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Amiga Are No April Fools

© John Chandler

Okay, it's 10am UK time on the Sunday after Amiga's announcement at Amiga2K and I've just finished reading all the stuff out there filtering past me from the first day. I can see some people thinking they've just been the victims of an April fool, but I'm pleased to say Amiga haven't projected themselves as fools. If you were expecting spanking brand new machines running a fully tested and ready version of Amie, the new Amiga OS based upon Tao Elate/Intent, then you really weren't thinking straight were you? Amiga made no pretences about revealing anything but a developer box, and we sort of knew it would be based upon readily available x86 PC hardware and running something which was first steps to a production Amie.

Hardware-wise, the Amiga developer system may not seem cutting edge in some places. The idea was to produce a box which was cheap to build and sell, yet powerful enough to be useful. One side-effect of not producing a top-of-the-range system is that people will be developing code that runs well on this base platform, and thus code that will fly when run on more recent hardware. So what does it feature?

• AMD K6-2 @ 500 MHz
• 64 MB RAM
• nVidia GeForce 256

Not cutting edge, but no slouch either, and with the advantage of being very cheap to produce - making it a tempting choice for a broad range of developers. Due to Tao's virtual processor technology, the choice of development hardware is irrelevant - software will run without recompilation on any supported architecture, from x86 to PowerPC, MIPS to SH4, and more. So then, why not something like IBM's PowerPC Open Platform (POP), my own personal favourite? Simple, go out and find a source of POP motherboards... oh, that's right, you can't. Ditto for MIPS, SH4, or whatever else Elate supports.

I admit at this point, I was expecting the system to be available in two flavours: a native Elate-based Amie with the developer's box and a hosted version available for assorted other OSs. In actual fact, what you will get is just a developer's box version of Amie, hosted on Red Hat Linux. One reason for this is that by having Amie hosted, you can show off the fast performance even when running on another OS. Double that up with the hardware, and you'd be forgiven for thinking Amiga really are just trying to