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The Continuing Rise Of Amiga
Mike Bouma writes: "Already well over 15,000 developers have bought the Amiga SDK 1.0 and soon there will be an update available (3D, Sound, GUI and performance improvements). It will be downloadable freely for 1.0 buyers and a Windows equivalent will be available.
There is an enormous amount of activity going on within the Amiga community, for example only yesterday
Hyperion Software acquired the rights for a Europa Universalis port. While Hyperion Software already had an incredible lineup of games licenses for the Amiga (Majesty, Soldier of Fortune, Sin, Heretic II, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Freespace: The Great War, Worms: Armageddon), Linux (Majesty, Sin, Shogo) and Mac (Shogo, Soldier of Fortune). Read this interesting interview with Thomas Frieden to know more about them. They are also working together with Titan Software to port various titles like Alien Nations as Titan has the Amiga and Mac porting rights.(Also their Exodus: the Last War *finally a Napalm beater?* and Evils Doom are great new games)
Meanwhile many other companies are investing a lot of effort to support alternative OSes and especially the Next Generation Amiga Digital Environment. Some examples are Epic Interactive and PaganGames (Earth 2140, Scavengers, Magick, Simon The Sorcerer 2, Dafel: Bloodline, etc., for both Amiga/Mac and Foundations series), Crystal Interactive (Gilbert Goodmate, Bubble Heroes, Dark Millennia, Dweebs, Gorky17), Digital Dreams Entertainment (Hell Squad, Wasted Dreams series, Diablo's Land), Blittersoft (Wipeout 2097 for Amiga/Mac, Payback, Homeland, etc.) and many many other small and unannounced companies developing for the new Amiga. Some interesting Amiga SDK information and some open sourced games and utilities for the Amiga SDK can be downloaded here."
My central point is that as someone who primarily uses Linux, even *I* would consider buying an Amiga if they manufactured cheap PowerPC boxes that Linux could be reinstalled on to.
So which part of my statement indicates I did not read the article. I just don't buy the hype.
If you read my post before firing off your lame "he didn't read the article" whinge, you'd realize I was opining more on the state of Amiga and fruitless advocacy, than the "news of the day" this submission links to.
Any system that FUNCTIONS is viable for a particular user, but if AMiga had 100 times the market share... they still wouldn't beat Apple or Linux. I'm sure Amiga will benefit from open-source software that gets ported to their OS, but even then there's only so many port maintainers, and I don't envision lots of closed source software getting ported.
Amiga could have targeted systems to Linux users,
most of whom have fond memories of the AMiga of old.
all this support for amiga, but beos users can't get any? ^^;;
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
>If that's your main problem, get longer display and keyboard cables, and stick that machine in another room.
:)
That's simply not an option in an apartment, and when I get a house I'd lose a whole room to "storage". I've already tried putting the system in the closet, but it gets too warm.:-/
I appreaciate PowerPC for other things than minimal heat. Just like some people view Linux as "free" because the software doesn't lock you into an OS vendor, I appreciate the potential for linux not locking us into *an architecture*. I am simply floored by people who don't click on this POTENTIAL... we'll never get anything revolutionary from Intel so why wear their handcuffs? I like cheap x86 parts (smp!) too, but Intel's lost there edge. The next revolutionary CPU designer will have nothing to offer if Linux apps are still chained to IA-32...
I ran PPC Linux when I had a Mac, and liked it. Sure, I'll miss out on Quake and Unreal, but Loki's porting PPC games.
One wouldn't need to compile everything if they run a Linux distro that supports apt-get. I totally love Debian now, after trying everything else first because of rumors of a difficult install (not so bad)
That's what the Amiga was FOR. The Video Toaster and all those neat applications that made Amiga famous? Those came later.. by several years.
As with many things from the early days of personal computers, the history is muddy and filled with opinon, but if you poke around for a bit, you can pick up one common thread: They were striving to build the next hot gaming platform.
One example of this would be a history found here.
There's dozens more out there.. I reccomend looking them up and getting a lot of opinions before making your own. But playing games exclusively wouldn't be an insult to the Amiga. :) It'd be using it for exactly what it was meant to do.
I'm not very familiar with the Amiga, or its rebirth, but from the list you given in the post, it looks like the Amiga has been demoted to a video game system, is the plan for Amiga to compete with consoles, or is the Amiga also going to be an actual PC platform with a broad range of applications?
Wow! A whole 15.000 developers have downloaded it! Maybe if they're lucky, 5 more will get it, and they'll have a nice round 20.000 developers... :P
Well, obviously the assumption being made here was that the people who click on the 'read more' link would be the people who do care.
I think this article will go down as "the most front page header space wasted in Slashdot history". A joke, but still...
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I do this too -and with good reason. There are NO lossless animation/pixel-by-pixel editing tools available anywhere else that I hae found that are on a par with the Amiga's various image processing suites, such as PPaint and Animation Studio.
The modern ones are all either veery powerful, but with hideous, clunky user interfaces (gimp, photoshop), or with superficially similar easy UIs to Amiga packages, but ridiculuously feature free.
If I'm drawing original, bitmapped web graphics, I use an emulated copy of Amiga software - although, now that phoitogenics is out for linux, that can finally begin to change.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Yes, the Amiga was a VERY similar m68k UNIX-like OO GUI architecture to NeXTSTEP, in fact - but at 1/10th the cost.
It was technically excellent, but management screwed it up.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
engineering overview
This sounds like a java that actually works. 3 month porting time, everything compiles to virtual machine code, and is translated native on the fly, depending on architecture.
Too bad about the licensing/fee issues that others have posted. The SDK itself should be free, and freely downloaded, if they are going to do that. Or $100 and free from royalties. But not both.
So, I think this is a great idea, and a high quality implementation, but the licensing stuff looks stinky. Too bad. Maybe they will open source it in a year or so?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Why is almost everyone here bringing up the long-gone-and-deadness of the old Amiga machines, and then in the same breath writing the SDK off as DOA?
:-)
This SDK has nothing to do with the old Amiga machines. They kept the name, but that and maybe a certain degree of technical unconventionality are about all this has in common with what Amiga used to be.
This is a cross-platform, hosted application environment. It has a virtual-processor architecture, such that the same binary will work for all platforms (through dynamic recompilation). Everything is based around the Taos kernel, which is (supposedly) the only thing that actually has to be ported to a new architecture for the entire system to support it.
So what this really is is something like Java on steroids, or GNUstep sans native binaries. I love that the core system is quite compact (apparently the Taos kernel is 12kB!), and that it is highly geared toward efficient parallel processing. That the whole thing is called Amiga is a bit odd, but looking into this, one explanation becomes clear: What Amiga boxen were to the hardware peers of its day, this seems to be to the software of today. This really does look like advanced stuff. Read more about it.
I am disappointed, however, that the system is proprietary. Don't wanna go there. But then, hey, these guys are way ahead of the curve. And who knows, maybe the AROS folks will begin their own implemetation of the new API once they finish with the old one
iSKUNK!
It can run unhosted. Yes it's an OS.
Which part of the Amiga didn't you like? Was it the efficient operating system? The colour graphical user interface? The multitasking? The 32-bit architecture when everything else was 16-bit?
"Braindamaged CLI syntax"
Oh, you didn't like it because it wasn't Un*x. You could have just got a port of a Un*x shell you know...
"atari 800 class video"
What!? You mean to tell me the Atari 800 also was able to display up to 4096 colours on screen at once!? And it could pull off reslutions at high as 1280 x 512? (And that's *without* overscan)?? TO think, I was under the impression the Atari 800's maximum resolution was a monochrome 320 x 192.
After reading a few of the marktoid blurbs on the new amiga envoirment, it sounds like amiga is reinventing the java wheel. I mean where have we seen 'write once, run anywhere' before? Also the idea of a singal compatiable abi across several different envoirments/chip archetecures seems again just like java. The final thing is how its being pushed, as an envoirment that scales from cell phones to super computer, java marketing spin again. What Amiga hasnt talked about is how they are going to fix the short comings of java. Well not licenseing the abi will fix one, like it or not if sun controlled all jvm's then we know the code would work on all systems. The next major pitfall of java is performance. Even with the best jvm compairing speed performance and stress testing isnt in the same leage as C or C++ compiled to a native binary. Now on super computer you might have cycles to waste on a emulation envoirment, but how many extra cycles do you think your cell phone will have. THere is one other amiga option which is you compile a seperate binary for each supported platform, then the binary loader picks its correct code. This sounds insane, but your makeing the trade off of size complexity for speed complexity, as big drives and ram prices fall, this trade off might be worth it to sustain run time performance. Really I would like to see amiga take off. Actually I would like to see several OS's develop and used by the general public, M$ is slow, fat and stupid ( which is no way to go through life) and I think some of these other os developers are a bit more hungry and willing to put in the effort to develop the best possible envoirment. Before I can get behind Amiga (again), I want to see a clear plan of the future, I want to know how they plan to solve real world problems, before the marketoids get behind a project the engineers have to sign off on it first. Amiga needs to stop putting out market buzz and start talking about cold hard facts, problems and solutions so us engineers can hold them up and say "Look these guys have something, and you marketoid morons should take a look"
Talk about throwing a bucket of ice water on people hot to do something really interesting with the SDK! That and the fact that the Elate OS stuff is heavily patent-encumbered (I wonder if the guy who developed/patented the VM ever heard of UCSD p-code) leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Oh well, it is interesting to look at until the next SDK from someone completely different is released with a more developer-friendly attitude (and license!). Fortunately, it didn't cost too much, so I don't feel cheated. I'll get my $80 out of it at some point.
Note- yes, I realize that there is a license on their web site that does not contain the royalty requirements. However, that license is not properly written to supercede the one on the disk. First, it does not reference any particular product (the "product listed above" is not listed at all). Second, the original license says that the royalty requirements may change and those changes are to be found at http://www.amigadev.net/royalties, which does not exist. Thus, I don't see, legally, how the royalty requirement has been dispensed with (properly). It doesn't matter if they claim that they won't sue for royalties; as long as the legal loophole exists, developers are at risk.
I wonder how many of the other 14,999 developers are feeling the same way. Further, I also am curious how many of them don't realize that they are at risk of being sued for said royalties, if "Amiga" decides to be nasty about it.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
You really think I meant Lightwave *itself* is gone? That's just plain dumb of you. Of course I meant in regards to Amiga OS.
:_)
Newtek no longer actively supports their new products on AMiga. Is that clear ENOUGH for you? Deal with it.
I was at NAB the last few years. Newtek has the best booth doughnuts.
I actually quite liked the way you didn't have to type "cd <directory>" you could just go with "<directory>", the CLI noticed you were trying to "execute" a directory and interpreted it as a change directory command. It saved 3 charcters, but think, How many times a day do you type cd ?
The last time I checked the definition of an operating system, it interfaced between the hardware and the software on the machine. Unless AmigaOS somehow usurps the underlying OS (by needing to be run as root, or whatever, in which case why not make it an independant OS?), can we really call it an operating system?
And yes, I am one of those guys that's pedantic about terms :) Hacker = cracker, web = internet, Red Hat version = Linux version etc are all mistakes that came into being because people weren't quite strict enough...
Sometimes I feel life I've been through more Amiga revivals than Macintosh miracle recoveries :-)
I used to be an Amiga Games Developer until the $$$ on the Sega Megadrive lured me away.
So now I'm just a "Hardware Prostitute" (whatever platform runs the fastest and pays the most money/egoboo to it's developers is where you'll see me.)
That is to say, I'm currently writing graphics apps on BeOS with a 14-month old 600 MHz Intel PIII -- I won't jump in with yet another OS company just because they use the name "Amiga" - But I'll come running back if they have a hardware/software combo thats nicer than what I've got now.
-ShunScene
(ring 0900-SYKIC-4-YOU for my EMail address.)
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
Graphics3D 640, 480
Wow, you must have them all listed in that news "blurb". Can we have the Reader's Digest version next time, please?
My friend's amiga 1000 had games that made my moth drop open. With most people stuck in CGA and EGA world, the graphics on the machine would blow ones mind. Add to that a windowing environment that beat everything up to about Win95 and OS7. Multitasking! On a PC! An OS for which the GUI and CLI made sense together.
Back then, PC operating systems were a joke compared to the amiga. If amiga had business apps back then, the choice would have been clear.
A comeback seems absurd today, but I remember that in grade school the amiga was a miracle. Who knows?
The Amiga started the trend of building an accellerator into the hardware. It also had the "COPPER", a device to manupulate graphics features on the fly. This was used for everything from increasing the palette in low palette modes to mixing screen modes to creating fairly radical enhancements to the double buffered screen concept. Generally your average $50 graphics card doesn't support any of this right now, and probably never will due to the lack of standardisation, but it was an innovative feature.
The only "1983" aspects to the graphics system were:
- The original graphics modes were orientated to NTSC/PAL resolutions and rates. At the time, it was rare to have a monitor that could support anything more powerful.
- They were also trying to get what they could out of scarce amounts of RAM. The most visible example was HAM, a colour mode that managed to get 12 bit "truecolour" [pedants - notice the quotation marks] at a 320x(200/240/400/480) resolution) by doing some tricks with the encoding. Right now, with RAM prices at an all time low, we don't consider allocating 8 megs to a graphics card remarkable, but at the time, it meant something approximating to a photograph could be shown on an affordable computer, and was thus radically ahead of its time. Right now, there's little point in palette based and compression based screen modes, so you probably wouldn't design the average "modern" computer with them.
I personally thought the hardware was sweet. It took until the early nineties for the PC to catch up in resolutions and colour depth, and until the mid to late nineties for features like acceleration to become commonplace. That's remarkable for a machine that was designed in the early eighties and that had had virtually no major improvements done to it until the AGA chipset was released (24 bit HAM, resolutions doubled) in 1993/4.--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I emailed Amiga developer support a few days ago to ask how in the world they were charging $100 for the SDK. I was answered that they need serious developer.. and that serious developer won't be scared to spend $100 knowing it's worthy. I was told that if they released the SDK for free it could have attracted a million peopole but not serious developers. Nice smack in the face of the old Amiga community. What's wrong in having a million people playing around with an SDK ? Also.. do they think those 15,000 serious developer were going to lose interest in the SDK because it's free ?
Well sorry if I'm not a developer serious enough to give 100 bucks away just to play around with something and find out if it's useful or not.
Amiga doesn't exist anymore.. it's a name of an hardware and software that used revolutionary.. if another revolution has to happen it wont be because of a name.
While this may seem like an original phenomenon, I draw your attention to the aging baby boomers and the success they have created for the Prowler. Nostalgia is nothing new. Computers, however, are, relatively. As the first wave of us who grew up programming games and such and measuring application sizes in KBs age, we happily return to our earlier and more fond experiences with computers that were fun and just plain Worked. Amiga is an example of technological nostalgia to come about more often in the near future.
Regards
It hurts the "root for the underdog" part of me, but Amiga has no momentum, and the best thing you can do with one is install Linux on it.
Well, OK, I'm overstating things a bit -- it's a viable platform for people who won't budge off it. However I don't see any NEW people moving onto it, Lightwave is gone, and most of the specialized, creative applications have since moved onto NT.
What I *really* wish Amiga had done was manufacture PowerPC-based boxes that could easily be refitted with Linux. Nothing against Apple, but I just want CHEAP POWERPC motherboards. My x86 boxes are so hot, and noisy, that I'm tempted to wear headphones in this room, and I hate headphones. I think Amiga could have made a much better run in the Linux workstation market than say SGI...
On the offchance that this gets moderated up, I'd like to THANK MOTOROLA for the lack of off the shelf PowerPC motherboards. Motorola pushes embedded Linux on [gasp!] Intel processors, their server line is Intel-based, and and you can't buy off the shelf PowerPC motherboards.
What corporate vision. They seem about as efficent as General Motors.
*sigh* Maybe my raise will allow me to get one of those G4 Cubes without wincing. They would make sweet Linux boxes.
Just a bit of history, for all the people that didn't grow up on the apple (computer):
The Apple ][, ][+,
The Apple ][ (orginal),
Woz says:
The only way to get the mini-assembler on the Apple ][+,
The enhanced
i.e.
You can see the source for the mini-assembler here.
An interesting read of the Apple (computer) history can be read here.
I can't help but notice that Mario 64 is on the list of games being ported... seems very unusual to me since Miyamoto has gone on record saying he doesn't want to port to other platforms. Yet the very promise of being able to play these games on any platform would seem to totally contradict that.
Also, would this mean that Nintendo is going to be using the Amiga platform? a common complain by developers of the n64 was that is was very hard to develop for... is this the answer?