L A S T M A N S T A N D I N G ! ! !  by: WiseGuy & Rustybrain  The name of this article made you wonder, didn't it? No - we're not writing about a movie or anything like that. We're dealing with a subject far more interesting to most of you: The current Amiga situation. "The Amiga is dead, the scene is dying. No discussion." We've heard it many times. Not only is the Amiga scene breathing, which is the most common sign of being alive, but there's lots of stuff happening and our favorite platform is actually getting a lot of software support once again. The Amiga scene has proved to be strong, it has shown that although it can be halted and even shrunk, it's pretty much impossible to stop all of us. Most of those who run around yelling about the scene being dead are (surprise!) often ex-Amigans. Perhaps they simply miss the Amiga scene, but do not want to admit it? Maybe they enjoy whining, or maybe they don't really know better and belive there's no Amiga development going on any more and that all demo parties consists of gamers and MP3'ers only? Unfortunately, there's a lot of "they"'s out there, telling us why we should abandon the 'miggy and everything else we love so dearly. Okay, so the last few years haven't been that good for the Amiga community,  but at least it's not because of the platform being outdated. The main reasons are the Commodore/Escom screw-ups, bad luck and stiff competition. It's a surprise that there's any activity surrounding this platform that haven't seen any major official design changes since 1992. There might be less users, but those still left are at least actively using their computers, some even developing decent software. Today, it's us who make the Amiga alive - not Commodore, Gateway or any other major company. In the easter, two major parties related to the Amiga scene was held. "The Gathering" up here in Norway, and "Mekka-Symposium" in Germany. There were some really nice releases, the winner in the amiga demo competition at The Gathering was a real treat! I (Wiseguy) watched it three times in a row. When I read the results list from Mekka-Symposium I was quite surprised to see many C64 releases. Those who state that the Amiga is dead, should really take a closer look at the c64 scene. I know the C64 scene is not that HUGE as it once was. It was there it all started, the birth cradle of the scene as we know it today. Would you find an active scene on almost twenty year old PC's? No, didn't think so either. Something to think about the next time you say the Amiga will disappear before christmas. A reason why there is less Amigan's attending these huge parties now days is perhaps that they have become "TO BIG" too commercial, and last but not least, attracted the wrong kind of crowd! With that I mean all those who show up just to link up, copy mp3's, play quake and have a ball on the IRC. It could perhaps remind us about the earliest amiga "underground" parties. There the main thing was  to load x-copy, and copy as much as you could. Luckily, we developed from there, we are humans after all. With the Windows generation you could start to wonder. Evil Bill Gates, the brain washer! There are good times ahead for the amiga. "Yeah right!" some might say, but we truely belive there is. I'm not talking about Phase 5's A\Box, nor the Pre/box. Not until I see some hard facts. A PowerPC based system, utilizing standard third party chips and boards is the way forward. There is no way Amiga, Inc. should even hope to compete with the makers of todays graphics and soundhardware. No way. Virtually everyone in the industry agree about it. A custom chipset would be out of date before it entered the market, and the money spent on developement would probably result in higher prices. We need an ported AmigaOS. Though the current developements, such as the Boxer and PowerUp boards are impressive products, Amiga International will need an PowerPC native version of AmigaOS to compete with other platforms. Features like retargable graphics and audio, virtual memory, a new iconsystem and a more pleasing visual design are being incorporated into the AmigaOS at this very moment, and hopefully we'll see the results of it before the end of 1998. The port will take longer, but hopefully it'll be worth the wait. When AGA and 68k is part of the past, an £500 Amiga featuring the latest in 2D/3D technology, the crispest 16 bit sound on the market and a PowerPC prosessor running at several hundred megahertz will be possible. The technology is already there, and it's improving all the time. An 1GHz PowerPC is already planned, PCI and AGP boards are there to be used. Intel  just released a new chip that beats Voodoo at 3D and Permidia 2 at 2D speed. Price? 28$. Feel free to compare its technical specs to whatever Phase 5 have up their sleeves, and you'll see there's really no question no more. I'm not saying the Amiga should use Intel chips though - there's a lot of hot competitors out there. The operating system, the cult status and anti-Microsoft-ness could be the Amigas edge - the reasons why people would buy such an new system to replace their PC or as their first computer. When the OS is ported to the PowerPC, it will most likely have been recoded in portable code, so even /if/ the PowerPC platform fails an Intel version is still a possibility. "Ok, but this is all nice thinking and we won't see a ported OS before 1999. We need something now!" We can't get everything, but I'd say I'm pretty happy with what the current clone vendors are coming up with. Especially Index Information's efforts seem to give impressive results. Their new mother board, the Boxer, is basicly the A4000 mother board improved in every possible aspect, price included. Though £479 for a mother board, excluding prosessor, might not sound too well at first, it's really a pretty hot deal. New serial and parallell ports, a speedy disk drive controller that supports those cheap PC floppy drives, EIDE, fits in a standard AT case, technology to support the PowerPC on the main board, space for 2GB of RAM, doesn't need a expensive CPU-board to house the 040/060 - I could go on forever. Hell, even the current graphics/sound chipset seems like it'll be  on a seperate board, which enables the user to replace it when all software supports RTG/RTA and an new OS with these features are out. Future proof, and you'll save in the end by getting one. It's nothing like ATs Walker, it's a lot more. Everyone can buy one, being an end user or large corporation doesn't matter. Amiga retailer Anti Gravity decided to make their own, complete computer setup based on this motherboard. Now the first /and second/ shipments of Boxer mother boards and parts are sold out - in preorders only! DCE in Germany recently started advertising their A5000 and A6000 systems. They made their own hardware design, and it seems it payed off. According to rumours, thousands of systems have been preordered and response has been phenomenal, even though most people are waiting for Index' systems. Probably because it sounds a lot more tempting. Just go on reading... Blittersoft will base their new Amiga compatible Black Box on the Boxer. £999 will get you a complete 060-based Amiga in the most lovely looking tower case ever, together with 32 MB RAM, a 4,4 GB hard drive, 32 speed CDRom and anything else you'll need to get started. The PowerUp boards for Boxer based Amigas will be a lot cheaper than the 1200/4000 ones, easily support the G3-prosessors and still be 100% compatible with other PowerUp software. AGA is a bit improved speed wise on the Boxer, so even if you can't afford a graphics board to fit in its' Zorro slots or in the custom connector for future Phase 5 products such as the BVision, you might just survive without  getting bored while waiting for the screen to refresh. It's likely that the price on Index Information's mother boards will fall dramaticly in price as soon as they have recovered initial developement costs, and together with OS3.5 this might just be what we need to attract some new users while waiting for the next generation Amigas. This new hardware it is probably not the "state of the art" you all longed after. Most software, the OS itself included, will still run on the horribly slow 68060 prosessor (yes - a 060 /is/ horribly slow by todays standards) and I'm sure you could get an equally specced PC for half the price. But it's close to being finished, and it's a viable project at the moment. That's what counts, isn't it? Dreaming about Amiga OS4.0 and millions of new users before the end of 1998 won't do anything. Perhaps we will see other mighty good Amiga clones coming in near future. Several other hardware developers are said to be negotiating with Amiga International to get lisences. Nova Sector Engineering and Quikpak seems to plan something big for the future, Quikpak are even talking about a 300MHz+, laptop Amiga. Wow! None of these developers will make millions overnight, but in the long term supporting in the Amiga and it's strong userbase will pay off. The Amiga have been described as the "computer that never gives up" by PC media. People write of the Amiga and say that it'll be dead tomorrow, all the time. This is no new phenomenon, as most of our older readers know very  well. People have been saying this for years. Remember the "Doom/Quake can't be done on the Amiga comments"? Now they are both available, and thank you very much - they're both better than their PC originals in most aspects. Sure, it's just a couple of games, but games are needed to attract new users. How many of todays top coders bought an C64 or Amiga because they wanted to learn assembly programming? Quite few, I'd guess. We belive top game titles such as Kick off 2, Rainbow Islands and Defender of the Crown - to mention a few - was far more important in getting people to actually get an Amiga home and learn the basics. Still annoyed at the pricing of Amiga hardware? Okay, then go off and buy a PC if it's that important for you to have the latest hardware. Why whine? Have in mind that the PC has a user base that counts millions. Heck, Windows95 alone have sold over 150 million copies according to a certain Mr. Gates of Microsoft. With such a large user base, so much money is put into development of the Intel architechture that even though it's based on an ancient and hard-to-improve-without-losing-compatibility design, powerful computers can be sold at a quite low price. It's simple maths really, with a high number of hardware sold the developers can cut the price substancially and still make a profit. With less hardware sold they have to raise the price to cover the constant expenses - the expenses that remain whatever number of computers you sell. Parts are cheaper when you buy them in bigger quantities. Same way with software. Though Windows 95 might be considered a pile of cack by most developers, there's money in developing for it, and thus  a lot is done to make decent apps anyway. Someone that upgrades their Amiga with a 250 MHz PowerUp board today, won't have to worry about it being obsolete in a few weeks. It's hard to give one reason why this is so, there's several of them. I'm sure a PowerUp board will cost you just as much as a new PC, but at least it'll be usable for several years. The OS won't become as bloated as Windows, never. Non- demanding tasks such as word processing and most Internet software does not require the latest prosessor to run well on the Amiga. All it needs is a bit of updates every now and then, to support new 'standards' and to incorporate a few new features. Amiga coders understand this, obviously very few Windows coders do. When it comes to software, we're still playing catch-up in some fields. It's easy to forget, however, that this is a not an Amiga-only problem. Thor and Deluxe Paint are examples of good Amiga software that's better on the Amiga than on other platforms. The grass isn't always brighter on the other side... If you need Excel, Word or Photoshop, there's always the possibility of running the Mac version through Shapeshifter or Fusion. Even a 030 based Amiga will do for smaller tasks. Try running modern Amiga software through UAE on a 386, mate! ;) The future seems quite bright at the moment. World Of Amiga 98 is soon to be held, and if we are lucky some surprises will take us with storm. For you  game freaks out there, there's a lot coming up. Ok, most new games will require hi-spec Amigas, so not all of you will be happy. The Phoenix staff can wholeheartedly recommend upgrading, though. It's worth it, belive us. If you haven't seen an Amiga with a 060 or PPC and a graphics board in action, please shut up about Pentiums being better and all that. Some software, especially games, require modern hardware to run in 640x480 with 50 FPS +. It's that simple. Sure, one can optimize, but a 030 will never be comparable to a Pentium that's ten times faster, and AGA will never be comparable to the latest 3DFX boards at Quake. If enough of us upgrade to PPC, there's quite a chance that Newtek will write an new Amiga version of Lightwave, supporting this hardware. They already have PowerUp boards, and members of their crew have expressed that they liked the boards and that further Amiga developement is not out of the question. The market is the problem. It's just not safe enough for all big companies. 3D package Imagine will be making an comeback through the powerup.library and the new hardware available, or so Impulse tell us at least, we have been promised the same about PovRay, Reflections and Cinema 4D. An old saying goes like this: "You are your own worst enemy". That is especially true with the current Amiga scene. With a large user base, piracy will not be noticed as well, since there's always someone buying your software anyway. This is not the case with the Amiga, we do not have a large user base left, at least not compared to platforms such as the Mac and Wintel. And we certainly haven't got a large number of users that actually  buy the software they use. Hey, we're am the first to admit that we use programs we haven't paid for. But we both have purchased quite a lot of software too, and try to pay for most of the software we currently use. Somewhere along the line you have to take a stand. I do not mean you have to buy every software package that is released just to support the Amiga. But it's fair enough to pay for what you use. If you're poor, at least try and pay for /some/ of it. The stuff that's still actively developed on the Amiga, or maybe the stuff you use the most. Decide for yourself. If you have problems finding an local software dealer, please contact us rather than use it as an argument to pirate even more of the latest apps/games, and we'll try and help you finding a nice software dealer that carry Amiga software (if you have a net connection, ask in an Amiga newsgroup). Since the downfall of Commodore, and the surge of DOOM many Amiga owners have left for the PC. Those who left first were those who where mainly interested in games, it seems. Those who where involved in the scene, somehow kept on devoted to what they where doing. As time went along we saw sceners that vanished too. We dare to say; not everyone switched platform because they had to, some did because their real life situation changed. Changes that made them leave the scene for more important things such as studies, work, marriage and so on. What should we do to get new users to the Amiga again? To start with, you could show it to your friends. Some of them could be interested in the foul duckling that has now got a cult status among some crowds. :) Seriously, we have to educate (if we can use that word) and  enlighten those who still think the Amiga is a plain A500. We've come by lots of people who are amazed, and have a hard time swallowing that the Amiga is capable of running games such as Myst and Quake. We do not know what the future brings since we do not have a crystal ball, but we certainly hope that the Amiga will once again conquer larger markets and that the recent growth in software developement will keep up. Not even in our wildest imaginations, the Amiga will conquer the world tomorrow, we'd both be happy if its' niche markets grow a bit and if some old Amiga fans move back. One thing should be set straight though: Amiga International or not, we have a lot to do in deciding the Amiga's future. Go out and spread the word - let's get her back to where she belongs! Last note: Since the announcement at WOA'98 concerning the future of the amiga, much of what we wrote in this article about the amiga future became very dim. However the PPC will not vanish over the night, its still a good purchase. Something to fool around with until the new amiga arrives sometime next year.