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© 1997-2006
Gareth Knight
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Gary Peake discusses Amiga Inc's latest plans

Emne: AMIOPEN: Re: Shock
Fra: gary@amiga.com (Gary)
Nyhetsgrupper: ntnu.mail2news.amiga.open
Organisasjon: unknown
Dato: 2001-Apr-03 - 06:31:42
As has been discussed here several times, AmigaDe has no memory protection. This and a couple of other issues are the reasons for the announcement.

Basically, here is what we are doing and why:

1. Developers are starving to death and will leave unless we find a way to help them make money fast. Dealers have the same problems. We need more oomph to take advantage of higher fps games, etc. This IS a multimedia platform community after all. My mail box tells us developers and dealers need something quickly. 
We can get AmigaOne and OS4.0 out by summer without losing any time developing the DE. This is with our thanks to Haage & Partner and Eyetech who have agreed to meet PRD's we set before them. We could not implement this plan so quickly without their valued help. Also we should include Hyperion who is assisting our team with a level of GL and video capability that will enhance game developers potential.

2. Users want new hardware. Amigas are starting to fail and frankly it is just too expensive to start R&D for new (modified) chips in the amounts we would probably be able to sell and just as expensive for fabbing the older chips as well. So, off the shelf, open designed, new machines based on PPC is the most inexpensive way to get the Amiga user onto a newer platform.

3. Amiga users have always been partial to PPC. Dean Brown, Dave Haynie, Mick Tinker, and Joe Torre (four of THE best and brightest Amiga minded hardware gurus I know) are all for a PPC based platform advance. Dave had the PiosOne design that he allowed us to release openly to help people see what can be done with an open hardware design based around PPC. We did not release Dave's specs the week before the announcements by accident. It was to open people's minds to what can be done by thinking outside the box. Dave Haynie doesn't know what a box is. Remember, we already run on a bog standard PC.  :)

4. Our Zico base specs are an open spec based around PPC. Alan Redhouse at Eyetech has a full plan, knows when to freeze the design and ship, and has met our Product Requirements Document. Dean Brown has approved his design. Dave Haynie saw it in St Louis and thought it was cool. Joe was there also and while I didn't ask Joe specifically for his ideas, he is open enough to have said if he thought the design was bad. Haage & Partner have met our PRD's on the software side. Both have excellent reputations for actually meeting deadlines and shipping product when they say they will. While they are contracting to us, these projects are being managed by us now.

5. Amigade provides us with binary compatibility, distributed processing capabilities and many otherthings we can get no where else. This line of development will continue as previously planned. Note: There are NO changes to what you have been told we plan to do with AmigaDE.

6. We intend, as we have stated all along, to cover everything from PDA's and cell phones, set top boxes, and servers. This plan allows us to do that with ease.

7. AmigaOS will continue to be developed and will be merged into or under AmigaDE so that we eventually have our own familiar base to play on and it will be a full AMIGA base that is server capable and cell phone capable as well. But we will not drop Windows and Linux compatibility either. Think of this as adding yet 
another playground for AmigaDE. It is no different from deciding to also play on top of Be or any other OS out there. We will continue to find playgrounds that provide us, our developers, and dealers even more opportunities.

8. As far as splitting the community and the developers:
We have over 2,000 developers currently involved with us. Another 30 added themselves today after the news from St Louis. My mailbox is so full I spent all day JUST answering new mails from developers and companies wanting to come to Amiga and play and I didn't get them all answered yet. Half of the developers are firmly in the PDA, cell phone, and set top box camp. The other half are either desktop oriented or want to do both. This gives everyone a place to utilize their talents and make money.

9. Most notable request from developers I have is "please also give us a desktop". As Bill noted in his banquet speech, he made certain promises to me based on what Team AMIGA members (6000 plus) and others in the community have said they want from whomever has the Amiga name. I took this job based on those promises. Bill keeps his promises.

10. This is a business and this is fun. We do what we do because we want to and we can. If someone tells us we can't, we do it just to show them we can. This is also a family. This was very evident over the weekend. I hugged more people in St Louis than I do at a family reunion. Bill had tears in his eyes as he talked about us losing Bob Cosby. We care. We have to make sure our friends and family can finally make money but we have to do it in 
ways that keep us afloat as well from a business standpoint.

11. Tao Group is a great partner and is providing Amiga with opportunities we have never been able to land before. Good business means taking advantage of this opportunity they provide and we intend to do that with their help and asistance.

12. Listen to the facts and ask questions here and in other Amiga forums where we are there to answer your questions truthfully. Don't listen to the naysayers, the hype, the conjecture, and the innuendo of people who have no clue. We will tell you the truth. Bad or good, you get the truth.

13. We have taken flak from certain people because they say we provide no value. Our value is in uniting as many people as we can into a formidable force. We can not do what we plan alone. It takes unity, solidarity, team work. All of us must work together and together we will slowly conquer the world ... just because we want to.

Sincerely,

Gary Peake
Amiga Inc.
--       

> G'day Luca Diana,

> On 03-Apr-01, on the subject of "AMIOPEN: Re: Shock", you spoke thus:

> > 
> > From: "Steve & Ulli Bowman" <stevebow@hotkey.net.au>
> >> I don't get that. I thought the whole point of DE was that it was
> >> scaleable, from PDA to desktop. Maybe I've misunderstood, but I thought
> >> once AOS5 was reached, AOS4 and DE would be integrated under the one
> >> banner, as a single product.
> > 
> > You got that right
> > 

> In which way :^), that I've misunderstood everything or there /will/ be a
> single AOS/DE product by V5?

> -- 
> Steve Bowman - Sydney, Australia

> "I have a really bad feeling about this."
> -- Han Solo

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