Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) tipped us off to “Amiga present and future,” an interview with Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology, a group funding ongoing hardware and software development for the Amiga community. “Amongst the topics are the still in betatest Mini-ITX and quad-core PPC Amiga motherboards. Trevor regularly writes editorials for the Amiga Future print magazine [English-translated version here] and his company will be attending and is sponsoring the Amiga34 event in Neuss Germany on the 12th and 13th of October 2019.”
A-EON now has about 50 part-time developers and beta-testers working on software projects for Classic and Next-Generation AmigaOS, Dickinson reveals:
I’ve been a Commodore and Amiga enthusiast since the late 1970s but only really got involved in the business side of Amiga in 2007 when I provided funding to Michael Battilana of Cloanto to help fast track the development of ‘Amiga Forever’. [An Amiga preservation, emulation and support package] The funding allowed Michael to hire Nicola Morocutti, the ‘Bitplane’ magazine Editor, to embark on a major project to catalogue the tens of thousands of Amiga games and software titles which lead to the development of the one-click ‘Retro-Platform’ player which made its debut in ‘Amiga Forever 2008’ and the subsequent development ‘C64 Forever’ in May 2009. But, if you discount my Hardware donation scheme, it was the ‘AmigaOne X1000’ project [a PowerPC-based personal computer from A-Eon Technology CVBA intended as a high-end platform for AmigaOS 4] that was my first Amiga next-generation funding…
I’ve always said as long as Amigans keep supporting A-EON by buying the hardware and software we develop, we will keep developing both for AmigaOS. The motherboards names, ‘Nemo’, ‘Cyrus’ and ‘Tabor’ are characters and place names from the Jules Verne novel, “The Mysterious Islands”. There are plenty more names available in that book.
Dickinson also discusses various projects that are attempting to build a portable Amiga laptop — and his own early efforts to fund hardware donations to encourage Amiga developers to write productivity software, games and applications for AmigaOS 4.0. (“I resorted to buying second hand AmigaOne machines from eBay and other online sources…”)
He also describes ongoing efforts to bring Libre Office and better web browsers to the Amiga. “Anyone who has the coding skills and is interested in helping out on such projects should contact me.”
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot