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© 1997-2006
Gareth Knight
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Amiga Interactive Guide: v3.7

Thursday November 1st, 2001

We live in unsettling times: numerous Amiga-related products have been announced but have yet to appear; the market is shrouded in doom and gloom; even Amiga news sites are being hacked. The so-called community impatiently waits for new exciting products to replace their slow machines. As always, the future is around the corner... Will it be worth the wait? Only time will tell.

The November 2001 update is another biggie - over 16MB of changes and new material! The more observant of you will notice I've done a bit of housekeeping recently. The main site entry point has been changed and each section has been redesigned.

The site has been reorganised to make the main sections easier to navigate. Several articles on the Features page have been moved to the all-new Amiga History page. The BenchPress main page has been deleted and the various descriptions have been integrated into the 'Techies workbench' page. According to the server logs hardly anyone would visit these pages, so it seemed pointless to place it prominantly on the navigation menu. The remaining articles have been moved into more logical sections. As part of the new update, Merlancia have been given their own company page.

The site is currently organised in eight main sections:
 

What's New? This page. Recent updates to the site.
Features Articles on Amiga magazines, corporate identity, the people who made the Amiga, games, and galleries.
Amiga History A new section! Charts the Amigas progress from its original incarnation and articles on the major businesses that have controlled its destiny. Current material on the new Amigas in development.
Amiga Systems Every Commodore Amiga, Amiga clone, bundle, and prototype. Also covers Amiga-related operating systems and emulators.
Techies workbench The newly renamed 'Get Technical!'. This page contains articles on Amiga diagnostic, Easter eggs, Workbench guides, and frequently asked questions.
Interviews Past interviews with people who created the Amiga or were inspired by it.
Web Links Other interesting sites
Downloads Download TV commercials, AROS demos, and more

Further down the site structure the Official Amiga products have been moved into the Amiga Gallery and the Joyboard box page has been turned into a gallery for surfing Amigans.

Prototypes galore
Thanks to the contributions of Mr. Dave Haynie and several others, the prototypes section has been expanded further with new information and photographs. Dave Haynie has provided detailed background on the Amiga Nyx, and dozens of other prototypes. To catalogue these  I've created a page dedicated to prototype versions of motherboards/expansion cards that were launched at a later date. The page displays several early images of the A2000, B2000, and A4000 prototypes. These can be found on the graphic-intensive 'Prototypes that became Classics!' page. The A3000+ and AA3000 page has also been updated with several photographs of the motherboard and lots of juicy specifications to make the mouth water.

The Lorraine page has almost been completely rewritten. It now includes better photographs of the prototype unit, taken at the VCF show last year, and press comments that were made at the time. I'm working on getting other items of interest from this time period. Watch this space!

While looking for more information on the Lorraine I discovered reference to an Amiga PC Developer machine. There is very little solid support for this at the moment - it is likely that Amiga Inc. could not afford to produce such a machine. Thanks to the webmaster of CDTV.org, more information and better images on the CDTV-CR have been revealed. These can be found in the CDTV-CR page.

The A1000+ and A1000Jr variants have been seperated into different pages and an advert of the A1000Jr has been found. The A300 has finally got its own page, although it does not provide much information beyond the obvious. Ah well! It has a pretty picture of an A600 to liven it up!

In an attempt to gain more information on this area I've collected numerous references to Amiga Transputer projects. This page is rather basic at the moment but it should generate discussion and feedback on the mentioned and unmentioned projects that were developed in this field.

Updated the BoXeR page to mention its recent cancellation.

The Commodore rumour mill was also shortened when I moved several items to their own pages and Joshua Walker's iAmiga spoof was added to the Prototype page.

Amiga in the Arcade
Information on an unlaunched Amiga arcade machine has been discovered - The Super Sente System. On a related note, the Amiga Arcadia page has been updated with new information, including screenshots of several Arcadia games. They can be found on the Arcadia page.

New machines
The new machines are not restricted to unreleased prototypes. Since the last site update several new Amiga-compatible machines have been announced and more details have been released on products in development. Merlancia have been busy bunnies of late, announcing six new AmigaOS/AmigaDE machines - the MMC Apocolyps, MMC Apocolyps Leopard, Hurricane UltraLite, Multimedia Convergence Computer, MMC Radian, and MMC Tsunami. More details on the Eyetech AmigaOne has emerged and bPlan have released images of their Pegasos PPC machine (a PPC machine that uses MorphOS to retain compatibility with the AmigaOS). New screenshots of the Sharp Zaurus have also been added.

New applications and games
For the first time in 18 years, Amiga Inc. are selling games under the 'Amiga' brand name. The latest Series Zero compilation demonstrate similar gameplay values to the original games, but are designed for a wider market. The Amiga DE Party Pack and  Amiga DE Player has been launched to allow Windows/Linux users to play these games.

Bundles
Several Amiga bundles have been added to the bundles page. The original A1000 bundle, standard A500, A600 Robocop, Checkmate 1500, German O-Box, and the Cubo CD32. The Amiga DIY page has a new submission - the coolest Amiga case design ever! The Amiga case has to be seen to be believed.

Emulation
To catalogue the growing number of Amiga emulators an Amiga Emulation page has been added to 'Amiga Systems'. This page covers Amiga emulators that are currently available. At the moment it mentions Amithlon, AmigaOS XL, UAE, and Amiga Forever. A write up of the DOS/Windows emulator, Fellow is coming soon.

New discussion forum
I have a confession to make. When I created the site the interactive part of AiG was intended to be ironic. Y'see, AiG has never truely interactive. The use of a forum in version 3.2 was a step towards viewer interactivity, but it was ugly and unpopular. No longer! I've moved the forums to a new service - the new forum can be access by clicking here.

Other Items

There are so many changes that I have probably forgotten something. In the miscellaneous department we have a copy of the original Amiga patent and a note from Jonny Högsten telling me that he has found a copy of CDTV 'Indy and the Last Crusade'. As a result, I have updated Peter Olafson's CDTV retrospective. The Amiga Power page has also been altered to take into consideration certain criticisms made on the Amiga Power newsgroup. Finally, the 23/10/01 AROS update has been updated for IBM PC

Thanks
Special thanks go to the following people (in surname order) for making suggestions, highlighting errors for the current site update:

Bernhard Berger
Diamond Braganza
James Boyd
Andew Crane
Jonny Högsten

 

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Last Update: 10/3/2002

 



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Latest updates to the Amiga History Guide. (more)


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· Amiga Hardware
· Amiga History.de
· Amiga Magazine Rack
· Amiga-news(en)(de)
· Amiga.org
· Amiga World
· AmigaOS 4.0
· Amiga University
· Commodore Retrobits
· Dave Haynie archive
· Lemon Amiga
· MorphOS Support
· morphos-news.de

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