ART Episode 12 - Here There Be Bills
October 16, 2007
8:25 pm
Amiga Roundtable
Hosts: Rich Lawrence, Sean Fitzgerald, Bill Panagouleas. Guest: Bill Buck
From the looks of it, this show is gonna be BIG, so please use the mirror or mirror the files yourself if you can, and post the links here.
Also, there is iTunes.
- Amiga Inc’s Open Letter & Bill McEwen’s 40 Questions
- Acube Annoucnes Sam440’s availability
- AROS now 64bit
- Tulip wants to buy back Commodore
- 1st Amiga Scene party in Netherlands
- Amiga Future Needs Help
- AmIRC for MOS
- Ranger 1.4 Released
- New Drivers for 4xEIDE’99 buffered interface
- OlderGames Announces New CD32 game
- Bill Buck answers questions from the Roundtable


I have a gripe this time.
Damage control is a difficult thing, and not being able to talk about the court case, OS 4, or other matters which might be protected by NDAs and embargoes doesn’t make it easier. I think you guys have been unduly harsh on Bill McEwen.
At the end of the day, Hyperion is not Amiga, ACube is not Amiga, Genesi is not Amiga. Kudos to all of these companies for their respective works, but the only Amiga we have a chance of seeing is coming from Amiga Inc.
Sean Fitzgerald keeps bringing up the “Amiga Community”. I count myself a card carrying member, but Amiga Inc. is not going to succeed if their primary concern is the remaining “17″ amigans spread across the globe.
Stating that Amiga OS5 will be better than Mac OS X is extremely effective for two reasons;
1 - OS X has been perceived as an OS of excellence inside and outside of the industry, so in a sense it is the benchmark for “cool computing”.
2 - Many former creative amigans have gone over to the Mac. OS X embodies many philosophies that made the Amiga OS ahead of it’s time. OS 4 is nice (supposedly), but it’s not enough for many of us to switch back.
I still love the show though. Kudos for getting Bill Buck on, I loved the interview.
I think Amiga Inc has done many good things for Amiga with the realease of the updated operating systems. Yet it still has not managed to embrace the community. Amiga Inc seem to distance themself from the community when really they should be the heart of it. I remeber when Petro was in Amiga Inc and I met him running around at World of Amiga trying to sell Amiga Theme Song Audio cds. I dont see any of those kind of community projects anymore or even see much of bill. He should be at Amiwest on the shop floor. The only link with the amiga community other then open letters I can see is the Os4 Gallery from Amigaworld on the amiga.com site.
The one thing he needs to stop is making deluded statements. Amiga community has had years of broken promises and failed ideas from Amiga Inc (previous owners) and this just distances them more from the community.
Sorry rant over
other then that great show loved hearing Bill Buck and great news about AROS 
Yes, I enjoyed meeting Petro too, I still have a signed ‘Amiga - Back for the Future’ poster on my wall.
We can’t ignore the zeitgeist though; What Petro was doing was releatively soon after the Commodore insolvency. Ramping up A1200HD and A4000T SKU’s for emerging markets was a reasonable strategy at the time, as was OS 3.5. The Amiga community was still a quantifiable entity.
12 years later many of us had moved on, we’d still like a new Amiga, but we’re using other up-to-date platforms.
Trudging around the world, extolling the virtues of a commercially abandoned platform, to an extremely thinned and disenchanted community doesn’t add-up.
Times have changed my friend. Amiga Inc. needs to create a community from scratch, and it sadly may not include you or I.
I have only recently got back into the scene so I am not that knowledgeable. To me and most people amiga is a hobby. I just feel frustrated. I think the os 4 thing has confused me a lot. The fact that I know a new os is out there and I know nobody with it and have never tried it. To me at the moment the amiga scene is pure frustration and has been for years.
I am more of a classic man anyway. I think the mini mig is a wicked thing and hope bright things in the future for that.