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[Franko]

I've been reading through a lot of the old threads here from the early noughties and not even having bothered with the internet until this year I was left feeling a bit dismayed and sad about what seems to have been a huge split and infighting in the Amiga community a number of years ago, mostly with the introduction of OS4 but also MorphOS & Aros Vs so called Classic OS.

I had no idea this had gone on, as when the last of the Amiga magazines rolled of the press and I lost touch with what was happening in the Amiga community. I was left in my own happy little world thinking that all Amiga users were still out their like me doing their best to keep the old machines running. It appears this was not the case and instead of helping one another some sort of silly war broke out and the community split into different factions.

Although this is obviously old news to most of you it's left me wondering for the first time in almost 25 years of being an Amiga user if their is such a thing as the Amiga community anymore and is it worth all the time, money & effort spent on this amazing machine or is it indeed time to move on to pastures new and remember fondly just what a great machine the Amiga was/is.

Given all that, personally I see the Natami as the way forward for the Amiga, as to me it appears it's going to be basically an Amiga that runs 68K code, is fully backward compatible but will run at much faster speeds and can use modern peripherals more easily. This seems to me to be closer to a real Amiga than using MorphOS or Aros running on a processor that is totally alien to the Amiga. I suppose though this will all depend upon the Natami actually making it to production or is it time to truly consider Aros or MorphOS or dare I say it move to pastures new.

Don't get me wrong, I have quite an interest now in Aros & MorphOS and am not putting them down in any way. It just seems to me looking at what I have learned so far about the aforementioned that the Natami would be the best way forward for the Amiga in my humble opinion.

Just wondering now where does everyone else stand with their views on the future of the Amiga and why you truly believe that your personal choice would be the right path for the Amiga to take...

[4pLaY]

Enjoy what you have and ignore all the BS? i mean, why care what lots of weirdos write on forums online? That said, if Natami is your choice, last i heard they are going to use AROS as well...

[bloodline]

Damn it!!! Where did I put my AROS flag!!!

Seriously, for me it's AROS... Both on 68k machines (real or clones-MiniMig, replay etc) for nostalgia... and x86/ARM to get a taste of what it could have been if not for Commodore.

[Karlos]

You'll never get any two former Amiga enthusiasts to agree on what made the Amiga an Amiga, only that the nebulous whole made it what it is.

The truth of the matter is, if it waddles and quacks like a duck then it might as well be a duck. OS1.x-3.x, MOS, OS4, AROS. As for the hardware it's even more vague.

In the end, all that matters is, does it do what you want?

[bloodline]

Actually Franko is pretty lucky to have missed the holy wars...

[Franko]

Originally Posted by bloodline

Actually Franko is pretty lucky to have missed the holy wars...

Actually I've read through quite a bit of them, reckon if I'd been around here at the time I would have ended up with a lifetime ban...

I agree with what has been said so far but I'm really interested to hear peoples opinions on where they think the Amiga's future should lye & why...

[Heiroglyph]

I agree with bloodline, AROS is the key. We all should have focused on this over a decade ago.

It not only gives us a path forward that is controlled by the community, it also allows us to legally go back for nostalgia as well.

It just takes manpower and time.

[bloodline]

Originally Posted by Franko

Actually I've read through quite a bit of them, reckon if I'd been around here at the time I would have ended up with a lifetime ban...

I agree with what has been said so far but I'm really interested to hear peoples opinions on where they think the Amiga's future should lye & why...

An interesting question is where your loyalties would have fallen? My initial sympathies fell behind PowerUp as I felt it was a cleaner expansion... This probably would have pushed me towards MOS had I not found AROS in 1999... And more importantly Michal Shlutz's x86 boot floppy...

[adz]

Originally Posted by bloodline

Actually Franko is pretty lucky to have missed the holy wars...

Many a troll perished...

[Franko]

@ dammy

From your first post here it came across to me that all you had used the Amiga for was playing games, nice to hear that you used it for something a bit more worthwhile like your BBS. Myself and my friends had already grown tired of just using a computer to just play games (coming from the era of the VIC 20 & C64) by the time I got my first A1000 at the start of 86. By the end of 87 I had two A500 and a couple of Star dot matrix printers and was running my own DTP/Design business from home.

Although I bought almost every game ever released for the Amiga, in this neck of the woods we did play them but most of our time was spent cracking them, creating demo's, writing mods, programming and creating VHS music/gfx videos using the likes of Digi-View & Digi-Paint. The actual playing of games was never very big around these parts. I do agree that probably for most users games were the number 1 purpose for buying an Amiga but the circles I moved in and probably because of the age range we belonged to we had kinda outgrown games and were more interested in seeing just what we could push the Amiga to do.

Strangly enough the only console I've ever owned is the SNES and it's the only thing I really still use these days for playing games. My Amiga collection very rarely gets used for games at all anymore as I still prefer to tinker and program on them more than anything thing else...

[bloodline]

Originally Posted by adz

Many a troll perished...

Many a troll was born also...

[vidarh]

Originally Posted by bloodline

Damn it!!! Where did I put my AROS flag!!!

Seriously, for me it's AROS... Both on 68k machines (real or clones-MiniMig, replay etc) for nostalgia... and x86/ARM to get a taste of what it could have been if not for Commodore.

Same here. I want both a Replay and a Natami, though the Replay looks like it'll be most suitable under the TV where my Minimig lives, while the Natami might actually get powerful enough to get more "serious" use, and I'll keep running AROS on one of my X86 boxes too, though likely hosted or in a VM for now...

I still want an X1000 too, though, and I'll keep AmigaOS4 on that because I want to play with that too... This is an expensive hobby

My goal is to get to the stage where I return to spending a decent percentage of my time using one or more Amiga-like OS's with as many as possible of the amenities I expect from using mostly Linux for the last 12 years.

[Iggy]

Originally Posted by vidarh

Same here. I want both a Replay and a Natami, though the Replay looks like it'll be most suitable under the TV where my Minimig lives, while the Natami might actually get powerful enough to get more "serious" use, and I'll keep running AROS on one of my X86 boxes too, though likely hosted or in a VM for now...

I still want an X1000 too, though, and I'll keep AmigaOS4 on that because I want to play with that too... This is an expensive hobby

My goal is to get to the stage where I return to spending a decent percentage of my time using one or more Amiga-like OS's with as many as possible of the amenities I expect from using mostly Linux for the last 12 years.

This isn't that expensive a hobby for me or Golem. And when you finally get your X1000, I'll probably have a G5 Mac with a X850 XT video card that will outperform it.
The Natami looks like a neat system as does the minimig w/ AGA, but these aren't realistic systems for everyday use.

As I said before, you keep blowing your money on old hardware or re-creations of old hardware. I'm getting more use out of what I've got and its gets better on a regular basis.

[vidarh]

Originally Posted by Iggy

This isn't that expensive a hobby for me or Golem. And when you finally get your X1000, I'll probably have a G5 Mac with a X850 XT video card that will outperform it.

When maximum performance matters to me, I have my Linux box which can easily crush any box you can MorphOS on while running several instances of AROS and UAE hosted side by side, as well as assorted other VM's if I so want.

Old PowerPC based Mac's simply have no appeal to me, regardless which OS they run. We recently threw a fully working one away at work because nobody could be bothered taking it home.

The Natami looks like a neat system as does the minimig w/ AGA, but these aren't realistic systems for everyday use.

As I said before, you keep blowing your money on old hardware or re-creations of old hardware. I'm getting more use out of what I've got and its gets better on a regular basis.

MorphOS on a G5 wouldn't be a realistic system for everyday use for me either. I don't have any animosity towards MorphOS but it just doesn't interest me - AROS appeals to me because it's open source, and AmigaOS4/X1000 appeals to me because it's new hardware specifically designed for AmigaOS. Classic AmigaOS appeals to me because, well, it's M68k and the classic chipset or derivations of it that I know and love. MorphOS has none of those.

If MorphOS does it for you, then good for you, but to me it doesn't matter at all if it's more "cost effective". Cost effective is what my Linux box is for.

I'm not "blowing my money" on anything. I'm spending money on things I enjoy to tinker with. As I said: It's a hobby.

[Buzzfuzz]

Future wise I love Natami

That is because it will be a full Amiga compatible and what we do most, so playing games on them.

But at current I enjoy Classic WB 3.1 with WHDLoad and that is what matters.
Office/work stuff belong on my PC, Amiga = for fun.