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AmigaOS 3.9 Released At World of Amiga Show
Mike Bouma writes "A week ago a new OS upgrade for the classic 68k/PPC Amiga computer was released at the World of Amiga show. You can purchase it here.
Thousands of Amigans gathered in Cologne Germany to buy the many new poducts on display at the booths or to watch the various presentations of the 20+ attending companies. Highlight announcement for me was the return of Realsoft 3D to the Amiga. Furthermore I bought the christmas issue of Amiga Active, at KDH Datentechnik`s booth a copy of Exodus: the last War and an Amiga skin for my cell phone."
I got mine about 8 months ago from these guys:
http://www.e-trade.to/en/index.html
Cost about $110CDN.
There's nothing special about the Amiga drives, it was their controller. It was more low-level and software controlled than a PC controller. The PC controller does MFM decoding for you already, so you can't alter that process, which is what needs to change in order to read an Amiga formatted disk (sync and such was different). The Catweasel is a custom controller though and can literally read ANY format disk you throw at it, be it 5 1/4" or 3.5". Hook up a 5.25 PC drive and read old C-64/AppleII disks!
The only problem is the very beta drivers for Windows and Linux that noone seems to be working on. The Windows drivers can read almost all formats, but cannot write any. The Linux drivers can only read and write Amiga disks. Of course, they give you the source, and if you're a low-level junkie, it should be easy to create a driver for the disk type you want. All you need to do is get your hands on the format specs of the disk.
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~~~
Not the drive - the controller.
Hetz (Heunique)
See... that is the wrong attitude. Mike shouldn't gain from the articles. We should. The whole point of this great experiment called /. is that we can get news and then hopefully insightfull comentary on the news.
./ community done in response? If all these negative views have occured, it is our fault, not his.
Mike has brought us news. What has the
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
I disagree. I like seeing Amiga submissions. What does it hurt? If you don't want to read it, skip it. /. staff feels that this information is indeed worthy, they should feel obligated to pass it along to us.
Don't turn this into another Katz type thing.
If Mike happens to keep up on Amiga and he thinks that we are interested in some of the information he should feel obligated to share it. If the
Just cause you are tired of seeing 5 articles in the last 5 months doesn't mean it is overkill. I could stand 1 a week if it was informative. I know I wade through that many for other OSes and hardware makers... and so on.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Umm, I'm sure someone's already told you this, but this OS isn't for your stinky Intel box. Sure, you can run it on an Amiga emulator, but it's meant for "the classic 68k/PPC Amiga computer". You know, A4000, A1200, etc and so forth? YOu know, those machines that ruled over Wintel PCs before the people running the company thought it would be fun to fly it into a cliff?
They killed Tux!
You bastards!
Er, no, you couldn't do everything you'd want to on an A1200. And this is speaking as someone who loves Amigas dearly and has 5 in the room he's in right now.
Firstly, there's no real way of upgrading the GFX. Yes, there are add-on busboards and the like but they involve some pretty extensive (and expensive) additions so you're effectively stuck at 640*512 in 256 not that fast colours. Not pretty.
Secondly, you'll be surprised to discover just how much CPU time some stuff takes. Decoding JPEGs is one thing I remember taking an absolute age compared to what we're used to on PCs.
I'd say we could cover most of our needs on an A4000 - definitely one like mine with basically a ported SVGA card, an 060 processor, big drives and a load of RAM. But the 1200 isn't up to that sort of thing, speaking as someone who held out on one until '98.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I suspect you'd find a problem with some drives, actually.
:(
;)
When the Escom machines came out, it was noticed that they couldn't play some games. Zeewolf 2 (wonderful fun!) was noticed as a problem just before release and fixed.
Seems they'd used drives which didn't support a certain interrupt - RS-RDY or something like that, never was a programmer at that level. Anyway, this wasn't a problem for OS-legal stuff because the OS didn't use it, but some games did with their fancy formats to help protect against copying. So they didn't work on these new machines
Fortunately I had one of the old ones
Anyway. It wasn't a serious issue and the disks could still be read, but you will almost certainly find standard issue PC FDDs which, no matter what you did to them, could not fully support an Amiga FDD's featureset.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
To a degree that's a spurious question since needs, to some degree, are redefined around the possibilities. Yes, in some ways that makes them wants but let's be honest here. We managed before computers so they're really wants themselves.
;) but it _does_ limit you. And believe me, you'd get irritated with JPEGs decoding that slowly pretty fast. Which reminds me - you'd probably want an uprated serial port to survive on the web. Easy enough to do, but it would be needed.
The point I was making was that an A1200 can't really hack it because the screen resolutions available make (some) document composition harder than it needs to be, while the CPU power for deciding JPEGs isn't there so you'll have a hard time on the web - that is, if you don't get irritated by the low screen resolution messing up the pages first.
Now, I know screen resolution is less of an issue with Amigas as the programs have a lower resolution as an assumption so 640*512 is actually pretty workable for most stuff (doesn't mean I didn't enjoy 1152*864 on my GFX card
Web and e-mail define a lot of our needs now, and an A1200 would begin to hit problems them. E-mail would be fine 99% of the time with most of the problems coming from attachments, but the web wouldn't.
If you were happy to leave the web well alone, though, you could cover pretty much any non-games domestic use on an A1200 with a RAM card. Surprisingly well, too.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
This doesn't really qualify as competition. First, it runs only on PPC and 68k. That pretty much limits it to competing with Apple. Second, it isn't even plausible competition. Its like saying that it is good that the socialist workers party is there to keep the Dems and Reps honest. Yea, there there, but are they really?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Of course, that assumes that FreeBSD, Openbsd, BeOS, Winblows, linux, etc, arent eating up all my available partitions... (stupid partition tables)
I am !amused.
i was about to recommand you using unix amiga emulator (uae for short) which is btw excellent for playing amiga games but i noticed this on their homepage:
4 x 3.5" floppy disk drives (DF0:, DF1:, DF2: and DF3:). It's not possible to read Amiga disks, so these are emulated with disk files."
there is a site here that has more info on techniques that might enable you to read those disks on pc.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
What race and country are Amigans from? And why do they have to use so much cologne?
Me confused.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Kinda OT. This awesome software is coming to Linux. I am beta testing it now. Finally an industrial strength 3D animation software for Linux ( I know Alias Maya is being ported as well ).
---
I actually applaud and am amazed that there even exists a GNU compiler, but then again from what I've read about it, its pretty outdated as far as front and back-end optimizations and intermediate languages.
You're referring to the GCC 2.95.2 release, which already generates code of the same quality as Watcom's. GCC 2.97, OTOH, employs some pretty sneaky optimizations, making code run fast (especially on x86). However, Alpha generated code is still slow because the Alpha architecture has never been optimized for inter-module jumps; the expensive compilers store RTL in object files and actually generate code during linking. Is this patented?
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Thousands of Amigans gathered in Cologne Germany to buy the many new poducts on display at the booths or to watch the various presentations of the 20+ attending companies.
I was wondering if anyone knew any URLs of sites selling these fascinating new poducts? I've already got a shakespeareduct and a hemingwayduct, and am looking into buying more!
______________________________
Eric Krout
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Contrary to Microsoft-sponsored opinion, most coders work in in-house departments working on bespoke systems or enhancing bought in packages. Anyway, the GPL doesn't say anything about not being able to sell software, it says that the source code should be freely available. GPL software allows people and companies to fix bugs as and when they need to, not having to wait on the whim of a large software company.
I wouldn't know pal. I don't care what I do, I'm in it for the money. After a 7.5 hour shift I go home and watch TV or go to the pub and see my friends. Computers are not the be-all and end-all of my life. Maybe you should get a life too.
According to the times displayed (in European time) only 2 of the posts were posted from my home PC, both times when I was on-call and couldn't really go and get wasted. The majority are posted from work when I'm waiting for stuff to finish, like now.
I dunno, I have enough work-related angst that I fancy I can smell another authentic sob story.
Besides, it fits very well with what we know about how Apple works. Product development there has always seemed to be "ego-driven." Avie certainly has the POWER to do what was attributed to him, and he and Steve are obviously big NeXT fans. It could be true.
I remember the promise of the old Amigas, and it is a shame that they never took hold of the market like some other products.
I understand that there is a substantial differance between the latest incarnations and the earlier machines. This is understandable because of the dramatic differance in the performance of todays machines vs those of a few years back.
I have mixed feelings about "Yet Another Unix Clone", and so I am happy to see the traditional line being advanced.
Yet I wonder if they could develop this to take advantage of hardware advances.
Amiga on an Imac, for example? or is this truly laffable?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Just kidding, but seriously, I don't think everyone here reading slashdot thinks that the world would function if every piece of software on this earth was completely free.
I actually applaud and am amazed that there even exists a GNU compiler, but then again from what I've read about it, its pretty outdated as far as front and back-end optimizations and intermediate languages.
I mean, if you depended on your livlihood to make money as a programmer, would you really want to give every innovation you came up with away for free right away? I'd want to make at least a little bit of money on it first. I think most /.'ers would agree with that too.
-winter fantom
Is anyone else tired of Mike Bouma shilling for Amiga Inc? I mean we have an example Here, and Here, and here, AND FINALLY here!
Sheesh, you know I really don't mind advocacy, I used to be a huge Amiga advocate myself, but Mike Bouma's submissions contain about as much objectivity as ABC doing a review of a Disney movie.
Hemos, please stop posting his submissions until the point that they no longer read as religious tracts.
Corinna
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
And I'll bet that all 81 remaining Amiga owners attended.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The URL is www.aros.org
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
And when I "sold out" in 1996, and got hold of what I needed to run Linux, I regretted it and still do. It's not that it wasn't the "right" decision, it's just Linux, wonderful though it is, is not the platform AmigaOS is. Neither are any of the other oft-proposed alternatives that I've tried. I've used OS/2 Warp 3, BeOS, QNX, and OpenStep, and while I thought all were pretty nice, they still don't quite get there.
I'm not saying AmigaOS was perfect, it's just that it defined an environment closest to the smoothest way of working I've ever come across. From the oft-maligned screens, which with later versions of the OS were done perfectly (you could decide whether an App would run in the current screen, a new screen, a new screen dedicated to that app, etc - I've yet to come across anything as dynamic and flexible since), to the CLI/GUI integration (but Workbench should have had a REXX port), to REXX, to the pre-emptive real-time multitasking, to the microkernel 'exec' that drove the thing and made the OS design so logical and intuitive.
Currently, a group at are trying to put together a decent platform independent version of the operating system. There are plusses and minusses to the approaches they're taking, they're keen, except on some hardware API issues, to duplicate AmigaOS as closely as possible, which means all of the good things but also some nasty holdovers like non-tracking of resources and a lack of memory protection. It's still great what they've got out so far, and I'm looking forward to the point a 'Slackware AROS' installation (or something similar...) becomes available.
Above all though, AmigaOS taught me something which, at the time, was an unpopular view - that the operating system makes the machine. The Amiga in 85 was revolutionary for its hardware, but if it had taken the Atari ST approach of installing a cruddy MSDOS clone and Mac-like interface emulator over the top of that harware it would have died on the spot. Amiga's genius wasn't to produce good hardware, but to, almost accidentally, produce an environment that made that hardware sing. And most of the approaches taken when building that environment could be applied to today, on hardware that is heavily influenced by what happened in 1985.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I think that still using an Amiga is as crazy as using just any other computer system. Or should I say no more crazy than that. Competition doesn't guarantee the victory for the best and the most elegant. Still, things would probably be even worse with no competition at all. Markets ain't fair.
From the ordinary user's point of view things haven't actually evolved much. You want ease of use, fast response time and an intuitive interface to the system having only a bit more features that you'll ever need. No more than that. Except for today's gamers most of us could very well do our daily things with the CPU and hardware power of an A1200. (Some of us did those things even before the whole Amiga era so what's the fuzz?)
It's just that the system environments have blown up. Sure you can't properly view that five-meg MS Word document with an Amiga 1200 but the problem is the five-meg document instead of the computing power and available resources. Writing a few dozen pages of nicely structured and layouted text into a document file wouldn't need to take a Pentium or better only if the applications and the operating system had to be one percent in size of those we use today. And that problem exists not only in the Microsoft realm. The newest Mozilla 0.6 on my computer is still slower than IBrowse on an 68030 equipped Amiga. Why do I find that it's most efficient to write my documents in XEmacs (which I actually loathed few years ago for being such a bloated piece of sticky Lisp) and then layout the plaintext just before printing? Why starting name-your-favorite-office-suite takes an eternity to load up and keeps crashing too? Have I gained anything in comparison to mid 90's when I wrote my documents in WYSIWYG with FinalWriter, browsed the web and even practiced serious programming on my Amiga. (I still have her working all right but using two computers conveniently together is a pain in the ass and PC feeds my family.)
The growth (in size and the needed cpu cycles) of user and programming environments is understandable, of course. However, most of the reasons are silly. Using the horsepower just because it exists makes not much sense. Increasing the available horsepower because of badly written applications choke makes no more sense. It's nerdish to do thing because you can, without thinking how they should be done. Technocrats seem to think that everything can only be either bloated or cryptic. You don't need all the hundreds of megabytes to build a high-level application development environment where the programmer works more with abstract modules and objects instead of writing raw code, as we once used to say. Even efficient networking doesn't take that much power and resources. And finally, Joe the User wouldn't need most of the things he has today if he hadn't been told to need them.
Then who needs to have a lot of resources and CPU power to consume for nothing? Probably the salesmen. Even hackers are happy with a minimal system that has left something out to hack on. Joe the Users can cope with such, too. I don't think multiplying the megahertzes or gigahertzes by some numbers each year has brought us anything remarkably good, uniquely useful and meaningful. Technology and the markets just have to stabilize their growth, it seems.
Amiga had most of the nice things we have today about ten years ago. I hope the Amiga Inc. or whatever company it is today will survive for another ten years. It's somehow comforting to have it there, somewhere.
I also dug up a diagram for a cable to connect an amiga floppy drive to a PC's parallel port, and a program to use with it, but i cannot seem to locate it... :(
Only other method is to get an amiga up and running, and save the files in PCDOS format, which can be read by PC's, or use a term proggy and transfer that way, or connect to a network. but since my access to my A4000 was terminated by fire and brimstone my options are limited.