Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:
Yes, and it seems this attempt even resulted in an AT press release mentioning a co-operation:
"Thanks to a close co-operation between Amiga Technologies and Phase V, a German turbo board manufacturer, a full range of Power PC boards will also be available for the A1200, A3000 and A4000 series."
http://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1995/at951111.html
> there were definite plans to build [...] a PowerPC port.
Considering AT in 1995 announced a Power Amiga for 1997 this only seems logical.
Petro said all kinds of things that weren't true. They were talking PowerPC then, but doing absolutely nothing about it... maybe that was Petro's cozying up to Phase V to have something to sell.
But in fact, actual PPC development didn't really start until December of 1995, when Stefan Domeyer was in charge and brought Andy Finkel and I into the company in order to actually deliver on this. Which was happening, at least until Escom managed to kill themselves in the PC market.
They had made some accomplishments before that -- the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000T were back in production, and they had hired an outside firm to make the "Walker"... some good ideas in there, some pretty nutso ones as well, but it was a real project in development before we came in -- we where just there for PowerPC. And 1997 wasn't necessarily a real date, either, but it did depend on just how well they financed the software port.
A big part of Andy's plan for PowerPC AmigaOS was a complete Hardware Abstraction Layer. So Phase V could have built their own HAL and run AT's AmigaOS on their hardware. Pretty much any PPC should have been supportable.
Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:
> MorphOS was fragmenting an already weak community by offering an Amiga clone.
As I see it, MorphOS was offering the only serious (AROS, albeit in existence, wasn't to be considered serious back then) way forward in terms of "AmigaOS" as we knew it. As you said yourself, Amiga Inc. tossed AmigaOS out for Tao's Intent/Elate.
I dunno... it was pretty close. The Gateway version of Amiga, Inc. ran from 1997 until sometime in 1999. Bill and fleecy founded their version of Amiga, Inc. that same year, but AmigaDE wasn't announced until sometime in 2000. MorphOS was started in 1999, maybe earlier... a few years before the Amiga, Inc. debacle.
By 1998, the PowerPC was already a fundamentally dead-for-desktop processor, since Apple canned the Mac Clones in August of 1997, so the best you were going to do is get Apple's sloppy seconds. Maybe MorphOS made a little better approach out of this by supporting used Macs, but really, neither was a "way forward", except for hobbyists. "Runs on old Macs" is hardly a business model, or a way to bring in a significant number of new users. That was my definition of "way forward".
And not that AROS does that either. And AROS isn't finished. But it's also something that's not going to die just because some company gets tired of it. And, much like the GNU project did for Linux, AROS has certainly helped out MorphOS, eh?
I don't currently have a problem with either one. I have no personal use for a PPC computer, but if you're happy with an old Mac running MorphOS, more power to ya. At least it's not this "X1000" nonsense, which to me anyway looks like yet another false promise to the Amiga fans.
