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The "New" Amiga Finally Releases Something
It appears that the new Amiga has actually released something - yes, in a
press release put out on the 3rd, they announced the Developers' Kit has been put out for Linux, Amiga and Java Developers. Yes, at only $99, you too can be a new Amiga Developer.
> While I'm a long time Amiga-user and love(d) the
> system, I can't really get excited about the
> resurrection of the platform.
I think the point that some people seem to skirt around is that Amiga are trying to resurrect the old Amiga in as much as Linus tried to resurrect Unix by writing Linux.
I'm sure that if Amiga had called themselves [insert cool name here] instead then they'd have an easier time of it (especially on slashdot) because people wouldn't be saying "Well it used to be good, but..."
Cheers,
oojah
Do you have any better hostages?
Perhaps I will stop
Then again I may go on
Both are good choices
There once was Anonymous Coward
Thought Five Seven Five dumb as a mallard
He replied with a smile
"I rhyme once in a while!
Free haikus, you want more? Show me dollars!"
from the press release:
"Amiga is Back..."
hmm. I've heard this a few times. Perhaps this gives us an insight into what AMIGA might stand for, in the good 'ol GNU style:
"AMiga Is Going, Again"
:>
"My" Fortune 50 company uses open source and free tools left and right, running on an OS (Unix) that runs the world *BECAUSE* of the vast quantity of free tools involved in it.
Name me one succesful computer platform that has tried to discourage development of free software.
There's not one; they die off if they try that.
Again, you seem to be laboring under some horrible misapprehension that Amiga makes less money if some guy off the street writes a program for their hardware.
By charging a measily 100 bucks for its SDK, it weeds out those that are only interested in developing free software.
Exactly; and that is a horribly stupid thing to do when trying to build a new platform.
I suspect that you are simply a troll spending too much time typing, so I'm going to go let you be an idiot now; the general public has long ago stopped reading this thread.
Oh, one last thing: "my" Fortune 50 company doesn't charge for it's software. The software is free, because it encourages people to use our services more, which means we make more money.
If we charged for the software, fewer people would use it, and we'd make less money.
Actually, we did make a piece of software once upon a time that we charged for. I can see a running count of every single time it's used, anywhere in the world; it's about a dozen total times a day.
Our free offering is used hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of times a day. Our web-based program is used tens of thousands of times a day.
We make more money in an hour than you will in your entire life. I think we're right and you're wrong.
Our revenue is nearly double Microsoft's.
--
The whole os fits in a rom of 512 kB. (256 on pre 2.0 machines.
So when you want to upgrade to the latest OS, you buy a new machine?
Will I retire or break 10K?
ya, right, now I know you're about as much BS as a stockyard can handle.
Ok, I admit it, it's not double; it's about 9/5th of theirs.
That's Fortune Magazine's figures, not internal figures.
--
Is this really something important? How many people will actually start developing for something that is just on the stage "we-will-make-it-we-really-will" and stated in the press release as the best thing since sliced bread?
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
from the article:
"Tao has been talking for some time now about our developments to create Digital Heaven(TM) and we see Amiga and its community as a fundamental part of the new order that can make it happen and take an industry lead. With the sheer tenacity and the many qualities of McEwen and his Amiga team, the world is going to see Amiga as a Premier Brand for connected digital appliances," said Francis Charig Chairman of the Tao-Group.
Clearly, the Amiga is going to Do It But Good (tm) this time - they're parterning with someone capable of delivering Digital Heaven!(tm) Oh, but Tao - be careful! Your Trademarked Phrase Of Goodness (tm) seems to have been taken from you by an evil Cybersquatter!:
Registrant:
Digital Heaven (DIGITALHEAVEN2-DOM)
725 Winslow St.
Crockett, CA 94525
US
Domain Name: digitalheaven.com
Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
Petty, Rob (PR117-ORG)
10g1cb0mb@VALUE.NET
Digital Heaven
725 WInslow St.
Crockett, CA 94525
US
510.787.1268
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin (DA817-ORG) dns@VALUE.NET,
Value Net
2855 Mitchell Dr. Suite #105
Walnut Creek, CA 94598
US
(925) 943-5769
Record last updated on 25-Aug-1997.
Record expires on 26-Aug-2000.
Record created on 25-Aug-1997.
Database last updated on 2-Jun-2000 13:41:57 EDT.
I can't believe many people are getting caught up in this total marketing scam. The only thing they are taking from the old Amiga is the name. I mean, it's great that they are trying to build a new platform and all, but why call it the Amiga? What does the old Amiga of 1984 have to do with this thing at all?
I don't know; maybe they'll come out with something and it'll be cool. But why do I have the feeling it's going to be a Caddyshack II? (or name your own bad sequel where some genius producer decides to make a movie whose only purpose is tack onto the success of the first movie)
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The Amiga market (or what remains of it) has been plagued for years by empty promises. Bill McEwen and Fleecy Moss emphatically stated that they would not be giving "teaser announcements" with estimated due dates because Amiga users have been jerked around enough as it is. From here on in, they make announcements when they've got something to SHOW for it.
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
"as much as Linus tried to resurrect Unix by writing Linux"
Hrm. That's funny.. My Solaris and Digital UNIX boxes seemed to be running just fine without the Linux explosion.
I hate to break it to you, but Linux did not resurrect UNIX. UNIX was never dead.
Linux originally was authored out of frustration for the lack of a good UNIX-like system for the PC. UNIX had been running on larger machines "forever" at that point.
-Jeff
Yes, at only $99, you too can be a new Amiga Developer.
How much is it to be an old one?
Whoops. My bad.
I misinterpretted the post I was replying to.
I guess the one I was replying to was actually the same point.
D'oh.
-Jeff
(of course, the fact that a good chunk of the Amiga kernel resides in the hardware Kickstart chip rarely gets factored into the equation, so I leave it to you to duke out the kernel-to-kernel faceoff silliness)
And 50 megs for an OS? Not bad, I guess, if you're going to use something fairly stripped down. I always loved the fact that I could install the complete Amiga OS (on what, 3-5 non-HD floppies) in the time it took just to BOOT my friend's WinNT monstrosity...
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
I don't think I've seen Caddyshack II, but the movie reference has got me thinking this way: it's going to be like Halloween III. If you've ever seen the Halloween movies, #3 sticks out as being total unrelated to the plots of the others. It's just Halloween in name only. That's what we have here.
Halloween III was a pretty bad movie too. But I dunno if Amiga II is going to be bad or good. Everything they've said about it has struck me as rather vague. It looks like it's going to be some very high-level APIs, and who knows, it might actully be useful. So I've ordered the SDK, just in case there's something here.
It's so important to break up the homogeneity in personal computers, that I'm willing to try out just about everything that comes by. I've already got an x86 Linux box, so this SDK is just another hundred bucks. Big deal. I'm also likely to buy a Mac when MacOS X comes out, and I'm damn well going to try out the QNX Neutrino release when it comes out this summer. Somewhere in all this noise, there's got to be a signal.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
But the PC has 1.44Mb disks, and the Amiga had 880Kb disks and a 512K ROM. Together, that is 1.4Mb for the Amiga, uncompressed. Many of the single disk Linux distros are compressed to fit everything on.
Of course, the Linux kernel has more features, but you would hope so considering how much more recent it is and the amount of work that hos gone into it. But being able to boot up into a full GUI, filemanager (Workbench), CLI available, many programs available on the first disk was amazing. A full preemptive multitasking OS, with autoconfig that is better than plug and play, and everything else that you all know, in only 1.4Mb. Nothing has come close since.
The Amiga was great in its day. Strict control of the hardware helped though, there was no having to support 100 different sound and graphics cards, the computer already came with the best you could get! A computer with real charisma, great games, but no killer applications, despite the superiority of the OS. WIthout the backing of business it didn't get brilliant sales except to designers and gamers.
Commodore were to blame. The managers there had no vision or foresight.
Hopefully the new Amiga will combine the best of the old Amiga with the best of other operating systems. Tao's VP technology is very good and doesn't take much of a hit on the system. The best way I could describe it is a very rich object code, and the OS loader incorporates the last stage of a compiler (very optimised) to get the best performance possible. I would bet that it would bo better on PPC, Alpha, MIPs, ARM etc than on x86 because of the limited instructions though. Also, the VP can include instructions like malloc, qsort, etc, so processor intensive applications will not be slowed down overly but core functions, as they will already exist in optimised formats.
The GUI is interesting as well. It isn't X, but it does allow anti-aliasing of text, transparency etc like Mac OS X. I don't know much else though, but it is a lot better than X, more like Berlin in a way.
"strict control of hardware" (I assume you mean integrated sound and graphics hardware in the system spec) sort of hurt Amiga in the long run.
Commodore was notoriously slow in developing their future chipsets. They held us over with minor enhancements such as the ECS chipset while the PC were gearing up with increasingly more powerful plug-in graphics adapters.
For the Amiga, there was really no choice--you had to wait for Commodore's latest offering. And when they did come out with a new chipset, you couldn't just upgrade. You needed a new machine.
Sure, you had cards like the OpalVision, etc. but since the regular chipset was included in the system spec, everyone wrote directly to the hardware and bypassed the OS. So your brand spankin' new card was useless except for the included applications and maybe some rare OS-friendly software.
Sure, the PC had a bazillion different graphics cards and such, but this allowed the PC to evolve while we had to wait for a single company to provide the new graphics solutions.
The fact is, the Amiga was so far ahead of its time, it took until about 1993 for the PC to catch up to what was essentially 1984 technology.
That year, Commodore introduced their new 'revolution' in graphics--the AGA chipset. What a joke--it was almost unchanged from ECS.
-=*> A S S V I C T I M *=-
It seems a lot of people missed the updated Amiga World today (http://www.amiga.com/press/zine/6-3-00/AW1.htm)
;)
There where actually a number of announcements today from Amiga. The update on their Amiga World magazine is the most informative.
The Amiga World actually contains a simple 'Hello World' sample code in VP (Virtual Processor Code) and a good explanation of the new Amiga Foundation Layer (AFL).
Quite an interesting read, I thought
A portable assembler? Isn't that another name for a C compiler?
They want developers? Then why charge for the dev kit? I would think _they_ need developers, rather than the the other way round. Feeling a bit pissed about how costs of (some) dev lits.
And in other news:
Nasa is trying to use "Pig Power" in order to fly the space shuttle.
Elvis admits that yes indeed he has been living a trailer park in Texas since he faked his death.
Aliens meet with president. Claim that now they are going to disney world.
This seems more real than anything in the past. So I hope they do have something here, but who else has seen one to many Amiga sigthings?
I start (say) MS-DOS with a bootdisk with command.com configured to load resident in high memory. I replace the bootdisk with a freshly formatted disk. To the computer, I just erased the bootdisk, but I can still do things (e.g. launch programs).
Will I retire or break 10K?
All applications will be totally code identical across platforms.
How can assembly programs (the language is assembly; an assembly compiler is an assembler) be compatible across platforms?
The closest we could get to portable assembly would be C.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Amiga community is supporting the classic Amiga because there was no viable elegant non bloated alternative available. Now the developers need something new as the advances in processing power and memory chips were able to compensate the inferior technologies in the current PC hardware architectures and Bloatware OSes.
OK, I'd like to hit this "bloatware" issue head-on. What is it about modern OSs that you dislike so much?
Size? Who cares in an era of 20 gig drives and 1 Ghz processors? I run Win/2000 on a Celeron 466/128 meg of memory. Things run instantaneously.
Features? What features do you advocate cutting? I like having a full-featured operating system. What benefit is there to stripping everything down?
I simply don't understand this longing for a stripped-down operating system. Help me out. What will a "non-bloated" new-style AmigaOS offer me, as a desktop user, that Win/2000 won't? [and don't say "reliability" because Win2K is pretty rock solid]
P.S. I do prefer Linux/Unix as a server OS, but I'm focusing on the desktop for this discussion.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Have a look here for an interesting interviwe with Hyperion Software . They have spent lots of cash on game licences (some costed them 50.000 -100.000 USD) for the new Amiga! Titles include Sin, Shogo, Heretic2, Worms: Armageddon, Freespace: The Great War and many other "Very recent" games soon to be announced!
They also have the rights for an Linux and Mac port of Shogo. They also promise to soon release some info about some Amiga only games.
However, one of the parties behind this movement, the Tao group I find very interesting indeed.
Platform-independent, binary-portable high performance Java implementation? I'd sign up today.
Jouni
--
Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com
Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant
"I for one am quite sick of having a bloated OS like linux on my HD. It's getting to the stage with GNU/linux/X that I am reminded how bloated windows was when I used to use it. Full Mandrake 7 install - 1.5Gb. Minimal - 250Mb. That story of putting linux on a floppy is bull**it."
Then don't be such a dumbass and get yourself a distro that *discourages* bloat:<http://www.slackware.com>. A reasonable non-X install with no kernel sources can be done in less then 50megs. Mandrake is installing not just the kitchen sink, but most of the plumbing in the bathroom and down to the sewer main. You don't -need- all that.
And a decent Linux install can be done to disk, it's been done, many times.
-> I hate sigs...
AAA was meant to be the replacement for ECS, and it was pretty good specwise. Unfortunately, Commodore went all funny, and then it was cancelled at the last minute and they had to produce AGA quickly. Terrible shame, as otherwise 1992 Amigas would have had much better facilities, such as true 24-bit screenmodes, 8 or 16 channel 16bit sound, etc, and it would have been a lot faster.
It is such a shame. PC 2D hardware still isn't as featureful as the Amiga graphics hardware (although it is a lot faster and more resolution etc). Of course, these features are needed less now with 3D hardware and 1GHz processors. Brings a tear to the eye.
Amiga, alive!
Our destiny etch'd in stone
We mean it this time
I've seen one of these dev systems in person (an early prototype version of the kit). The 'portable assembly' actually refers to a CPU-independent bytecode with its own assembly language.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard