Slashdot Mirror

Though Iconify was sort of a cross between Bubbles and the MacOS dock (iconified apps went to the desktop, rather than persistently hovering over everything else) which made more sense in the early 90's desktop-centered UX context.

From AmigaOS_3.1.4-FAQ.txt

* Why won't AmigaOS 3.1.4 boot with 512 KB of ram?

Well, we all heard the dummy phrase "512 KB ought to be enough for
anyone", but today is 2018 not 1985. ...

So it doesn't seem like it supports A500 either unless you put in some upgrades.

* Ok, I get it, 512 KB is not enough anymore, but can I get my way
    with less than 2 MB of RAM? ...
0.6 MB just to boot + 0.5 MB for loading ROM modules + 0.9 MB for free
memory. ...

So it isn't enough with the normal bottom slot 512k memory expansion for A500, you need to use the side expansion and those are a bit rarer.
It also won't work on a stock A500+ or A600.

Requirements are pretty much A1200, A3000 or A4000 and even then you sort of need a memory upgrade unless you are content with just looking at the backdrop image.
Say that you want to paint something in DPaintV. That is another 600k to the executable.
A lowres 8-bit image, the spare page and an undo buffer will take another 250k. That means that you don't even have memory left for copying a brush.

You can't have an OS that takes half of the available memory, especially not since they want to compare themselves to 3.1 rather than the bloated 3.9.
3.1 needed what? 50k?

I understand they wouldn't use it in this case but I always used Disksalv. Looks like it is still being maintained and is now freeware. It was one of the only tools at the time that would recover to another disk rather than beat the crap out of the damaged disk while it tried to fix it. I now use ddrescue under linux for recovery but disksalv was way ahead of its time.

BeOS lifted the codec idea from [AmigaOS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS) [DataTypes](http://wiki.amigaos.net/index.php/Datatypes_Library#Introduction_to_the_Datatypes_Library) (nothing wrong with that, it's just if BeOS was doing it in 1998, AmigaOS was doing it years before that...) (BeOS was like a cleaned-up C++ AmigaOS-alike in a lot of ways. Even the name may be a sly allusion: A-OS, B-OS...)

Basically, any datatype-using program can open any relevant format that there's a datatype for. And there are a lot written, even the program was written long before the format even existed. It's ...neat.

Not too long ago, WinUAE added MMU support. And it didn't take the community long to get Linux running on it.

It's nice seeing Linux run in WinUAE, but the distro is rather dated. It would be nice to have something recent running in WinUAE. And before you ask, I have no idea why this is so cool to me and why I want this so much. I just know that I do. Having a recent distro running in WinUAE is for some odd reason very nifty.

Can't explain it. Still though, I'm just very happy about this news.

http://aminet.net/search?query=scummvm&sort=date&ord=DESC

The version on AmiNet is a little aged. While the site lists an official Amiga release for OS4, NovaCoder has been releasing for 68k Amigas and we should support his efforts. As well, there's a on official MorphOS port http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/MorphOS

Pretty neat stuff.

Nice to see the PC world is slowly catching up with the Amiga and only 15 years behind on this one. I seem to remember approx 8 sec boot time from cold with my old 0.5GB HD. http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/FastBootV1_0 Where are my datatypes and arexx ports? I am still waiting for those.

3D-models from a 90's science fiction tv-series can not be misplaced, they were all placed on aminet.

Lightwave models of Babylon5 objects.

3D-models from a 90's science fiction tv-series can not be misplaced, they were all placed on aminet.

Lightwave models of Babylon5 objects.

BeOS was designed as a replacement for AmigaOS, really. A-OS->B-OS, hahaha.

Design-wise, it has a lot in common with AmigaOS (only cleaner, without compatibility constraints), and back in the early BeBox days Be aggressively pursued the Amiga market and particularly Amiga developers as Commodore floundered. Among other things, it's why the cygwin-like layer for AmigaOS and BeOS is the same project, GeekGadgets and bebits was obviously modelled on the Aminet

The Apple thing was a much later thing. As the USA is like a black hole of non-Amiga-ness, it's understandable the Amiga link might be missed in this area as so many others (fed up of americans mistaking inferior PC ports of Amiga heyday software for the canonical version, gah...).

A legal snapshot of IMDB was contributed to AmiNet in 2004: http://aminet.net/misc/imdb

That's extremely damning. For those following along at home, this is the image up on Commodore USA's website, and this is the original image from ten years ago. The difference? The image up on Commodore USA's website has a bad photoshop hack job of removing the word "fantasy" from the top right of the keyboard, and the word fantasy from the mouse cord (and the cord itself). It still attributes the image to Marko Hirv.

I don't think there can be more irrefutable proof that this is a scam.

Yes. The ability to output PAL and NTSC made it popular for video and interactive presentations. Some of these systems are still live. The scripting system made it possible to mix multimedia or run multimedia batch processing jobs. The POSIX-like API allowed a large amount of Unix style utilities to be run. The shareware and open source libraries continue to be one of the largest and highest quality - and it is still growing because much of it is cross platform: http://aminet.net/tree

AmigaOS 4 isn't particularly obsolete (apart from being closed source, I happen to consider closed source obsolete in social terms). Classic AmigaOS's one serious failing* was its lack of memory protection, AmigaOS 4 added memory protection.

So yeah, modern OS versions have caught up in many areas with AmigaOS. But that neglects the gestalt - the macosx-like-but-different way everything hangs together coherently (I refuse to say synergistically). It has a bunch of features that would be recognisable to modern macosx/linux and even windoze users. And stuff like datatypes are still kinda neat today. Want every app on your system to be able to open some new multimedia file format? Drop in a datatype (codec) for it. Want [the amiga equivalent of] /usr/local/work and /opt/mystuff/work2 to appear as one logical volume? ASSIGN ADD them together. Or you can faff about with unionfs on linux of course. Want to script a bunch of apps? Gee, you can, because there's a systemwide standard for that shit. Okay, apple has applescript and windows has windows scripting host, but amiga had analogous facilities back when windows didn't even have preemptive multitasking.

A textbook basic AmigaOS setup isn't much like what the few remaining hardcore AmigaOS users can make their system do anyway:
The line between os and add-on is very blurred (a bit like linux), of course, you've got a zillion "commodities" (daemons) that mutate the GUI and OS in various directions. You've got a bunch of deeper hacks that use SetPatch() to augment/replace core OS functionality (a bit like LD_PRELOAD on linux, if you squint).

(* and strength, back when performance mattered it allowed it to use an interproceess message passing by reference architecture, which gave amazing speed on limited hardware)

Executes the cellular automata game of LIFE in the blitter chip. Uses a 318 by 188 display and runs at 19.8 generations per second. Author: Tomas Rokicki

Yes it's the cool Amiga stuff Matt Dillon. I still remember getting DICE on two Amiga Shoper coverdisks and the ever useful FMS (thanks Matt!). It's interesting to note that Dave Jones (who later tweaked FMS) is a Red Hat Linux kernel hacker.

Sorry Sxooter, you're letting the rose-tinted glasses blur your memory.

The Amiga multitasking was preemptive, sure, but the reason you didn't see the cursor hang was because it was well programmed and software was WELL BEHAVED.

I'm an Amiga programmer and know its hardware and the RKRMs inside and out. Exec had round-robin ABSOLUTE PRIORITY multitasking. The highest priority ready-to-run task _always_ gets the CPU, no exceptions.

The input handlers which move the cursor in response to your mouse movements executed in a task with priority 21. Normal programs run at priority 0, but there is NOTHING to stop them running at priority 22 and starving the input handlers of all CPU time.

If you look up a process and do "ChangeTaskPri +22" on it, you will see whenever it does any processing, because the mouse will judder to a halt. If it continues to use the CPU, your system will lock solid until it voluntarily yields the CPU (e.g. it waits on a signal or does some I/O)

By contrast, a UNIX process scheduler realises that it can't always give CPU to the highest priority process, because that starves lower priority processes. A program called Executive could patch the Amiga scheduler and replace it with a fair UNIX-like scheduler instead.

The other major factor is good hardware design. The Amiga's hardware, including the big-box Amiga Zorro slots, were DESIGNED not to interrupt the CPU all the time. It had the bare minimum of hardware that needed to be polled, almost everything worked by DMA. By contrast, the IBM PC architecture is shit. Even a well programmed OS like Linux has to suffer long interrupt-handling periods on the IBM PC architecture.

Well, with Linux there is little choice. Due to it's obscurity and lack of popularity, unless you put all the software in one place it would be pretty difficult to use. Also, the number of packages isn't really something to brag about. First, many of those packages are not full featured software programs. Many are single use command line tools that do little except handle [stdin] and [stdout].

Second, check out Aminet's collection of Amiga software, a machine that has been dead for awhile. Around 32,000 packages, not including any graphics, music, demo or text files.

Since you are not a Linux user just how is it you know what is in the Debian repositories? I'd like to see you trot out facts to support your bald-faced assertions, or maybe I should call the assertions what they really are, lies.

I've been using Debian as my default desktop for 5 years now and I'm still running across software packages that I never knew existed, and you know exactly what's available without ever using it. [sarcasm]You're really some kind of genius.[/sarcasm]
   

Well, with Linux there is little choice. Due to it's obscurity and lack of popularity, unless you put all the software in one place it would be pretty difficult to use. Also, the number of packages isn't really something to brag about. First, many of those packages are not full featured software programs. Many are single use command line tools that do little except handle [stdin] and [stdout].

Second, check out Aminet's collection of Amiga software, a machine that has been dead for awhile. Around 32,000 packages, not including any graphics, music, demo or text files.

http://aminet.net/search?query=noclick

Wrong. Commodore Amiga used standard industrial floppy drives, (as did Rolland for theirs midi boxes). Note: standard industrial floppy drives have noting in common with floppy drives used in Atari, Amstrad CPC and PC clones except for data storage medium. Amiga had capability of detecting floppy disks without spinning them, could use up to 4 floppy drives on single controller and DMA access was default mode for floppy use.

Ticking sound was meant as a reminder to prevent damage that could occur if hardware / cables were removed while Amiga was powered on. It could be silenced, an patch (CLI) command is available on http://aminet.net/disk/misc/anticlick.lha and the exe size is 178 bytes.

AROS is an open source operating system largely source-compatible with AmigaOS 3.x APIs and runs on modern PCs. It's not "finished", and shares AmigaOS weaknesses as well as strengths, but is usable (helped by recompiles of a load of amiga stuff from the Aminet (still around!) I guess) :

http://aros.sourceforge.net/

Grab a liveCD from Icaros desktop and give it a go.

http://vmwaros.blogspot.com/

I wouldn't really want to use a system lacking full memory protection in the modern era (though some effort at retrofitting memory protection is underway IIRC), but it does work.

Feel free to correct the Wiki article. While you're at it, you might want to get the myriad web sites which disagree with you to fix their pages.

AmiDock. It's been around for a LOOOOONG time.

http://aminet.net/search.php?query=amidock

I used to use a tool on the Amiga called FastBoot. Quite an impressive hack; it's basically Suspend to Disk. Disable task switching, write out memory to disk, when you next boot, run a tool to load it back in. Since I had a lot of crap running on my Amiga, with boot times of a minute or more, it was awesome using this to reduce that to a couple of seconds.

And.. indeed, this is exactly what I do on my Windows desktop, and indeed what I do on my XP partition on my laptop today; I Hibernate them so bootup happens in 20 seconds instead of 120 (yes, I still run a lot of crap).

Why not let the player save the whole planet?

One of my favourite P&C Adventures, "Muscarine", had the brilliant idea of the mission being to destroy the universe in order to restore the balance from other games requiring you to save it.

I remember holding my walkman's microphone up to the TV speakers in order to capture the music to particular games. In some cases where the music was in-game (and before I learned how to hack them out), I'd have to play the game for as long as possible without dying (and causing as few sound effects as possible) in order to tape it.

There were several 8-bit masterpieces I liked that are well known (Rob Hubbard's, for instance) but I liked a lot from the Amiga too. Hybris, Turrican, Project X, Shadow of the Beast to name a few, plus of course lots of the music from demos - I don't think anything will ever beat the music from Static Chaos by Silents for me.

The good news is there are tons of sites full of fans of this music, Aminet is the best place to start.

We replaced a FDD in our A1200 (10+ years ago!) with a modified Panasonic JU257, which are quite common. Try this

It made a clunk every few seconds as it checked for the presence of a disk. This made you stick in disks at random just to shut it up.

Yeah, the trackdisk.device was lousy in that way. But for every AmigaOS version there were programms that could stop the clicking.

For 2.0 upwards they were even implemented as Commodities

The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.

Most of the software still in use is old 68000 stuff from companies which themselves are so long in the grave

The only PPC platform in production these days is the PS3 but it doesn't allow "other OS" to access the 3D hardware which would be a bummer since Amaga OS 4 just gained 3D support. :(

I find XP refuses to hibernate with more than about 600MB of active memory; it makes an attempt, then returns you to the desktop with a popup bubble saying "Insufficient resources exist to complete the API". This necessitates me closing all my apps before each hibernation, and after a week or two even that won't work.

Anyway, I remember using something closer to what the story is talking about, on the Amiga of all places; FastBoot had you boot normally, then save a snapshot of the system at the end of the startup-sequence. Future boots would use this snapshot, which you generally didn't want to update at each shutdown -- you got 2-3s boot times, but each boot was clean. It worked surprisingly well for a scary hack :)

qz

Too bad about this (website might try to "force" you through a survey -- clicking "submit" skipped it for me): "Linux is found to be much faster than Apple's OS X for statistical computing. And although Linux is 5 to 10 percent faster than Windows XP, both are markedly faster than OS X. For example, in one benchmark both Linux and Windows XP are more than twice as fast as OS X."

Anecdotally, the Amiga is the most popular computer ever, and it has way more titles than the Mac and the PC combined.

Here's a huge list of some of the applications available, from some website: http://aminet.net/tree.php

Now mod me +5, Informative.

I think you're looking at the wrong technology. Some of those linked sites to the hacked up MIDIs are cool and everything, but MIDIs have their limitations and they seem like a particularly clumsy technology to me.

What MIDIs these days do is work with a set of digital samples then apply fancy transformations to the PCM data to give you instruments with different pitches, frequencies, etc. My first big problem with this is that MIDI is pretty much stuck with a single set of samples for the instruments unless you use something like Creative's SoundFont where you can change the sound of every instrument in the set. The problem being is that now you can't distribute the original MIDI and expect a consistent listening experience from all of your users. You're forced to record the audio to an MP3 or something on your machine before distributing it.

Which leads me to my next point. Incase you were not aware, a new type of music has existed since the days of the Amiga that fixes the problems of the gimped MIDI standard. I'm talking about digital modules (MOD, S3M, IT, XM, 669, etc.) These modules work on the same priniciples as MIDI but they have some distinct advantages:

• Runs on the cheap hardware and low end systems. Just needs a sound card capable of.. Outputting sound..
• The digital samples used for the music are saved within the file itself. Sounds the same on everyone's system.
• Better quality than MIDIs if they're done right. Some formats (XM and IT especially) have some pretty slick advnaced features for instruments.
• The audio processing for most of these is fast enough to be run in real time alongside some other processor consuming task. (Doesn't really matter these days, however.)

My second largest problem with MIDI back in the day was that by comparison, the software MIDI emulators drained the computer of most of its resources.

So there you have it. I recommend diving into this world instead and stay clear of those icky MIDIs. Here are some resources if you don't know where to get started:

• MODPlug Central popluar player and tracker. And yes, you can use your MIDI keyboard to compose music with a lot of these trackers.
• Nectarine Shoutcast streams of a lot of these modules
• The Mod Archive Could forget the good old MOD Archive! A modern repository for this type of music.
• chiptune.com A great resource for Chiptunes! (really, really small modules.) And music in other formats (including Adlib music.)
• Aminet Has a lot of the older ("classic") modules that first appeared on the Amiga with the popular ProTracker
• Fasttracker 2 Just for completeness. The trakcer that introduced the XM file format. The same functionality is in ModPlug tracker.
• Impulse Tracker Included for completeness. Another excellent tracker like Fasttracker. Introduced the IT file format. The same functionality exists in ModPlug tracker.
• ScreamTracker Only including a link to information about it because of the nostaliga involved with it. It's lacking in the features that Fasttracker and Impluse Tracker have but it's really easy to use.
• The Hornet Archive Another nostaliga site. Music and programs from the Demoscene.

Also, if you're interested, there has been some development relatively recently with "Buzz trakcers"(?) I don't have as much knowledge with these but from what I saw with Jeskola Buzz, it's really very

But anyhow, everything I've seen so far seems consistent with my hypothesis that floppy reliability is a matter of quality mechanical components. (File systems that are more paranoid than FAT12 help though.) Systems that needed good floppy reliability put in better drives.

The polling was a secondary means of detecting a disk insertion for drives without the detection switch. There are "noclick" utilities that most will turn off the polling since most hardware did support the switch. noclick search on Aminet

It reminds me of my days checking Aminet's recent uploads page over and over back in my Amiga days.

Hollywood (presentation software), Pagestream (DTP), Candy Factory (graphics software), AmigaWriter (Word processor - handles MS Word files), ArtEffect (Photoshop wannabe) and lots of other software. New stuff still appears on Aminet pretty much every single day. Oh, and around 1000 people chose to actually cough up 50$ to show that they wanted to buy the board when it came out with AOS4. A lot more are waiting in the shadow.

This kind of problematic already occured in the past... for Open Source development on Amiga Platform.

The Workbench 2.04 and later (especially 3.0 and 3.1) included the concept of "Catalogs file". Each catalog had a CT file (plain ascii to be edited through a System tool) and CD file for "compiled language description".

When releasing a software, you had to first think of putting all text strings in a separate file, even for the "standard" English release. The file was to be stored in a Locale/Language/English/ folder.

Later, anybody could get the CT file to modify it, compile it again and get a new language done... or un-compile the CD file and modify it manually too.

This was quite easy to implement and the need for international translators rose. Most of the time, someone would offer freely to translate a software and post the Catalog file on Aminet. But how coordinate 10 translations at the same time?

Thus was created the Amiga Translators Organization whose responsability was to offer free translation for Freeware tools and Open Sources projects. A few commercial games and Professional tools were also done (I did some of the last Amiga Games and GFX Tools for French).

I'm sure this could be done again today for a plateform independent translation process...

Rgds, Julien

Yes, but Amiga Inc does not only own the names but also AmigaOS and related Amiga products. The includes licenses for usage of all Amiga patents and costed them (Amiga Inc employees under Gateway) around 5 million USD.

Hyperion is leading the AmigaOS4 project and they have several coders working full-time on the project.

If you would like to see what the PEGASOS is like them here's an interesting demonstration movie showing the hardware running AmigaOS3.x on top of MorphOS.

Thats one of the lower quality MODs I've heard. One of the instruments sounds like a car trying to start in a minor key, and its used throughout the whole tune. Don't introduce people to .mod files as something worse than MIDIs...

If you want to hear a high quality repetitive music MOD, try Bubblegum. :-)

Take a look at the stuff by Mathias Wengler at Aminet.

Before I lead to confusion: This product is "not there yet" but it is part of the final plan.

The AmigaDE is a "virtual computer" and thus AmigaDE applications run anywhere. They are binary compatible to all devices the DE engine runs on. Some say: "This is like Java." But it is not. Java is a runtime-environment (in this case) but

the AmigaDE is a fully virtual computer, coming with its own CPU.

What does this mean, especially in referral to your question ?

It means, that all your beloved applications run everywhere. This way you need to carry a disk only, on which you have installed your favourite applications, databases etc. and as soon you find yourself using other hardware the DE runs on, you just slide in your disk and the "virtual computer" deflates. You use the same machine as the one at home, the DE does scale down and adapts to the hardware it is running on, be it a desktop, a PDA, a notebook or a special terminal at the airport (well, I said its not there yet ;-)).

While this does not mean that you access a central server remotely over a network (your question), this way you take your "central" machine away with you on a ZIP/JAZ disk (or so).

This is all very interesting and exciting stuff.
However, Amiga Inc. have not yet shown, who and what they are, and this makes me raise an eyebrow and concerned if we will see the DE ever going so far, to utilize its full potential.

This is such (theoretical at least) a revolution, that it will need time to absorb and get accustomed to. And the market plays an important role as well, sigh.
At the moment the AmigaDE is nothing more than a system running on (I am naming the most important platfomrs only) Windows, WindowsCE.NET, Linux (RedHat offer(ed?)s the SDK on their web-page (once?)) and others, mainly to play games on PDAs.

See here or here (list of mirrors) for a video [mpeg, 85MB] (or DivX v5, 13MB) where it gets demonstrated.

Can I launch an AmigaDE application just like a reqular windows application? Meaning, can i launch DE apps without launching the special DE GUI?

Here is a demonstration video of a seminar by Amiga`s CEO Bill McEwen, little over a year old in Australia, showing an AmigaDE game running binary identical from a diskette on both Linux and Windows platforms. During this seminar Bill also demonstrated Photogenics (a popular Amiga graphic application) on the AmigaDE.

I am wondering if it will be possible to launch AmigaDE Sheep programs/scripts in the same way.

Any idea on how much it will cost to put and AmigaDE environment on my machine?

When will Sheep come out

and will it be included in handheld versions of DE?

Are there any plans to port elate technology over to qnx rtp 6.x?

Can I launch an AmigaDE application just like a reqular windows application? Meaning, can i launch DE apps without launching the special DE GUI?

Here is a demonstration video of a seminar by Amiga`s CEO Bill McEwen, little over a year old in Australia, showing an AmigaDE game running binary identical from a diskette on both Linux and Windows platforms. During this seminar Bill also demonstrated Photogenics (a popular Amiga graphic application) on the AmigaDE.

I am wondering if it will be possible to launch AmigaDE Sheep programs/scripts in the same way.

Any idea on how much it will cost to put and AmigaDE environment on my machine?

When will Sheep come out

and will it be included in handheld versions of DE?

Are there any plans to port elate technology over to qnx rtp 6.x?