Ordering the A1222+

[RobertB]

In the latest AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup, I see the article details and link for ordering the A1222+ !

https://amigaos4gaming.wordpress.com/2023/10/31/amigaos-4-monthly-roundup-october-2023/

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network - http://www.portcommodore.com/sccan

[Arnuphis]

$1700 for something that is outperformed by a $300 chromebook? What a colossal waste of money. Are there really people who think this is something they want to buy? I always though the whole point was to develop something low cost to run AmigaOS 4.1? Surely it's time to give up on this dead end architecture and port the OS to ARM and run it on a Raspberry Pi or equivalent? At least you may actually grow the user base that way.

 

At the end of the day is it really still an Amiga? Or is it an overpriced emulator? Better results running MorphOS on an old PowerMac and way less expensive. 

 

The A1222+ expensive for nostalgia purposes. To limited to be taken seriously as a modern OS. I wonder why it's even a thing anymore. I Guess I am not the target market. 

 

Sorry for the rant. If this is something you grow excited about then more power to you. Personally I would get a real classic amiga/emulator  for nostalgia fun and a real computer for serious tasks and still spend less than the asking price of this thing. 

[+OLD CS1]

10 hours ago, Arnuphis said:

$1700 for something that is outperformed by a $300 chromebook? What a colossal waste of money. Are there really people who think this is something they want to buy?

No lies detected.

10 hours ago, Arnuphis said:

At the end of the day is it really still an Amiga? Or is it an overpriced emulator? Better results running MorphOS on an old PowerMac and way less expensive. 

It is.  AmigaOS4 is still native AmigaOS, just one of the evolutions after 68k.  Between AmigaOS4 and MorphOS, I love MOS on a MacMini and it runs a lot of my OS3 stuff just fine.

10 hours ago, Arnuphis said:

The A1222+ expensive for nostalgia purposes.

Some people cannot put a price on nostalgia.

10 hours ago, Arnuphis said:

To limited to be taken seriously as a modern OS. I wonder why it's even a thing anymore.

It will never be a modern OS so long as there is no protected memory functionality.  Plenty of developers have said giving AmigaOS a modern sheen would take far too much work.  Apple was able to go from 68k to PPC, then PPC to x64 on a Unix (BSD) kernal, of course with an internal dedicated army.  Could AmigaOS??

 

Why do we climb the mountain?  Because it is there.

10 hours ago, Arnuphis said:

I Guess I am not the target market.

I feel that.

10 hours ago, Arnuphis said:

If this is something you grow excited about then more power to you.

I want to get excited about it.  I really do.  The Amiga is near and dear to my heart.

10 hours ago, Arnuphis said:

Personally I would get a real classic amiga/emulator  for nostalgia fun and a real computer for serious tasks and still spend less than the asking price of this thing.

For the nostalgia part, running old Workbench or old games, yeah, Amiga Forever is the ticket if you do not want to fuss with hardware, inexpensive or otherwise.  I am not going to be dropping $1700 for a 1222+, but I can see putting a modest amount of money on a next-gen Amiga to do some serious tasks.  Certainly not tasks like video editing, graphics editing, Microsoft Office-compatible productivity (I have not checked in a while, but I am unaware of these kinds of programs on any Amiga that are not just horribly deficient.)

 

Until someone takes the Amiga seriously^*, we will never get our serious Amiga.

 

* Not to denigrate or minimize the work done for my beloved machine by many, many talented people.  I mean it is going to take money and people to push something in a short enough time on new enough hardware to not be irrelevant and relegated to a hobby machine.

[Arnuphis]

For me an Amiga was the hardware. The custom chips and the design. It was revolutionary at the time.  The OS was just the interface to bring it all home. So I don't view these new machines as true Amigas. If the OS makes the machine an Amiga then FPGA and Pi/Emulated setups are just as much an Amiga as the X5000, A1222+ are. And they are way less expensive. 

 

And yes. Having seen the 'modern' systems up and running they are too lacking to be taken seriously as a replacement for a Windows/Linux or Mac system. Even the enthusiasts I observe using them have to make way too many concessions to it's limitations from the moment they turn it on. This is what makes their price point so hard to accept. For me at least. It also makes me ask 'where are you going with this?'.

 

So no, I will not be buying one of these. Like I refused to pay the price of an X5000. It would just be a useless doorstop full of buyers remorse. I would rather get a Mega65 and a Commander X16 and still have money left over. They at least know exactly what their purpose is.

 

I wish someone would take the OS seriously, port it to ARM and make it open source like Linux. So at least people could use it without spending too much $$$. But if you know anything about Amiga history you know that will never happen for reasons too complex to go into here. 

 

 

 

 

 

[+OLD CS1]

On 11/4/2023 at 11:31 AM, Arnuphis said:

But if you know anything about Amiga history you know that will never happen for reasons too complex to go into here.

Without turning this thread into a long-winded and futile discussion of what could, should, or would be, I once mused that if I should win the lottery, one of the things I would do is bring everything Amiga to the table for a week-long conference to hammer out a unified direction for the future and figure out ways to bring it to the market as a serious venture.  I figure it would take a monumental effort with an equally monumental finance to de-fraction and de-faction our old gal.

[Daedalus2097]

On 11/4/2023 at 3:31 PM, Arnuphis said:

Having seen the 'modern' systems up and running they are too lacking to be taken seriously as a replacement for a Windows/Linux or Mac system. Even the enthusiasts I observe using them have to make way too many concessions to it's limitations from the moment they turn it on. This is what makes their price point so hard to accept. For me at least. It also makes me ask 'where are you going with this?'.

If you're expecting a hobbyist platform to be able to compete with any of the big three, you're only going to be disappointed. And anyone who tells you that a modern Amiga platform can is just deluded. It's a hobby platform, it's intended to progress the Amiga with more modern features, which is something many users have always wanted to do. Those people who spend thousands adding accelerators, graphics cards, faster I/O cards, all just to bypass the ancient limitations of the precious hardware... Are they doing it wrong, just because it's not to your taste? Or is a fully decked out A4000 not an Amiga any more? Amiga OS4 and its hardware are a nice glimpse of what might have been - after all, Commodore were already planning to move away from the legacy hardware that had served them so well in the '80s but was really creaking at the seams by the '90s. Moving to commodity hardware was inevitable, and the PowerPC path was the natural progression of a 68k OS at the time.

 

But at least you've included the very important point there: "For me at least". It's good that you realise that it's a hobby for people, which means you have absolutely no say in whether it's financially justifiable or not. Trying to compare to mainstream products is simply nonsense and shows a complete lack of understanding of the hobby aspect. If you really want a sensible comparison, why not compare it to another machine in its niche? These machines are intended as a follow-on from the tired old 68k classic platform for running Amiga OS that required many expansions to bypass all the legacy cruft of the classic architecture. So compare an X5000 to something like a fully-loaded A4000T. With a graphics card, Cyberstorm PPC, SCSI drives, network cards, USB cards, Zorro RAM cards and everything else. That's not a machine you would by to run A500 games, yet it's still an Amiga and people still build and buy such machines. The costs aren't that different, and the X5000 is *vastly* more powerful. It's the machine the A4000 wants to be.

 

On 11/4/2023 at 3:31 PM, Arnuphis said:

So no, I will not be buying one of these. Like I refused to pay the price of an X5000

*slow clap* Well done for standing up for your rights and refusing to pay that much money. But... You say "refuse" as if someone was trying to make you buy it, when nothing could be further from the truth. You really have to actively look for one to even know it exists, let alone try to buy one. It's obviously not a product for you, so why does it even concern you? What are you so worked up about? I really don't get your problem, in my mind it'd be like me getting worked up and ranting on the internet over the cost of a designer handbag, when my £30 rucksack does a far better job in every practical way.

 

On 11/4/2023 at 3:31 PM, Arnuphis said:

I would rather get a Mega65 and a Commander X16 and still have money left over.

Good lord, you'd actually pay that much money for a machine that has a price/performance ratio more than a *thousand* times worse than the X5000?

 

See how easy it is? The Mega65 does absolutely nothing for me so spending that sort of money on one would be a crazy idea. But I think it's wonderful that it even exists and that people can go out, buy it and enjoy it. And I wish them the very best with it.

 

On 11/4/2023 at 3:31 PM, Arnuphis said:

I wish someone would take the OS seriously, port it to ARM and make it open source like Linux. So at least people could use it without spending too much $$$. But if you know anything about Amiga history you know that will never happen for reasons too complex to go into here. 

You're giving totally mixed messages. For most of your rants you seem to be totally uninterested in anything other than the original Amiga hardware. Why do you want a modernised version of the OS then? There are also updates of the classic OS available (which incorporate several features backported from OS4 as it happens). And people like to wave this whole open-source thing around like it's a magic wand that will suddenly solve innumerable problems and somehow make Amiga OS viable again. But that's ridiculously optimistic at best, and probably closer to delusional. There's nowhere near the coderbase available for that sort of project. And besides, even if it did magically happen, what then? What software would you run? And why would you pick it over AROS? Brand loyalty? Why hasn't AROS taken the world by storm? Why aren't you just happily using AROS instead of moaning and ranting about Amiga OS? Or, on a smaller scale, look what happened when extremely popular pieces of software like DOpus 4 and DOpus 5 were open sourced... There were all these wonderful ideas about all the new features they'd gain, how they'd evolve continually and be used by every Amiga user every day... But what happened? We get 2 or 3 different versions of each scattered in various corners of the internet, all stagnated, each with different bugs and limitations and no consensus as to what should happen next. If the community who were so vocal about open-sourcing them can't pull together an update for a file manager, what hope does a whole OS have?

[Arnuphis]

Wow.. Triggered much? I guess we now know at least 1 person who is buying the A1222+ 😄

 

Let me try to respond to some of the things you said in your frenzied ramble. 

 

2 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

If you're expecting a hobbyist platform to be able to compete with any of the big three, you're only going to be disappointed. And anyone who tells you that a modern Amiga platform can is just deluded.

But the thing is. Some people do. I have met them. At every show there is an attitude that it is a superior machine to other platforms. And yes they are deluded. 

 

2 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

Trying to compare to mainstream products is simply nonsense and shows a complete lack of understanding of the hobby aspect.

You are wrong. It's being sold at a price point that matches and exceeds that of equivalent machines and people are trying to use it as a modern desktop replacement. Again, I have been to shows and demonstrations where people are trying to run modern application suites on it. So it has to be compared.

 

3 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

Those people who spend thousands adding accelerators, graphics cards, faster I/O cards, all just to bypass the ancient limitations of the precious hardware... Are they doing it wrong, just because it's not to your taste? Or is a fully decked out A4000 not an Amiga any more?

Now you are taking nonsense. There is a vast difference between someone keeping old hardware running with addons and a completely new machine with none of the original hardware. What point are you even trying to make here? calm down.

 

3 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

*slow clap* Well done for standing up for your rights and refusing to pay that much money. But... You say "refuse" as if someone was trying to make you buy it, when nothing could be further from the truth. You really have to actively look for one to even know it exists, let alone try to buy one. It's obviously not a product for you, so why does it even concern you? What are you so worked up about? I really don't get your problem, in my mind it'd be like me getting worked up and ranting on the internet over the cost of a designer handbag, when my £30 rucksack does a far better job in every practical way.

Because it was brought to my attention on a public forum? And I guess that the idea is to sell them? Heaven forbid that you want anyone else joining your little clique of fanatics obviously. You are the only one getting frantic and worked up on this thread at any criticism of your precious Amiga from potential new customers. Maybe you best retreat back to your safety bubble?

3 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

You're giving totally mixed messages. For most of your rants you seem to be totally uninterested in anything other than the original Amiga hardware. Why do you want a modernised version of the OS then? There are also updates of the classic OS available (which incorporate several features backported from OS4 as it happens). And people like to wave this whole open-source thing around like it's a magic wand that will suddenly solve innumerable problems and somehow make Amiga OS viable again. But that's ridiculously optimistic at best, and probably closer to delusional. There's nowhere near the coderbase available for that sort of project. And besides, even if it did magically happen, what then? What software would you run? And why would you pick it over AROS? Brand loyalty? Why hasn't AROS taken the world by storm? Why aren't you just happily using AROS instead of moaning and ranting about Amiga OS? Or, on a smaller scale, look what happened when extremely popular pieces of software like DOpus 4 and DOpus 5 were open sourced... There were all these wonderful ideas about all the new features they'd gain, how they'd evolve continually and be used by every Amiga user every day... But what happened? We get 2 or 3 different versions of each scattered in various corners of the internet, all stagnated, each with different bugs and limitations and no consensus as to what should happen next. If the community who were so vocal about open-sourcing them can't pull together an update for a file manager, what hope does a whole OS have?

Maybe because I would like to see it succeed? It's pretty obvious you don't. You would rather see the OS die on overpriced hardware that no one will buy in any number sufficient to grow the platform. Just as long as you and your shrinking circle of like-minded people feel special.  So in closing a nice *slow clap* for you sir and your fossil thinking.

 

[Boschloo]

On 11/4/2023 at 11:31 AM, Arnuphis said:

For me an Amiga was the hardware.

 

I don't understand. Why are people paying $1700 for an emulator that doesn't even look like an Amiga?

 

Anyone can go on eBay and buy a 4000 and just max it out. 

[+OLD CS1]

17 hours ago, Boschloo said:

Anyone can go on eBay and buy a 4000 and just max it out. 

I cannot argue your first question, but I can argue that using original hardware is not for the squeemish and can be anxiety-inducing even for the experienced.  After running fine for 15 years, my 4000D became unstable and after over a year of trying I pretty much gave up.  It has sat here barely used for almost four years.  It saddens me.  I might have time sometime soon to try, again.

[Daedalus2097]

Also, maxing out an A4000 will probably cost you far more for far less stability and performance. And, just to point out, Amiga OS runs on it natively; it isn't an emulator. If all you want is an emulator to run old games, it's a ridiculous proposition - just pull an old PC out of a skip and use that for a far better experience. Thinking that's what it's for is entirely missing the point.

[Daedalus2097]

On 11/10/2023 at 12:36 AM, Arnuphis said:

Wow.. Triggered much? I guess we now know at least 1 person who is buying the A1222+ 😄

 

I'll ignore the rest of your poorly thought out drivel; you've already nailed your disinterested colours to the mast so there's no point. But I did want to point out that I have no plans whatsoever to buy one, which given the quote above demonstrates just how far off you are with your preconceptions. And, given how convinced you seem to be on this point, it might just illustrate (if not to you, at least to others) that your other preconceptions might be equally flawed.

[+davidcalgary29]

I tripped into this thread, and discovered:

 

-The Amiga 1222+

-The Mega 65

-The Commander X16.

 

And here I thought my (NTSC) CD32 was pretty much the end of the line. Thanks, guys!

[+OLD CS1]

On 11/20/2023 at 6:31 AM, Daedalus2097 said:

Also, maxing out an A4000 will probably cost you far more for far less stability and performance.

I am almost certain that is where my problem lies.  I am pretty sure that the USB modules I have loaded in my Deneb are not stable with the latest version of Poseidon I am running, so that is going to take some work.  I am Ivory sure the ailment is not hardware, and I do not really have much of a motley crew of hardware: CS MK-III, Picasso IV, Deneb, SCSI-to-SATA SSD, SCSI-to-SATA DVD-RW.

On 11/20/2023 at 6:31 AM, Daedalus2097 said:

just pull an old PC out of a skip and use that for a far better experience.

A modern Android phone or tablet does a good job, too.  The 500Mini is not terrible, either.

 

I just want my old gal working, but she is buried under a gargantuan list of TODOs right now.

[leech]

On 11/15/2023 at 7:21 PM, OLD CS1 said:

I cannot argue your first question, but I can argue that using original hardware is not for the squeemish and can be anxiety-inducing even for the experienced.  After running fine for 15 years, my 4000D became unstable and after over a year of trying I pretty much gave up.  It has sat here barely used for almost four years.  It saddens me.  I might have time sometime soon to try, again.

A recap will do it wonders!

[leech]

On 11/21/2023 at 10:18 AM, OLD CS1 said:

I am almost certain that is where my problem lies.  I am pretty sure that the USB modules I have loaded in my Deneb are not stable with the latest version of Poseidon I am running, so that is going to take some work.  I am Ivory sure the ailment is not hardware, and I do not really have much of a motley crew of hardware: CS MK-III, Picasso IV, Deneb, SCSI-to-SATA SSD, SCSI-to-SATA DVD-RW.

My desktop system has been laying in pieces on my desk downstairs for far too long as well.  Kept having memory issues and crashes with just basically the CSPPC plugged in.  Swapping around memory modules, I'd occasionally get it to pass memory checks.  But I kind of think one of the chips has gone bad, and that's why I'm having stability issues.  Ordered some diagnostic roms for it, but haven't spent the time on it yet... then again I've been playing more with my A4000D Toaster Oven... then came to the conclusion that the Toaster doesn't quite work right with 3.2 Kickstart, so ordered a couple of switchable ROMs off ebay so I can go between 3.1, 3.2 and two different diagnostic roms

[+OLD CS1]

38 minutes ago, leech said:

A recap will do it wonders!

Was already done

[leech]

44 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

Was already done

Hmm, I also have been using SCSI -> SATA, but I think the cyberstorm either doesn't like it too much, or it was my memory issues that was causing random crashing that'd trash my install.  Then again, I ended up going pure scsi at some point, and still had similar problems.  Pretty sure the SCSI isn't working correctly, which is a crime, as it's so much faster than any other throughput for the Amiga.