Mar 13

Finding a home for the black-sheep of the computer industry

Hi my names Ravi aka Theformula and I have used and loved amigs for many years. Currently there has been a lot of debate about why people use Amiga these days. I would like to do a small article on how I think new Amigas will fit into the world of modern computing. I will leave out new classic machines like MiniMig as I want to do an article on the future of retro Amiga soon.

I think amiga is a very personal computer for the people that have used them. Many people have different views on amiga and what it means to them. This is purely because amiga covered such a broad base of subjects and areas. It was not just used by gamers, it was used by video professionals, music makers, arts and many others. Amiga may mean a great game of lemmings to some people or a very good platform for live video switching and cutomzing hardware to others. This means that many people look to a new amiga they expect it to be as broad as the old machines coving all aspects of hardware and software. This is a hard task to accomplish even for apple or microsoft let alone Hyperion or Amiga inc. Think about it macs may be great for video editing and sound work but I would not buy one for gaming. That go’s for a windows box they may be good for gaming and other things but i would not buy it as a stable platform for a total computer illiterate. This may not exist so much these days with vmware and unity but I know from personal experiance that there is still a lot of things I can do on windows that i cannot do on osx and vice versa.

Computers have reached the state wear a 600mhz linux laptop can do everything the average user wants to do so hardware is no longer holding us back. This presents a good and bad situation for the future of amiga comuting. It means with low power boards amiga os can fly and compete on a level of speed as other os’s, but hardware much faster is produced in higher numbers and is cheaper. With emulation and Morphos now on PPC Macs and (fingers crossed) Amiga Os4.1 this solves the problem. So on the hardware side I think its all about playing the waiting game, but hey at least its here (yay hyperion!).

Software is changing and they way its run and distributed. Most software is aiming to be web based and face it Amiga and the web have not had a good friendship for a long while until recently (yay OWB, Netsurf, Sputnik!). With webkit now on Amiga it finally brings Amiga Internet to the level of other systems but also makes which os you are using irrelevant (every os has a web browser, so why choose one?). This may also be good. This development means that software has not got to be ported as it is web based and runs in your browser so yay loads of apps. It also means that any webbased software designed on Amiga will lose its Amiga exclusive appel but its also easy to make Amiga applications that can spread and compete with others on the same level as it could be run on any os with a browser.

I think personally a good way for Amiga to go forward is to use the feature it still has left that are completly unique to Amiga. Like dragging down the resolution and swapping between them instantly and the power and control of the os. The low power consumption, Trackers, great old software. It could be used as a great media center using hollywood and the touch screen driver. The key now is to get onto the cheaper hardware and get the web more advanced. Amiga will never get back to its former glory but it can still make some interesting, innovative and different projects. In my mind Amiga computing has started fresh and still has a way to go but still impressive. Finally we have a good starting base and with os 4.1 and hardware out and available. Hopefully we will get onto smaller cheaper systems and the Os will develop and we will start seen many interesting and exciting projects develop.The future of modern Amiga computing is a great alternative system to use that is not a just a hobby but a great small fast system, people just have to see it and they will come.

Posted by: Ravi Abbott

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