No Commodore but real USA
Commodores Amiga?
Sven Harvey Micromart UK takes a look at new CommodoreUSA Amiga Mini
The new Commodore in the USA is now the only Commodore after its taken control over the brand.
It`s also licenced Amiga brand from Amiga Inc., and it has been working on uniting the brands for quite a while.
The product that was to be the first „Commodore Amiga“ since 1994 has gone true lot of changes since the agreement was reached between the two companies, while Hyperion Entertaiment quite rightly challenged the agreement following the settlement that awarded it an exclusive perpetual worldwide right to the brand, at least in some form.
Commodore had planned on doing new Amiga 1000, 2000, 3000 and so on, but the first product to break cover and become available to order is in a 7,5 x 7,5″ mini-ITX case.
The Commodore Amiga Mini will be available in silver or black and is distinctive in that it features a molded-in Commodore „chickenhead“ logo on the top of the casing, while and embossed Amiga logo (in the original form) adorns the front of the casing along with the silver Commodore Amiga case badge very much in the traditional style.
There are few confusion on the Commodore website regarding the specifications. In one place it seems to suggests 16GB RAM comes as standard whereas elsewhere it sais 4GB. Filtering the pages it seems the standard specification was originally going to be what is now the highest end, but reaction to the pricing has resulting in lower specs being available.
The motherboard is of mini-ITX form factor and comes with 1GB (DDR3) nVIDIA GT430 GPU board as standard. From there you can choose processor, either a dual core i3-2130 at 3,4Ghz, quad core i5-2500K, or the quad core i7-2600K. Memory can be configured as 4,8 or 16GB, while blue ray slot loading optical drive (with DVD R/RW) comes as standard. A 1TB hard disk is the default option, while 2 SSD options are available.
The machines comes with CommodoreOS Vision – a customized Linux distribution based on MINT and Debian with bunch of pre-installed software.
Sounds all very PC doesn`t it? There is a reason for that. This is no more an Amiga then HP laptop from TESCO. The name is on it, but no Amiga-related technology resides within the hardware nor the software. Amiga Forever isn`t even bundled, thou it is suggestion on Commodores site that machine can run 16-bit and 32-bit Amiga software. The question is how because without Amiga Forever package, it cannot legally include the Amiga kickstart ROM code …
With pricing ranging from USD 1 500 up to nearly 3 000$ including 600GB SSD option, its a good job. The casing is available as barebones (thou this included the blue-rays sloat loading drive) at 345 USD.
The question is, without AmigaOS, should it have the name at all?
Find out more at http://www.commodoreusa.net
AmigaOne X1000
Following the complete sell out of the AmigaOne X1000 first contact systems, A-EON has commissioned further run of initial systems, so if you are happy to spend the money and get sonething really different running the AmigaOS 4.1 (and soon 4.2) you might want to keep an eye on www.amigakit.leamancomputing.com/x1000/
Sven Harvey has been our Amiga specialist for over 12 years, drawing on his vast computing knowledge which is itself the result of 21 years of retailing computer and video games.
A great AW.net moderator Eliyahu has made this simple and nice guide
a few months ago we had another new-to-OS4 user ask the same questions. i responded in this thread, but i’ll repeat it here, too:
there is a tremendous amount of software that works well on amiga NG machines, both classic software from the 68K days as well as more modern applications. obviously exploring os4depot and aminet should be your first stops, but here are some of the tools i use on my SAM on a regular basis:
* astronomy: i’m a bit of a ‘backyard astronomer’ as it were so my absolute favorite amiga application is easily the superb digital universefrom bill eaves. it is commercially available, but very reasonably priced, and unlike astronomy programs on other platforms, this one gets you the information you need for observation quickly, easily, and without flim-flam. it is also hugely scriptable via REXX and is nice for demonstrations i sometimes do for neighborhood schoolchildren. a version of celestia, an open-source program from the GNU/linux world, is also available although requires miniGL — so you may have issues running it on your X1000 before the release of OS4.2.
* audio: coupled with a nice audio card, you’d be surprised what you can do with a modern amiga. previously commercial, audio evolution— a multi-track audio editing suite — is now available for free. additionally you’ll also want to check out HD-REC if you’re into MIDI. you’ll also want to try soundFX 4.3 on your system as well; although a classic application it works beautifully on my SAM. of course if you want to build up your MP3 collection, you’ll want ADripper to rip your CDs, tunenet or amigaamp3 to play them, and amipodder if you’re into podcasts. amuse is also good if you need a last.fm client. lastly you’ll want to play MODs — this is an amiga, after all — so check outmilkytracker, or hivelytracker, or schism, or ….
* emulation: there are emulators available for just about every classic computing or console platform you can imagine. among the ones i use are amiNES (for the original NES console), basilisk2 (for the classic Macintosh), DOSbox (for old DOS programs), E-UAE (for amiga games that ‘pound’ the custom chipset), hatari (for atari ST programs), KEGS (for apple IIgs emulation), VICE (for C64 and C128 games), and warpSNES (for the SNES). you’ll also find emulators for spectrum systems, amstrads, the original playstation, neogeo arcade games, and many others.
* graphics: most of the graphics tools i use from the classic days. among them are imageFX, photogenics, and fxpaint — which are available commercially — and tvpaint, personal paint, and perfect paint — which are freely available. probably the most used on my SAM is the photoshop-like arteffect from alinea, available for e15 including a printed manual. there’s also terrific 3D applications including the modern blender, the still-commercially available aladdin 4D, and the freely available lightwave 3D. if you want to work with vector graphics, check out amifig or the classic drawstudio v2.0, although finding the latter isn’t easy. there are many available graphics viewers out there for browsing your photo collection: amiphoto from alinea is my personal favorite, although warpview is excellent as well. some folks like loview.
* internet: this has been touched on by previous posters. among the tools to check out are, for IRC, amIRC for OS4 and wookiechat. for instant messaging you can use jabberwocky for google talk (and other services using a jabber backbone) and sabreMSN (for windows live messaging). folks have touched on browsers well enough: i find netsurf and MUIOWB to be my personal favorites. there is a native version of newscoaster for USENET newsgroups, a twitter client called amitwitter, and a telnet/SSH client called amtelnet (although for connecting to most systems using SSHv2, the openSSH client on os4depot is a better bet). remote access to your other systems can be done via either RDP or VNC with the remote desktop client and twinVNC respectively. there are several bittorrent clients — such asctorrent and transmission — but i’ve never been successful with either. lastly you’ll want to check out xnet-rss for RSS streams and subscriptions, and either YAM or simplemail for email.
* productivity: this is an area of relative weakness for our platform, most of the office tools for amiga NG very old indeed. that said there are some pearls, such as MUIbase as a database system, pagestream for page layout, and the amicygnix environment which brings tools like abiword and gnumeric to the amiga. on the classic side you might be interested in amigawriter from alinea (still sold today) or wordworth 7 for word processing. some folks swear by finalwriter 97, but that’s rather tough to find a copy. spreadsheets are rather old: some still use turbocalc 5, although i much prefer staram plan which is available freely.
* video: there are two varients of mplayer, the older reaction-based version and the more recent MUI-based port from morphOS. i’ve had much better performance with the reaction version, and coupled with mplayer-GUI, i quite like it. i’ve also purchased DVplayer and recommend it wholeheartedly. if you need to convert between formats ffmpeg and its accompanying GUI utility is rather useful and full video editing is possible in blender.
this post is getting way too long, so i’ll skip games and utilities for some other time. enjoy your new amiga NG!
Thanks Eliyahu and dis one from DJ Rikki and great Hollywood designer
Our dear C=USA felt that, even Commodore-Amiga „support forum“ was moderated by Linnar and BigAussie, they need MORE CONTROL (even their C-A forum was free of any Amiga related topics such as AROS, MorphOS or AmigaOS)
http://www.commodore-amiga.org/en/forum/27-commodore-usa/15947-new-official-cusa-forum#15948
Please visit the new official Commodore USA forum. This site went online on Sunday, July 29th, 2012, and was created to replace the commodore-amiga.org forum, which was running extremely slow and starting to show it’s age. As you may know, the commodore-amiga.org domain is owned by Commodore USA, LLC, but the actual forum itself is owned and managed by terminals, who has done an outstanding job of creating the first forum to feature and showcase the CUSA product line. Since we are not the actual owners of the forum, it placed restrictions on our ability to fully monitor and implement corporate policy and other features that will now become integrated into this official Commodore USA forum, forums.commodore.netThis forum is officially supported by the CUSA staff, and is a great place to talk about and get support for your CUSA products, as well as engage in general Commodore and Amiga chat. The staff of Commodore USA, LLC will no longer be participating on commodore-amiga.org, and will be available to answer all your questions and concerns, as well as engage all our new members on our official site: forums.commodore.net.Please take the time to read our TOS and FAQ. Please understand that this is our official corporate forum, and as such it’s primary purpose is to promote and support our products, customers, potential future customers and those that have an interest in our line of retro and innovative contemporary products.We invite you to create an account and join us in the discussions!
AmigaOS 4 is fully recompiled AmigaOS from Motorola 68k code to PowerPC. Any software that is system friendly and can open a Workbench windows works out of box or with minor setting tweaks.
Thanks to Petunia, 68k JIT, a core AmigaOS 4 component in Kickstart
old 68k software works unemulated blazingly fast.
So recently, an old Amiga raytrace veteran Mike Brantley has demonstrated Lightwave working on OS4
Also, and old veteran, Image FX simply works
True step forward – AmigaOS 4
Thanks Mike!
1) Fake Commodore Amiga domain owned by CommodoreUSA
Nothing to do with real Amigas, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS with extreme censorship
Every criticism or anything Amiga related get deleted and users get banned for it
Other faked Amiga resources owned by CUSA
All under EXTREME censorship!
2) DiscreetFX hosts Barron interview where everything Amiga is sipitted on, all the brave ideas of innovation
3) AmigaWorld.net has Amiga Inc discussions in basement and tolerates their promo
4) CommodoreUSA Wiki page we fight for less propaganda (also: Talk page, COS page)
5) Amiga4be fake Amigan pages You Tube and Blog
6) Example of CUSA threating people that expose the truth
7) List of C=USA promoters that rarely do help AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS and yet claiming to be Amigans
8) Barry Tweets
As opposed to Real Amiga resources
On the Edge: Spectacular rise and fall of C=USA 