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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?"
What about the AROS Project which has been running for long ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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?
So, when I think "screenshots," I don't usually assume they're pictures of a laptop from a few feet away.....
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!
That's not what I meant.
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.
-- Never make a general statement.
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.
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Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
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)
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?
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
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
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?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
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
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.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
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:
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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).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.
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.
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"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).
That was classic intercourse!
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.
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!
Money for nothing, pix for free
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.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
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.
For geek dads: Contraction Timer