Comment by david-given
11 years ago
I wasn't really involved in that, being a mere foot soldier, but --- from memory --- we licensed intent to them and then they rebranded and extended it to become Amiga Anywhere. The idea was that AA games could be written using our tooling and run on a runtime based on intent. So, they'd run anywhere with our runtime. I think they were trying to exploit the Amiga brand to leverage synergies, or something.
I don't know why it failed; we didn't have anything to do with Amiga's operations, apart from offering support. (I don't think any of us were Amiga people.) My impression was that the general feeling inside Tao was that the Amiga of the time was cursed, and we didn't want anything to do with it. Tao itself wasn't doing well then and we were all a bit superstitious. It didn't help that the main person we dealt with was called Fleecy Moss.
I did get one perk out of it: I own a copy of the Amiga comeback album. Lucky me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szMGxqwfxiI
Here's a terrible video of someone from Amiga demoing it. God, those iPaqs. I had one on my desk with a PCMCIA hard drive in it for doing the ARM Linux port. Horrible, horrible things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfHcwpzxSdk
I'd be interested in playing with a copy of AA if I could get my hands on a version which would run on a modern machine.
> I don't know why it failed
At the time, the Amiga name didn't have a lot of mainstream recognition anymore. And the people who still cared about Amiga slammed AA every chance they got on amiga.org & amigaworld.net because it wasn't classic AmigaOS running on a cell phone. There was a lot of resentment that the Amiga name & logos were being slapped on something completely unrelated.
Wow. I remember Amiga Anywhere. I was a big Amiga fan back in the day, and that was their big hope to be able to maintain relevance. Alas, it seems to be the way of all cool tech to eventually get discarded in favor of the less capable mainstream.