Hi all,
I hope you have already read the Intro which summs a bit the purpose of this work.
I think you know the state our computer is now. When I'm writing this, still none has finally managed to purchase the reamins of the Amiga technology after the death of ESCOM.
But what surprises me more is this fact that the name Amiga is dangerous in the financial and technology world. It may be cursed, seen all the damages it has done since it was born. Or maybe just unlucky.

But what does matter is the fact that the Amiga technology, from the hardware to the operating system is now 5 years old with respect to the last technology. Even though the ideas and the ways the Amiga has been developed has made it (her?) years ahead of all the others, now the other ones can enjoy the fruits of the last years of development on fields like graphics card , sound card, new I/O interfaces, faster memory, processor and software.

5 years old technology is very old, expecially today which has suddenly seen the birth of new ideas and possibilities like the global interconnection (Intenet) and Java. And we have still not a frame compatible browser, nor a Java compiler or even a hardware which can handle the new 33.6K modems at full speed but on the fastest and most expensive machines. I'm just wondering what I have to do if I buy the new Epson Stylus 600... where and when will be the driver available?

These are, in my opinion, the immediate problems we have to face everyday. The fact that my brother can turn on his Pentium and play MechWarrior2 exploiting DirectX 3 or F1GP2 while we have still slow and ugly Doom clones. The fact that if I want to make a broshure there's no software on the Amiga able to reorder the facing pages which are printed on the same sheet. The fact that there's not a useable 3D CAD and the existing ones are Autocad incompatible.

What I'm tring to point out is the fact that we lack professional software, including really good up to date games (I'm quite bored playing Civilization or DuneII). And those who once produced masterpieces like LightWave, Scala or PageStream2 have now abandoned the ship or have multiplied their efforts trying to port their software to other platforms leaving the Amiga market in a secondary (or tertiary) place in their duties. It's not a mystery that we had to wait more than 2 years for the last version of PageStream (3.2) which is still full of bugs, while the same program is going to be ported to the PC compatibles (I don't know with which quality and possibilities against monsters like XQuarkExpress, PageMaker or Corel Ventura).

Not everything is so dark. We now have the biggest archive of PD available software (Aminet) which has passed the OS/2 archive in size and number of files; it's a huge place where to find small programs which can even cost nothing useful for our everyday needs. And seen how our OS is highly customizable, we can find all sort of programs able to enhance its capabilities to a cartain amount.

But still all this is something created to try to fill the gap between the power of our computer with respect to other system, PC compatibles first.

What we really need is a complete update of our machine, starting from the improvement of custom chips (some of them are now 12 years old!!), the CPU (68060@50MHz are still to slow for certain professional works), the bus, the expandibility (which was almost ignored before), the chance to use cheap hardware thought for the PC compatibles together with more poweful and expensive hardware dedicated only to our computer (I can't understand why Amiga HD floppies cost 5 times more that PC compatibles ones even though they have to be (slightly) modified or why there's not a cheap 16bit sound card as for PC).

Forgotten the idea that some "angel" coming from the Heaven could made the Amiga raise from its ashes, new companies have started on their own the projecting of new machines, some of which follow the original Amiga idea of "custom is better", while other companies have just chosen for the more profitable (and less dangerous) way of cloning already existing systems like PowerMachintosh. The common things on which almost everyone has agreed is the fact that the new Amiga, whichever will be its name, aspect or basic architecture will use the PowerPC processor as its "brain".

PowerPC processors, for those who do not know, constitute a very good and powerful family of RISC CPUs, capable to compete with the most modern CPUs in terms of speed and prices and have the advantage that their speed is continously increased (in MHz). Till now their maximum speed has been brought to 240MHz, but 300 and 500 MHz PPC versions have been announced for the end of this year. You can get much more informations directly from Motorola WWW site at www.mot.com and looking for the semiconductor sector of the company.

I just hope we'll finish having a better machine in terms of hardware so that the quality of software can be raised to a level that is not thinkable on PC compatibles (especially now that the market is monopolized by Microsoft and their crap products). Only this will allow our machine to spread in all fields where high quality is more important than using something compatible with the rest of the world.