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1. This Month's Question - we'd like your opinion

In this section every month we will pose a question touching the Amiga or offer a provocative statement (which we will later deny was our opinion in any way, shape or form) for discussion hoping that many of you will come forward with your opinion. Your statements will in each case be published in the following edition. Please send them to aakt@aakt.de

Last month's question was: »What do you think about the announcement by Amiga of marketing an official Amiga emulation for x86-computers?«

Andreas Falkenhahn comments quite sceptically about the project: »I believe that an official Amiga emulator for x86 systems would mean the absolute end of the classic Amiga, as we know and love it, because such an emulator certainly can have the capability to make the classic Amiga look rather old concerning speed and graphics display. This might please many users, but it simply cannot be in any way the definite solution in the interests of the Amiga community, which invested very much money in their hardware. Thus the Amiga will reduce to a Windows addon, it will not exist any more as an independent computer system. Therefore AMIGA must think it over, if with this solution they will not ruin themselves, proceeding from the fact, that AMIGA still is interested in the classic machine, which according to the recent state of affair seems to be obvious. Here as well the Commodore past clearly should be recalled to our minds: Because Commodore, too, had already tried with help of PC boards and similar to make the Amiga fit for x86, instead of marketing it as a completely stand-alone system independent from the, at that time still weak, counterpart. It must not be that AMIGA goes the same way. The Amiga must stay independent, because an x86 operating system always will be put in the shade of Windows.«

The shortest commentary I ever received, comes from Andreas Steup: »Unnecessary.«

Gernod Schomberg in the contrary has a positive view: »It would be a good thing, if it only was pushed through at full power. And the future development of the AmigaOS should not pass by. After all they said, that AmigaOS 5 will natively run among others on x86.

I am a Commodore user of the first hour (PET 2000) and Amiga fan of the second (my first Amiga already was 2000 with OS 1.3), but because I am afraid, that AmigaOS 4.0 will be nothing more than a port of the OS 3.9 to PPC, I don't think, that I will change to AmigaOne. For x86 computers in the area, where the Amiga once had held a leading position, in the meantime there are many programs, which let our computer appear as old as it really is. I'd be excited, if I could live up to see the advantages of both worlds on a single machine. And if I could have the pleasure of a lean operating system, which by support of the Amiga coders could play off all its abilities, then I'd not doubt, that a real competition for Windows might arise from this.«

Another comment, which comes from Krister Skrtic: »To be honest i don't like it. Yes it's good to have a good emulator on pc but then the problems comes when coders start to code programs for the amigaemulator in x86 code which means amiga programs that don't work on amiga, only pc.«

And as addendum to the last question of month (Amiga-Webbrowsers) Krister wrote: »It would be great if all amigabrowsers goes together. Then the time they use for coding is for better performance, new stuff etc. And every coder is good on something merging all the best :) Only one browser is enough. Look on pc with compatibility problems with IE and Netscape.«

And here is the recent Question of the Month:

»How do you evaluate - as well in respect to AMIGA's "Amithlon" - the announcement of Haage & Partner, to market an additional Amiga emulator, this time for the operating system QNX?«

Please send your contributions to aakt@aakt.de.