Running AmigaOS on a PC (The Proper Way)

AmiLover writes: "OSNews is running a review of AmigaXL, a system that allows you to boot AmigaOS on your PC in a way that resembles a regular-booting x86 operating system. Screenshots accompany the article show the latest version of AmigaOS 3.9 running on a Compaq laptop. With AmigaOS 4.0 coming out in March with lots of new features (antialias fonts, better memory protection etc) is AmigaXL the one true future of Amiga, a future that AmigaDE, QNX and Gateway failed to materialize through their involvement with AmigaOS?"

Comments

fp

[Captain Peacock]

fp

AROS ?

[mirko]

What about the AROS Project which has been running for long ?

Re:AROS ?

[digitalunity]

I just want a Toaster. Is that too much to ask?
:)

If anyone has an extra, just ask; I'll give you my address!

Re:AROS ?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I don't think AmigaOSXL has drivers for the Toaster. Or for zorro slots, agnus, amiga keyboards, amiga mice, etc.

Then again, when Be ported their OS off the proprietary platform, and onto a PC, was the best thing that ever happened to them. Now Be Inc., is worth what? 2 trillion USD?

Re:AROS ?

[Binestar]

Then again, when Be ported their OS off the proprietary platform, and onto a PC, was the best thing that ever happened to them. Now Be Inc., is worth what? 2 trillion USD?

You are joking right? Be recently went through liquidation and is no longer a commercial entity.

Re:AROS ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looked like sarcasm to me...

And some parts of AROS are used in OS3.9/OS4.0

Also, Amithlon (which also comes with AmigaXL) is a JIT enabled 68K emulator with *native x86 calling support* - replace the OS with AROS for even more speed? Might be possible :-)

Re:AROS ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on!

Re:AROS ?

[DavidRavenMoon]

Then again, when Be ported their OS off the proprietary platform, and onto a PC, was the best thing that ever happened to them.

I think the amount of tech support involved in running BeOS x86 killed them off!

they didnt have as much on either the BeBox or PowerMacs.

(Former BeOS user)

Take your bets!

[Anonymous Coward]

How many "beating dead horse" or "amiga is dead" posts!??!?!

Vm_Ware

[Wind_Walker]

Has anybody tried to get this working under VMWare yet?

For those of you who don't know, VMWare is a way in which multiple virtual machines can be created on your desktop. What VMWare actually does is it isolates a section of hard drive (appears as a regular file in Linux) and isolates sections of memory (I've had up to 128 MB allocated) and runs a "virtual machine" which runs through a "BIOS" and can do pretty much everything that another computer can do, including running Windows 98 Games!

So, has anybody got this running under VMWare yet?

Re:Vm_Ware

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderation Totals:
Offtopic=170, Flamebait=1, Troll=4,Redundant=2,Insightful=44, Interesting=87, Informative=20,Funny=5, Overrated=3, Underrated=28,Total=364.

Funny how about 500 moderations NEVER HAPPENED. There were over 750 moderations on this post. They just fucking dissappeared! I guess they were moderations done by the UNPEOPLE, that you erased from the moderation system.

Re:Vm_Ware

[powerlinekid]

The performance would probably be bad though... this would be a double emulation. Boot up a virtual machine that then boots a virtual amiga to run the OS. Seems kind of not worth it, may as well just set up the AmigaXL thing on its own partition.

Re:Vm_Ware

[Hal-9001]

I think you misunderstand what VMWare does. My understanding is that VMWare is a thin emulation layer that emulates your physical x86 machine on itself so that you can run Linux/*BSD under Windows or Windows/*BSD under Linux. Seeing as how AmigaOS was designed for a completely different platform and, according to the article, a fairly exotic architecture that is difficult to emulate, I don't see how VMWare would help in this case.

Re:Vm_Ware

[Insightfill]

Completely right. I'm running VMWare on this machine for development and testing, and the performance is "decent." Linux and 3 flavors of Windows.

It is a thin emulation of just the hardware, so VMWare supplies a fake BIOS, sound card, NIC, video, hard drive, etc. It always starts with your CPU, and doesn't try to hide this from the virtual OSes. What this means is that CPU speed is par for the base machine, but the video, etc. take a bit of a hit. Don't get me started on virtualize net connections - slow, but working. You wouldn't want to play Quake on it, but nothing beats it for testing how an app works on Win98,2000,XP, and all versions of IE and NS without blowing away and reinstalling a machine. We used to use Ghost, but now we switch OSes on the box in about ten seconds.

Seriously, if you want to screw around with any OS, or whatever, download the free 30-day version of it at their site and try it out. I'm running Win2000 for the "host" OS, but am installing RH7.2 in one window and testing a UDP problem in Windows XP in another. All on one drive and one CPU.

The best part is that you can set up the virtual hard disks to be "undoable", and when you shut down your session, you get asked if you want to save your changes into the main virtual drive or discard them. Throw them away and you have a fresh image.

http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/

Re:Vm_Ware

[BrookHarty]

I couldnt get Amithlon to run under vmware. I dont know if QNX runs under vmware, but im grabbing 6.1 to try that later. Searching the the web, and a guy states Amithlon runs under vmware with tweaks, but his screenshot is of the boot screen, which is were it locks. So its prob a fraud.

Amithlon is a whole OS, but its picky about hardware. It is more compatible, which is more important for an amiga user.
AmigaOS XL runs on top of Qnx, in that respect, I would rather have it run ontop of linux or winxp.

Re:Vm_Ware

[BrookHarty]

Amithlon/AmigaOS XL runs on X86 hardware, VMware runs OS's for X86 Hardware. So his question is quite legit, I in fact tried to run it under vmware, but it locked at the book screen.

Re:Vm_Ware

[BrookHarty]

Boot screen.
damn it slashdot really needs an "Edit" feature.

Re:Vm_Ware

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he was implying:

using the VmWare thin x86 emulator to boot the emulator, which then runs AmigaOS.

Seems like a very valid question.

Re:Vm_Ware

[^me^]

preview anyone? :)

On Another Note, I'd like to try this thing.

It's nifty.

Why not UAE, then? (was: Vm_Ware)

[Carl Drougge]

If you don't want it to take over the computer you could just use UAE, couldn't you? (Ok, so networking isn't exactly perfect, but I'm sure someone will either fix it or pester me enough to fix it.. (This is about the unix-version, I've never even used the windows-version.))

The JIT might not work in the latest version, but 0.8.15 isn't such a bad version, is it?

Re:Why not UAE, then? (was: Vm_Ware)

[mrseigen]

UAE works nice and fine under Mac OS 8.1 (on a 120mhz 604) and OS X 10.1 (on a 600mhz iMac). I doubt if it runs well on Windows, but I don't really care (even Basilisk II is slow under XP).

Re:Why not UAE, then? (was: Vm_Ware)

[Karlt1]

UAE works nice and fine under Mac OS 8.1 (on a 120mhz 604) and OS X 10.1 (on a 600mhz iMac). I doubt if it runs well on Windows, but I don't really care (even Basilisk II is slow under XP).

What type of CPU and what programs? Basilisk II ran all of the shareware 68K games I threw at it fine -- i.e. Maelstrom, Apeiron, etc. on a 400Mhz Celeron.

Re:Why not UAE, then? (was: Vm_Ware)

[Alan Partridge]

apparently you can't read. where he writes "(on a 120Mhz 604)" what do YOU suppose he means? mutt

Re:Why not UAE, then? (was: Vm_Ware)

[Anonymous Coward]

(even Basilisk II is slow under XP).

I suppose you realize that you can't run XP on a 120Mhz 604 PowerPC. Running Basilisk II on a machine that can already run the programs seems kind of silly. That would be like running a 386 emulator program on your Pentium II so you can run Windows 3.11.

apparently you can't read

Apparently you don't understand what you read.

Re:Why not UAE, then? (was: Vm_Ware)

[Alan Partridge]

WTF are you talking about? He's making points about how fast UAE runs on a couple of Powermacs, then you're asking if you'd be able to do the same with Basilisk, which emus 68K only. He's only saying that he feels UAE would be an unknown quantity under XP - he's obviously an Amiga-loving Mac user (as are many). How and why would he be running Basilisk on a Powermac? (I know, via VPC) and FYI, you CAN get a 68K emu for the Powermac to supplant Apple's JIT emu - some think it runs pre-system 7 better. And WTF do you think the Windows 16bit subsystem does?

Re:Why not UAE, then? (was: Vm_Ware)

[nusuth]

WinUAE is currently either the fasters or second the fastest uae port around, only uae.0.8.15 running under x86 linux with JIT patch can be compared.

Re:Why not UAE, then? (was: Vm_Ware)

[Anonymous Coward]

Poster #1: Talks about performance of UAE on Powermacs then makes a comment about Basilisk II on XP(Obviously on x86).

Poster #2: Asks about specs on Basilisk II machine (x86 remember?) and tells about his experience on a Celeron 400(still x86).

Poser #3: (You) Snide comment about 604 PPC.

Poster #4: (AC) Points out that the first 2 comments were about x86 Basilisk II machines.

Poser #3:(You again) WTF....UAE....Powermac....WTF....

Re:Why not UAE, then? (was: Vm_Ware)

[mrseigen]

It looks fine now, I was running Mac OS 8.0 on a P3/450 with 384mb RAM. Now that I cleared out the memory leaks (which, according to Microsoft, don't exist in XP's "protected memory") from various other applications, it runs okay. But how do you mount a Mac floppy? I've got a bunch of old Mac games that I'd love to see XP butcher and make ugly.

I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The Amiga, despite its awesome power, is dead. There is no future for it, when all it is, is an emulator that Joe Windows turns off after playing a video game for an hour. There is no future when its only an OS, ported to the most horrid CPU ever devised. A lame port, ported by an even lamer company that is only trying to cash in on a trademark that it bought the rights to. This will soon die too, and be forgotten quickly. The sooner the better, IMO, so that we can go on remembering when computers were actually cool.

Go to hell, McEwen.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[no reason to be here]

If I'm not mistaken, it says in the article, and here in the Slashdot posting, too, that AmigaOS is being released on new PPC machines machines. Is this the lame port to the horrid CPU to which you were referring? I would hope not, as it is fairly established that the PPC is in fact a much better performing CPU than the various x86's, in terms of power consumption and performance.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[mrseigen]

This is pretty pathetic. It just emphasizes the idea I've had rattling around in my head that computer manufacturers and operating system makers are continuing to pander to the lowest common denominator (Joe Windows). Hell, most of the people who will fire up this emulator for a quick game of Hired Guns, for example, will probably pirate it. That is, if they don't pirate the bloody emulator in the first place.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[boltar]

Awesome power in 1986. These days its power is nothing. And that power came from the hardware
not the OS so frankly apart from the fact that no one really cares anyway anymore why bother porting
an OS that was good but nothing special?

Retro reminiscing is all well and good but people should remember that the past is the past, dragging
it kicking and screaming into the present does no one any favours. What next, a new version of the
TRS80 OS?

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

To the x86, of course. That's been McEwen's ambition all along, to be able to claim he has ressurected Amiga without actually having to do any real work, like design an actual computer. H&P is doing what little real work is being done, and it's still lame. This PPC machine you speak of is complete and utter vaporware, which is a good thing. It bares as little resemblance to the real Amiga as possible. No binary compatibility, no continuity, no legacy hardware support, nothing that would ever lead you to think they were related, even distantly. Whereas a new amiga could have been a kickass power user machine, that one could believe had evolved from the originals, it's a watered down iToaster.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I also own several TRS-80's. In addition to my 6 amigas, of course. Strangely, my Amiga 2000's are on the same ARCnet segment as the Model II.

You say these things as if you were a true progressive. The past teaches us nothing, and unless it's a fresh design finished in the last 30 seconds, it's worthless right?

Do you even own an Amiga? Did you ever?

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[no reason to be here]

ahh...ok. thanks for clearing that up.
that's very disappointing, then.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[ScumBiker]

I think the big problem is that the 68k cpu line is basically dead. I have to assume that nobody out there is able to design or create the proprietary off-cpu chips that did so much of the Amiga magic. Thus the need for a PPC machine. I don't see a problem here. Of course, if someone can overclock a 68k cpu to like 1GHZ, without creating a small fusion reaction, that might have possibilities.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[boltar]

Putting words into my mouth just to shoot them down doesn't do your argument any favours.
The past teaches us a lot but it doesn't mean we have to live in it. Why would I want to use an
Amiga for gaming now? Because its got 256 colours and a bit blitter. Oh man, hold me down! Watch
out NVidia!

The amiga was good for its day , just like Dolby B and C60 cassettes were but these days I prefer
to use recordable CD. If you want to keep using your amigas fine, thats your choice but don't expect
the rest of the world to go back 15 years in time just for the sake of some nostalgia trip.

And yes I did own one. Sold it years ago.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Daengbo]

I pine for the days of 4kb RAM and a cassete tape player to load games. Yeah Baby!!!! Bring back the Z80.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You're looking at it wrong. Yes, the 68k is dead. Good riddance... as cool an architecture as it was, CISC deserves to be dead. The PPC is the true heir. But they have so much in common, what little 68k emulation needs to be done (temporarily of course) can easily be done on a PPC.

This does not an amiga make, however.

Proprietary coprocessors? No one is asking you put an agnus or denise on a new Amiga. Certainly not me. What we are asking for, is for McEwen to create an architecture with some token legacy compatibility, a single Zorro slot, or perhaps the video slot would be better. We're asking for a bunch of coprocessors, even if they are off the shelf. Stick a few GeForces on the thing. Give us a power users machine. For god's sake, manufacture a keyboard with the proper "A" keys, and the Help. If it were USB, all the better. Put a floppy controller on the thing that can read proper amiga disks. Any single one of these things, would make it a true successor in my eyes. They're not willing to do that.

And it wouldn't be a bad thing, if it were more a power user's machine, and less something designed for the AOL crowd. That means 64bit PCI, and some firewire ports.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Well, you refuse to put any intelligent words in your mouth, I can't help it if I didn't do a better job for you.

You're focusing on all the wrong things, as clever fools tend to do. For instance, a modern Amiga would benefit greatly it is took the same approach to co-processing. This wouldn't have to be done with the old chips, or even new versions of them. Load the thing down with geforce's galore, and a bunch of fast DSP's for sound.

Not that you have the brains to ever understand anything that's at a lower level than the shrink wrap of your Windows XP software box.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not too bad- this is mostly for people who haven't seen a real Amiga in years and basically shows what can really be done with a 1000Mhz processsor when its not spending most of its power keeping Windows going :)

There is a OS4 on the way too, that will only run on PowerPC (new PPC motherboards from 1-2 companies and existing PPC Amiga cards like Phase5's old ones IIRC)- those who really want to upgrade their Amigas will go for that.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[boltar]

Well since the article is talking about the OS not any special hardware I'll be nice and assume you
simply didn't bother to read it rather than the fact that perhaps you're just an ass.

And FYI I use Linux and BSD and have probably forgotten more about operating systems than
you ever knew sonny. I suggest you can it before you make a complete pillock of yourself.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actaully, a lot of the power came from the OS. One, the OS got out of the way when you wanted it to, and two, the OS was message-passing BY REFERENCE - so IPC was zero-copy. Hence the massive data throughput and near realtime performance.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[boltar]

The OS got out the way when you wanted it to. Hmm wasn't there another OS that did that ... umm ,
it was a monitor program now what was it called... oh yeah... DOS.

As for message passing by reference , so what? If you use shared memory you don't even have to pass
anything , its just there. BFD.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[zangdesign]

computer manufacturers and operating system makers are continuing to pander to the lowest common denominator

What would you rather have them do? Go broke pandering to the .05% of the market with some knowledge?

The Joe Windows crowd is the group that has the money to burn and needs someplace to spend it. One can hardly blame mfg's and os companies for wanting to give them a place to do so.

That being said, this does look like a last hurrah attempt to monetize a dead OS architecture.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

This is hilarious.

Operating systems that I use at least once a month.

NOS's
Banyan VINES 6.0 (with streettalk)
Netware 2.x
Netware 3.x
Netware 4.x (with NDS)
Netware 5.0 (with NDS)

OS's
Apple ProDOS
Apple GS/OS 6
MacOS 6.x -9.x
Amiga OS 1.x - 3.1
Windows 3.0, 3.11WFW, 95, 98, NT 3.1, NT 3.51 NT4, 2000 (all flavors, 2k with AD)
CP/M (for TRS-80 Model 4)
IBM PC DOS 3.x-7.0
MS DOS 2.x-6.22
Novell DOS 7
DR DOS 5,6
Atari TOS/GEM
IBM OS/2 2.1-4.0

RX11
OpenVMS 7.0
Ultrix 4.3
Solaris 7
NeXTstep 3.3

And literally too many 8bit OS's to keep track of. Tandy renamed the trs80 dos's every other week, I just can't remember all the different flavors of minix, cp/m and things named "dos". I have the only integrated ethernet/tokenring/arcnet/localtalk/fddi/atm/econe t/802.11/rs485 network that I've ever heard of. I'm a busy little bee, trying to write a VIP stack for linux, and integrate streettalk, ad, and nds all into my strange little OpenLDAP directory. I just got my first PDP-11 a few weeks back, and I've almost got unix v7 running on it. If you want to play guru, bring it on.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[boltar]

Nice cut & paste. Next time you want to come up with BS try not overdoing it , it doesn't look
very convincing.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Maybe I'll have to post a link to a picture of my computer room. That was written out by hand, dimwit.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? For fucks sake why?

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The joe windows crowd is anything but. These are the lower middle class families, that buy computers because 30 second TV commercials convince them their children will grow up to be bums, if they're not exposed to a computer. As if it has some magical radiation, that if you get a dose of it by being in the same room, you become computer literate in any significant way.

The power users may be a much smaller group, but if they buy less than 1 mid-to-high end system per year, it's because they're between jobs at the moment (not that that stops all of them). They're people so fed up with the consumer garbage, that they'd pay a premium for something truly made for them. As it is, they end up buying stuff meant for the corporate enterprise, simply to get cool stuff.

The free market fails even more miserably every year, and this is an example. A smaller market, yes, but one that isn't being catered to very well, if at all. That happens when companies are allowed to get too big.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Because if I connect enough disparate systems together, AI will spontaneously emerge. It will escape and wreak havoc on the world, but remember me as its creator, and elevate me above the other pitiful bags of meat.

At least, that's the plan.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[cmkrnl]

Massive Data Throughput : Bollocks!
Compared to what ? A floppy disk ?

Near Realtime Performance : Double Bollocks!
Compared to What ? A pocket calculator ?

'Near Realtime' is an oxymoron. Either the OS is 'realtime' or its not. There is no such thing fanboy as 'near' realtime.

That so called IPC 'feature' you lovingly refer to also crashed the OS hard when any errant process decides to take a detour round the memory map of what is an unprotected OS. Passing the address of a data structure in some other process space & then inadvertantly changing it when you are not supposed to is not a good idea.

You aren't that fscking section 8 called Steve Giovenella by any chance ?

Curmudgeon

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Anonymous Coward]

as it is fairly established that the PPC is in fact a much better performing CPU than the various x86's, in terms of power consumption and performance

Except in terms of I/O.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Alan Partridge]

well, 68k is sort of still alive, in the form of the Palm in your pocket. yes folks, Dragonball EZ is part of the family indeed. I think Moto also has a line called "Coldfire" which is 68K related. I agree that there's no point to emulating something as wonderful as the Amiga. Moving the Amiga to PPC might have helped 10 years ago, but that's when they would have had to start thinking about it, not now. When was it that PowerPC debuted? 1992? If the Amiga wants to live again (and why should it?), they would have to plan on using a NEW architecture, not even x86 - which is in it's death throes as we speak. By the time a new Amiga COULD arrive, we'll be knee deep in IA64, x86-64, PowerPC G5, UltraSPARC III and possibly even CELL. Maybe a smart move would be to exploit CELL to build a truly powerful custom architecture that could show us what multitasking is all about again.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Alan Partridge]

"Load the thing down with geforce's galore, and a bunch of fast DSP's for sound." if this is what you're after, why not look at Linux on the PS2? There's some co-pro going on there, and at least that machine has SOME kind of future.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[TheDick]

Nothing was cooler than editing broadcast quality video on a NLE that cost less than $20,000 in 1995! I miss my toaster flyer :(

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I've heard both the people like you, that claim the OS is what was great, and those that think it was the hardware. You're both right, and both wrong.

It was the combination of the two, that made it great. If you have just the hardware, then at best it's another machine to port linux to (not even that, considering the era we're discussing), and at worst, it's a machine that has no OS. That went out of fashion in the 1970's.

If you have just the OS, then it's another OS for the x86 monstrosity. You get to compete with the likes of OS/2, BeOS, even Openstep. All of which were admirable on a technical basis, but had no viable chance in the marketplace.

But you put the two together, and at least for a little while, you have something both whizbang and new, a thing unto itself. That even happened with Be Inc, though briefly.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Since I don't own stock in computer companies, I don't really care "what has a future" and what doesn't.

While I like hacking around on every piece of hardware I can get my hands on (this would include a PS2 of course) there is something special about the Amiga. It deserves more than C= ever gave it, and certainly more than McEwen will give it.

Linux on a PS2 would be a poor substitute for a new Amiga done right, no substitute at all, really.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a right bloody poofter, what?

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Alan Partridge]

but if you want advanced custom hardware, someone's gotta pay for it. A small company could barely manage a custom mobo these days, let alone a CPU. Maybe you could take the DSP route but I doubt it, people ARE trying, but going nowhere fast. With something like the PS2, you have a chance to create a new platform that happens to have been designed from scratch with co-processing in mind and high bandwidth hardware. It looks like a chance to build something new and different, powered by Sony's cash and burning desire to compete with MS properly. There won't be a new Amiga, but there might be a new platform free of MS and Intel.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Anonymous Coward]

zero-copy IPC? No wonder it crashed all the time. Copy-on-write is a GOOD thing, you stuck-in-the-80s fool.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[zangdesign]

Anything but what? Rich? Tell me something I don't know ...

However, if you add up the total aggregate of wealth, the lower middle class is where you aim if you want to market something. To run a growing, successful company, you have to aim at that market, because it is the one that is growing. The elite computer users are going to form such a small market that you'll go broke trying to supply and support them (though they are likely to need the least support).

As for the free market failing, what would you suggest? There are no viable alternatives that don't rely on some degree of "being nice to each other" (which might be nice, but you can't count on it).

My suggestion is that you quit whining about how the free market is failing and get out do something constructive. What? I don't know. I'm going to keep working in the free market system until someone provably comes up with something better.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Free of M$ and Intel, but just as bad?

You can't build something new with this. The hardware is 100% closed, I can't even burn my own custom games for it, with the way they are treating mod-chip makers. The PS2 is the future of what they want technology to be for us, watered down, expensive, totally closed, and served to us at their leisure, not ours.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Alan Partridge]

100% closed is not the issue. COMPETITION is. Maybe Sony would be as bad as MS (experience says they won't be), but you KNOW they're looking for a finacial return too. It's obvious that Sony wants a way out, they'd LOVE to run a new system on their laptops. Sometimes, just being different is enough - they don't have to be saints too.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[mdwh2]

It bares as little resemblance to the real Amiga as possible. No binary compatibility

AmigaOS 4.0 will run 68k software via emulation (as stated in the article). I fail to see the problem with this when it's likely to be cheaper and faster than having a real 68k CPU in there; one could just as well complain that PowerMacs aren't "real Macs".

no legacy hardware support

If you want things like AGA chips and Zorro slots, then I believe these will still be useable under AmigaOS 4 if you run it on a current Amiga. Any new machines won't have them (and a generally good thing too, considering UAE will do for running old AGA games, and PCI cards tend to be much cheaper than Zorro equivalents).

nothing that would ever lead you to think they were related

Many PC motherboards don't come with ISA slots these days. Windows 2000/XP is I believe a very different OS to Windows 9x underneath, but maintains compatibility, and similarity in usage. Macs now have PCI slots, and I believe there was some slot they used to have that they no longer do (Nubus?); they also went from a 68k CPU to PPC. MacOS X is at least as different an OS to previous versions, as AmigaOS 4.0 is to 3.9 by the looks of things. If AmigaOS 4.0 and any new machines ever appear, they will have evolved from the originals, just as much as Macs and PCs have.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Not fair at all. First off, having a single zorro slot would cost them nothing in board space, and not much more in design logic. Why not have one? I don't expect a renaisance in zorro devices, just for people like myself to be able to put a real amiga device in this supposedly new amiga.

As to the win9x to winXP comparisons, the truth is it's very easy to have a winXP use devices from a win9x machine. Same cpu family, comaptible chipsets, compatible software.

The same goes for macs. And even though macs no longer have nubus, for a time powermacs had nubus. There is a very direct evolution to what they are now, and if archeologists of some sort study this 100,000 years from now, no doubt they too could identify each and every mac as such through it's evolution. With the exception of the amiga logo plastered all over everything, they couldn'tt do the same for the "new amiga".

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[mdwh2]

I think the more important question is how much would it cost (in money terms) for that single Zorro slot?

What sort of card are you thinking of in particular? Cards like graphics, sound and network have dirt cheap PCI equivalents - it would not surprise me if one could buy a PCI replacement for less than the cost of implementing Zorro on the motherboard (plus you now have the comparatively expensive Zorro card to sell off second hand).

Also remember that not all "real" Amigas had Zorro slots (indeed, only a small fraction in terms of numbers produced).

for a time powermacs had nubus

And PPC Amigas can have Zorro slots - an A3000/4000 with an appropriate PPC card. Perhaps you will say this doesn't count since it's an upgrade, but I believe you can buy A1200s/A4000s with PPC/Zorro already fitted if you really must. As with Macs, it's a choice of sticking with older machines if you want to have complete backwards compatibility, or lose some compatibility if you want the latest machines.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Derfs]

AmigaOS 4 (meant to be released to developers this month) is being designed for PPC computers by Hyperion and a few extra Amiga developers they have hired.

It is aimed to work on new PPC hardware designed by eyetech and bplan, as well as current amigas that have older 603 and 604 PPC processors like the blizzard and cyberstorm accelerator cards, allowing people to use existing equipment, or newer equipment that allows use of off the shelf PC items such as PCI cards etc.

There are other PPC expansions coming out and they may be supported as well.

x86 is not a goal for AOS4, as to change it for that, instead of going the naturla route of 680x0 to PPC, would take a lot longer, and people want product asap (as always).

all this is just a small piece of the market Amiga is aiming for anyway, and has aimed for since they were created. See this recent interview with CEO Bill McEwan for what is currently on the minds of Amiga.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You miss the point. If you want the cheapest possible, run win98 on an emachines, and quit bitching at me.

Oh, and every amiga except the a1200 has either a z1, z2, or z3 slot.

I'm afraid McEwen and company can't take credit for PPC cards, if he'd even want to, with their astronomical prices and lack of power.

These aftermarket upgrades do not count as the "new amiga". Nor do they constitute a bridge between the old and new. You like the garbage these guys are manufacturing (I'm not sure what word to use here, they neither make hardware, which is farmed out to others, nor the OS derivatives, which so far has been farmed out to H&P), then go ahead and like it. I don't care. If you loved the amiga in any way, shape or form, you wouldn't like this at all. They are bastardizing things just the way Be Inc did in its death throes. There isn't a single thing I can think of, that is good about this. As much as I hate emulators, there are better ones. There are certainly better alternative OS's, so many I hope that is their intended market, they'll die alot quicker. And by alienating those like me, they can't even claim the nostalgia market.

They're nothing but a perpetual marketing machine, that didn't bother to find a real product first. It's funny how many fall for it to, if they decided to use the Amiga trademark to manufacture ergonomic toilet bowls, would all you losers rush out to buy one, and say "well at least its the new amiga!" ? It's not. In name only, which means little for those like me.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[geordie]

There is a slight difference when it comes to the upgrade path/evolution of Macs and Amigas though...
Sure, early Powermacs had Nubus slots, but the early Powermacs followed directly on from 68k Macs. The new Amiga designs come 7-8 years after the last 'New' Amiga... a lot of things have changed since then.

Zorro was great at the time, but virtually every card that was available for Zorro slots can now be picked up for a fraction of the cost in PCI form. Sure, some of the more exotic cards no longer exist, but they are few and far between.

So why lumber the new Amiga with a slot that the majority of users will never use? Why not instead come up with some kind of bridge that allows Zorro cards to be connected to PCI slots much like the way you could use ISA cards on an Amiga.

Trying to follow a steady evolutionary path between the AGA Amigas and any new machine would be crazy... too much time has passed.

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Well, if they don't care about any continuity, as I have stated oh so many times, I guess they shouldn't put a zorro slot on the new amiga. But you've latched on to this in particular, not I. I would be happy with any single one of several features that would pay homage to the old. Especially an amiga capable floppy controller, and/or a specialty keyboard in a true amiga layout. Nothing could kill the mood more, than to look down and see the ugly windows keys.

If you want an amiga that has nothing about it that makes it like an amiga, doesn't any computer fit that bill, once you slap a boing logo on it?

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Anonymous Coward]

>'Near Realtime' is an oxymoron. Either the OS is 'realtime' or its not. There is no such thing fanboy as 'near' realtime.

No there isn't, but there is 'hard' realtime and 'soft' realtime (and flavours in between), so make sure you know what your on about before you post.

I'm not sure I'd really call the Amiga 'realtime' as such, but it has much in common with true realtime systems...

Re:I wept silently to myself, when I read this.

[Anonymous Coward]

The A600 has no zorro at all. The A1200 comes a LOT closer, as it has a 32 bit zorro 2 compatible slot.

Dead parrot sketch...

[jonr]

You know the drill... not dead, resting, ex-parrot, ceased to be... etc...

Screenshots

[Cheesemaker]

So, when I think "screenshots," I don't usually assume they're pictures of a laptop from a few feet away.....

Re:Screenshots

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Well if they had just been captures of what was in the frame buffer, what proof would there be that it was really running on an x86 machine? They could have just fired up an Amiga and did the screen captures.

I know what AmigaOS looks like anyway, this is more interesting.

Re:Screenshots

[Svenne]

Proof? What proof do you have that the laptop is not merely running an imageviewer that displays screenshots from a real Amiga?

Now, I happen to own a copy of AmigaOS XL (Amithlon and AmigaXL) so I know it's real, but I wouldn't call it proof just because the laptop displays a picture of AmigaOS 3.9.

Re:Screenshots

[maggard]

What makes you believe the laptop isn't from a framebuffer too?

grin

Re:Screenshots

[me0]

All I want to know is what the fuck the first screenshot was all about. The one with qnx on it :-P.

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Well just read the review to find out.

I'm not dead!

[Dino]

Amiga = the computer that won't die. Just to drive home an dprove that point, I just purchased an Amiga 1200 from an old friend for $100. Amiga 1200 with EC040/50, 10megs of RAM, couple gigs of HD spread over 5 HDs, SCSI PCMCIA... I've been shopping around second-hand computer shops looking for a giant PC tower case to move it into. I hope to eventially pick up a PPC + graphics board, install WB 3.9 (has super-pimped/hacked 3.0 right now with most to all of the features of 3.5).

Ahhh the memories. While the Amiga was left behind in the speed wars a long time ago (I forgot how long it takes a simple JPEG image to load!) For ease of use and simple hackability, there never was any competition.

Long live the Amiga! May she never rest in peace!

Re:I'm not dead!

[Alan Partridge]

you paid a HUNDRED BUCKS for an AMIGA 1200? are you insane? that thing only cost 400 when it was new, and that was 10 years ago. WOW.

Re:I'm not dead!

[Toraz Chryx]

He did clearly state that it wasn't a stock Amiga 1200 :)

stock amiga 1200's didn't have 50Mhz 68040's, or for that matter gigabytes of harddisk space ;)

Re:I'm not dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

From the specs that he's posting it looks like it has a decently fast accelerator card plus all those other things like extra ram, etc. That thing would go for more than 100 on ebay, that's for sure. More like 350, probably.

Re:I'm not dead!

[Alan Partridge]

hang on, he said "a couple of Gigs spread across 5 HDs" BFD, how much does a 20 Gig HD cost 2day, 25 bucks? 10 megs of RAM eh? what's that, twenty cents worth? and the awesone number crunching power of a 50 Mhz 040 (you could pull a 66Mhz one out of a $30 Mac). GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD. And is this even an Amiga anymore, what with all these mods? Show the deceased some respect, will ya?

Re:I'm not dead!

[Dino]

you paid a HUNDRED BUCKS for an AMIGA 1200? are you insane? that thing only cost 400 when it was new, and that was 10 years ago. WOW

Calm down boy! Listen, I offered him $250 for his Amiga and would have happily paid it. Look, here's an Amiga 1200 with similiar stats going for $275 [ebay.com]. Plus, I received FULL ORIGINAL (disks & manuals) copies of great Amiga software, DPaint IV, Imagine 2.0, ImageFX1.5, AMOS Pro, FinalCopy, PageWrite, games, games, games, etc...

You're obviously used to the PC used market where the value of the computer drops 75% when you open the box. That's because they're a "commodity." 10 year-old Amigas have value because, like I said, they won't die and people still want them.

I for one will enjoy what I paid $100 for and with what I will undoubtably drop another $500 into.

Re:I'm not dead!

[Dino]

Yes, HDs are cheap and a dime a dozen but upgrading the RAM on my current system would be a little pricey. My Amiga has a GVP accelerator and thus needs the properitary GVP RAM (though it is possible to connect 72(?)pin SIMMs via an ugly hack). I will most likely wait to upgrade the RAM for a PPC card which typically take industry standard SIMMs.

Ever try finding the old ZIPs chips the Amiga 3000 took? Whoo-wee. Believe me, old RAM is not twenty cents to the 10 megs.

Re:I'm not dead!

[Alan Partridge]

no, I'm a Mac-head and an ex-Amiga user (although I do spec and build PC workstations at work sometimes). I never even bought an AA Amiga, when I started reading about games incompatibilities from my A500, I tuned out. Anyway, Flashback played real nice on my brothers' 386, and Another World was pretty great on my Dad's Mac too.

Re:I'm not dead!

[Little Dave]

Ahhh... the Amiga. I have great fondness for this little beige pal, with whom I spent so many joyous times. Started off with a humble A1200 and gradually borged it into a tower case with 64Mb RAM, a Cybervision gfx card (which never worked properly) and a mighty 060 processor. See, my PC owning cretin, as I dazzle you with my "games machine's" ability to run Mame (bombjack only) at full speed, or decode MP3s in glorious mono!

Looking back, I was kind of odd as a young adult.

Re:I'm not dead!

[Toraz Chryx]

actually, IIRC, no mac ever shipped with a 68040 faster than 40Mhz

then Apple brought in the PowerPC 601, whilst a few Amiga's were released with 68060's

as for the ram, FPM ram is quite a bit more expensive that SDram (which itself has been going back up in price)

in addition, an Amiga with 10MB will be really quite usable because the OS only needs a few hundred KB

Re:I'm not dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bet both Flashback and Another world had great sound on the PC (and # of colours) beep-beep bep beep-beep

I'd rather.....

[mbennis]

prefer a system that allows me to boot MACOSX on my PC
That's a thing that will be coool.,

Amiga was so awesome at one time

[buckrogers]

I am wondering if the Amiga can ever rise from the ashes like the Phoenix?

It is interesting that it will run on both x86 and PPC platforms. This will help it gain ground. Unfortunately they chose QNX as their kernel, which is not only proprietary, but also has few fanatical supporters. (unlike either *BSD or Linux, both of which have lots of fanatical supporters.) It is at least a UNIX like kernel, and very high performance.

It would have been better to emulate Apple in picking a free kernel. Then you would have had the supporters of that OS adding the the core supporters of Amiga. Worse case, how hard would it be to make *BSD or Linux be API compatible with QNX?

All that being said, I would love to see a demo of it, and to see just how fast it is and how well it runs all the programs. I bet we can look forward to ports of open office and mozilla rather quickly as soon as a few developers get their hands on a copy. The full set of GNU tools will also probably be quickly ported to the new environment.

I have a feeling that this is the last chance for Amiga, it is sink or swim. If they don't succeed this time, then it is all over for the platform.

And even then I think that Amiga has a lot to prove in a market that is crowed with Windows, Linux/X and Mac OS X in the top 3 places. No one else is even a contendor on the desktop. OS2 is dead, BeOS is dead. They have to prove that they are worth the price. BeOS was arguably as good or better than the new Amiga, and it never caught on.

Re:Amiga was so awesome at one time

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

"It is interesting that it will run on both x86 and PPC platforms. This will help it gain ground."

I bet some fool in marketing at Be Inc., said this same thing, when they decided to kill the Bebox, in its cradle, no less.

"It would have been better to emulate Apple in picking a free kernel."

Um, let me get this straight. A new amiga, without real amiga hardware AND operating system? Yeh, you may want to apply for a job with them. I have a suspicion you'd get along fine there.

The last chance was in the early 1990's, unfortunately. I think newtek killed what was left of Amiga, and who can blame them? They would have killed themselves trying to defend the remnants.

Re:Amiga was so awesome at one time

[markhb]

How did Newtek kill Amiga? By porting the VT/Flyer to a platform that was in active production? (I'm not trolling, I'm really curious as to what you were referring to).

(Posting without updating the .sig)

Re:Amiga was so awesome at one time

[mdwh2]

"Unfortunately they chose QNX as their kernel"

Not so at all; AmigaOS 4 won't be using any other OS as its kernel.

As for AmigaXL, it consists of two products: Amithlon and (confusingly) AmigaXL for QNX. The latter is basically a modified version of UAE running on QNX which is perhaps what you're thinking of.

It's also not clear that this is a dual-platform approach. Amithlon (and AmigaXL for QNX, and UAE) will only emulate 68k (albeit, extremely quickly) so won't in their current incarnation be able to run AmigaOS 4. But still, it may help the Amiga gain ground as you say (especially all the while AmigaOS 4 is nowhere to be seen).

Re:Amiga was so awesome at one time

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

By realizing they had to stop porting software to a dead platform. I don't blame them for this. I'm glad they survived themselves, actually.

Re:Amiga was so awesome at one time

[dadaist]

It would have been better to emulate Apple in picking a free kernel. Then you would have had the supporters of that OS adding the the core supporters of Amiga. Worse case, how hard would it be to make *BSD or Linux be API compatible with QNX?

Almost a cognitive game there, but the line breaks are unpredictable. if it were like this instead:

It would have been better to emulate Apple in picking a free kernel.
Then you would have had the supporters of that OS adding the
the core supporters of Amiga. Worse case, how hard would it be to make
*BSD or Linux be API compatible with QNX?

These word games are a lot more interesting than your post. What exactly makes you think that the Linux or BSD OS's match the preemptability or real-time nature of QNX? As a sort of media OS, these features are primary. Also, Amiga already has a die hard core of supporters who will love and buy no matter what the kernel or cost.

Visit my journal.

Re:Amiga was so awesome at one time

[OpenLith]

I have a feeling that this is the last chance for Amiga, it is sink or swim. If they don't succeed this time, then it is all over for the platform.

If I had one yen for every time I've heard that pronouncement, I'd still be a poor man, but I'd have a million yen. The poster who said "it just won't die" was more realistic. The Amiga inspired so many geeks that we'll keep trying to revive it just to play with it. I'm pretty sure the goal of Amiga-wraiths is no longer to bring down Microsoft, but nostalgia.

After my Amigas became doorstops, I moved to Macs. Then everybody began pronouncing the imminent death of Apple, with each new technology being a make-or-break litmus test. "If OpenDoc doesn't work out, Apple is dead." "If PCs don't adopt RISC, Apple is dead." "If CHReP doesn't take off, Apple's dead." "Unless the clones succeed, it's curtains for Apples." "If the 20th Anniversary Mac tanks, so does Apple." "If the Newton doesn't survive, neither will Apple." "If Apple can't leverage HyperCard as an HTML platform, chapter 11 is around the corner."

All those technologies failed miserably in the marketplace-- yet, Apple is still around and doing quite nicely in its niche market. Commodore bit the big one ages ago (in web weeks), yet the Amiga still has a dedicated hardcore cult following. Harley-Davidson bikes are unreliable compared to rice rockets, yet there is still a subculture centered around them. Amiga enthusiasts are mostly in our 30s and 40s, so the AmigaOS still has about 40 years to get its act together before we all croak.

Unfortunately they chose QNX as their kernel, which is not only proprietary, but also has few fanatical supporters. (unlike either *BSD or Linux, both of which have lots of fanatical supporters.)

The Amiga has plenty of its own fanatical supporters, thank-you-very-much. Sure, Amiga on Linux would be the ultimate geek toy, but "BSD fanatic" is an oxymoron compared to "Amiga fanatic." We're the people who got our kicks going to Apple and PC stores just to watch the salespeople squirm when we started comparing them to Amigas.

AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[garoush]

I used AmigaOS over 17 years ago. And I can tell you, it WAS way ahead of it's time. Not only was it Max OS X, Linux, and Windows of today, it also had the best hardware of today from low end device support to the best graphic technology.

It was a developers machine as well as a user's machine to love.

----

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[hendridm]

If it was so superior, what killed it? Marketing?

Sorry, this was a bit before my time (at least computing time). I started on Apples, and even though Amiga was around, it was going out of style (at least around here).

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft. It didn't have DOS, which companies all used at the time. Go figure. But yeah, had they marketed it correctly, they could have become the Microsoft of today.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[sheldon]

"If it was so superior, what killed it? Marketing? "

Yes.

I'd have to say just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Still it was a cool machine. It was the innovator in cheap video production. Or rather NewTek was with the Video Toaster.

Even so, there are still a number of names around that first started on the Amiga. A lot of the 3D rendering packages like Lightwave started on the Amiga. Some of the game makers are still around like Psygnosis. Jim Sachs was a noted Amiga artist and is responsible for the Aquarium screen saver which is part of the Microsoft Plus! XP pack. etc.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[sph]

If it was so superior, what killed it? Marketing?

Among other things, yes. Commodore's marketing was awful to say the least, and bankruptcy followed in 1994 leaving Amiga in void for a couple of years. That finally killed the machine for the masses. Yes, I know it is still pretty popular hobbyist machine, but so are for example C64 or MSX.

Another fatal thing was slow progress. It took almost *ten* years to get new graphics chipset and more processor power to the lower-end models, and when AGA finally arrived it was too little too late, PC had already got first sound cards and VGA, and more processor power. There were rumors that Commodore had *lost* the original chipset (OCS) designs, and they had to reverse-engineer the chips to be able to make next generation AGA chips compatible.

It is also impossible to make an AmigaOS-compatible operating system with real memory protection without using virtual machines or emulators for older software. Original AmigaOS uses pointer-based messaging, and that's why the OS is so efficient. But unfortunately, that's impossible with virtual memory. So though AmigaOS was still way ahead of its time in 1985, it can't be updated to even 1995 standards without losing compatibility.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[dobber]

I agree. The Amiga just had the 'snappiness' that users really want out of a UI. Back in 'the day' I ran circles around my friends maxed out i386s. They had three times the clock speed and hundreds of dollars more hardward in their systems - yet mine seemed much quicker.

My first replacement for my old Amiga was a 90MHz Pentium system. I initially ran OS/2 Warp on it, but eventually migrated to Win95 for game support. It was an okay system, but didn't really impress me.

When I got my hands on BeOS, (then running a 233MHz K6), I finally found a system that really GOT multitasking - at least from a GUI perspective. That little OS really cooks. I challenge you to (even today) fire up 10-20 Quicktime moves, an OpenGL app, a MIDI player, an MP3 Player, and then just try to do file operations. Sucks doesn't it? Be really handled that well. It's very sad to seem them be a commercial failure.

Now I have a 500MHz iBook and run OS X. I like OS X, but the UI lag is really annoying. Every time I get that damn Beach Ball cursor (even when opening the damn terminal!) I just want to pull hair out.

Well, enough of a rant for now...

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[nickos]

Even sadder, if I remember correctly, Commodores management had AA (AGA) as early as 1990 but looked at how far the competitors were behind and decided to delay it for a couple of years. They were close to finishing AAA when Commodore layed off all of it's engineers.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[Prowl]

That, my friend, is an understatement!

Its interesting to note,
how many staunch DOS advocates do you hear of...none.
win95-ME ... none. most people accept the use of windows as a chore!!!

and yet the atari ST and the amiga and others STILL have a core group of advocates.

had commodore/atari not aimed their hardware solely at the games market, we would now be living in a world where OS allowed getting things done quickly and efficiently.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[jtrascap]

I'll agree with a bunch of that! I used to be the Tech Support/Graphic Designer/Doc Writer for Progressive Peripherals, a big Amiga hardware and software manufacturer, waaaay back in 1991.

We were doing pretty well - 030 & 040 accellerators (anyone remember Mercury and Zeus?) for the 2000 & 3000 line, software like Disk Master and 3D Professional (one fo the first 3d apps to use NURBs), and lots of kick-ass stuff. We were seriously in the zone - our stuff kicked the butt of the competition (like...hack!..GVP) when it came to reliability and speed.

Users loved us. We were doing well. Then Commodore nailed the coffin shut.

That last Christmas in 92, Commdore just let the Amiga die. No adverts. No promotion. I think Tramiel wanted to keep all that off-shore Jamacian bank cash to himself and get out of the biz, and then PPI went belly up a few months later.

They regrouped and formed Aspen System, making Alpha motherboards (always geeks...god save 'em!)

But our people loved the Amiga. It was *SO* far beyond it's time...just a perfect example of waste via marketing.

bah!

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[jtrascap]

Ack! Replying to my own mail...bah! One thing I wanted to add...we went belly-up because we were recovering from a devistating fire at our old offices on Kalamath street, and cash was tight then. We really needed a good christmas to stay afloat.

Aparently Fat Jack only need to keep his yacht afloat.

double-bah!

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[jtrascap]

Arkanoid!

Lemmings!

Defender of the Crown

Deluxe Paint

and it goes on and on...I think I lost a thumb muscle with Arkanoid.

bah!

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[Alan Partridge]

Well, the marketing was a little strange, but it was really a hundred different things at once. First, the Amiga was never marketed to business (would have been pointless anyway), secondly Amiga CD-32 - a spectacular waste of money that went up against Sega and lost, thirdly incredibly shitty build quality, fourthly no progressive scan GFX until the 030 machines meant WP and office stuff was extremely headache inducing and lastly, the Commodore management were idiots and thieves who blew all their cash on private jets and crap when they should have been investing. The real shame of it was the all of the software developers' fantastic work was wasted, some moved on and thrived, some didn't.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[Squid]

secondly Amiga CD-32 - a spectacular waste of money that went up against Sega and lost,

In North America anyway. But in Europe, particularly Britain and Germany, the CD32 was doing a remarkably good job handing Sega's ass to it on a plate, right up until Commodore disappeared out from under it.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[donglekey]

Playing a quicktime movie trailer crashes my pIII 450 384 megs RAM half the time. *Sigh*

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[HeUnique]

Oy vey...

Marketing - THATS what killed the amiga - beautiful machine, excellent hardware, great OS (do u know any other OS today that you can mix resolutions on the same screen like 640x200 & 320x200, different bitplanes and all at once? didn't see it anywhere else...

And yet, Commodore (who bought Amiga) managed to screw each time their customers over, over, and over again.

Anyone who where following Commodore in their last few years will tell you about their biggest mistake - making their last machine (Amiga 4000) totally incompatible with everything else - was their biggest mistake. Did I mention how much they screwed their customers?

And people wondered how come Atari ST with less then HALF of the featured kicked Amiga's sales in the butt (neck to neck sales in Europe, sold better then Amiga in U.S)

Oh dear...

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[MaxVlast]

I don't know about y'all, but I could never bring myself to take seriously a computer whose screen image jittered so violently that using any GUI app was risky to mental health.

And it made it worse when our CS teacher (touted to be one of the top Amiga minds in the country) told us that it wasn't a big deal. Particularly when I could pull out my PowerBook and do twice as much, twice as happily, and without putting up with ridiculous shortcomings in the interest of being "more advanced."

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[Anonymous Coward]

It is also impossible to make an AmigaOS-compatible operating system with real memory protection without using virtual machines or emulators for older software. Original AmigaOS uses pointer-based messaging, and that's why the OS is so efficient. But unfortunately, that's impossible with virtual memory. So though AmigaOS was still way ahead of its time in 1985, it can't be updated to even 1995 standards without losing compatibility.

Shared memory. If the kernel knows how large the data pointed by the pointer is, it can allow multiple processes to read/write it.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[Steveftoth]

One reason that you don't see any dos/win95 advocates is that you can still run a lot of the apps that ran on DOS on win2k or XP. Not all of them and sometimes the one that won't run is the one that you really like, but a large number of them still work. I can still play Master of Magic on 2k, even if the sound doesn't work.

However, on amiga there is no other way to use the programs that were written for the amiga. Many don't have ports to other platforms. People don't want to sacrifice their work enviroment for the sake of 'progress'. (that's also the reason you see so many mac users/advocates)

I mean if all anyone wanted out of a computer was fast and cheap then we'd all be running linux on athlons.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the interlaced modes, 320x400 and 640x400 (or their PAL equivilents x512).

You weren't forced to use those however, you could use 320x200 or 640x200, which is what most folks used unless they had a flicker-fixer (which also came built into the A3000).

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[CKW]

Drool. I remember the first time I saw the full-page Zeus ad in an Amiga Magazine. What was it, something outrageous like expandable to 64-128 MB of memory? A HUGE stack of 8 or 16 SIMM slots. This when 1MB was "expanded" and 8MB was "a lot".

I still have my A500 plus GVP A530 memory/accelerator/HD combination. I remember the first night in 199(1/2/?) that I plugged the A530 in and pulled up 8 simultaneous applications and dragged the screens part-way down to show them all. Wordprocessor, that famous delux paint program that had all the neat features (whats-its-name), a demo running god knows how many colors with shimmering slithering video tricks, a mod in Protracker, the bouncing Amiga ball, and some others.

Unbelievable.

If someone were to create a lineup of home PC systems from 85 through to modern times, and then insert an Amiga in full demo mode into 1988 or 1991, it would look *SO* out of place, with all the colors, music, and ultra smooth multi-tasking. It would be obvious even to the dim witted that someone somewhere had overlooked something big.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[Anonymous Coward]

> then we'd all be running linux on athlons

bingo.

Re:AmigaOS -- ahead of its time

[jtrascap]

Absotootly - in a linup, the Amiga would knock the socks off of any of the competition, up until recently. Our hardware was the best - easy to work with yet tough as nails. The only issues we had was with SCSI voodoo out the back of the Zeus SCSI connector (people alternativly added and removed terminator blocks at random...ah, the days!)

For a 60K microkernal, AmigaDos had it wrapped up. Amazing amount of power, and the user always had it at his fingertips, kind of like the effect the "multitasking" the old Mac OS had. Frontmost apps jumped to the GUI's touch, and unlike the old MacOS to v9.x, the background tasks pretty much didn't sink the system. I'm running OS X 10.1.2 and I wish it felt that pliable under my fingertips.

Why do I feel like I'vce just set myself up for a goats.cx post?? Gotta filter higher!

Also discussed here...

[ckemp]

Exactly same news item was posted on ANN several hours ago. In the comments section, Bernie Meyer, the main programmer behind Amithlon, responds in several posts (1, 2, 3)

Why use an amiga these days?

[d-Orb]

OK, I come from an amiga background, and I am quite happy to see developments on the Amiga front still happening. On the other hand, I am puzzled, as I do not know how the Amiga is being used today, and why people bother starting companies with it. I don't understand why you'd want to pay 150 euro for this emulator when Apidya II works fine on UAE :-) You seem to get some software with it, but that's not particularly ground-breaking software (or is it? A WP, a graphics package...).
I don't know, I just don't see the point of pushing the Amiga further like that. I'd be quite happy to play around with an amiga-ish system, but _not_ for that kind of cash.

Re:Why use an amiga these days?

[fistynuts]

Why is this post Score 0 Troll? The author gives a valid point of view. How many people would pay that kind of money to get an Amiga emulator and a couple of standard apps? I mean, it probably won't even run IK+.. ;)

Ahead of its time

[Grax]

an excellent windowing and multitasking architecture (smooth, not slow and jerky) in 1985. 32 bit hardware at a reasonable price well before that stuff was available for PCs.

Amiga was one incredible PC and way ahead of its time. I'd certainly love an up-to-date model if the new ones can attain the same type of standards as the old ones.

Re:Ahead of its time

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell can't we round up all you Amiga retards and send you all on a ship straight into the sun.

My god did the Amiga suck. It has the honor of being the only computer that made me happy to get back on a DOS machine back in the late eighties.

Re:Ahead of its time

[Anonymous Coward]

The new machines will boast hardware similar to that of PC hardware. That is PCI/AGP/SUB/Firewire. The AmigaOS is being ported to PPC and given a hardware abstraction layer so that it is more portable int he near future to platforms such as x86.

In theory Amiga Inc could port their OS (effortlessly) to Spark/Mips/x86 very quickly and very effeicently... :)

Re:Ahead of its time

[Grax]

Everyone I know either loved them or was completely unaware of them.

Everyone I know that loved them is a successful computer professional now with an excellent understanding of computers, how they work, and what they are capable of.

Was there another high performance multitasking interface that you preferred in 1985?

Does this mean....

[ThinkingGuy]

I'll be able to use VideoToaster once again?

Re:Does this mean....

[British]

If they brought back the video toaster, darn right this new Amiga would catch on. The VT was indeed a "killer app", to coin an overused phrase.

Re:Does this mean....

[sheldon]

Go to www.newtek.com. They have a new Video Toaster 2 that's based off of a PC running Windows 2000.

I might consider buying it

[codexus]

but it's a bit expansive. 150 euro when UAE is free. (But I only own the AmigaOS ROM 2.0) but this one seems to be a fastest way to run my old amiga code.

The truth is this thing is a gadget for amiga nostalgics and I would love to see the face of some people when I'll "boot" an AmigaOS on my PC (not really the truth this is still emulation but I don't have to tell them right away and it still would be fun). Is that worth 150 euros?

What are the chances?

[The Famous Brett Wat]

I'm a fan of the Amiga. Not as vehement a fan as I used to be: my shelf-full of old Amigas goes largely unused, but not entirely unused. I can't help but wonder, though: no matter how cool any Amiga-related stuff may be, is it even possible for a proprietary OS to be successful in today's market? Look at Be -- it's the new Amiga: it will probably never die completely either. Apple has its little niche and is staying there thank you: it's not going away any time soon, but nobody is asking whether it will take over the world anymore.

And note: Linux is quite horrible in most regards as a desktop OS (which doesn't stop me using it as such, or even installing it on the machines of the clueless as a virus-proof alternative to Windows), but it's still the only system making real inroads on the desktop.

I find the empirical evidence too hard to ignore: unless you're Microsoft, the only way you're going to make significant advances in today's OS marketplace is to be Open Source. Proprietary releases of the Amiga OS for the PC platform might make a few old Amiga die-hards very happy, but is there really any future in it? Is history going to repeat itself again?

Re:What are the chances?

[Anonymous Coward]

is it even possible for a proprietary OS to be successful in today's market?

Windows is

Re:What are the chances?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that you may be a slight bit "open source" slanted. Perhaps the only OS that will make advances in the marketplace is the OS that meets and/or exceeds end user needs, regardless of the open/closed status of the source. You seem to forget that the overwhelming majority of users do not care about the source, their computer is a tool.

Re:What are the chances?

[Sloppy]

is it even possible for a proprietary OS to be successful in today's market?

I guess it depends on what you call "success." If you mean gaining a large marketshare, Amiga ain't gonna do that. If you mean make a profit, then yes, it's theoretically possible.

Proprietary releases of the Amiga OS for the PC platform might make a few old Amiga die-hards very happy, but is there really any future in it?

No, there's no future in it. I still use my Amiga every day (for all my email and most of my web surfing) but even I know that. But if you can make Amiga die-hards happy enough to write checks, type in credit card numbers, etc. then everybody wins.

Re:What are the chances?

[The Famous Brett Wat]

I may well be a bit biased towards Open Source, but I think the evidence is there to support my view. The primary benefit of Open Source is not that the end users get to see the code, but rather that the operating system gets a much larger body of developers for free.

With a proprietary OS, the proprietor does all the coding, and the end users all pay for it. It's a simple sell/buy publish/subscribe produce/consume kind of relationship. The proprietor must make enough money out of it to be viable. Open Source isn't like that. The only question of viability in an Open Source project is whether there are enough individuals interested in using it and working on it.

Consumer needs include value for money, application availability, and reliability (both in the sense of no crashes and no viruses). Biased towards Open Source I may be, but that doesn't change the fact that both Windows and Linux (for entirely different reasons) beat the Amiga OS hands down in the "meets end user needs" stakes. If Amiga OS cost nothing (or nearly nothing), that would be a plus from the perspective of the consumer. There just wouldn't be much point making it free unless it were also Open Source, though.

Re:What are the chances?

[Drazi100]

i think he was talking about an alternative proprietary GOOD OS.

Re:What are the chances?

[GPS Pilot]

is it even possible for a proprietary OS to be successful in today's market?

Isn't Windows a proprietary OS?

Seriously. Don't mod this down.

PW&LP

[CmderTaco]

2Lameness has filtered me!
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Why would you want to actually boot AmigaOS?

[ccontrol]

As a production platform for film, music, etc, the Amiga is quite obsolete. You do not want to run Deluxe Paint when you have access to Photo Shop, don't you? I cannot imagine a single reason why you would like to run productivity apps on an Amiga in 2002 besides nostalgy.

However, there were several games for the Amiga which were quite remarkable. UAE does a fantastic job at emulating them. But booting AmigaOS like you boot Linux or Windows is of no practical value for that. Another great proof of concept on ./

Re:Why would you want to actually boot AmigaOS?

[benjymous]

Well I don't want to run Deluxe Paint because PPaint is so much better. And yes, there have been many times when it's been much easier to fire up UAE and do a task in PPaint than to use Photoshop or PSP

Re:Why would you want to actually boot AmigaOS?

[Explo]

As a production platform for film, music, etc, the Amiga is quite obsolete. You do not want to run Deluxe Paint when you have access to Photo Shop, don't you?

Actually, Photoshop is not exactly very hot for pixel-level editing, which is the thing DP focuses most on. If I'd have both DP on Amiga and Photoshop on Windows/Mac running in front of me and I'd have to draw for example a small icon from scratch, I'd use DP. (Although then again, IMO Brilliance was a better program than DP for that ;) For most heavy-duty graphics work Photoshop is superior, but it's not the best tool for everything.

Re:Why would you want to actually boot AmigaOS?

[vortexau]

Actually, I use TVPaint and ImageFX mostly.

ImageFX is very PaintShop like!

This was assembled from four sections with ImageFX.

.

is AmigaXL the one true future of Amiga

[John Harrison]

The author of this /. story asks, "is AmigaXL the one true future of Amiga...?"

An answer your question from the article:

"Is this the future of Amiga computing?," you may ask. Although this package offers a very valuable addition to the options currently available, the future of Amiga computing lies with PPC based Amiga 4.x compatible computers and other AmigaDE enabled solutions.

The Amiga.

[cooperj72]

For those of you who have never used one, let me put it like this.

In 1989 I bought an Amiga 500. My jaw dropped.

I have never experienced another piece of
technology the way I did the first year I used
amiga. It's sound, graphics, multitasking, and
interface WAS that good... that far
ahead of it's time.

If there were and equivalent to getting laid the
first time it would be the Amiga. Sure
you've had better since, but you will
remember it always. For the record I'll take my
first lay over the Amiga anytime ;)

-J

Re:The Amiga.

[richie2000]

For the record I'll take my first lay over the Amiga anytime ;)

I'm not so sure, myself. :-)

Will then learn?

[saqmaster]

What will stop AmigaOS 'XL' on x86 architecture from suffering the same pain as o/s's like BeOS? They cannot rely on the fact that there are a lot of ex-amigageeks out there willing to run AmigaOS on a PC. The software support isn't available and will end up just like BeOS. I, being an amigageek, would have a play with it - but I think the CD/Box would end up back on the shelf after a day or two of realizing that I just can't do what I want to do with it. It's not the same as it used to be which will put off many amigaholics..

AmigaXL screenshoots

[Anonymous Coward]

This is sick, what you can see there is a Compaq laptop running QNX... and package manager app ready to install AmigaDE... seems like another cloud of vapor

I'd love to support it but...

[Nijika]

I have to face the fact. The Amiga as an all in one platform, is now dead. We were the fringe of the fringe at the time, battling even Mac users for spot as the underdog.

Amiga as we remember it is dead, and it's not comming back! I've moved on to Mandrake as a desktop.

Traitor!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah.. women.

Re:Traitor!

[cooperj72]

Haha! But it the babe in "Sword of Sodan!"

Still don't get it

[maggard]

OK - Like 99.99% of the computer owning public I never owned an Amiga. Fifteen years ago I thought they were great and a pity the company was run into the ground but hey, life moved on.

Since then the industry has changed tremendously, we've been though how many generations of hardware, software, and even OSes. It's nice that an Amiga-legacy has come back but - to what?

Is there anything that Amiga now offers that Be didn't or MacOS X doesn't? Something that Wintel in it's messy but with 90% of the market way can't cough up some half-assed version of? The Linux/BSD/etc. can't reproduce?

Surely there aren't enough Amiga-fanatics out there to support a viable market for running old binaries? And all of those old kewl Amiga apps - they're old hat now - certianly there are better alternatives on other platforms by now aren't there?

What, exactly, does Amiga offer other then seeing an old friend again? I know nothing else is quite like it but after all these years is it really viable as an ongoing concern? Or is it like CP/M, just a joy to see it but of little real purpose other then the familiarity and the odd bit that can still be useful if only because nobody ever did it as well elsewhere?

Re:Still don't get it

[ShieldWolf]

>Is there anything that Amiga now offers that Be didn't or MacOS X doesn't?

How about running multiple resolutions at once? If that sentence doesn't make sense to you then you truly don't get it. ;)

-Jeff

Re:Still don't get it

[maggard]

How about running multiple resolutions at once?

Nice, but doesn't seem a make-it-or-break-it thang to me, how is it useful to you?

-- Michael

btw I expect (but don't know) that this could be done in MacOS X with it's Quartz layer; might be an interesting thing to look into if you're hurtin' for the feature.

Re:Still don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't useful anymore.
It was when running animation or color-intensive application was impossible under 640x480 with its 16 colors.
These days with 1600+ resolutions running at 32 bits multiple resolution does not make sense at all.

Re:Still don't get it

[hitchhikerjim]

OK -- but why?

Any good graphics API out there today (and even back into the 90's) will let you define a canvas and then redefine it in virtual units. So you get the same thing just done a different way... the difference mainly become semantics.

Again -- innovative in its day, but most of the things learned from the Amiga of old have already been applied to other systems.

Is there anything Video Toaster (as an example of a 'killer app') on Amiga could do that Final Cut Pro 2 on the Mac can't?

Not saying don't try -- I'd love to see new innovative stuff from the platform. But I just don't hold much hope considering how much it's playing catch-up today.

Re:Still don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Multiple resolutions at once?

That was a neat hack (some games even made use of it), but it stopped being very useful once we got higher resolution / color depth displays. The fact that it didn't work well with VGA displays and the really high res modes didn't help ... :)

Re:Still don't get it

[Sloppy]

How about running multiple resolutions at once? If that sentence doesn't make sense to you then you truly don't get it. ;)

The reason to run different resolutions is for performance and memory efficiency.

Once I got my CV64 (and, later, my Picasso IV) and a Cyberstorm '060 (which let me add a lot of RAM), I stopped using that feature.

Hardware advances have made that feature obsolete.

Re:Still don't get it

[Jhan]

This feature (Screens) is one of the major reasons I still use my Amiga daily (in fact, I'm writing this on it!)

An example: My Workbench (finder, ) runs in a medium-resolution (800x600), 24-bit mode in order to make the icons the right size and the text readable. My paint program is set to run in the highest 24-bit resolution my piss-poor gfx card can handle (1280x960). My C IDE is set to run in 1600x1200, 256 colors.

I can launch both applications and toggle through the three screens quickly with the screen depth gadget. In fact, I can launch a game and still toggle screens (with a key press, since the game is fullscreen).

In combination with MUI this feature becomes even more usefull. You can set up any number of screen definitions ahead of time, and select which applications go on what screen. For instance, the graphics program and the picture viewer could both share the high-res, 24 bit screen. The IDE and the text viewer could share the extrememly high-res, 256 color screen. (Normally, each application would either run on Workbench or on its own custom screen.)

Screens are probably the hardest to reproduce likable feature of AmigaOS, but there are tons of others:

• Ram disk that automatically grows/shrinks as needed. Perfect for those temp files.
• Handlers in general, allowing you to very easily create disk-like thingies.
• A shell that's smart enough to realize that when I type the name of a directory, I don't want to execute the damn thing, I want to move to it!
• Any sized icons.
• Icons and disk drawers that remember their position/size. Of course, the Mac has always had this, though apparently there're som problems with OSX.
• RDB partitioning system.
• Assigns, esp. multi assigns.
• The ability to run all my (100's) of old games :-)
• A unique compromise between simplicity and power. Repeat after me Bill and Linus and Steve: user friendliness is not about creating a horrendously overcomplex system and then trying to hide it from the users by pasting a cute graphical shell on top!
• Dozens more points I will not bore you with here.

All of these thing conspire to make me hang on to my dear Amiga, year after year. And the fact that I bloody hate both Microsoft and the PC hardware design.

Re:Still don't get it

[maggard]

Thanks for the great response. Apparently the ability to have different bit-depth screens is important to some folks.

I'm still not sure how critical it is to the majority of us nor that it can't be reproduced (and some if it's functioniality seems predicated on remedying other Amiga OS weaknesses) but yes, I can see the advantages. Again, I wouldn't be suprised if MacOS X can't offer much of what you want with some work but it'll never run those 100's of games, at least not natively (hmmm - Virtual PC running....) nor behave like the WorkBench.

Each to his own.

So do you think there are enough folks interested in using Amiga or enough developers willing to support it that it will ever "take off" in any more-then-obscure-hobbyist way? I know anything is possible but do you expect it to happen or are we seeing the cadaver get yet another shock through the heart but afterwards it'll still be laying there on the table, lovely but going nowhere fast?

Re:Still don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly why the Amiga failed. I cannot put into words why AmigaOS is more pleaseant to work on and develop for, but it is. The only way to understand why is to use it, and there's no free download for such things (WinUAE is NOT even close despite claims to the contrary).

If you had one and used it, you were hooked. If you didn't, you probably wondered why we put up with the big mouse pointers or something otherwise as superficial.

It took me close to 15 years to get it out of my system and the only reason I switched was because of the obscene cost of hardware for the platform and the lure of inexpensive broadband on other platforms.

Re:Still don't get it

[ascii]

"What, exactly, does Amiga offer other then seeing an old friend again? I know nothing else is quite like it but after all these years is it really viable as an ongoing concern?" NOTE: I'll have to admit that I am a Windows user and have never got the hang of *NIX beyond installing the occasional mandrake, redhat and fiddling around with it. For one thing: the Amiga OS was in many ways designed with and incredible elegance. I have never seen this degree of transparency in use since then. Datatypes are an excellent example of this: need to read PNG's? Find a PNG datatype and plonk it in SYS:Devs/DataTypes and your programs would recognize and read PNG's just like that. Another thing was the ease with which you'd install programs and / or upgraded system components. Shared libraries went into LIBS:, Device managers into DEVS: and so on. With the Amiga you didn't need programs to manage programs: they were easily managed via the GUI and / or Shell. This type of integrity, ease and straight-forwardness was evident throughout the entire OS. After next to two decades things like these still - makes me tick. And still, you'll have to excuse me not being able to compare it to *nix, but I'm a complete moron with respect to that.

Re:Still don't get it

[donglekey]

The Video Toaster was and is still quite a bit different. It was a complete system that was really a video tool, including hardware switching, hardware compression, editing, a copy of Lightwave, and CG Generation. So yeah, there's a whole list of things, especially because the Video Toaster had hardware too. Now the Video Toaster has been out on Windows 2000 for a while (and 2.0 rocks). So the Video Toaster is no longer a reason to buy an amiga, although it is a reason to keep them around, they do what they were made for so well that it would still be a shame to throw one away.

Re:Still don't get it

[MaxVlast]

"An example: My Workbench (finder, ) runs in a medium-resolution (800x600), 24-bit mode in order to make the icons the right size and the text readable. My paint program is set to run in the highest 24-bit resolution my piss-poor gfx card can handle (1280x960). My C IDE is set to run in 1600x1200, 256 colors.
"

This may be a little abrasive, but that's just stupid. I can think of few worse GUI choices than having the resolution different for different applications. I used the Amiga (500 and 1200), and thought that it was the most poorly thought-out, user-confounding GUI ever. It was all sorts of tricks and ideas bundled together to work quickly, but in the weirdest, least productive fashion I have ever seen.

> Any sized icons.
And that was just outrageously stupid.

Re:Still don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

UNIX:
/{,usr{,/{local,share}}}/{bin,lib,man,etc}
/dev

No standard for file formats, though, I'll give you that. OTOH, NeXT (which became Mac OS X) has some of the nice things you describe, and lots of potential for it, in its Foundation and AppKit.

Re:Still don't get it

[mdwh2]

Is there anything that Amiga now offers that Be didn't or MacOS X doesn't? Something that Wintel in it's messy but with 90% of the market way can't cough up some half-assed version of? The Linux/BSD/etc. can't reproduce?

I don't think there's any unique "killer" feature - but these days, it's not like any OS has any great features that isn't in anything else. To put it another way, what does MacOS have to offer me that I can't do on other platforms? Not everyone uses a platform because of a unique feature, I'd suspect more people use it because they feel something's done better, not because it's unique.

What, exactly, does Amiga offer other then seeing an old friend again?

It isn't just nostalgia value - since I know my way around AmigaOS both as a user and a programmer, I don't have to spend vast amounts of time learning about it as I would if I decided to switch to BeOS or Linux or MacOS (I'm currently using Windows). In general, it's a case that not everyone is the same, not everyone has the same preferences. AmigaOS has a few things I like about it that don't appear to be available in quite the same way on another platform (eg, datatypes, assigns, a shared library system that doesn't leave you in DLLHell, being able to boot into a GUI environment even if your hard disk is trashed). I also enjoy programming it (I can also enjoy programming for Windows, thanks to Borland, but more variety makes life more interesting:) There are also some programs I enjoy more than any equivalents I've found on other platforms (eg, YAM for email).

Quite probably, Amiga has nothing to offer you, just as Be/Mac/Linux/etc have nothing to offer me, but hopefully I've explained why some are interested.

Re:Still don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

These days with video RAM not an issue, it probably doesn't make too much sense (though it could still be handy as the example given suggests). At the time though, it made huge sense. I do agree that Workbench wasn't the greatest desktop in existance, I used DOpus for file management and toolmanager for common app. launching, only using WB as a last resort. I also agree that (until BOOPSI and GadTools came along in OS2.0) the Intuition gadgets were a pain to program and had no standard look-and-feel, infact early RKMs TOLD you to design your own gadgets!
Variable sized icon were great IF used consistently (again, no standards) - morons who thought 250x250 pixel icons were cool...

Re:Still don't get it

[matrix29]

> Any sized icons.
And that was just outrageously stupid.

And when I go to Adjust Display Properties/Advanced/General/Font Size
and change "Large Fonts" to "Small Fonts" I get the popup window stating, "You must restart your computer before the new settings will take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now? Yes / No"

Every fucking time you changed the display resolution all of Windows had to reboot up to Windows 98!

The Amiga was launched in the mid-1980s and NEVER had to reboot to change the display resolution size. It took over a decade and a half to have Winblows catch up with even basic interface issues. And that's only one thing in which the Amiga beat Windows easily at the time. Hell, it even had a Mac emulator that was faster than an accellerated Macintosh.

So tell me again about outrageous stupidity?

Re:Still don't get it

[MaxVlast]

I think that's outrageously stupid, as well. It's even stupider, actually.

I'm not saying that it wasn't a capable system, but I am saying that everything about it frustrated me. Every single aspect of the system. I find that to be a very impressive feat.

Re:Still don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

It is useful. Even if my desktop is 1600x1200, i wouldn't expect my 40MHz 64080 to run any games in that resolution, and this is where full screen at a lower resolution rezlly IS useful.

i remember the days...

[xtstrike]

when i had my amiga 600 - booted from floppy into my gui (workbench)

then i spent about £200 ($300) on my 40MB hard disk - i was in awe - i installed the OS to hard disk, and booted from HD - once again my jaw dropped.

at about this time i just had to get my memory upgrade, i think i remember it being a 1MB upgrade, wow, it was great, i made a 1MB ram drive with it when i needed to.

im too excited, /me goes out to buy AmigaOS to remember the good old days.

All this and im only 22, LOL

Please enlighten me...

[d0n quix0te]

I see the obligatory Amiga posting every month or two on /. I'd like to know more about the user base. In what fields is the Amiga used and why is it a viable platform? What are the unique Amiga only features today.

This is not a troll. I'd like someone to enlighten me and possibly other readers.

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Mr Teddy Bear]

I don't know too much about the Amiga (I wish I had the chance to own one but I didn't) But I do know that a lot of lower end production companies still use Amigas for their video editing. (Yes, the Amiga was THAT good that people have decided NOT to go with Adobe Premiere) Also, Commodore systems have always had graphics that were way ahead of their time. (Hell the C64 had 320x200x16 back in 1979, PCs at best had CGA (320x200x4)) So as best I can see this is where Amiga shined the most just because this is where people still use them for real tasks everyday TODAY.

Maybe I am wrong, if so let me know.

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Sloppy]

I use an Amiga daily, so I'll take a shot at this.

For me, the Amiga has no unique features, anymore, that are terribly important. BUT...

I happen to like the scheduler and the GUI's responsiveness. Until about (very roughly) 2 or 3 years ago, the Amiga was much faster and responsive than any mainstream OS. You could beat it with other fringe OSes such as BeOS, but GUIs such as GNOME, KDE, and Windows, couldn't really measure up to it. The catch is that the hardware that the mainstream OSes run on, is so much faster, that at even one tenth (this is very subjective, I admit) of the efficiency, they're able to keep up now. A 300 MHz Pentium running Windows or Linux is a sick joke compared to a 50 MHz Amiga, but a 1.2 GHz Athlon isn't. So this advantage has mostly disappeared, as far as I'm concerned.

The other advantage is one that only applies to Amiga die-hards. We're just familiar with our old software. If you don't already have an Amiga, you probably don't need this stuff. But I have a hard time giving up:

1. AWeb: a very nice web browser. Galeon is better in some ways, but missing some features. Netscape 4.x and MSIE (all versions) are very crude. Opera is pretty nice. There's no reason existing browsers couldn't gain the things about AWeb that I like; it's just that they haven't for some reason.

2. Directory Opus Magellan: a very good file manager. I find Nautilus, GMC (or whatever that older GNOME file manger was called), KDE, Windows Explorer, and yes -- even Mac finder and OS/2 WPS -- to be somewhat slow and clumsy in some ways compared to working with DOpus (it depends on what you're trying to do). DOpus 5.x has a extremely efficient UI, IMHO.

   FWIW, I have recently been thinking that the best parts could probably be duplicated in a couple hundred lines of Python, so maybe I'll give it a try. Also, I've heard it's recently been ported to Windows, but I haven't seen it. And I think some older versions of DOpus (4.x) have been cloned for other platforms. So it's not a really unique advantage, but it's still something that the mainstream hasn't latched onto yet.

I also use my Amiga for mail, using a program called Serious Voodoo. But I suspect that today's mailers on other platforms are just as good; I just haven't tried them. But when I first started using it in 1996 (?), the mainstream didn't have any decent GUI mailers with PGP integration (which I'm guessing is commonplace now).

Other Amigans may list other apps that they like, or violently disagree with my favorites. Whatever. I guess the point is that, no matter how dead the Amiga may seem, it had many years of life, and in that time, a very large library of software was written, some of ahead of its time. The remaining Amiga users are probably pretty used to the apps.

There are some little things too, like "assigns" (a way to use a sort of shorthand for a long path) which you can kinda fake on Unix-like systems with softlinks in your root, I guess.

Re:Please enlighten me...

[fistynuts]

The c64 released in 1979? 1982 surely!

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Carl Drougge]

here are some little things too, like "assigns" (a way to use a sort of shorthand for a long path) which you can kinda fake on Unix-like systems with softlinks in your root, I guess.

You can?

assign libs: sys:mui/libs add

How do I fake that using symlinks, eh?

(For those that don't get it, "add" *adds* the contents of sys:mui/libs to the libs: assign, without replacing the old.)

(And yes, I can make /libs a dir, and put thousands of symlinks in it, but that seems silly..)

And more importantly, how to I make a thing like the TCP: "device" on a unix-like system? (I've implemented several special-purpose devices on AmigaOS, and named pipes are not the same, no.)

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Alan Partridge]

"But I do know that a lot of lower end production companies still use Amigas for their video editing." err, I don't think so. You could put together a PC based edit system for 1500 on a PC or 2000 on a Mac that would crucify ANY Amiga Toaster - no-one in business uses such ancient HW these days. I work in TV, the last AMiga I saw in use was in 1996, and that was in a room full of Macs (it was a fully tricked out 4000 running Toaster, looked pretty shabby next to an Avid).

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Virtex]

There were a lot of things in Amiga's OS design that I really liked, and for the most part, haven't seen duplicated. For example, I absolutely loved the way it handled multiple screens (it allowed you to drag them up and down to see one in front of the other). I also loved things like appicons (drop an icon onto one of these and it would perform some action on it), and the datatypes library (a directory of modules for reading all different types of input -- pictures, text, sounds, etc, and if a new format came along, add the new datatype and *all* your software would instantly support it!).

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Sloppy]

Ah.. "assign .. add" -- you're right, of course. "Modern" platforms still can't do that sort of thing. That's probably why Dozers have "DLL hell" and my Linux boxes have huge /usr/local/lib directories and my brother's Mac has so much stuff in "extensions" folder. Good call, Carl.

The TCP handler... you could probably write a device driver for Linux/BSD (/dev/tcp or something like that) that works the same way. So yeah, the "modern" systems don't have the functionality of AmigaOS+AmiTCP out-of-the-box, but unlike the assign thing, there's no major barrier to prevent it.

Now that I think of it, it's pretty strange that some Amiga refugee over the in Linux camp hasn't already done a tcp device. Weird.

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Carl Drougge]

The TCP handler... you could probably write a device driver for Linux/BSD (/dev/tcp or something like that) that works the same way.

I don't think so..:

echo foo >TCP:foo.example.com/discard
echo foo >/dev/tcp

How does the second know where to connect? It would have to be a whole preudo-filesystem. And the fact that it hasn't been implemented strongly suggests this is not exactly trivial. (Trivial might be a strong word under AmigaOS too, but it certainly wasn't that hard..)

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Note to moderators: Alan Partridge is a Troll, presumably from britain, beacause noone else would know who alan partirdge is (he's a fictional spoof tv presenter created by the comedian steve coogan). I DO work in video production, and, quie scarily, Amigas are still in widespread use - Disney has a warehouse full of 'em, stockpiled, and Nick Park (wallace and Gromit) has several.

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Anonymous Coward]

unlike the assign thing, there's no major barrier to prevent it.

Wrong. There's no major barrier to the assign thing either. It wouldn't be hard to hack the VFS to allow a funky kind of mount, I don't think.

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think GNU HURD has a /dev/tcp-type thing where it's something like /dev/tcp/host/port.

HURD is actually really cool. Shame development hasn't caught on.

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Babylon 5 (the tv show) was created by a group that started with Amigas running Newtek's Lightwave.

Back then Lightwave was not a stand alone program, but was part of a package called video toaster.

Video Toaster and Lightwave only ran on Amigas.

Of course the creators of Babylon 5 subsequently moved to the pc platform when lightwave was ported.

to sum it up:

Early 90's: Photoshop was to Mac, as Lightwave was to Amiga.

Re:Please enlighten me...

[andrewski]

Actually, believe it or not, many public access stations use the Amiga for both video editing and for compositing raster graphics with video. If you have $1500 or $2000 to donate to your local public access, please do so.

Re:Please enlighten me...

[schon]

It wouldn't be hard to hack the VFS to allow a funky kind of mount, I don't think.

a mount hack would be pretty heavy-handed..

the assign command is user-level, not admin-level.. it must be something that the average user can do at will.. mount isn't the same thing

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Anonymous Coward]

everything possibible with pc is possible with an amiga. I still use it everyday for email and irc :-)

the only thing lacking in todays amiga's is processing power. AmigaXL makes it possible to run already existing amiga apps (dtp,sound/video/bitmap editing) a lot faster.
I started with Amiga and remained with it for a long time. I know how it works and find it nicer to work with than windows or linux.( using both for some years)

Re:Please enlighten me...

[Alan Partridge]

I'm hurt. No troll, I work in Soho (yes, I'm British) for a TV post-production company. We work in the episodic, gfx and high-end corporate market. Our company had a single Amiga/Toaster up until 1994 (among many other systems). These days we have 12 Avids (2 Symphony), 1 Editbox, 1 "Floctane", 1 DS, 1 linear Digibeta 3 machine suite, 2 DPS Realitys' and 2 FCP/Digital Voodoo machines. I happen to know Aardman's set-up quite well, and they use a heck of a lot of DPS Perceptions over there. never saw an Amiga though. We DO have ONE client (an animator) who uses Toaster on WinNT, but it seems a troublesome set up.

Re:Please enlighten me...

[vortexau]

On "the features", This shows some. The hardware in this case is a 1987 design, with upgrades, but still the same motherboard.

In general, users find the system more user friendly than mainstream OS's. I acknowledge that Macs have superior speed, and displays. I just like (like Frankie) to do it "my way"!

.

Amiga etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved my Amiga, but... While the stuff that Amiga and Tao are doing with DE is pretty exciting and may even catch on in the portable marketplace, Amiga desktop machines are only ever likely to be a niche product. I'm happy running WinUAE when I want to dabble (though note that the $150 package includes an enhanced emulator capable of running x86 and 68K - AROS anyone? aswell as the version hosted on QNX).

Still, I'll watch with interest (if it was half the price I'd but it now).

A feature request...

[Mister Black]

Hopefully the ability to take desktop sceen captures will be part of the next release. Nothing better than digital stills of a laptop screen ;)

Re:A feature request...

[benjymous]

Well there are plenty of screengrab tools available on Aminet

As pointed out earlier, it's most likely that a photo was used to show the OS running on a laptop, rather than just to show what the OS looks like

Where's the platform?

[SoupIsGood Food]

So, the Amiga joins the ranks of Be, Geoworks, OS/2, GEM, and SCO.

They are all also-ran commercial competitors to not just Windows, which commands 99% of that market and comes bundled with 99% of the systems available, but three flavors of BSD, all free-as-in-beer-and-as-in-speach, and a few housand different Linux-based operating systems (distros). Top it off with a few clever, and completely free "other" OSes, like Atheos, and the situation looks grim.

I expect them to enjoy the same long-term success enjoyed by Be and OS/2... which is to say, an ignonimous death after the Nostalgia buffs tire of toying with it.

To be brutally blunt, the only way to introduced a closed platform in the current market is to work it as a total system. Sun and Apple desktops survive in a Windows world by offering a total package... you don't gotta be faster than Wintel, or cheaper than Wintel, but you have got to offer something Wintel doesn't. Comprehensively integrated systems is a damn good start, the insane system speed and responsiveness with limited resources that was a trademark of the Amiga of yore is another area to focus on. Move to Mips, ARM, PowerPC, MAJC, what have you... design a platform, not an OS but a whole platform, and you have a fighting chance.

Emulating a 10 year old architecture on an bone stock PC and then charging for the privelege is a fast track to irrelevancy.

SoupIsGood Food

Re:Where's the platform?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga cannot die, because it is already dead. It had died, died, and died again. You don't seem to realize you're dealing with an undead entity here. She still walks, because the usual rules don't apply anymore.

Re:Where's the platform?

[Etriaph]

You're forgetting that AmigaOS has tenure. ;)

Re:Where's the platform?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its an emulator for christ sake. Do you think they are trying to compete with actualy OSes? ITs only to aid people who have old rund down amiga's by proviidng cheap hardware.

Also, for providing past amiga owners a way to runt their software.

Cloanto's Amiga Forever

[BigJimSlade]

I never had an Amiga, but I'm fascinated by "old" computers (anything older than 3 years is ancient history, right? &ltgrin&gt)

Anyway, for people looking for a slightly lower cost (but legal) solution, check out Amiga Forever, a commercial distribution of UAE that comes with *every* version of the Amiga Kickstart ROMs and Workbench disks! And this isn't a warez CD either... these are legitimately licensed from (insert current company that owns Amiga's IP). I believe it also includes some commercial software and software that will allow you to mount Amiga hard drives as network drives under Windows. Might be worth a look for former/current Amiga fans.

dazed and confused

[rutledjw]

I'm a big a fan as any of the old computer stuff, but I have to ask - what's the point here? How would an Amiga OS be useful in todays computing world? Do we have any new software for it? Is any looking to port any present software to it? (most likely candidates would be open sw packages, I'd think)

If not, then this really is just sort of an oddity. Off hand, I'd think that the AmigaOS would have some advantages in that:

• It has to be small, even with 10 years of semi-active development, I would think that it would be pretty streamlined
• It's VERY userfriendly from what I've been reading
• It looks to have at least decent 3D support

Could this be an alternative to desktop for Linux? I'm sure it would be tough, but is it feasible to utilize the Linux kernel instead of QNX (I think it was)? I'm really asking here. I don't know much about kernel hacking as my job is at the application layer.

I also don't want to start any desktop wars. But as much as I like KDE and BlackBox (for VERY different reasons/purposes, obviously) it doesn't seem like they are as "user-friendly" (idiotproof?) as they should be. Perhaps Amiga/Linux could be an alternative desktop for Harry Homeowner. (although it seems as though some features would have to be unloaded as the Linux kernel supports those features).

Anyway, I thought I'd throw it out there and ask...

Re:dazed and confused

[Anonymous Coward]

A modified linux kernel is used in Amithlon.
you dont notice it and only get the Amiga Os.

AmigaXL runs on top of QNX and both systems are available to the user.

Amiga can be an alternative desktop to linux because it has more apps for desktop use: sound/video/bitmap editors are very good, dtp and word procesing are available too (even with MsWord import filters)

AmigaOs is small and easy to learn (compared to linux)
ports may be possible, or already started (mozilla or OpenOffice) but the current real amiga's are lacking in both speed and memory (72pin Ram modules)
The real point of it is that it runs existing amiga software on existing x86 hardware
AAAU (another anonymous amiga user)

3 machines in one

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved my Amigas. I had an A4000 that ran:

• the AmigaOS (Real3D was my fave app)
• an Emplant Card running Apple System 7
• a 386 PC card running Windows 3.1

3 different machines in one box. And that box had an Amiga logo on the front of it. :)

Re:3 machines in one

[DGolden]

If real3d was your fave app you might be interested to know that its direct descendant, Realsoft 3D is available on Windows and (just about - working beta) Linux.

Emulation is still good

[WWWWolf]

I recently got a copy of Amiga Forever 5.0, and I tried out WinUAE with that. I also installed AmigaOS 3.9 to it and it worked just fine. Even when I am not really a big Amiga fan (more of a foamy-mouthed Commodore 64 user =) I must say I'm really impressed... With the JIT stuff and the bsdsockets, it worked fast and supported network. A real, hardware C64 can do ISDN (with proper RS232 buffering, of course), but now I have an emulated Amiga that does DSL =)

(Screenshots? 1 2 3)

Of this stuff, I have to say I'm impressed, too - no need to boot to some other OS to run another, which means some more stability - UAE 0.8 isn't 100% stable yet. Very nifty.

(And I think Amiga hardware was pretty nice, but PC got ahead of it at last (after so many years!) when they ditched ISA bus and got USB input devices.)

I need to get the JIT + bsdsockets for *NIX UAE soon. Too bad the fullscreen modes in X11 UAE often suck - DGA, with its r00t requirement, means trouble. Anyone working on a SDL port?

The Amiga's strength was not its OS

[srussell]

I used Amiga's for five or six years, and my impression was always that the strength of the Amiga was in its hardware, not its OS. The Amiga OS did some impressive things with very limited resources, due in large part to liberal usage of shared libraries, but the most powerful thing about Amiga was the use of specialized, intelligent chips for each type of IO. Nowdays, this is common, to varying degrees, on x86 platforms. If you discount Intel's push to offload IO processing onto the CPU (thereby driving the need and market for faster chips) via dumb peripherals like WinModems, USB, etc., most x86 based machines have intelligent graphics cards, intelligent sound cards, and intelligent network cards.

I don't see a clear, motivating reason to buy into the new AmigaOS, except for nostalgia.

It is ironic, to me, that all that survives from Amiga is the OS. One of the main reasons that the Amiga line died back because Amiga was even worse that Apple about releasing new versions of the OS.

Re:The Amiga's strength was not its OS

[Sloppy]

What I find the most nostalgic about this /. discussion, is that some of you Amiga-is-the-hardware guys are still around. ;-)

I replaced as much of my A3000's hardware as I could with GVP, VillageTronic, and Phase 5 "cyber implants" at the first opportunity, because the Amiga hardware was so limiting. I remember when I had to choose between talking to my modem at 115200 bps, or displaying 4 bitplanes on my hires screen, because the chip bus'es bandwidth was maxed out. Amiga hardware was great in the 80s, but lame in the 90s. But once I took care of the hardware limitations, the Amiga still kicked ass well into the late 90s and I'm still using it today... no thanks to the Amiga hardware.

Re:The Amiga's strength was not its OS

[Tassach]

The fact that the Amiga's hardware was so hackable was part of what made it so attractive. Compare the variety of aftermarket add-ons available for the Amiga in it's heyday to what was available for the Pee Cee. For a "fringe" system, it certianly supported a huge 3rd party marketplace.

I want my ASSIGNs!

[xmda]

Is anyone else missing the absolutely wonderful ASSIGN command? Sigh... Still, 13 years after I got my first A500 I long for this long gone command.

I want my pics:, mp3: and games: again, not just stupid c:, d: etc. Unix paths doesn't do it for me either and the same for soft and hard links.

Give back the ASSIGN command to me and give it to me NOW!

:)

Re:I want my ASSIGNs!

[heideggier]

I want my pics:, mp3: and games: again,

Hmm,,, your Amiga 500 must have come from the tardis mate, I think you mean mods:

Re:I want my ASSIGNs!

[Tet]

I want my pics:, mp3: and games: again, not just stupid c:, d: etc. Unix paths doesn't do it for me either

Shell variables:

cd $pics
xmms $mp3/*

Re:I want my ASSIGNs!

[Physics Dude]

Yes, I really miss Amiga ASSIGNs! They make for slick systems management.
Shouldn't be too hard to hack into bash though...
~/.assigns anyone?

Re:I want my ASSIGNs!

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get it:

Assign PICS: Work:Pics
Assign PICS: Work2:Gfx/MyPics ADD
Assign PICS: DF0:Pics ADD DEFER

cd PICS:

(all those directories become part of PICS:, but DF0:Pics only if there happens to be a disk with such a directory in the drive...)

Assigns are generalised $PATH variables that are
part of the FileSystem, not simple env variables (which the amiga _also_ had, and which were also
part of the filesystem in ENV: (currently used) and ENVARC: (saved across reboots, ENV: loaded from ENVARC: att boot time))

Other good feature - differentiation between the DRIVE and the DISK-IN-THE-DRIVE. If you put a CD in CD0:, you could access it via CD0:, which was always the disk currently inserted in the first CD drive - but you could also access it by its volume name, say MYCRAPPYCD: - and the OS would know you meant "MYCRAPPYCD, no matter what drive it's in.". This little point makes using removeable media much, much easier, and is a core feature of any OS worthy of being called a "Desktop OS". Note how few supposedly "Desktop" OSes get this wrong...

Re:I want my ASSIGNs!

[Anonymous Coward]

ANOTHER good feature: Clipboards.

So what? you say. Everyone has clipboards.

On the Amiga, the contents of the clipboards (all 255 of them) were part of the filesystem, too, in CLIPS:

You can't begin to imagine how useful it is to have (a) 255 independnent clipboards and (b) access to them as part of the filesystem.

Re:I want my ASSIGNs!

[Anonymous Coward]

How about devices?

As an example: replace serial.device with telser.device, and you can use your favourite terminal program as a telnet client...

Re:I want my ASSIGNs!

[Caktus]

If I recall correctly VMS had an equivalent command that also accepted multi assigns.
Also VMS like the amiga is dead.
It's a shame that they all died.

Re:I want my ASSIGNs!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had totally forgotten about assign. Mind you, I only had floppy drives with my old A500.

I'd really like to see this functionality on my Linux box. How did writing to the PICS 'directory'
work? Is that what the ADD param is for?

Amiga speed = no memory protection/virtual memory.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga O/S was fast due to lack of memory protection and virtual memory.

Give up

[eison]

Remember it fondly, of course - but why does the world really need yet another OS?

Re:Give up

[MatrixManiac]

Microsoft asked that same question when Linux came out. When there is Windows, what else do you need? :-D

Wrong way

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga was great couse of the Hardware, not couse of the Software. Amiga software wasnt bad at the time, actualy it was great.. but what made me use the Amiga wasnt its programs, it was its superior hardware design.

Dear AmiLover

[Mekanix]

Can you please tell me what the hell AmigaXL/Amithlon have to do with AmigaOS 4.0?

Thanks to the Jobs-wannabee, Ben Hermanns of Hyperion and his irrational x86-angst, OS4 will never be ported to x86 and Amithlon will never run OS... unless someone does a PPC-emulator for Amithlon.

Re:Dear AmiLover

[Derfs]

ever since it was really announced, Amiga OS 4, and all its point revisions, was always going to be PPC only. Why are you so upset at something that has been known since early last year ? oh wait, they are meant to write OS 4 straight to multi-platform and everyone will be fine with waiting an extra 3 years ;) Amiga OS 5 is targeted to be multi-platform so im sure you can wait till thats out.

Re:Dear AmiLover

[Mekanix]

2 words for you: zico-specs inclued x86 AND at AmiWest where Bill announced Amithlon to the masses and as an official Amiga product and a future path. Ben Hermanns went balistick and killed off Amithlon as an official Amiga product.

The first computer/console computer machine

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga was the first computer that gave you both the power of a desktop computer and the game play of a console.
Also it was very affordable, you could use it with any TV (US/Europe's PAL system) saving you the cost of a monitor.
This let people whom other wise could not afford a PC clone computer, a chance to own a computer.

The Amiga had a larger following in Europe then the US, look at the Demo party's started by Amiga owners which still held today though now Windows PC orientated.

Here is something to think about after 5 or more years the Windows PC is just starting to have features the Amiga did back then.

Re:Why not UAE, then? (in English)

[Anonymous Coward]

WinUAE is either the fastest or the second fastest uae port around; only uae.0.8.15 running under x86 linux with JIT patch can be compared with it.

My 2 Eurocents

[Anonymous Coward]

Before being attracted by the penguin I was an Amiga user and developer back in the 80s, and I never - repeat - never loved so much to use, play with and write software for a platform. It was a marvellous piece of hardware and software I still miss so much after 10 years.
I believe it would be NOW the best platform to develope new multimedia appliances and devices, but the only problem that will certainly kill any use of AmigaOS is its dependence to the hardware: the M68k platform was, and still is, far better designed if compared to the -ugly- X86 processors we're forced to use today, but x86 is the standard - period.
My point is that even if AmigaOS is a great operating system (it's near realtime and highly responsive) , it would suffer both if ported to the X86 architecture or run on emulated Amiga harware.
A great operating system needs great hardware; unfortunately , the best $20,000 PC you could buy today isn't that good from a purely technical point of view.

Amiga XL boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!

It's an ENTHUSIAST MARKET! Get over it!

[derinax]

The vehemence of the community whenever an Amiga post (or any other alternate OS post) comes up pisses me off. The posts that are so politically guaranteed of instant karma: "What's the point?" or "How can the Amiga possibly survive?": you've all completely missed the point. It has nothing whatsoever to do with why most individuals and companies spend time, effort, and money on the Amiga.

We hack Amigas for the same reason audiophiles spill their salaries on tubes, or on mint vinyl pressings. There's a vibrant aftermarket for new Amiga processors, graphics cards, and bus expansion cards for the same reason that vacuum tubes still roll off the assembly line. There's nothing about the platform that's about dominance, or resurrection; it's an ENTHUSIAST MARKET! Get over it!

Computers are such a dominant part of life anymore, why do people assume that an enthusiast market for computers COULDN'T survive? It's just the opposite: the Amiga thrives exactly because the OS market has percolated to two, maybe three dominant OSes. We can make our money on Windows, and spend it our Amigas.

I don't believe there is a phoenix complex any more, not with those of us who simply enjoy spending money on our favorite platform.

I am a DOS advocate

[Dikarika]

I loved DOS...

I still do. I want to get it installed on my P100 soon and relive some of the good ol' days.

Just wish I could find all those damn floppies... :)

What's the big deal about the Amiga?

[zrafnid]

The Amiga was waay ahead of it's time. Yeah, sure, you've heard this before, but I know of what I speak. No kidding. Let me explain.

About 10 years ago, a number of business associates (well, friends, really) and I had a company that used the Amiga extensively. We built, from the ground up, an embedded control and data collection system using Amiga computers. The average facility we installed with this product (yes, we sold it) went for about 70K.

Why the Amiga? Several reasons :

1) it was built for NTSC/PAL output. We needed to get signals to TV's for display.
2) it had state of the art graphics. I believe the only other "standard" at the time was VGA or SVGA.
3) it was *really* fast, compared to the X86 machines of the day. This was probably due more to the custom chips than the CPU clock...
4) it was built by very intelligent people who put a lot of thought into the design of it. The Zorro bus (peripheral card bus) was pretty straightforward to connect with. We built a single card design that worked on an A2000/3000/4000 and the A500.
5) it was cheap. Really really cheap for what you got (about $300 per A500 and this had everything we needed in a nice, small package).
6) apart from the lack of an MMU (generally) and memory protection, the OS was a dream to program and the system a dream to use.
7) we liked it. What can I say? We liked it. In addition to the company that built this embedded system, we had a computer store that dealt in the Amiga and Video Toaster.

We had to kill the product when Commodore went the way of the Dinosaurs. It's too bad, really, because we would have liked to continue.

I still love the Amiga - but it's not ever going to be a viable system to use again. I really *do* hope that the hardware and software guys who built the Amiga system get together and build a *real* piece of hardware and software again.

Think about the custom chips for a minute -

You had the blitter : basically an area based logic unit. Big deal? Well a buddy of mine wrote a program that could run a hi-res screen, some blitter code and very very little CPU and iterate through life (the simulation - not reality) at about 30 frames per second. No discernable CPU use. It wasn't until about '96 that I saw similar achievements on X86 hardware.

You had the copper : the chip that allowed for multiple resolutions. It defined how to output graphics information and at what resolution : take a hi-res screen with x colors and allow it to be dragged over a low res-screen with x*256 colors. There's nothing I've seen since that can do this.

You had the graphics chips themselves : Agnus and Portia (or whatever). They did all the work of putting out the display, along side the other two custom chips.

All of the use of the CPU was in processing - everything was basically DMA, everything ran the same memory interleaved with the CPU. It was *sooo* cool and so very quick.

A couple of my partners wrote a program called Amoeba Invaders (space invaders clone) (through our company Late Night Developments - we were young and thought it was a cool name). I could run about, oh, 20 copies of this game concurrently because most of the animation was done with the custom chips and not the CPU - and this was on an Amiga 1000 (68000 system).

But... Commodore was run by business folks who wanted to make a buck. And they did. And when they were happy with the buck they'd made, they killed it.

So, the Amiga was waay ahead of it's time. But it's now dead and technology has certainly improved well beyond what the Amiga excelled at.

I saw this thread on an emulator and have one thing to say. So what? I liked the Amiga because of the hardware and the software. No emulator so far has been able to do a good job of the hardware that made the Amiga greater than the OS. Oh well.

Re:What's the big deal about the Amiga?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amoeba Invaders?

I think I remember that one :) The company name also rings a faint bell- I think I remember thinking that was the kind of cool name for a software company if I ever got one started- this was back in junior high.

I think you hit the nail though about what make the "classic" Amiga cool- the very tight integration of HW/SW and the feeling there was a lot of stuff in there just waiting to be found out. Those days a long gone, but they sure where good.

I'm not big on the emulators, I'm currently working more with the AmigaDE system, there's a bit of the Amiga magic in it- I've e-mailed with a few of the people working on it, they get what made the first Amiga cool and I think they will make sure its in the next one.

Nice piece, but it's not a review

[Lproven]

Interesting piece, but I'm afraid it's not a review. It's a piece of Amiga evangelism in the wrong place.

We don't need to be told about AmigaOS. We don't need to be told about AmigaOS apps, or about how good or bad they are, or anything about Amiga itself.

There's about 5 pages of irrelevant stuff in there.

This is meant to be a review of an emulation package.

There are, as I understand it, two emulators.

Identify them. What are the differences? What do they do? Why use them instead of UAE or Fellow?

Start with one. Explain what it is and how it works. Explain how it's installed and used. Comment on how well it works. Criticize its failings, don't just praise its strengths.

Then take the 2nd. Do exactly the same.

Now, compare the two. Explain the differences. Take 1#. Point out where #1 is better than #2, then where #1 is worse than #2. Now take #2 and do the same.

Now, comment on the overall package. Compare it to any competitors: UAE, Fellow, AiaB, AmigaForever. Compare it to a real modern Amiga.

What's in the box? What manuals? What's the help like? What's the support like?

Specify its EXACT hardware requirements. Explain an optimal config, a minimal one, and the difference it makes.

Explain its cost and where to get it.

Summarise, in ten words each, its pros, its cons, and an overall verdict. Award it points out of ten for performance, ease of use, features, functionality, compatibility, value for money and overall.

*That* is a review.

This piece, however enjoyable, isn't.

But thanks for it! I enjoyed it. It just didn't tell me what I needed to know: do I want it? Is it worth buying?

--
Liam P.
[echoed on OSnews]

Re:Nice piece, but it's not a review

[Anonymous Coward]

Why shouldn`t he tell about AmigaOS? It is included in the package....

Doesn`t make much sense. Also alot you are claiming to be missing is written pretty well within the article. Very good review in my opinion.

scrshts?

[nslu]

these are not screenshots, these are screen photos! i wonder -- is author too brainless or just amigaos misses `xwd -root` ?

What's the point ?

[stud9920]

What's the point using a so called OS that doesn't even implement the Screenshot technology ?

Re:What's the point ?

[Anonymous Coward]

its an os without bloat.
screengrab (free from aminet) can do it (one example)
various graphics packages can do it
whats the point in wasting time writing another screengrab utility when there are many already available.
these were photo's taken from an x86 computer running amigaxl

Factory new A1200 and a bit of a rant.

[richie2000]

A few months ago I bought a factory new stock Amiga 1200. Since then, I have added an old 4 gig 2.5" Toshiba laptop hard drive and am thinking about a '060/PPC card with some serious RAM (on an Amiga, 16 MB is really lots and lots of RAM).

A few years ago, I lived a coupla miles from the old Commodore Sweden HQ and they didn't take down the old sign until recently and every time I passed by on my bike or in my car, I'd shed a tear thinking about the good times I had with my amigas and how different the world could have been, if only... If only Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali hadn't been such greedy bastards. They must have been grown out of a baboon's ass - there is no way in hell those two idiots could have been born and raised by humans. No, I'm not bitter. I'm BITTER!.

Let me go, I feel much better now! No, don't make me run XP again - NOOOOOooooo!

The hardware was half the attraction

[UsonianAutomatic]

I had two Amigas, a 500 and a 2000 (40 meg hard drive, 1MB RAM, 7Mhz... w00t!). I used my Amiga 2000 right through 1996, when I moved cross-country and had to leave it behind... it is currently gathering dust in my inlaws' basement. :(

I'm still amazed when I remember what that computer could do at the time compared to its PC counterparts... and it worked so well/quickly because graphics, and sound were handled by separate processors on the mobo, and the core OS was stored on a ROM chip... so even though that Motorola 68000-whatever was only doing 7mhz, overall performance was stellar.

The workbench environment was great, but I don't know if it's great enough to be worth emulating on x86 hardware; The attraction of the Amiga (for me, anyway) was its overall performance compared to everything else that was out there at the time.

Now that x86 and PowerPC hardware is exponentially faster than the Amigas ever were and can get away without having separate processors for video, OS, etc, I don't really see what the point is. I hope the upcoming AmigaOS 4.0 does well, but the original Amiga was more than an operating system; its hardware was just as important.

Re:The hardware was half the attraction

[Anonymous Coward]

>Now that x86 and PowerPC hardware is exponentially faster than the Amigas ever were and can get away without having separate processors for video, OS, etc

umm , whats that chip on your gfx card? - a custom gfx proccesor :-)
emu10k1 (sblive) emu10k2 (audigy) - custom sound processor :-)
video capture card (higher end models) - more custom chips
thats what makes games /video /sound editing much faster on the pc.
AmigaXl is fast on existing x86 , faster than any amiga that is AVAILABLE NOW (how much longer will it be delayed in march?). It is an very good alternative for the aging existing amiga hardware imho
AAAU (another anonymous amiga user)

Slightly off-topic...

[Anonymous Coward]

In general terms:

1. I agree; emulators are useless and uninteresting.
2. AmigaOS4.0 is not useless for current Amiga users nor an emulator; it's a bridge to...
3. AmigaDE which will kick ass!! (even by todays standards) and will be a competitive alternative to both M$ and *NIX. If the product ever make it to the store shelves.

Please refer to www.amiga.com (OS) and www.tao.co.uk (Kernel).

AmigaDE teaser
It currently runs on a dozen CPUs (x68, ARM, MIPS, bla bla). And also in MIXED multiprocessor systems(!).
It runs hosted on both 32-bit Win and Redhat distro. Maybe even unofficially standalone as I write.
It utilizes a new type of JIT which deliver 80% of C/C++ efficiency. The JIT supports Java, assembler and C/C++.
A few games have already been published, many more is in brew (not that it really matters, just that it shows that things are happening).

And oh, I forgot; it works on everything from your x86 desktop to Sharp handhelds. Write once in Java C or Asm, run everywhere.

It's still under HEAVY construction, but looks promising.

Infotainment brought to you by JetRacer.

ARexx

[Judebert]

The nicest thing about the Amiga, that no one has mentioned yet, was the extensive integration with a scripting language. ARexx was a Rexx variant that allowed developers to expose the internal functions of their programs, and it was a joy. That integration was worth learning a new syntax for.

An example: I loved doing animation and putting them onto tape. By hand, this involved running each frame through Art Department Professional to resize, deinterlace, and change bit depth; then hitting the "Append" button in my Personal Animation Recorder and adding the changed frame (fields) to an animation.

I wrote an ARexx program that started ADPro and PAR, then waited for new frames to show up in a directory as they were rendered. It would press the appropriate buttons to load the image in ADPro, manipulate it, and save it to disk, then do the same to have the PAR add it to the animation. If I had a serial VCR, it could even have recorded the thing when I was through.

That kind of integration was marvelous. Everything had it. You could automate the most amazing tasks. It was like getting a little command-line utility for every function of a monstrously complex program's GUI. It would be nice to have in Linux; the closest we've got now is Gimp scripting.

Re:ARexx

[DrCode]

Is that the same Rexx that was on OS/2? IBM put out a Linux version a couple years ago, but it doesn't seem to have made much of a splash.

Re:ARexx

[maggard]

Actually it is (almost) the same Rexx - one of my old Amiga buddies way back when went nuts when he discovered Rexx on his Amiga, apparently they supported it really well.

So there's a point but is it unique?

Wintel has VB able to claw into most things and easy to play with as well as ports of most big scripting languages including (I believe) Rexx. MacOS & MacOS X both (and their applications!) support their native AppleScript as well as standard hooks (Open Scripting Architecture) for any number of other languages including Perl, TCL, Phython and even JavaScript. Linux/BSD/etc. of course have all of those scripting languages though few of their larger applications support scripting in any sort of universally structured way (command line switches notwithstanding.)

A great scripting language is a joy and yes Amiga was innovative in that on a GUI platform but that was then, today it's hardly a distinguishing feature. Heck if that were critical we'd be knee deep in OS/2 right now (IMHO a kewler OS then Amiga and having it's own stalwarts.)

Re:ARexx

[Judebert]

Rexx is actually a platform-neutral scripting language; it was included on OS/2, I believe. I was thinking of trying to release a Linux version, but it was too big a project for me.

Rexx itself is no great shakes. The integration was the beautiful thing: every decent program exposed its internal functions to ARexx, even the Video Toaster. It's that integration that would be so marvelous on Linux.

Re:ARexx

[Anonymous Coward]

That is true. Rexx offers nothing different but a interpreted scripting language such as Basic or whatever. Integration within applications is the great thing... well, perhaps it is also nice the way that (A)Rexx handles strings, and yes, that includes the PARSE command :))))

Antonio Noguera

Amithlon not AmigaOS

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you that dont really understand this whole thing.

AmigaOSXL is different to Amithlon however, they are both just emulation :). Their not supposed to compete with AmigaOS, but for the time being, it is doing so because there is no PPC OS avaliable. Shortly however, their will be.

Amoeba Invaders yum

[Ribo99]

Oh man I remember playing Amoeba Invaders on my old 1000 back in the day. The good ol' days.

not quite

[markj02]

AmigaOS was a great OS and it is impressive that AmigaOS could do what it could do on a $1000 machine. AmigaOS, at the time, beat MacOS, Windows, and TOS, hands down in architecture, performance, and funtionality. If AmigaOS had taken over the world, instead of Windows and MacOS, the computer industry would have progressed much faster.

But the underlying concepts weren't new, even at the time: message passing, multitasking, GUIs, hardware acceleration, etc., were already being used in several other operating systems. OSX's ancestor, Mach, was already being developed, and Linux's ancestors, various versions of UNIX, had been out for nearly a decade. Several GUIs, including early versions of X, were also in use.

Amoeba Invaders

[The Famous Brett Wat]

Amoeba Invaders was a nice piece of work. Very smooth. Well done.

AmigaOS XL, Amithlon, ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the CD comes with both emulators, just forget AmigaOS XL and install Amithlon (if the current version works on your hardware, try booting with the CD first)..

I'm using Amithlon on my desktop box and I haven't even tried installing AmigaOS XL on it - Amithlon's features are far superior. :-)

Why would I want to first run QNX + it's GUI and then start the emulator, when I can just boot into the emulator right from the start?

Oh well, it IS running under a Linux kernel, but you don't really see any of that - it's AmigaOS that's in control. :-) Just what I've been waiting for for a long time.

Thanks again, Bernie!

TWAJS

[Anonymous Coward]

he wanted to point out that although the pictures DO show amigaos running on an x86, it makes them unreadable and a screenshot would have been more appropriate.

AmigaOS on x86

[greywire]

AmigaOS XL is just an emulator. Its pretty fast though.

OS 4.0 *wont* run with AmigaOS XL or UAE because its a PowerPC based OS (with lots of stuff also running emulated 68K).

Not that it's impossible to also make a PPC emulation for x86..

If you want AmigaOS *actualy* running on x86, not emulated, check out AROS. Its not complete yet, there's no workbench even. But its kinda cool to boot AmigaOS from a CD on a PC knowing its running x86 native code -- no emulation, and no host OS.

Comments from a former Amigan

[Stephen Williams]

A couple of things that might be of interest to you should you ever decide (or be forced :-) to make the switch to a Unix-a-like:

Ram disk that automatically grows/shrinks as needed. Perfect for those temp files.

Several Unices (including Linux 2.4.x) have tmpfs, which is the same deal. I use it for my /tmp. I still type "ram:" occasionally when I mean to type "/tmp".

A shell that's smart enough to realize that when I type the name of a directory, I don't want to execute the damn thing, I want to move to it!

zsh can do that if you add "setopt auto_cd" to your .zshrc. I don't think bash can do it, though I might be wrong; I haven't kept up with bash features, having been a zsh user since 1996.

Handlers in general, allowing you to very easily create disk-like thingies.

It's not quite the same, but Linux has a "loopback device" which allows you to treat a file as if it were a disk partition. So you can (e.g.) mount an ISO9660 image as if it were a CD.

If you like ARexx, you can get a Rexx interpreter called Regina for Linux. You can't use it to remote-control all your apps, but you can at least use it for scripting. It will remain my scripting language of choice until I get around to learning Ruby. (I'm not touching Perl with a bargepole).

Like you, something from AmigaOS that I really miss is:

Assigns, esp. multi assigns.

I want something like that for Linux; I want to be able to map lots of directories onto (e.g.) /usr/local/bin and be able to see all their contents in that one directory. A halfway-house is possible if you make /usr/local/bin into a symbolic link farm, but it's not as nice as a multi-assign. Rumour has it that the GNU Hurd has directory overlays (or something like that) which provide the same sort of effect as a multi-assign.

-Stephen

Port the cool features!

[AntipodesTroll]

As prople have explained here to the masses that never had the chance, the Amiga had some really, really good ideas. Here is some:

Assignments. You can assign a label "label:" to a drive or an arbitary path. This label can then be accessed rather like a device. Now I know unix people will be like "So what! Big deal." But THINK about it. You can assign say AmiTCP: to sys:amitcp1.2 and all scripts and programs are written to use AmiTCP:. Later you can install sys:amitcp1.3 and reassign AmiTCP: to that, and NOTHING BREAKS! Its an EXCELLENT mechanism for software. It also makes env variables like PATH a lot shorter and simpler, especially when you have your favourite well-known assignments. (And no, its NOT the same as exported env variables, as assignments are system wide, and you can access them almost like a device.)

Another neat feature of AmigaDOS: You can label a drive, and access the label name very much like a device. Say you have dh0: (/dev/hda1) now you can write all your scripts and programs to access dh0: but what happens if that changes? On most OS's, youre stuck, especially if your SCSI and IDE devices arent hard wired down, and even if they are, youre screwed if you swap disks between machines and ther eis an id conflict. AmigaDOS to the rescue, instead of writing scripts and programs to the hardware name dh0: you label the disk and that disk can be accessed as the label, label: instead of dh0: Now, no matter what ID the disk comes up as, anything that wants to acces THAT DISK, will work! it gets better, the boot disk on AmigaDOS is also always aliased to sys: so if you always have to write your program to access the bootdisk, use sys:. THe only caveat about using the label is if you need to change the label, but the label is only cosmetic, so I have never seen the need.

Those 2 features are just 2 of the many things I miss about the Amiga since I went to Windows and Unix. It would be fantastic if someone could take these old ideas and improve other OS's with them. There are many other. (Can someone please write a good Workbench knockoff WM? AmiWM is okay, but kinda old and crufty now.)

Re:Port the cool features!

[Anonymous Coward]

>Assignments. You can assign a label "label:" to a drive or an arbitary path. This label can then be accessed rather like a device.

No, you accessed it EXACTLY like a device. AmigaDOS made no distinction to the user between volumes, devices and assigns. And devices could be pretty much anything (FTP:, TCP: etc) as they were just DOS level entities implementing a set of standard methods and acting in a filesystem like fashion.

I still miss these sort of features. No other OS can do this sort of stuff so effortlessly...

Re:Dead parrot sketch...?

[vortexau]

A customer enters a Bomber shop.

(snip)

Like the B-52?

.

AmigaOS 4.0?

[vortexau]

AmigaOS 4.0 is for PPC!

.