Here I am taking this opportunity to say I word or two on amiga. I've been silent, just listening to other people. I decided I need to have my word now.
As I see it, Amiga is really dying. It's not dead, but dying, a slow and horrible death. I am observing the market for 10 years now and things are definitely going on the worse side. Yes, one good thing for amiga happens and 2
bad things and we usually forget about the bad ones. Proggrams have improved a
lot and we now have many great programs that have not existed before. But seems
all like an illusion.
Users are abbandoning our machine. One now, one tommorow. There are less and less people who read amiga magazines results of what we see - many magazines ceased to exist, all of them have a lot less circulation figures than before.
Let me just briefely tell you a few of my examples:
Once a king on amiga programs, Scala is now concentrating on PC. In fact, it doesn't help Amiga in any way any more, does not fix bugs etc. The only thing left for it to do (which it will not I guess) is to put Scala in PD. There are
many serious bugs in it (for one, our fonts are almost unusable in Scala 300 and 400) and nobody will fix them. Their PC Scala need even their own OS, which
shows in what state PC is, but we can not use it, can we?
Digita's wordworth was once a pride and joy to use, but more and more it seems
they took almost all the programmers to work on PC versions of their products.
WW 6 was just a small upgrade, nobody has even touched font engine till 3.0 (engine doesn't support not standard adobe fonts), bugs aren't fixed etc. I hope
they don't dissapear from amiga market in whole.
Softwood: I don't know what happened to them, they seem to work on Final Writer
still, but since I live in Europe, I have no real feedback. Their WWW page is dead as far as I am concerned, Final Calc 2 is vapor, Final Data 3 is vapor. Again, I hope they don't dissapear.
Octamed, a fine program is now in it's last incarnation for amiga. Author will
develop it further on PC. Nuff said.
Lightwave, well, I fear no new versions will be produced as the amiga version is
now way behind PC one. If they make a 3D engine for CV3D I will be gladly surprised.
Gfx cards: Well, I still see both CV3D and Picasso IV a major dissapointment. The first is slower than CV64, has no application that uses 3D on top of that it
doesn't have pass through and no scan doubler at the moment. I wouldn't exchange
it for my CV64. Picasso IV is I guess a fine product, but Picasso 96 still needs
time to be stable and works with more applications (it doesn't for example work
with Wordworth). As both companies are now in dispute, there will be no CG3 for
Picasso IV, so... After 6 months Picasso 96 will be able to stand by CG3, but today it can't. I don't say their programmers are more skilled, because I remember how long CG2 was unstable. It is good the last few months (maybe 6).
Amiga shopper died :((
Amiga Power died :((
Pro Page died :((
Imagine 5 is alive and the company is urging people to buy it for only 100$. Supports CG and has Arexx. I plea to everybody to buy it if it suits your needs.
Games market is dead. People who have amiga only for playing are either gone to
PC or will go there. Games like Warcraft II or Phantasmagoria are new kind of games. People who love it will not find it on amiga. We do have many good games,
but not CD ones. Games market is weaker and weaker.
Now you all must flame me for making bad news here. You now expect me to say: So
I am gone to PC or whatever like some other letters like this. Well, no, I am not. There are 2 reasons for that:
1. I like where I am
2. I have nowhere to go
What makes me sad is looking at my lovely computer market dissapearing in ashes.
Amiga can do everything for me. On top of that, modern PC's are still bad and even becomming worse. The best sentance to describe them is:
Amiga is my tool, on PC I am it's slave.
PC is a monster machine. It's so hungry for resources I can not tell you. It takes 32Mb for granted and my wallet does not. YOu need a degree in science to
be able to understand all thoose niffty appliations which you need just 10% of
their power (or bugs).
I cry if I can not use screens. PC i like having all your programs open on Workbench. It is to cry!
The only thing PC has it has 1000 and 1000 of people making something and they
set standards :(( Unfortunate. Programmers on amiga are magicians. I really think so. People like Oliver Wagner and author of Aweb combating the thousants
of programmers and money resources from Microsoft (Explorer) must be magical workers. Why? Because let's say Voyager is not so much inferior from Explorer (wait, no flames, I don't need those niffty stuff in Navigator, I need to view
Information not play cards with it). I think one people from MS could not make
something like Voyager.
Market here of us who are staying is incredible. I really mean so. There are so
few of Amiga programmers compared to machinery of Microsoft world, that we really do wonders. They still don't have a good IRC program, nor anything like
Thor. Hack, they even not have something like Dir Work or Opus. Man, I can not
work on a computer so wierd!
I am not interested for most things about the MHZ speed. I care about productivity work. Once I was force to use Word for some customer showed me that
I spent more time going through bugs than preparing a book on it.
This is OK for today, but in few years time, we will be lost if nothing happens
with machine. THe sad thing is, it has (or had) such a potential. PC is still crap, tell me what you like, everybody migrating from amiga misses a lot of it's
functions he doesn't have now. PC is good if I need it to play a game. If I needed only that, I would buy one. I really would.
Mac is a joke of itself. No CLI, no windows... Oh well. Still much better than
PC imho.
Anybody who will leave amiga will need to regret it. AMiga is something that people have nostalgic feelings about, like ZX Spectrum or C64 was. Man I like every morning looking at aminet, how many new great things are waiting there every day for me. I wouldn't have AMinet on PC.
Aminet is really a piece of work. I am really very proud of it. Shows that amiga
programmers are really a bunch of dedicated people.
I do hate Microsoft. It's ignorance toward the others is unbelievable. I wish some day they die, long and horrible death. Some better computer should be in every home, not PC. In fact, PC is not so bad, just Windows is.
So why am I sad? Becasue if the things will continue the way they do now, the day will come, when even I will have to change my computer for something that is
set standard. I am sad that the amiga suffering is continuing in it's 4th year.
Commodore, Escom, Viscorp, etc... This is really too much. Judges are just waiting for everything to loose it's value or not? I know this is complicated Judge stuff, but anyway: 4 years of waiting. Now they tell me 28th of February.
I can not even smile any more...
I don't care waht happens to amiga, if Phase 5 succeds with A/BOX or pOS or whatever. I just want something to happen NOW. In the state amiga is in (with no
real owner for 4 years), it is very alive. When I see Voyager, Thor, Draw Studio, Pagestream 3.2, Final Writer 5 and all the other programs I see it is really a miracle. No other computer platform would achieve that! No way! I even
feel that less and less people are migrating now from amiga. I guess the one who
stayed are made of tough steel.
So enough of my little babbling. I have to go working on DTp and WWW pages, with
amiga of course. I do have many wishes, but here's only one: People stay together, do not sell the machine because even on the other side, the rivers are
still black. Programmers remember: Even though the market may be small, PC market is too big, you'll be just floating ducks there. On amiga you can do something people like and say: great job, XY, on PC people only say: oh, no, again 1000 new functions we will never need. Maybe it is better to be the first
in the smaller group than the last in the biggest.
And finally - thank to all the helping people who helped me before and are helping me now. Without you I don't know how I could manage to keep the spirit
up here in the small Alpine coutry called Slovenia where Amigas are endanered species. If you are a publisher and have anything to review, write us a note, I'll love to review it.
Thanks to all the helpfull people with their advices. I have yet to see a PC company helping it's users as much as let say Softlogik does.
My last wish would be that Michael Pelt as soon as possible free hiw excelent filesystem AFS from FLD right and release the 3.0 version. This is one of the best pieces of programming I've ever seen.
At the really last, I ask publishers to still have faith in Amiga. They make a
lot of people happy...
And to the people who tell the destiny of amiga by making law: Let it go. Please, let it go. Free the spirit once again. Don't let it die. Do you hear, lawyers?
Well, that's all. Thank you for listening.
Yours
Jernej
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mails: jernej.pecjak@kiss.uni-lj.si
future.tech@mrak.si
Editor of Amiga Master, The Only Slovenian amiga magazine ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Running: A4000, 060/50Mhz, 1.7Gb Hard disk, Samsung 17" monitor,32Mb RAM
System alert: Although I have 32 Mb RAM, I am not connected to Microsoft
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHECK WWW AT: http://wet.kiss.uni-lj.si/~k4ff0030 !!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Den torsdag 13 februari 1997 kl. 09:00:00 UTC+1 skrev Jernej Pecjak:
Here I am taking this opportunity to say I word or two on amiga. I've been >> silent, just listening to other people. I decided I need to have my word now.
As I see it, Amiga is really dying. It's not dead, but dying, a slow and
horrible death. I am observing the market for 10 years now and things are
definitely going on the worse side. Yes, one good thing for amiga happens and 2
bad things and we usually forget about the bad ones. Proggrams have improved a
lot and we now have many great programs that have not existed before. But seems
all like an illusion.
Users are abbandoning our machine. One now, one tommorow. There are less and >> less people who read amiga magazines results of what we see - many magazines >> ceased to exist, all of them have a lot less circulation figures than before.
Let me just briefely tell you a few of my examples:
Once a king on amiga programs, Scala is now concentrating on PC. In fact, it >> doesn't help Amiga in any way any more, does not fix bugs etc. The only thing
left for it to do (which it will not I guess) is to put Scala in PD. There are
many serious bugs in it (for one, our fonts are almost unusable in Scala 300 >> and 400) and nobody will fix them. Their PC Scala need even their own OS, which
shows in what state PC is, but we can not use it, can we?
Digita's wordworth was once a pride and joy to use, but more and more it seems
they took almost all the programmers to work on PC versions of their products.
WW 6 was just a small upgrade, nobody has even touched font engine till 3.0 >> (engine doesn't support not standard adobe fonts), bugs aren't fixed etc. I hope
they don't dissapear from amiga market in whole.
Softwood: I don't know what happened to them, they seem to work on Final Writer
still, but since I live in Europe, I have no real feedback. Their WWW page is
dead as far as I am concerned, Final Calc 2 is vapor, Final Data 3 is vapor. >> Again, I hope they don't dissapear.
Octamed, a fine program is now in it's last incarnation for amiga. Author will
develop it further on PC. Nuff said.
Lightwave, well, I fear no new versions will be produced as the amiga version is
now way behind PC one. If they make a 3D engine for CV3D I will be gladly
surprised.
Gfx cards: Well, I still see both CV3D and Picasso IV a major dissapointment.
The first is slower than CV64, has no application that uses 3D on top of that it
doesn't have pass through and no scan doubler at the moment. I wouldn't exchange
it for my CV64. Picasso IV is I guess a fine product, but Picasso 96 still needs
time to be stable and works with more applications (it doesn't for example work
with Wordworth). As both companies are now in dispute, there will be no CG3 for
Picasso IV, so... After 6 months Picasso 96 will be able to stand by CG3, but
today it can't. I don't say their programmers are more skilled, because I
remember how long CG2 was unstable. It is good the last few months (maybe 6).
Amiga shopper died :((
Amiga Power died :((
Pro Page died :((
Imagine 5 is alive and the company is urging people to buy it for only 100$. >> Supports CG and has Arexx. I plea to everybody to buy it if it suits your needs.
Games market is dead. People who have amiga only for playing are either gone to
PC or will go there. Games like Warcraft II or Phantasmagoria are new kind of
games. People who love it will not find it on amiga. We do have many good games,
but not CD ones. Games market is weaker and weaker.
Now you all must flame me for making bad news here. You now expect me to say: So
I am gone to PC or whatever like some other letters like this. Well, no, I am
not. There are 2 reasons for that:
1. I like where I am
2. I have nowhere to go
What makes me sad is looking at my lovely computer market dissapearing in ashes.
Amiga can do everything for me. On top of that, modern PC's are still bad and
even becomming worse. The best sentance to describe them is:
Amiga is my tool, on PC I am it's slave.
PC is a monster machine. It's so hungry for resources I can not tell you. It >> takes 32Mb for granted and my wallet does not. YOu need a degree in science to
be able to understand all thoose niffty appliations which you need just 10% of
their power (or bugs).
I cry if I can not use screens. PC i like having all your programs open on >> Workbench. It is to cry!
The only thing PC has it has 1000 and 1000 of people making something and they
set standards :(( Unfortunate. Programmers on amiga are magicians. I really >> think so. People like Oliver Wagner and author of Aweb combating the thousants
of programmers and money resources from Microsoft (Explorer) must be magical >> workers. Why? Because let's say Voyager is not so much inferior from Explorer
(wait, no flames, I don't need those niffty stuff in Navigator, I need to view
Information not play cards with it). I think one people from MS could not make
something like Voyager.
Market here of us who are staying is incredible. I really mean so. There are so
few of Amiga programmers compared to machinery of Microsoft world, that we >> really do wonders. They still don't have a good IRC program, nor anything like
Thor. Hack, they even not have something like Dir Work or Opus. Man, I can not
work on a computer so wierd!
I am not interested for most things about the MHZ speed. I care about
productivity work. Once I was force to use Word for some customer showed me that
I spent more time going through bugs than preparing a book on it.
This is OK for today, but in few years time, we will be lost if nothing happens
with machine. THe sad thing is, it has (or had) such a potential. PC is still
crap, tell me what you like, everybody migrating from amiga misses a lot of it's
functions he doesn't have now. PC is good if I need it to play a game. If I >> needed only that, I would buy one. I really would.
Mac is a joke of itself. No CLI, no windows... Oh well. Still much better than
PC imho.
Anybody who will leave amiga will need to regret it. AMiga is something that >> people have nostalgic feelings about, like ZX Spectrum or C64 was. Man I like
every morning looking at aminet, how many new great things are waiting there >> every day for me. I wouldn't have AMinet on PC.
Aminet is really a piece of work. I am really very proud of it. Shows that amiga
programmers are really a bunch of dedicated people.
I do hate Microsoft. It's ignorance toward the others is unbelievable. I wish
some day they die, long and horrible death. Some better computer should be in
every home, not PC. In fact, PC is not so bad, just Windows is.
So why am I sad? Becasue if the things will continue the way they do now, the
day will come, when even I will have to change my computer for something that is
set standard. I am sad that the amiga suffering is continuing in it's 4th year.
Commodore, Escom, Viscorp, etc... This is really too much. Judges are just >> waiting for everything to loose it's value or not? I know this is complicated
Judge stuff, but anyway: 4 years of waiting. Now they tell me 28th of February.
I can not even smile any more...
I don't care waht happens to amiga, if Phase 5 succeds with A/BOX or pOS or >> whatever. I just want something to happen NOW. In the state amiga is in (with no
real owner for 4 years), it is very alive. When I see Voyager, Thor, Draw
Studio, Pagestream 3.2, Final Writer 5 and all the other programs I see it is
really a miracle. No other computer platform would achieve that! No way! I even
feel that less and less people are migrating now from amiga. I guess the one who
stayed are made of tough steel.
So enough of my little babbling. I have to go working on DTp and WWW pages, with
amiga of course. I do have many wishes, but here's only one: People stay
together, do not sell the machine because even on the other side, the rivers are
still black. Programmers remember: Even though the market may be small, PC >> market is too big, you'll be just floating ducks there. On amiga you can do >> something people like and say: great job, XY, on PC people only say: oh, no, >> again 1000 new functions we will never need. Maybe it is better to be the first
in the smaller group than the last in the biggest.
And finally - thank to all the helping people who helped me before and are >> helping me now. Without you I don't know how I could manage to keep the spirit
up here in the small Alpine coutry called Slovenia where Amigas are endanered
species. If you are a publisher and have anything to review, write us a note,
I'll love to review it.
Thanks to all the helpfull people with their advices. I have yet to see a PC >> company helping it's users as much as let say Softlogik does.
My last wish would be that Michael Pelt as soon as possible free hiw excelent
filesystem AFS from FLD right and release the 3.0 version. This is one of the
best pieces of programming I've ever seen.
At the really last, I ask publishers to still have faith in Amiga. They make a
lot of people happy...
And to the people who tell the destiny of amiga by making law: Let it go.
Please, let it go. Free the spirit once again. Don't let it die. Do you hear,
lawyers?
Well, that's all. Thank you for listening.
Yours
Jernej
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mails: jernej.pecjak@kiss.uni-lj.si
future.tech@mrak.si
Editor of Amiga Master, The Only Slovenian amiga magazine
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Running: A4000, 060/50Mhz, 1.7Gb Hard disk, Samsung 17" monitor,32Mb RAM
System alert: Although I have 32 Mb RAM, I am not connected to Microsoft
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHECK WWW AT: http://wet.kiss.uni-lj.si/~k4ff0030 !!!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello there from 2016, read your thread from 1997, just wondering what OS you are running today if any? and if you have changed your mind to what OS is superior?
Anyway, a big hail from almost 20 years from the future. Like to here about your opinion then.
I still know one ore two die-hards that have working Amigas systems.
Hello there from 2016, read your thread from 1997, just wondering what
OS you are running today if any? and if you have changed your mind to
what OS is superior?
Anyway, a big hail from almost 20 years from the future. Like to here
about your opinion then.
As long as you aren't into the latest video games, they are still very
fun to mess around with.
I myself gave up LONG ago. I DO have a legally purchased copy of
Amiga Forever that I fire up once in a while to play Project X or Shadow
of the Beast. There just isn't really much in the way of platformers or scrollers these days, and sometimes I just don't want to be in a 3D
world. :)
I also use it to fire up my CNet BBS from back in the day when I have
a sick Hack n Slash or Global Wars craving...
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