Why would a 1968 Camaro SS be a sought after thing that anyone could want in a world with Tesla? There's no good reason, it just is.
If you do an eBay search, you'll find they are quite sought after. At this point Amigas sell for almost what they sold for new, if they are in very good condition. There is a revived demo scene (just as the C64 has seen a resurgence in recent years), and even new software is being written.
It's not sensible, it's just fun.
Edit: I own a C64, and would likely buy an Amiga, if I came across one in good shape at a reasonable price. I enjoy the old machines. Tinkering with something so simple is a very different experience than tinkering with a modern computer.
Because it feels very, very different to the mainstream options, and if you stuck with it long enough to get invested in the PPC versions, why not? At that point you got hardware that if not competitive is at least fast enough to be reasonable. It's an extremely lightweight OS, with a culture of minimalism, so while things will be slow if you try to do stuff that's actually CPU heavy, most Amiga software is responsive on very slow hardware.
I doubt there are many Amiga users today that use it as their only system, though there might be some diehard people doing even that, but for many of the remaining users AmigaOS is the OS they enjoy using, and they'll "resort" to Windows or OS X or Linux as a fallback when they have to.
It really is mostly for the novelty/nostalgia factor. Most of the Amiga OSs run on ancient PowerPC hardware and aren't useful in a modern sense for much more than simple web browsing and IRC.
While there are certainly people who make things for the various scenes and sell them, usually they're just trying to cover manufacturing cost of physical product. Software is usually freeware/opensource. The Atari 8-bit computer scene, for example, produces lots of weird custom hardware that the makers usually sell for parts + labor + shipping, but I can't recall ever hearing of license fees for a new DOS (there are many DOSs for the old 8-bits).
What's particularly weird about the Amiga scene is how locked down the IP still is and how that seems to permeate the rest of the scene. It's like the IP owners think that somehow they'll suddenly come across hundreds of millions of dollars in VC money and will reignite the Amiga fire with new hardware and software that will sweep the world...if only they hold on to the licenses for 30 year old ROM images a little bit longer. Or that they'll somehow sell enough licenses to make up for millions of dollars of development investment.
No joke, AmigaOS 4.1 is actually 30EUR today -- in almost 2016 -- and it only runs on bizarro PowerPC hardware that's built out of weird industrial control system motherboards or something and sold by yet other hopeless companies. [1][2][3]
If they sell 1,000 licenses a year, their revenue is 30,000EUR.
So I mean, Hyperion Entertainment is supposedly a company and there's probably more than one person hacking away at the OS, but there's no way they're coming close to covering costs on this. If I wasn't convinced of the earnestness of Amiga enthusiasts, I'd almost believe the entire thing is some kind of complex money laundering operation.
There's even commercial software still developed and licensed: [4][5][6][7]
and even an entire app store! [8]
I really admire the enthusiasm and passion, but I just can't figure out the money angle or what the point is.
3 - http://www.acube-systems.biz/
4 - http://www.pagestream.org/
5 - http://www.amigaos.net/software/100/amidark-engine
6 - http://www.hollywood-mal.com/purchase.html
PageStream was truly fantastic stuff. I managed to create quite a few newsletters and even school projects with that. Oh the good old times.. :-)
I lived in Juneau, Alaska when the Amiga scene peaked and ran a 4 line BBS on my Amiga 3000. I had purchased a laser printer at the state surplus.
I was given a 300mb SCSI HD by a friend who worked at an architectural firm. The HD had some bad sectors in the middle of the drive and was unusable for IBM's, but I was able to create partitions around the bad area and use the majority of the drive. Truly, the AmigaOS was revolutionary!
What I always thought was really weird is, the community helps them with this. Like, the Amiga scene for some time was about the only retro scene I know of that self-policed for infringement. Regular Ami fans would take it upon themselves to scour the web for people hosting the Workbench ROMs and disks and report them, and would get very very cross about requests. It was as if they thought if they could only shut down emulation people would just start rebuying real hardware in droves just to play ancient games. You can't even practically build an actual high-end Amiga anymore like you can get up and running in WinUAE with a few clicks, because the accelerator and graphics add-on hardware is all mostly rarer than gold these days.
It really is the case that there's this hardcore of really obsessive Amiga fans who're convinced they can somehow force the world to once again go Amiga. No one else is like this; there's no hardcore Risc OS fans out there waiting for the day when Acorn arises again and slays Microsoft or something.
It's bizarre.
I agree, but I can see two good things that came of the actions taken to protect the ROMs.
1. A company that supports the Amiga could sell the ROMs for use in emulation.
2. It helped to push for an open source version of the ROMs (AROS 68k).
This is what amazes me, really. I get the novelty factor, but who's dropping $500 on new PPC Amiga hardware still? It's one thing to go out and find an old amiga on ebay and run some retro apps or games for fun, but buying new hardware for an OS that could probably barely browse the web these days (is there a modern web browser for Amiga?) and doesn't even really meet the standard of "classic car like hobby" seems odd to me. I just assumed there was something critical that still needed to be propped up.
Perhaps a few TV news outlets are still using it since the turnaround there is so tight that everything needs to be "just so" to meet your deadlines, but even then, I have difficulty believing with the move to digital and HD that you could even get your footage onto an Amiga and work with it. I can't believe the hardware could handle HD.
Regardless, your point is probably valid, but I have to imagine there is at least a handful of A/V enthusiasts taht swear by the RGB based computers.
When Commodore was producing Amigas, the Amiga OS that ran on top of them ran from the Amiga OS 1.x series to the Amiga OS 3.x series, with Amiga 3.1 being the last version that was produced before Commodore went bankrupt.
After Commodore went bankrupt, the future of the Amiga was uncertain. Some Amiga users began debating how to take the platform forward. After a lot of debate, this culminated in the decision to start by creating an open-source OS based on the design of Amiga OS 3.1, which could be used as a platform for future improvements. This became the AROS project.
Ownership to the official Amiga assets (OS, patents and hardware) changed hands a number of times. The common pattern seemed to be a purchase by a PC manufacturer, who would then outsource the development of the platform through a dedicated subsidiary. First owners were Escom. Second owners were Gateway. Gateway was purchased by Acer at one point, so I believe the current owners are Acer. However, as mentioned previously, official development of the platform was managed by subcontractors, that went under names like 'Amiga Technologies' and 'Amiga Inc'.
Another OS split would happen because of the lack of new hardware coming from official sources. During the time when the official owners of the Amiga appeared increasingly incapable of bringing new hardware to market, a series of PowerPC accelerators appeared for classic Amigas (classic Amigas are based on the 68k family of processors). At first, these PPC accelerators would run on software designed to work alongside Amiga OS 3.x, but in time this evolved into a dedicated PPC-based OS for Amigas. This became MorphOS.
What about the official developments? So after Amiga OS 3.1 there were two additional releases in the 3.x series, 3.5 and 3.9. IIRC of these releases were developed by a company called H&P (Hauge & Partner, or something like that). At one point, it looked like MorphOS would become AmigaOS 4.0, however a couple of the H&P developers formed a new company called Hyperion and convinced Amiga Inc to let them develop the PPC version of Amiga OS, which became the Amiga 4.x that exists today.
There were various other twists to this tale that I've glossed over, but notable mention should go out to Amithlon (sp?), which was an unofficial AmigaOS port/emulator for x86 hardware. At one point there was some hope that this could've been used to pushed the Amiga forward, but it never got the official backing it needed.
So in terms of the remaining factions, it's arguable that four remain:
1. Classic Amiga (68k-based AmigaOS, running on either real or emulated hardware).
2. AROS.
3. AmigaOS 4.x.
4. MorphOS.
In terms of software releases, there's still a small amount of new releases, but killer apps that would be worth investing in the platform for are thin on the ground. Closest to that you'll probably find is Hollywood, but it's available for non-Amiga platforms now too:
The PPC Amigas don't really have custom co-processors. One or two of the PPC Amigas has an embedded microcontroller or FPGA, but they're not very powerful. You're also able to use some dedicated PC GPUs.
With regards to the future of Amiga hardware, what interests me more than the PPC machines are the FPGA computers/accelerators. For example, MiST board is able to recreate Amiga hardware in FPGA, along with a number of other classic computers.
http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON-III_CN7XXX.html
The Octeon II's often go for around $200 on eBay. They have 16 cores, multi-Gbps network acceleration, onboard crypto, Linux support, and use little power. That's the kind of shit that has potential. Maybe that plus a good FPGA for high-end model where main SOC is multiplexed like usual but one app at a time gets FPGA and/or GPU. A bunch of simple cores, the right on-board accelerators, and FPGA could combine in performance-critical apps to blow Xeons out the water despite being on older process nodes.
My old prediction and dream gets even closer to reality with the rise of the "semi-custom" businesses of AMD and Intel that do this on a case by case basis for their x86 lines. And Intel's acquisition of Altera w/ likely FPGA circuitry in future Xeon's. You can already buy a FPGA desktop from Pico Computing in small form factor. I envision something a bit more integrated into OS API and management systems.
Thanks.
> "What's more interesting is the Amiga model of CPU + accelerators is becoming the new default in high-performance applications. There could be a revival of OS's natively supporting accelerators of a niche market that cares about that sort of thing."
It's possible, though I'd like to see an OS designed from the ground up to support this type of heterogeneous architecture. A few years back I wrote a few notes about how to make better use of reconfigurable computing (on an Amiga forum, funnily enough), still think the basic ideas are sound, though there are plenty of details left to work out:
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=679874&postcount=...
> "The Octeon II's often go for around $200 on eBay. They have 16 cores, multi-Gbps network acceleration, onboard crypto, Linux support, and use little power. That's the kind of shit that has potential. Maybe that plus a good FPGA for high-end model where main SOC is multiplexed like usual but one app at a time gets FPGA and/or GPU. A bunch of simple cores, the right on-board accelerators, and FPGA could combine in performance-critical apps to blow Xeons out the water despite being on older process nodes."
The Octeon III sounds like quite a high end device, I'm sure it'd be a beast with regards to performance, but do you know of anything similar at a lower price point? Does $200 get you an Octeon II evaluation board on eBay?
Re octeon
Yeah, it's high-end but that's due to its market & low volume. Probably custom, too. I got the price by various boards that show up on eBay with Octeon II's priced from $150-300. Example:
http://m.ebay.com/itm/Interface-Masters-Quad-1GbE-PCIe-Ether...
Far as cost, a standard cell design with a few accelerators should be straight-forward. I also just got half a dozen papers on transistor-level optimization techniques that are automated and get a bit closer to custom performance. So potential there.