As someone who grew up with Amiga... I find it amazing these boards still keep coming (X1000, X5000... anyone?) - they have always been insanely expensive for specs that are decade(s) old, all in the name of... really no idea what beyond "we can".
Or in other words: I wonder what if all that time, money and effort went into say AROS[1] and/or emulation. I can imagine still using AmIRC and HippoPlayer if I could run them as any other software on Linux.
Yeah, the lack of support for off-the-shelf hardware has been the doom of the Amiga revival since day one.
The refusal to port AmigaOS to anything but dead or near-dead architectures has always amazed me -- had the resources been spent on AROS instead, we'd have a usable modern ecosystem by now, rather than multiple different options that fall back on various ways of running 30 year-old binaries.
All I want is a decent modern version of YAM and universal ARexx/datatype support! :(
> Yeah, the lack of support for off-the-shelf hardware has been the doom of the Amiga revival since day one.
The Amiga was not just an OS. It was all about the custom chips that added such interesting and powerful capabilities to an otherwise unspectacular 68000. When combined with the OS, it created a system that was truly ahead of its time.
But I don't see the appeal of AmigaOS on modern hardware. Most Amiga fans are more interested in the games and demos that didn't use the OS, and used the blitter/copper etc directly.
And if you just want a faster Amiga, the PiStorm is pretty cool.
There have been firebrands attempting a revival of the Amiga since the mid 90's, and back then it was a question of making a new and modern platform -- not watching demos.
Today is a different matter, of course. Personally, emulation is more than enough for me.
There's an AROS runtime for GNU/Linux and others.