AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 – Pre-Release for the AmigaOne X5000 | Hacker News Reader

AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 – Pre-Release for the AmigaOne X5000

hyperion-entertainment.com

113 pointsdoener26 comments

Presumably one of the excellent points about using a PowerPC structure is that there is no Intel ME system within it: since the system (X5000) is already marketed as running Ubuntu and Debian (http://www.amiga-shop.net/Amiga-Hardware/New-Amiga-Computers...) there's presumably no reason why it couldn't be certified for Qubes OS and find wider audience!?

The X5000 presumably succeeds the X1000 from 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne_X1000

Are there any sales figures available for that machine? I'd love to know how many people are still buying "Amigas".

(Also worth noting, the X1000 had a dual-core CPU, but AmigaOS can only use one core. RISC OS (the ex-Acorn OS) has a similar problem when running on later Raspberry Pi devices.)

Only as C-one or FPGA based, as a toy for my kid.

The old machines are still back home in Europe.

They're being coy about it, but [1]:

"As I replied in another interview recently, we have sold in excess of 200 AmigaOne X1000 systems and boards but less than 2000. As for satisfaction, yes we were very pleased with AmigaONE X1000 sales but, due to the high cost and shortage of P.A. Semi CPUs, we took the decision to discontinue manufacturing the Nemo motherboard." (June 2015)

Note that this is not the only AmigaOne's on sale. There are also the ACube SAM boards/computers [2], which are substantially cheaper. They don't really directly compete due to the price gap - in fact, A-Eon apparently contracts ACube for some work (firmware etc.).

Estimating the yearly sales of AmigaOS 4.x machines is thus quite hard, but I'm assuming it's in the low hundreds per year at most.

[1] http://distrita.com/a-eon-interview-about-amigas-future/

[2] http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware&pid=7

So how can these companies survive? And produce custom motherboards, no less?

I'm not sure there are even drivers for all the onboard hardware on the X1000 yet either, and it's now been discontinued. Modern Amiga hardware sounds like a trainwreck, with a trail of expensive boards with missing drivers, questionable availability and often major hardware bugs. (The hardware bugs are obviously a lot easier to miss when there aren't even working drivers when it ships.)

> RISC OS (the ex-Acorn OS) has a similar problem when running on later Raspberry Pi devices.)

Yet the speed of it puts other OSes on the device to shame.

Price for that board is preposterous especially considering it doesn't have the old Amiga custom chipsets to optionally run old software and games, but depends on emulation.

How many years left till these vultures stop picking the bones of the Amiga community...

Nobody are forcing anyone to buy these. And I very much doubt Trevor Dickinson is making much money from A-Eon. It's pretty clear he's doing this as an expensive hobby.

Those that can't afford these have plenty of cheaper alternatives to choose from, ranging from AROS on a wide range of platforms, to classic AmigaOS or AROS in emulators, MorphOS on old Macs, classic AmigaOS on upgraded classics or FPGA reimplementations, to SAM AmigaOne boards from ACube.

I love the Amiga, but this seems a little too much; for a computer that will cost € 2.299,00, consisting of 'old' hardware.

> this seems a little too much

It is. Especially considering that other m68k systems are sold for much less, such as this one which is an Atari-compatible computer and is sold for 643 Euros (560 for the motherboard and 83 for the case): http://firebee.org/fb-bin/index

My FireBee is being couriered to me as we speak, I'm super excited about it.

But it is kind of a different sort of thing. I think the AmigaOne is a foolish concept, but it is a far more powerful machine than the FireBee, as it is based around a high speed PowerPC board.

PowerPC IMHO is a dead-end, but it seems like many in the Amiga community have tried to hitch their wagon to it. They'd be better off porting to ARM (running in big-endian mode I guess) if the OS is really worth it.

What are you planning to do with the firebee?

Own it :-)

Nothing practical. I will probably try to do some dev work on it to improve it. Dabble in some VHDL and OS work for it.

That's because history. 680x0 was dead, so PowerPC was intended to replace sometime in the mid 90s after Commodore became German (Escom/Amiga Technology).

Dave Haynie and a couple of others were asked to help design a new platform around Power as Amiga was dated. Escom had money issues almost immediately (of course) so it never happened and Escom went bust within a year.

Commodore UK's bid was planning HP RISC.

AROS does run on ARM. As for AmigaOS 4.x I don't think Hyperion have the resources, and they're very dependent on their hardware partners bearing part of the cost.

The only problem with PPC from an Amiga point of view is that most of the SOCs are targetting networking and automotive markets and similar embedded use rather than desktops (total PPC sales in terms of number of chips is still in a similar region to x86 sales; revenue per unit is way lower, though). It's not like people will buy these machines looking for top end performance, and the OS is still incredibly light weight, but if you pay for it you can still get PPC chips that perform very well.

But AmigaOne's are an very expensive hobby for most people who buy them, not bought to be cost effective.

More comparable to the FireBee you have a multitude of M68k accelerators and FPGA Amiga reimplementations that are much cheaper.

There's been various discussions about trying to run AmigaOS or AROS on ColdFire like the FireBee too. Problem is people would expect to run their old binary-only software, and AFAIK the ColdFire can't trap all the unimplemented instruction combinations fully, so it'd require "fun" hacks (e.g. dynamic translation; I think it probably could be done reasonably easily for AmigaOS, but finding someone with both the time and the skills is another matter) so the Amiga community focus has been on FPGAs.

Yeah ColdFire is also a dead end because Freescale isn't going to be releasing any more models and certainly not at any higher clock speeds. And it's really being made for specialized markets (automotive, ethernet switches, etc.)

The FireBee is a neat hack I don't mind supporting, but if people really want hardware and emulators don't cut it, then FPGA is probably the way to go.

Or switch architectures and port the OS (EmuTOS and/or AROS) + some sort of CPU translation/emulation layer for 68k stuff. It would probably have to be something big endian, so that rules out RISC-V but OpenRISC, J2 (SuperH) and OpenSPARC are some open source candidates.

But this is a PowerPC computer, not m68k.

Oh, you are right, how did I miss that?

So basically the Firebee (Atari compatible) is an m68k board, while most "modern" systems for Amiga OS are currently PowerPC, NOT m68k as I erroneously implied in my previous comment.

BTW today I've been googling a bit and it seems that the SAM boards by ACube Systems are substantially cheaper than the X5000, so they could be a valid alternative for people on a budget wanting to run Amiga OS: https://acube-systemsbiz.serversicuro.it/shop/en/5-sam-mothe...

Wii U is an 1.24GHz 3-core PowerPC cpu, with 2GB RAM, dual GPU (one of which is radeon-based), 8GB or 32GB eMMC ROM, SD slot, USB ports, HDMI video out and wifi and bluetooth.

I got mine for $80 (they sell for very cheap without the gamepad).

Considering it has been almost fully hacked, I think it's a good candidate for a cheap AmigaOS platform.

Does it have an FPGA? Because AFAIK you need to emulate custom chips to run Amiga flawlessly (although I think they can also be sw-emulated, but there is a price to pay in terms of performance)

Link? Thank you. :)

http://www.a-eon.com/?page=x5000

IMO the X5000 is kind of a joke. It doesn't even have USB 3.0, for instance. I really don't understand how A-Eon or Hyperion stay in business. Why the entire Amiga community, including the commercial interests, don't get behind AROS is just insane.

What can you use this for?

Is there a PPC VM that could run this on Linux or Windows?

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