Cheers from Downunder

I'm sure that had Thomas, Gunnar and company been able to spend as much, we'd have them yesterday.

Even Gunnar seemed to fail to understand this, and started to market a product of his own mind, not the hobby project Natami really is. :)

On the other hand , now , voicing from the always vanguard realms of doing things at its best , some great artists , also in this discipline of doing a piece of hardware upon which software ought to run , for fun & for other needs , even for businesses & industrial stuff , why not , one may be generous and open up a project to achieve acceleration in the many tasks , as has happened here , some kind of spiritual commitment to the final goal of realising the thing , anyhow , in a team it is important to maintain the right kind of culture , for each and every .oOo.JRT | One jolly good day ... dreams may come true , hope & faith !

There are people who actually do that.
Thomas does not strike me as such a person, However as a writer is blind to his own mistakes, Thomas be effected in the same fashion.
Creating a system in a void is not in the best interest of the system for this reason.

However i respect his choice.

Well it would be done a little faster, because he wouldn't have to do any job for living. But then he would probably spend more time with family and friends, and some other fun stuff. So not much faster. But a little :)

EXTERNAL LINK 

I personally am different. I want to change and move something with the finished product, for me it is not important how much of it I have done myself (expecially if i can speed things up). Thomas is different, as far as I can judge it he wants to do everything on its own otherwise it would be not his project anymore. Of course one person doing sth. in spare time (regardless how genious he/she is) is slow at finishing such a complicated project. But we cannot change it...

Of course Thomas has not stopped. And its frustrating to hear that kind of crap all the time, knowing that it is completely false. But you will have to wait for Thomas announcements, since I am not going to speak in his place just to shut someone like Wojtek up :)

André Jernung wrote:

Of course Thomas has not stopped. And its frustrating to hear that kind of crap all the time, knowing that it is completely false. But you will have to wait for Thomas announcements, since I am not going to speak in his place just to shut someone like Wojtek up :)

That's understandable. We'll wait and see what happens. :)

Purely engineering:

*) get the line mode working. This is not so easy as it uses the same registers for something completely different, and the additional logic needs to fit into the existing design. It is probably not so simple to do that if this mode wasn't part of the initial design sketch in first place. I wouldn't be surprised if adding the line mode requires a complete re-design of the already existing blitter logic. It is anoying, will take a lot of time, and the frustration curve goes up.

Purely technical "boring" problems:

*) get the boards working. To my knowledge, a small series of prototype boards were produced that were then finally assembled by hand. They cost quite some $$$ to produce, and losing boards is a loss of money. Thus, Thomas tried to rescue as many of the faulty assembled boards, but this takes a lot of time (weekends spend of soldering, tracing and fixing), and the frustration curve goes up. It is a very unsatisfactory task, progress is slow.

Management problems (the toughest ones):

*) creating a business model from this: It means, you need to pre-finance a larger production batch, find a manufacturer, find a bank to finance the project, find a method of collecting payments by credit cards or similar, find methods to ship the boards. It typically implies that you need to either found or find a business (it is hard to collect money otherwise), you need to do tax declarations on it and so on. In other words, it is a full time job.

Just to give you an idea: I had exactly the similar problem when trying to organize a JPEG meeting - it was a complete nightmare and caused me several sleepless nights just to get the financing straight. It worked in the end, but only by endless phone calls to the bank, to the meeting organization, to the DIN, to the credit card company, to a company of a friend who helped in the financial adminstration....

Thus, it is not unsurprising for me that, at a certain stage, when the progress no longer depends on technical brilliance but on organizational and management talent, the technical development slows down or stops.

What it would probably take at this point is a management that takes up and solves these problems. (Quite unlike what most engineers believe, management *does* have its value - and I'm certainly not a man with talent in this respect).

Greetings,
Thomas

It would have been much easier if this complex and huge project would have been shared between a team with hardware specialists (2 or 3 who work on the core), software- and system-specialists who test and work on drivers and others who f.e. help with management-tasks, marketing...

It is a huge (perhaps too big) task for one person. But I do not believe that Thomas was and is interested in sharing tasks because it would not be his (100%) project anymore.

I also think that he will continue to work on it but it is not predictable when it will be finished.

Great , I knew You would believe … , You are a financial Genius , let Us know when You are ready ;)

Oo.JRT

I would go with A-Cube and Amiga Kit.

I would welcome it if IBM got on board if they allowed us to have the Natami and would further the technology in the Natami.  Their commitment would mean we are working with a winner.  Their involvement would spell success and it is a no-brainer in my opinion.