At the end

Can the Amiga hardware market be saved?

Regarding the software for the current Amigas the situation is not the best - in various application areas there are still big holes, which will most likely never be filled again. Best example is the area of the text processing software. Final Writer as well as Wordworth were cancelled some time ago and there is just an announcement for a next release of the software AmigaWriter - but this announcement has been there for a long time.

But at least there is software released at all. But the hardware market is worse. What has been put on the Amiga market within the last months except the interface cards of various manufacturers? I have idea, if you want a quick result. The situation would be better, if there were products available, which were put on market - but they are not. A good example might be DCE, who bought the licences for producing Phase 5 products. But the extensions are currently not available.

But announcements are present like nothing else. Beginning with the 3D-add-on of Village Tronic for the graphics board Picasso IV, via the G3/G4 PowerPC extensions of various manufacturers (and it is very likely, that there will be no Phase 5 boards) to the Amiga compatible resp. Amiga like computer systems nearly any hardware area is present. But the problem is: Nothing is coming.

Well, at least the PowerPC-G3 series of Metabox gives a lifesign from time to time, so we can expect a release - whenever. The situation seems to be similar with Village Tronics 3D-Add-on. At least the company admits, that ParaGlide does not have the highest priority, which makes a soon release uncertain. In my opinion this is the same with the USB-extension, announced by TigerTronics - due to one logical reason: If the development of such a hard- and software combination was that easy, there were products already available for the Amiga. Because USB is not new, but popular.

Conclusion: Even with some bright spot on the horizon the current bad situation of the Amiga hardware market cannot be ignored. And it is very unlikely, that there will be a great change for better, but in the contrary. That what is missing is a large number of users, who buy those products. But to raise their number a compurter, which is more up-to-date is required.

See you next month,

yours

Carsten Schröder