Will 2004 be the return of Amiga? It all looks quite intresting really. Press more ;)
To begin with there are two companies out there who actually seem to be able to deliver, this have not happened for over 10 years for any single company so only that is impressive. Would be great if they didn't compete and instead corporated thought.
Anyway, first we have Genesi which has already released both the computer and the os, they attract new developers and other oses aswell which gives the platform added value, the Pegasos2 price is quite ok, the hardware is good enough and the upgrade options from Pegasos to Pegasos2 is a nice move against their users. MorphOS seems to develop well, and in the very short feature the computers will probably run Linux, OpenBSD, OpenBEOS, QNX, AROS and maybe even more OSes. The only trouble as I see it is that there are still quite little documentation, and more of that kind would be good for helping users who want to develop for the os or attract new developers.
Secondly we have Amiga Inc, the AmigaOnes have been delivered since long, thought a bit expensive imho. Hopefully the mini-itx AmigaOne will be cheaper and the board might attract people from outside which want a PPC cpu instead of Via. I think Amiga Inc and Eyetech would benefit in this if they attracted other than Amiga-users aswell.
Hyperion seems to have done a great job with AmigaOS4, it's not like the AmigaOS3.5 and 3.9 was (to me it always seemed like the regular AmigaOS 3.1 with a bunch of included freeware patches), they have managed to improve AmigaOS in many areas, the new GUI looks awesome and more modern than the old one. Thought I haven't seen how it runs on PPC since the first tests it seems like they are moving it over at a fast rate and we have seen various Amiga-apps actually running and working on it. Hopefully we can finally have see a release in the not to distant future of the first real new AmigaOS for over 10 years. I've heard Hyperion are writing some kind of reference manual for it aswell which is great. The only suggestions here is to try to make the AmigaOne boards a little more affordable and also get the AmigaOS4 to run on the pegasos to gain more users and therefor more applications and publicity.
Then we have AROS, I don't know which current state they would put themself in, something like the OpenBEOS teams roadmap/timeline/whatever would be appreciated. Anyway as I've understand it the OS is quite usable now and the only problem is to get more applications since m68k applications wont run? or?
Anyway, with the possibility of growth in the Genesi camp, cheaper AmigaOnes together with a release of AmigaOS4 and even more progress from the AROS people 2004 is starting to look like a good year. Something which would be cool and might help anyone is if some company was intrested to make an IDE which can compile programs for all of the OSes, thought I don't know how big chances for that to work are. As I understand it all of the got GCC running and MUI should work on them, so why not? Since we got a small split here and the current Amiga user base is quite small something like this would be needed. An easier route would of course be to have both of the OSes running on both of the platforms, and the best solution would of course be if the companies could try to corporate and agree on similair features but i don't see that comming :/. Hopefully time will solve this issue.
Anyway great work all of you and a happy 2004 =P
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