At the end
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At the end
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In the last weeks it became silent about the various announcements of the G3/G4 PowerPC boards for the current Amiga models. Someone could think, the projects developped to pies in the sky. In deed, it was strange, that after the pioneer Escena announced it four other companies, namely Phase 5, Metabox, Titan Computer (resp. ACT) and GVP-M, also announced their products.
Did the managers of these companies overrated the possibilities to realise such boards? But the development of One-Processor-PPC-boards (which have been available also for Macintosh computers) should be nothing but "kid's play", but at least not that problematically as the dual-processor-boards by phase 5. There should also be no problem with the operating software, if you believe Haage & Partner. According to that company the 68k emulation has been ready for months and hasn't been shipped yet, because it wouldn't make sense without a PowerPC-Only board.
On the other hand it could be possible, that you don't hear anything new, because the companies are busy developping these products. But this wouldn't be logical with Phase 5, because this company wanted to begin the development after 1,000 advanced bookings have been made. But there hasn't been a confirmation that this goal has been reached and that no one has been asked to pay the price to Phase 5. So it has to be expected, that the necessary number of advanced bookings hasn't been reached (, yet), what wouldn't make someone curious if you consider the little size of the Amiga market and the high prices of the products.
Be that as it may: If the various manufacturers won't soon make statements, this wouldn't be impolite to the Amiga users, but would corroborate the opinion, mentioned in the beginning of the article. But at least Metabox announced to ship the 'AmiJoe' boards for the beginning of the third quarter in 1999 - so it's within these weeks. If this will be the case- we will see...
See you next month,
yours
Carsten Schroeder
