I Pre-Ordered an Amiga 1200 ⭐

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4aGhSoP7Rg

Last summer, I was delighted to learn that Commodore had been acquired by a enthusiast who then announced the company's first new computer in over 30 years, the Commodore 64 Ultimate. But this was only a minor test of my resolve to not descend into a nostalgia-fueled spiral: Though the original Commodore 64 was my first real computer and I will always love it for that reason, its "breadbox" design is inelegant and uninteresting, and I very much prefer the later C64C design. But even that computer is too primitive, and my mind immediately went to the Amiga, the ultimate what-if of personal computing, and the possibility that the new Commodore could somehow bring back that platform as well.

This is very much a possibility, as it turns out.

Though the new Commodore is the legal owner of the Commodore brand, trademarks, and other intellectual property, that ownership does not extend to the Amiga. After a series of licensing deals by Commodore's owners over the years, a company called Cloanto acquired "all worldwide rights, title, and interest in and to all Amiga-formative trademarks" from what was then called Amiga Corporation in 2019.

"Since 2019 we have been supporting the efforts of Amiga Corporation to consolidate the Amiga IP as well as the copyrights for all Commodore/Amiga works (software, ROMs, manuals, videos, etc.) that had previously been assigned to Cloanto," Cloanto explains. Among other things, Cloanto makes the Amiga Forever and C64 Forever emulation solutions that I've long owned and championed as a way to relive this incredible past.

And now, Commodore co-founder and CEO Christian Simpson says that he is working to collaborate with Cloanto to bring new Amiga hardware to market.

"We won't repeat the mistakes of the past relating to Commodore and Amiga," he writes on the Commodore FAQ page. "We’re in open dialogue with the most relevant rights holder to explore a potential reunion, and techno-optimism is in the air. Commodore and Amiga belong together in spirit, and we hope to make that true in practice as well. We're just waiting for them to give the green light and let the fun begin."

As exciting as that possibility is, there are all kinds of questions. Which Amiga being the most obvious, though there is an important and complex series of sub-questions as well. Which Amiga chipsets and capabilities being the next logical chain of thought. The brain wanders, but to me, there are three generations of classic Amiga chipsets, the original OCS, the Enhanced Chipset (ECS), and the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA). And any modern Amiga should support—and, God help us all—extend them all.

There's also issues with the OS(es), including later efforts from companies like Hyperion that licensed the rights to Amiga OS from Amiga Corporation in the early 2000s and created new Amiga OS versions like Amiga OS 3.1+. That went badly, with Amiga suing Hyperion in 2007 and then...