Wednesday 2 February 2011

4000 YouTube Subscribers Q&A Special

4000 YouTube Subscribers Q&A Special

A couple of weeks ago I invited people to ask questions for my 4000 subscriber milestone video.
Here are the answers :)



A few days after posting this video, I received a very interesting message from rednight2476, in response to certain things I'd spoken about.

After asking his permission, I'm pasting his message in here, as it's well worth reading.


"If the sites you look at primarily from the UK and Europe, Amigas are everywhere, however if you look at mostly American sites they are very rare. This is mostly because the Amiga was never popular in the US, most people that had computers in the 80s either had a C64, or Apple II, with a few TRS-80s, then moved to clone PCs or Macs. Everyone in that crowd was aware of the Amiga, but with Commodores stupid dealer programme they simply where not available for purchase in most places.

For example, I went to high school in Austin Texas which was, and still is, a huge tech city. In Austin in 1989 there was exactly one official Amiga dealer, they where a primarily a video production supplier, and did not generally do retail sales. I think there was a whole three official Amiga dealers in the whole state. The only people that had Amigas in the US where people that really really wanted one. A PC on the hand, there where five stores in a residential neighbourhood that sold IBM AT clones. If you wanted a Mac you had to go into the city, but there was still several places that carried them.

If you where an Amiga user in the US, and you wanted a Amiga magazine, they where almost entirely imported from the UK. There was one US Amiga magazine, that had no cover disk, and really only covered software and products that would be of interest to TV producers. Most Amiga software you had to mail order form the UK, or Europe, other than Video Toaster stuff, and DPaint. With that being the case, thats why you see so many 'how to convert NTSC A500 to PAL' in places like Aminet etc.

On the X1000, PPC boards, the Amiga clones, retro gaming, and DRM

When it comes to X1000, and other PPC stuff, I completely agree with you. They are valiant effort, and I commend the people doing them. However these machines will never be bought by anyone other than die hard Amiga junkies(I may even be one). They really are just specialised PCs.

On the new clones that are 68k and have the Amiga custom chipset, I see a lot of potential in these machines. I don't know if your aware of this or not, but the problems with DRM, and NDAs, and other thou shalt not use your hardware in ways not approved of by a corporation, also exist throughout the PC hardware. This is especially true of graphics and sound boards, which is the same problem the Linux guys have with getting drivers from several cards. When the Natami is released it will also be the only 3D graphics processor that can be programmed at a hardware level by a home user on the market.

People absolutely are getting sick of being told by corporations what they can and cannot do with stuff they supposedly own. With the work just started to open up the possibility of small run chip fab, all the home brew systems being worked on with FPGAs can reasonably become high speed ASIC. Moreover with the web returning to being standards based with HTML 5, and not at the whim of who Adobe ports flash too, these system have a real chance. Wouldn't you love to have an 2GHz 68060 A1200 with a 3D accelerator, modern display output, a browser that works with youtube, a real programmers manual, and the promise that you can do whatever you want to with it; I know I sure would.

I am really pleased that the return of real computers at home, is once again becoming a reality. It doesn't matter how matter how fast a PC runs, if you are not allowed to programme it, it is not a real computer."

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