Editorial

What started as a European AmigaOS4.0 tour has now gone global, and it is all through the heroic efforts of the Amiga community itself. When Juergen and Guenter approached Amiga to suggest this a few months ago, we were very happy to agree, not just because AmigaOS4.0 was at a point where it could be presented running native on the PPC but because we knew that if we presented it ourselves, we'd be accused of rigging it, of not letting anyone near it and other, even more bizarre claims.

By working with the dealers and their customers, and the user groups and their members, we were able to give AmigaOS4.0 to the community at a much earlier stage than we had expected, and the powerful bounds between Amiga Inc, the dealers and the users could be reinforced whilst also allowing the dealers and user groups to demonstrate their worth to prospective customers and members.

The European tour added AmiWest and Canada. New York and Denmark have now become the latest participants and in the next few weeks there should be more announcements as others around the world join the AmigaOS4.0 bandwagon.

All of this makes great preparation for the actual pre launch marketing and the event that we have all been waiting for since 1995, the launch of a pure PPC AmigaOS4. At that point we want to be able to move forwards and begin to engage both older Amigans who left the platform and new users who have not yet had the pleasure of the Amiga experience.

Most of these potential users are already computer literate and very happy with their Windows and Apple machines. This presents a challenge for us in how do we get them interested in the Amiga platform when they are faced with the very real barrier of a $1000 or more needed to buy a new Amiga.

"Cometh the hour, cometh the man" as the old expression goes. One of the best-kept secrets (unfortunately for its owner) of the Amiga world is an excellent package produced by Cloanto, a long time supporter of the Amiga platform, called Amiga Forever. This is a product that has been in production for quite a few years, updated every year and which provides anyone owning a PC with an AGA Amiga that runs on Windows.

Not only does it provide an AmigaOS3.1 Amiga but it also provides running versions of every Amiga back to the original for some real time travel as well as integration software that allows it to use many of the underlying Windows services. As an added bonus, it also includes a wealth of historical information including video, providing a complete, living history of the Amiga platform.

So complete is its emulation that some of AmigaOS4.0 has even been written and tested on it, at least whilst in its 68k phase. Existing applications can be run on it and it delivers a pretty good response time for most work. Best of all, it is the only fully licensed and therefore legal emulation solution. At Forty pounds sterling, it offers a great way for lapsed Amigans and Amiga virgins to get hold of a modern Amiga and experience what all the fuss is about. We intend to make it one of our primary tools in wooing the PC population and we hope that existing Amigans experiment with it as well, since the more copies that are on PCs, the more people will see it.

With tools like Amiga Forever, the active support and participation of the dealers and the user groups and individual users, the world will once more start to hear of the Amiga, the platform that will not die. In their secret cave somewhere in the world, the AmigaOS4.0 development team is in the last stages of bringing the latest version of our beloved platform to life.

Everything is coming together.