Amiga Portables/Mobile markets

[carmel_andrews]

I was going to stick this in the amiga post that dauber made, since it does sort of relate to amiga things

 

I seem to remember that during the period between commodore going under and gateway turning the amiga into an OS only platform, that there was an attempt by whoever owned amiga at the time to expand amiga's technology or OS onto the mobile/portable devices market, probably as a competitor to Microsoft, apple and also Psion/Palm

 

I am just curious or interested to know how well Amiga did in that market and how many mobile/portable devices the technology or OS was ported to, the only one i recall was something called Zaurus (or was it Taurus) and also whether they are still 'active' in that market (something along the lines of AROS based mobiles/portable devices perhaps)

[FastRobPlus]

After Commodore, Amiga went to Escom - a huge computer distributor in Europe. Following the Amiga name after Escom collapsed is pretty pointless. It became a shell game run from P.O. boxes. The "Amiga" we all know and talk about ended in around 1996. Anything that happened after this can and should be ignored in the same way we ignore Infogrammes endlessly telling us how great they are because they invented pong, then releasing unplayable games like the new Alone in the Dark.

 

Just to give you a taste of what’s happened with Amiga since then:

Where I live (Seattle area) there's a city called Kent that wanted a sports arena, but the public was against funding it. In 2007, Amiga came forward and pledged 2.5 million dollars to gain arena naming rights and to ensure the project was started. The problem was, as far as anyone could tell, Amiga was just one guy working out of an unmarked rented room of a building in Issaquah. When some folks on Amiga.org contacted the local newspaper (Seattle Times) they investigated and shone a light on the situation. The money came due, and Amiga was never heard from, leaving people to speculate that the Kent city council knew that Amiga was not good for the money, but used the illusion of a real company backing their project to get the groundbreaking done, effectively sidestepping the rules that say the city could not begin the project without private funding.

 

So when you hear the name Amiga mentioned in the same breath with some new technology or project, its probably safe to assume:

It will never materialize

I might even be some kind of ruse or scam

[desiv]

There were some tablets with an Amiga logo that weren't related to anything really.

As for the Amiga and "mobile," I think you might be referring to this:

 

http://www.amigahist...uk/amigade.html

 

desiv

Edited February 23, 2013 by desiv

[Cammy]

Amiga released Snowman Maker, a mobile app which let you build snowmen. It was about as far as they got in the mobile market after all their grand plans to create a digital environment to run on phones. Several years later they were licensing the brand name out to Chinese manufacturers to put on their TVs and tablets. Commodore USA also licensed the name from Amiga to put on some PCs which never came out. Now Amiga is dealing with Blackberry to release a bunch of classic Amiga games on Blackberry 10 devices.

 

Aros is being ported to ARM at the moment but it's a long process when only one or two developers are working on it. I think the current target platform is the Raspberry Pi, so eventually there will be a way to run it on phones, although I'm not sure how suited it is as a mobile OS using the current desktop, someone would need to write a Wanderer or Ambient replacement.

 

Amiga OS4, developed by Hyperion for specific PPC systems developed by ACube and Aeon is still going, development continues and doesn't seem like it's going to stop.

 

MorphOS now runs on a variety of PPC systems including G4 Macintosh computers. It's the most advanced and stable Amiga OS at the moment.

 

There are also a few homebrew FPGA projects to recreate the Amiga hardware, various versions of UAE that run on phones and tablets to play old Amiga games with, and there's still a very dedicated community making software and hardware for the original Amigas still.

[FastRobPlus]

Now Amiga is dealing with Blackberry to release a bunch of classic Amiga games on Blackberry 10 devices.

 

 

 

So the one or two man "company" is alive and reselling emulated games made by game developers of the past. In other words - exactly the same necromancy Infogrammes practices on Atari nostalgia, but on a much smaller scale.

[+save2600]

Thought this thread was going to be about PAWS... the Portable Amiga Workstation.

[+orpheuswaking]

Oh ESCOM, I purchased my first PC from them (A pentium 60)