I've just started a new job, working on Internet Development work for IRDC in Buckingham, UK (subtle advertising! *grin*) so I really haven't had much time to get anything really exciting and different to talk about this month. Instead, if you haven't already heard about Petro Tyschtschenko's recent speech at the Midwest Amicon Exposition then you may like to know some more things about the future of the Amiga. There's still nothing concrete, like specs of PowerPC machines, details of OS 3.5 or 4.0 or the like, but it does give some hints as to what a great future the Amiga is set to have.

Amiga A1200 Update

The first news is that the A1200 Magic Pack will be available with NTSC machines as well as the existing PAL versions. The North American market will finally receive its NTSC machines from December 1997 onwards.

Price Cuts and Common Sense

Amiga International are also committed to cutting the costs of machines, which will build up the user base again and hopefully restore the Amiga back to its position as a low-cost, high-performance system. This should also wipe out the ridiculously high prices of A4000 class machines, which I've always found to be very embarrassing.

In addition, Amiga International have pledged to give extensive support to three key aspects of the Amiga:

• The existing user base
• The current technology
• Future developments

The last two aspects concentrate upon licensing technology, providing technical assistance to developers and promoting an 'Open Amiga' system which relies upon industry standard components in order to reduce costs, improve development times and widen the user's upgrade path.

Licensing

On the subject of licensing, you may be interested to know who has licenced Amiga technology to date (1st November). The information is the same as that featured in Petro's speech, and seems to be missing some notable names (i.e. Phase 5 and PIOS) for the moment. Still, it's early days yet... and the current list is a good sign of things to come:

Other Interesting Developments

Recently, I've been told a couple of rumours about possible CPUs for official next generation Amigas. One is an Amiga using a 200 MHz 68080 (yep, 080, not 060), which I didn't think existed - the 68060 being the end of the line. Perhaps it could be the 'completely new processor' which I've also heard rumours about for some new Amigas. Sticking with a CISC chip (well, I'm assuming it follows on from the 060 in the same way the Pentium follows on from the 80X86 line *spit* *spit* *grin*) isn't really my idea of the way to go, but it would certainly give a much-needed boost.

The other rumour is a custom PowerPC 604 processor with a 680X0 instruction set inbuilt. Hmmm... an interesting idea, but I can't see it being cheap if you get past the problem of getting Motorola to actually build such a thing. Well, they're both rumours so don't put too much into them just yet. However, this could just be an overactive imagination working on the more likely possibility of an Amiga using the A\box / PowerUP dual processor system - the PowerPC and 680X0 running in tandem. Well, take your pick... until something definite turns up all possibilities are equally valid.

So, that wraps it up for the moment. Once I've managed to settle into my new job and, assuming we start to get some better information on new Amiga technology, I'll get some more substantial comments published. In the meantime... two quick plugs for web sites:

[metaljoe@oocities.com]