back to article Amiga explains AmigaOS 5 AmigaAnywhere

It's the next generation of the Amiga operating system - company President Bill McEwen reveals what it's all about... Can't see the video? Download Flash Player from Adobe.com CES on Video WowWee wheels in Tribot DisplayLink demos multi-monitor USB dongle Guitar Hero gets true air axe WowWee demos FemiSapien robotrix …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Ewww, flash video

    Some people don't like flash, as they see problems with it others don't understand, so please can videos like this be offered for download too in a less repulsive format? Even .avi would be OK :)

  2. Mage Silver badge
    Flame

    Download format prefered

    I prefer text. Then I can read it.

    I hate headphones and work in quiet office areas.

    Also text is easier to stop/start when interrupted.

    When you starting the Satellite Channel? I want text and stills on web sites. Not rubbish video.

  3. Michael Coburn
    Alert

    .AVI is a container, not a format

    Just sayin'. :)

  4. András Puiz

    Learn to type!!!

    This is the web. People read text and look at pictures at their own pace. There is a medium where people watch sheepishly whatever they're being presented. That's called television. Hope this helps.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Here We Go Again

    You would figure after the disaster Amiga Anywhere (aka DEad) with Tao Group based IP, Amiga Inc (aka KMOS) would have figured out AA2 is 10 years too late. Guess they are looking for another round of VC funding.

    One good thing about Bill's video at CES, he didn't do any of Fleecy's (Amiga Inc CTO) sheep sex jokes.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Flash Video Very Useful

    Flash video's the best. If I'm out with my laptop and get a little chilly, then I can just watch some flash video. While the video's content won't always warm my heart, at least I can depend on the video to peg one of the two processors on my mac at 100%. Soon my lap is toasty warm! A really efficient content delivery system in my opinion - not every app can claim to offer thermal feedback as part of a rich web experience.

  7. dave
    Dead Vulture

    Looks like Amiga users haven't changed

    You can see why they went down in the first place, based on comments here.

    <sigh/>

  8. Outcast
    Dead Vulture

    Vid doesn't work

    Well whatever version they have on here doesn't work in x86 Gutsy Gibbon (plugins installed)

    You tube works ok.. so it must be here !!

    TBH though... I suspect I don't really want to see McBill in action.

  9. Alan W. Rateliff, II
    Paris Hilton

    Dave?

    I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't follow that. Would you mind expanding upon your comment?

  10. Leo Davidson

    You can download Flash video and play it using whatever you want.

    There are Firefox plugins that give you a toolbar button which you can usually click to download the .FLV component of a Flash video to your HDD.

    That in turn can be played in any DirectShow-compatible player using the FFDShow (the only codec you need) and the little FLV Splitter (so DirectShow understands the FLV container), without Flash or any other Adobe code being run.

    I presume similar is true for Linux since FFDShow is based on stuff that runs on Linux as well.

    Personally, I like Flash video since it works so much better than any other embedded video format. I would rather have text for most interviews but for some things video is best, and if someone's going to put video in a webpage then I'd much prefer them to use Flash rather than RealShite, Windows Media Shite or QuickShite, none of which have ever seemed to embed in web pages anywhere near as well as Flash.

  11. Meaty

    The amiga went bust

    Is because they didn't make what everyone wanted, which was a new, more powerful amiga. Instead we had CDTV, the A600, the Amiga GS. Anything but what everyone was clammering for.

    Amiga announced a new amiga in early 2007 to be released by the end of 2007. Where is it? Oh, you've made a JVM clone. How very "amiga". It doesn't deserve to have the Amiga name anywhere on it, because it's not an amiga, it's just some software that nobody will use.

    Cheers Bill!

  12. Damir Colak

    No reading for st00pid?

    Where is the article?

  13. Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware (Written by Reg staff)

    @Damir

    There is no article. The key giveaway is the word 'video' in the phrase

    'CES on video'.

    Seriously, for anyone who's not at all keen on video appearing on these pages, I'd suggest you don't click on stories introduced with the word 'video' and leave them to the many thousands of readers who do like to watch some stories and read others.

    Cue flames from vocal minority...

  14. Frank Bough
    Stop

    "Even .avi would be OK"

    No it would not. MPEG is the only properly standardised format so MPEG is MUST be. MPEG4 if you can, MPEG1 if you cannot.

  15. Frank Bough
    Alert

    Leo, No

    "I'd much prefer them to use Flash rather than RealShite, Windows Media Shite or QuickShite, none of which have ever seemed to embed in web pages anywhere near as well as Flash."

    You're kidding me, surely? QuickTime was better in HTML 10 effing years ago!

    Irrespective, QuickTime is not universally supported, so the only proper option is MPEG.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Does this Amiga have Flash or MPEG-4 H.264 or Skype?

    So you are saying that this new "Amiga OS" now supports Flash, and maybe H.264, Skype, Silverlight, etc., and maybe it even has a CSS-compliant browser that passes the Acid test?

    Because this speech seemed identical to so many other speeches by Bill McEwen, also on YouTube. He was saying exactly the same things in 2001!

  17. Mike Gravgaard
    Dead Vulture

    Same old story

    Well I've been a supporter of the Amiga for years but Amiga Inc have done little with the Amiga and they don't really own any Amiga IP (the only thing they really own is the name).

    When Commodore died (due to management incompentence mainly and some bad decisions like the Amiga 1200 being released just after Christmas rather than before it). The Amiga was years ahead of it's time but died with Commodore, any chance of a true rebirth died in a game of parce the parcel (Escom bought the Amiga IP then went bust from trying to grow to quickly, they then got bought by Gateway which did every little but they kept the Amiga IP (chip designs and alot of the IP rights, they sold the name though).

    We now since about 2001 which have done very little (they did make AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 but haven't done a huge amount, I don't think they even made this though).

    I always wished the Boxer had been released and I missed some of the old companies (anyone remember Blittersoft?). The Boxer encase you are unaware was a ATX based motherboard which had PCI slots, programmable logic chips (which were set to basically the AA chips and we set via flash when the machine was powered up) and some things which are common on normal PCs. Unforthunitly it never materlised (there were prototypes but they never got released.

    The original Boxer used Zorro slots (remember those?) but the rumour goes that Mick Tinker followed the original Commodore spec for Zorro but due to a bug in the hardware with the Amiga 3000 and 4000 Zorro 3 implementation alot of 3rd party hardware worked around this bug but these didn't work on the Boxer due to the spec (I'm never sure if this was a rumour or true but it was quite destrubing). I think this was the reason the Boxer changed to PCI slot (also possibly due to the high prices of Amiga GFX cards and amount of cheap PCI cards on the PC).

    The triple A prototype looked interesting (I remember reading about it when Dave Haynie sold out alot his old Commodore prototypes on Ebay, I managed to get the Gemini prototype but I just couldn't afford the dead triple A board (went for silly money). I think it got killed by some chip people at Commodore due to a loose ROM board if I remember correctly (I think there were only ever 2 made if I remember right and this was what Dave was working on when Commodore started to go down quickly.

    I think Amiga Inc are a waste of time and I don't hold out for a new Amiga (the Amiga One and Pegasus are not true Amigas).The Boxer would have been interesting. Triple A looked very interesting.

    But since all this, I've taken an interest in Linux, Windows is nasty but seems to be the mainstream norm (WHY?). I really miss the Amiga (though I still own a few, its not the same using a PC).

  18. Mike Gravgaard

    RE: The amiga went bust

    Amiga GS ? Do you mean the CD32?

    The CD32 was Commodore's last attempt to get some money, it was a last chance attempt to claw some money back (you realise they were very close, they were only about 70000 out from not going bust). If they had sold just a few more they could have possibly have made it (Atari did the same with the Jaguar if I remember right). The CD32 was basically a Amiga 1200 without a keyboard and with a CD drive instead of floppy drive.

    If you want to learn more, you should buy a copy or watch a copy of Dave Haynie's Deathbed Vigil.

    Dave Haynie on his last day of work at Commodore went to work with a camcorder and recorded everything he could (this is a really good film if you are an ex/Amiga owner). Actually it is quite sad viewing and very interesting.

    Mike

  19. Gordon

    RIP Amiga

    The Amiga went bust due to a combination of the rise of the cheap "Generic" PC (taking away the Hobbyist users) and the games console (taking away the gamers). It is possible the format could have survived in a niche in much the same way as Macs do even today. However, since a large number of Mac users are "Anything buy Microsoft" types it's equally possible that it would have split the "We Hate Bill" contingent in half - making both sides unprofitable and given Microsoft an even greater monopoly than they enjoy today.

    Some effective management would have helped as well. They didn't invest in the format at all and let the Amiga become dated, cheap and complicated (compared to a Megadrive!) to use. The AGA chipset was a fine idea and the slightly faster processors were welcome (but not fast enough to make a major difference), but not given them a hard disk when all PCs had them, and failing to upgrade the entire chipset to keep it as ahead of the game as it was on release was unforgivable - if they wanted to keep the company alive.

    My guess (and it is only a guess) is that someone worked out that they could either plough huge resources into CBM for potentially no returns (if the enhanced format didn't catch on). Or they could just push what they had already as far as they could to get maximum returns on existing investment, before folding the whole thing up as a bad job when it stopped selling. The end result for the format would be the same - it would just be a question of whether they bankrupted themselves in the process.

    When you consider how cheap PCs and Playstations are these days - it was probably the smart thing to do. What they really, really should have done is stick the Amiga brand on a range of games-orientated PCs at reasonable prices for that they had in them. Then built these as cheap as possible, and sold them with bundled games and whatnot (much as they did with the A500), aimed at the consumer!

    Sad, but true.

  20. Andy Bright

    Heh

    Most of what people have said about why the Amiga died is true, and unfortunately it's death did herald the end of fun computing.

    If a decent owner with some good funding had come in about 10 years ago it might have clawed a market in the video industry - after all it was still being used in production TV and the movie industry until probably as little as 5 years ago.

    But the concept behind the Amiga was not originally a computer, no matter how much Amiga fans like to think it was. The original idea was to build a console style system which such an advanced chipset and design it trounced the Nintendo and Atari equivalents.

    The computer part came after Commodore bought the idea, who incorporated all the original games playing ideas and incorporated them into a computer. By sheer accident they chose a British company to produce the OS (and fortunately a very good company as opposed to IBM/Microsoft) and by another sheer accident ended up with the ideal computer for desktop video.

    The combination of these accidents was that although Commodore intended the computer to take the place of it's games' centric C64, they actually produced something much, much more. Unfortunately they forgot to market it as such, so it was never taken seriously outside a few hundred thousand devotees.

    Yes I have missed out large parts of the story, and yes some of the ideas that came later were promising. But eventually instead of allowing the developers and engineers to build upon their accidental computer, they continually broke it by producing models no one wanted, wasting exorbitant amounts of money.

    The CD32 was a little bit more than just an A1200 with a CD drive instead of a hard drive. It also had the ability to make direct use of "chunky pixels", the method of displaying graphics that PCs were using. This produced a lower quality image, but meant 3D images could be moved around much faster - and also could have reasonable (for the time) texture maps applied.

    But again it wasn't what the people wanted, by now they wanted a decent computer, not just another console. The playstation was nearing completion, and the CD32 was nowhere near that level of sophistication. AAA was broken and couldn't be made to function as a chipset, and yet more broken, money wasting designs were left unused on the drawing board.

    All this could have changed if a passionate owner had bought out Commodore, unfortunately the IP just moved from one trainwreck of a company to another - before ending up with some idiot that wants to produce a glorified gameboy and call it a phone or something. Who cares, they fucked it over and it isn't coming back.

    What could come back is a completely new design of computer that makes use of the Amiga name. Not likely, but if it was good enough, it could carve out it's own niche, given the all time dissatisfaction with Microsoft and their horrendous Vista OS.

  21. Gordon

    Thats' true

    They certainly did waste a LOT of money on crud like the CD32 and the a1200/600+. They needed a whole new architecture, not just a few gimmicky warm-throughs of their existing (increasingly dated) hardware. IF they'd wanted to keep the company running long-term they needed to raise revenue, and concentrate it on a genuinely next-generation "A500" with as much power as a playstation, significantly cheaper than a PC. Developing a new computer is something you just cannot do half-heartedly. You either build something completely new and up-to-date, or you save your money.

    It's like cars. Rover built the V8-powered 75 and the streetwise when they desperately needed to replace their "cooking" models. The pissed huge quantitys of development capital away on these marginal pet-projects and imported a weird indian thing as their supermini. What they should have done is ditch the weird plastic mouldings on existing models and given us a NEW Rover 45 and Rover 100, which might have actually recouped the investment in sales. But would they be able to rise the revenue for this developement? They knew that a rewarmed 15-year-old Honda design wouldn't be enough - and if they couldn't raise the costs to develop the new models AND stay in business long enough for them to work they were completely snookered.

  22. Giles Jones Gold badge

    Seperate the Amiga and Commodore

    The Amiga was largely finished before Commodore bought the company (Amiga Inc) that designed it.

    The Amiga would probably have never been designed in any large computer company at that time. Amiga Inc were a small startup with some very gifted designers.

    Once Commodore took control there was no way the original talent was going to hang around and they largely didn't. Aside from incompentant management and other issues, this is another big factor in why there was not another big leap in the Amiga's hardware.

    Compatibility plagued any major changes to the hardware since many software makers would bypass the OS and bang the hardware direct. Don't forget games were the main market for the Amiga and upgrading to find all your favourite games wouldn't work was a major drag back then.

  23. wayne

    Amiga

    Ahhg! How long has this Amiga Anywhere revolution being coming, ten years? Sounds familiar doesn't it, DukeNukem Forever=Dukenuken Anywhere style.

    The Taos Intent stuff was really good, I am into OS design, and they were my only real technical competition.

    They really killed it when they decided to charge for the Amiga player software. They could have made money, like Flash did, from selling development tools, and anybody could have got into buying software for the platform, or even web pages using it instead of Flash (another possible market).

    The Amiga has had the most brilliant run of BAD luck, that I can remember in the computer industry. Amiga did not advance the system enough to produce quality demand to keep enough money coming in. We then got the take overs, here there etc, promising all sorts of things (like the Amiga Vacuum cleaner like case). After the first one or two takeovers, the Amiga hardware was looking worth as much as the Sinclair QL compatible computer industry. These days, those designs are really only suitable as cheap Chinese 1000 in 1 game systems. The Amiga anywhere software, was an good shot in the arm that did not go very far.

    What can we do these days. Development of Linux is so far advanced, that drab desktop screens of revolutionary Amiga OS just don't cut it (get an ergonomic GUI stylist in guys). Hardware is even worse. The cost of graphic development is so high, even the console industry use PC graphics technologies. The cost of processing development is also so high that the PC and console industry already have many things covered. The consoles have become the Amigas of this day. So, unless they want to invest seriously big money, how can they compete on conventional technology.

    There are an few avenues, there are massive parallel arrays, used on chips like the Ambarella codec, clear-speed etc, role your own massive ARM processor array, and processor in Memory precessing arrays, are some of the few low-cost avenues left. There are also some other technologies, including new ways to do physical displays, 3D graphics and simulation, like I have been considering. But the reality is, few companies have use of the right staff to make the breakthrough to pull ahead.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    review your Amiga history

    you guys assuming you were there from at least the A500 days, need to reread your Amiga history.

    the time lines many of you put forward here are way off as are many of the points put forward.

    Micks boxer did infact exist as a POC and could have been taken to manufacture and got as far as trying to get a formal sanction from the then current Amiga corp.

    any of you reading the Team Amiga mailing list of the time can surely remember BBs points about keeping quiet and under playing the IP rights etc to gateway so he and his people could get the right on the cheap as he and Flossy fleecy had already layed the ground work while they work at gateway....

    it was infact the 3rd party devs such as Mick and others that were working towards a valid and finantially sustainable hardware/software upgradable collaction around the same time.

    on the basis that they could (primarilly key TA members and later the Phoenix developers collective) take the new corps word that they would be the key players for the desktop part of the plan at that time, while flossy and Co did their hairbrain anywere bits.

    as we know now , the corp headed by B and F never intended to licence the Boxer (or the 'InSideOut' card i found so much more Innovative ,dont forget the InSIdeOut in all this timeline), so it moved to another 3rd party company to licence the hardware part in the hopes of a OS licence later than never came.

    this is just scratching the erface there are lots more (community)insider info that exists in both the TA message board lists and more so the Phoenix/phinixi/PPC/PDC archives if you review your backups, please do so.

    [wave] to GreenBoy and the rest of that collective that had the real vision, the talent, the hardware POC, and the real plans for a productive long term life evolution the community aproved of at the time (even today and beyond),but lacked/didnt receave the finantial backing commitment from others in the end and thats the biggest shame in all this.

    the last chapter of the so called real Amiga legacy in all this.

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