchanging all that many emails.
> I am talking about our recent email exchanges, not those of many years ago.
Of course, but still.
> I never accused you personally and you know that, I have only stated a
> general warnings in a general notice and asked you a question, just now. I
> cannot help it that you took it personally...
I took the accusation personally, and I know that I'm not the only one who got that impression. You might not have mentioned any names, but who else could you really have meant but ANN and Thendic?
> > Oh, I'm sorry, I must have missed it inbetween all those accusations.
> There were no accusations, and still you haven't awsered my question.
What question? Whether Bill Buck had asked me for my loyalty?
> > Funny, that's exactly what I was thinking about you and Luca.
> Then maybe there is still hope for the future.
Like I said before, none of my opinions are set in stone. I'm always willing to adapt to new developments.
> > Which might be different from you: you were an Amiga supporter, and still
> > are an Amiga supporter (and apparently always will be), even though they
> > are losing more and more momentum (and credibility) with every day.
> I see this differently, hopefully something will happen within the community > that will bring us all closer together again.
While I wouldn't mind bringing some sanity back to all the recent discussions there have been on ANN and other forums, I think that in the short term, people will continue going crazy and taking the advocacy too far. Which is a shame, really, because all this time could be better spent on projects that have any value: writing and/or porting software, creating web pages, learning something new, or just finishing some personal projects... |
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