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I really think that a device that captured the spirit of Amiga could be a success. Not only amongst ex Amiga users, but amongst other users as well.

What was the "magic" of the Amiga in the 80s and early 90s and what could be something similar today?

In the 80s and 90s:

- Really good graphics and sound (when most PC users got EGA graphics and PC speaker sound, if anything besides ASCII at all)

- Easy to use (you could do everything with your mouse)

- A device for games, fun AND serious stuff

- Relatively affordable

What could this be today? Maybe an affordable "ready to use" device that drives forward Virtual Reality for games and other use cases? A smartphone that is also your PC and you can easily combine it with monitor, keyboard and mouse?

Any ideas?

3 comments

I agree with you that there's potential. I particularly see it in MorphOS: beautiful, usable, different, very responsive, and all on cheap hardware. Might be pushed as an alternative to Chromebooks, gaming, and design boxes that combines best features of each. Gets out of your way, bloatless, fast, supports key apps/features, fun side stuff, and doesn't spy on you. ;)

I also see a use in business. This comes from products like THEOS that are still around despite having almost no functionality haha. One selling point that product uses is that it doesn't run modern stuff. The reason? Productivity boost if you're mainly using it for line-of-business apps where people can't screw around because there's no software in it for doing so. So, above benefits to consumer applied to business scenario in companies that want work to get done and with OS more pleasant to work with.

So, these are two possibilities I see. Some possibilities in low-end market like OLPC project, too, but I haven't fleshed that out yet.

Much of the attraction of the Amiga (and the Atari ST) from that time, as far as I remember, was the 'step-up' in terms of the quality of the graphics and the games, when most people were rocking 8bit micros like the C64 or Amstrad.

In terms of what you could do software-wise, I think we can forget about the mainstream games industry. Same with the mainstream graphics industry (for the reason we have no Adobe Creative Studio for Linux).

What would interest me would be a killer OS with an active ecosystem supporting more indie-style products like Firefox, Sketch (https://designcode.io/sketch), Sublime Text, Atom etc, as well as indie games like Hotline Miami.

Start 'small' and see where it goes kind of thing.

I, for one, would be very interested in something like this.

So.. Linux then? Happily playing Hotline Miami and using all the programs you mentioned.

Unless that's what you meant, in that case "whoosh over my head"

Yeah, but optimized for a very specific set of hardware. Like an Amiga-flavored Rasbian I suppose?

A Chromebox/gaming console hybrid?

Thing about Amiga was that it was the last of the micros, where the state of the computer was blanked with the flip of a switch.

Any game has the run of the place, and you didn't have persistent storage beyond the floppies it came on. Thus if the game blew up, it could only take it self down, it could not ruin your spreadsheets or the monthly report.

The closest you get to that today is a Chrome-book/-box. This because very little is stored internally, and nothing the user does can touch the OS side.

> and you didn't have persistent storage beyond the floppies it came on.

Well. While that was true by default for the majority of models, it wasn't for the A2500HD, A3000 or A4000, and the A600 and A1200 had internal ATA ports and were often sold with harddrives pre-installed. And after-market harddrive expansions quickly became common for every single other model too (including via horribly ugly "sidecar" type designs).

You're sort-of right in that certainly a large proportion of Amiga's were A500's sold mostly as game machines.

Note, though that generally even HD models were surprisingly robust against harddrive crashes etc.: You could generally safely assume that you could just wait until the hd light stopped flickering and flip the power.