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New Amiga Hardware Runs Mac OS
Ethan writes: "A developer on the Yahoo Amiga One mailing list has successfully installed MacOS 9.2 using Mac On Linux. And it seems that adding OS X support is on the to-do horizon for the MOL developers.
I think that it will be interesting to see the people at Apple lose some sleep now that a low cost, fast, off the shelf solution exists to run Mac OS, without any Apple hardware.
If it doesn't do anything else, at least it will give the people buying the new Amiga One G3 PPC board an existing software base." Mind you, I've never even seen an Amiga One, but it would be a pretty silly thing to make up ;) Update: 07/05 07:03 GMT by T : Mike Bouma piped up with a link to a page featuring the same hardware, in this case running Debian, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla.
BasiliskII (Google for it, I'm too lazy to find a link) has worked fairly well for me. Note, however, that it only emulates 68k Macs and requires a valid Mac ROM image.
You can download a ROM image for the Power Macintosh 7200, 7500, 8200, 8500, and Starmax 4160 because apparently they don't have the correct hardware ROM. I don't see how that would be so different from doing the same thing with an Amiga system.
MacOnLinux basically loads OS 9 in a simulator. And that's what he got working, not OS 9 itself. Yes he's able to use most (non hardware specific) MacOS apps, but he did NOT get MacOS to boot, and without cracking Apple's bios, that's not gonna happen. He provided proper hardware and then made a small emulation field, it doesn't look like he accomplished anything new there at all.
Here you can see some screenshots of Debian, Mozilla 1.0 and OpenOffice 1.0 running on the AmigaOne. If you would like to support the AmigaOne/AmigaOS4 then you should read Bill McEwen latest exec update.
To begin with, the name Amiga was bought by Amino in the begining of year 2000, so no, Gateway don't own Amiga longer. I think Gateway owns the patents thought.
// Hagge, IRCnet
The new AmigaOS4 is a port of the old ones for PPC, and porting is if I have got everything right mostly made by Hyperion(http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/).
The first AmigaOnes will have a G3@600MHz, but will probably ship with G4s later.
Bplan (http://www.b-plan.gmbh.de/) makes their own Pegasos PPC motherboard which might at some stage run AmigaOS but to begin with with run Linux or MorphOS (http://www.morphos.de/). The Pegasos is a dual PPC motherboard and can use both G3 and G4.
I always liked Amiga, I still do, and I will probably always do. But I really think it's to late and to slow progress, but who knows. One day...
From the amiga website(www.amiga.com),
"We completed the AmigaOne specification three months ago, and dubbed it the "Zico". It is a specification and not a product because Amiga is a software company, not a hardware manufacturer. The ability of the Amiga DE to host itself on multiple hardware and operating system platforms frees us from hardware dependency and gives our partners and our customers the freedom to chose the hardware that best suits their needs and tastes."
I thought that the new Amiga hardware had been made CHRP compliant and that the development team had been looking to the Mac for inspiration.
If I'm right then this story is no more than "Man runs an application of Yellow Dog Linux" - it's really no more exciting than me getting YDL running on my iBook.
MOL developers themselves have been striving for Mac OS X support anyway - it's not as if they've started doing this just becausee the Amiga One hardware can run it.
Also the 600Mhz G3 Amiga One board from a European vendor is 600(euros) with processor, no case, memory, video, sound, monitor, mouse, keyboard.
A 600Mhz G3 iMac - the closest system - is around 1000. So Amiga One hardware is hardly cheap. I can pick a higher spec Intel/AMD motherboard and processor combo up for half thay price.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
The great thing about the Amiga was that the performance of the system didn't rely solely on the CPU + MEM combo.
My 14MHz A-1200 still seems more responsive than even some high end wintel boxen. Now, I know the OS is partly to thank forthis, but the problem with modern wintel hardware is that everything is being designed to run off of the CPU...Softmodems, integrated video, sound, and even integrated IDE interfaces use the CPU and System Memory.
The Classic Amiga wasted as little CPU time on non-mathematical functions as possible. Which seems to be the exact opposite directon the wintel platform is going.
Most AmigaOne costumers/developers are mainly interested in AmigaOS4, for which a large development group is working full-time to ensure everything is as polished as possible when upon general consumer release.
By having MacOS9 and several other OSes including Linux running on the AmigaOne now it offers people a much more wider choice of applications. It will take time to port applications like Mozilla or OpenOffice to AmigaOS4. By having Linux running on the AmigaOne now, makes the wait alot easier.
So without having read the article, I'll comment as best I can...
The first thing that comes to mind is that this is not the first time an Apple unauthorized computer has natively run the Mac OS. I can think of a few other examples.
In the early days of the Macintosh there were machines with Apple boards repackaged in to different form factors, but this was still arguably Apple hardware.
Later, Outbound notebook computers came out that used their own board designs, but were based off scavenged Apple ROMs -- usually from compact Macs. They were nice machines in their day: they had trackbars (which are hard to explain unless you've actually seen one), fast processors, and good B/W screens. Of course, these were still sort of using Apple parts thanks to the ROMs.
Around the time of Outbound's demise (BTW, Outbound's death boiled down to being priced out of the market by Apple's PowerBook line), an impressive effort was completed to reverse engineer the Mac's ROM from published APIs. The machine this ROM landed in was a Mac/PC hybrid that was theoretically untouchable by Apple's legal department. I don't know what ever happened to this thing, but the fact that it wouldn't run Pagemaker could well have doomed it -- even without help from Apple's lawyers!
After that machine faded and vanished in to nothing, Apple licensed cloning. Around the same time we started seeing demos of the PReP and CHRP boards. These could have run the Mac OS, along with several other operating systems, but to my knowledge no Mac compatible boxes were ever released (If someone else knows of some, please post!).
Now Apple's machines use open firmware in place of big ROMs, so any attempt to get the Mac OS running on other hardware might be simpler, but the OF could still be a tricky river for an intrepid cloner to navigate. I don't know much about OF myself, nor Apple's implementation and use of it on their machines, but if you would like to speculate on this subject please do!
In regards to the motherboard in question, there are a few things to consider:
a) To the extent the cost of equipment is dependent upon volume, this may not be a high enough volume product to make it as a "mass market" board.
b) The advance here might be that you can run PowerPC Mac OS apps on non-Apple hardware, which (as Slashdot story pointed out) could be a convenient extra feature for a few users of this board. It is of course fairly common to emulate a 68K Mac. Aqua and the rest of OS X would be bigger advance, but that doesn't sound like an advance that has happened yet...
c) To get OS X running, you may still have a decidedly different task (remember I didn't read the article; see above).
d) Unless you use ROMs, etc., that were illegally copied, Apple Legal probably doesn't have much to say against this. They may be annoyed, but probably not scared...up until OS X and Aqua will run on it.
e) This isn't a mass market solution for running OS 9: You still need to get one of these machines, get Linux up and running, get a Mac ROM, install the compatibility environment, and only then do you get to use OS 9. That's a pretty geeky sequence, but the geeks don't seem to be the ones who want to run OS 9! Of course, once Aqua hits this hardware...
f) It sounds like this is a G3 board (note: I still haven't read the article). This will limit its appeal; a lot of folks might be looking for a G4 based machine so this might not be the ideal option for them. Of course, the G3 and G4 perform comparably per MHz in non-Altivec operations. OS X, however, on G3 machines seems rather pokey.
In short, this is pretty cool but the advance to date doesn't by itself threaten Apple; loss of control of hardware that could run OS X's UI would threaten Apple. Also don't forget that there are Mac emulators for PCs and Apple hasn't successfully come down on them. And yes, I know that's different, they're only 68K emulators, and they can be slow, etc., but I still think this doesn't yet threaten Apple. For the time being it's simply another neat thing you can do with a neat 3rd party niche board. I'll keep an eye on developments.
Finally, I would like to see commodity G4 based boards that could be coaxed to run OS X. That would be killer. Doubtless Apple would agree...
There are several 68k mac emulators for PC: softmac, fusion, basiliskII, vmac, etc...
These all emulate the Mac hardware at a lower level than ARDI's Executor, (I'm not sure if you're making that distiction or not) and so they need a copy of the MacOS and a Mac rom image to operate. BasiliskII is notable because it's GPLed, Linux-compatible, and fairly full-featured.
There are no PowerMac emulators for PC, however. Given this latest news about MOL running on fairly foreign (although still PPC) hardware, it must have a pretty complete architecture emulation. All that would be needed for a portable PowerMac emulation would be for a PPC emulator core to be tacked on and optimized a whole bunch. Although this would take some time, it doesn't seem terribly impossible.
Unfortunately I have to be in the "big whoop" crowd. This is not a terribly impressive feat. I can run MOL on my Powerbook. Terra Soft briQ systems could do the same thing. MOL doesn't require a ROM image in order to run MacOS 8.6 or later because the New World systems don't use the ROM to store the ToolBox anymore, it is a file in the system folder. All the ROM does anymore is tell the system where to find certain devices and stuff. MOL takes care of that as a virtual machine.
MOL as a virtual machine is impressive in its own right. I use it a bit on my Powerbook when I'm booted into Linux because there isn't always an analog for a Mac program I want to use. It isn't always terribly fast but I can get stuff done with it if I'm a little patient. However an Amiga PPC board running MOL under YDL isn't exactly making me cream in my pants. It is a PPC board that runs Linux well enough and then runs MOL which abstracts MacOS from the hardware. If someone had managed to get MacOS running on the PPC board natively by hacking up their own ROM replacement I'd ooh and ahh. Suggesting the ability to run MacOS in a virtual machine is somehow a competitor to Apple's hold on the desktop PPC market is a bit of an immature statement.
If OSX ever works directly on the hardware my ears will perk up. However it will only take a small tweak in the Cocoa framework to check for a Mac ROM. Lack of a ROM will keep the whole Cocoa environment from even working leaving you with the Darwin kernel working but none of the rest of what makes OSX unique not work.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Will keep it simple...
,don't even reply, I know those kinds of stuff sounds unbeliavable...
I have both Amiga 1200 with 68020 cpu and a Powerbook Duo which has 68030 CPU running Mac OS 7.6.
What I see is, MacOS 7.6 is really badly coded, can't multitask, essentially WASTES that CPU power.
On the other hand, in Amiga 500 days, I *sure* remember we had a Mac emulator which has run Mac programs/OS 1.5 times FASTER than Mac itself (same days mac)
So, thats why story is a pointless thing...
If you never owned a Amiga or a Mac
Recently? Already at the time Commodore went belly up Amiga was starting to show its age. Doom was the game to show that Amigas "superior" chipsets wasn't so superior. This wasn't due to the Amiga chipset being inferior. The Amiga simply used a completely different method for storing graphics data which was much more suitable for 2D stuff. Even nowadays the old AGA chipset can do things in 2D which standard pc cards can't do. The disadvantage is that 3D games which use chunky graphics need some aditional Chucky 2 Planar conversion routines to run on the AGA chipset (the CD had a custom chip to do this). In the late 90's asm optimised asm chunky 2 planar conversion routines where written which allowed games like Doom to be very playable on an A1200 with 50mhz 68030 and quake on machines with a 68060 or ppc. How so? There is absolutely nothing interesting about the new Amiga. The most advanced feature of the new OS is... *gasp* .... some sort of memory
protection. How do you create a modern OS in less than a year? You don't, OS4 will
mostly be a PPC-port of OS3.1 (H sits on 3.5/3.9).
There wil actually be 2 new Amiga (compatible) operating systems. OS4
which is indeed based on OS3.1 but with a completely rewritten kernel
(exec), slightly updated GUI (ie more flexible/configurable), built in
TCP-IP and USB support, it will no longer depend on the custom
chipset, enhanced 3D,audio and video API's to support the latest
graphics card from both ATI and Matrox. Future updates for OS4
will have a completely new GUI and printing system.
Than there is MorphOS which has been in development for a number of
years now. It is build around a completely new kenrel (the Quark)
kernel and features and A-Box environment which will run a PPC native
Amiga compatible OS with most of the features also found in OS4
(kinda like mac OSX). The Quarke kernel also allows usage of multiple
G4 CPU's.
And what about software? There have hardly been released anything for the
Amiga the last 8-10 years. And even less for all those PPC-addons.
Granted this is a really big point of concern. If the Amiga wants to
survive it will need more support. Having said that I mainly use my
Amiga for watching movies in divx/rm/asf/mpeg format, listen to mp3's,
chat using irc/icq/yahoo/msn and play games like Shogo, HereticII,
Quake2 (the leaked beta). For me this is enough so an AmigaONE/Pegasos
that can do this better and faster will more then please me.
And then there is the HW... It'l be closed and crippled and "donglelised"
as always (just as a Mac)... I'm sure the slashdot-crowd will be more interested
in bplan's [bplan-gmbh.de] more open PPC-board.
I don't see how the AmigaONE is crippled. Maybe the surface mounted G3
on the AmigaONE-SE is a bad idea but the AmigaONE-XE will feature a
CPU slot. The dongelising just seems to be a move to prevent OS4 from
running on unlicenced hardware (ie mac's and unfortunately for now
also the Pegasos) we can only hope that A Inc. will come to there
sences and allow OS4 to be run on other hardware without the need for
a licence.
To be able to run AmigaOS4, if and when it comes out, ....bla bla
...., there is an open source Amiga
you'll need to have installed a modified bios. This
is to insure systems are certified
bla.... by Amiga....
Only those system Amiga approves of will be able to
run AmigaOS4, for the Bois will only be available to
Amiga approved OEMs.
What it is in essence is a bios resident dongle.
The reason for it is to reduce piracy of AmigaOS4.
In a way you can view it as a form of DRM.
I'm sure someone will come up with a way around it
but it then becomes illegal and Amiga inc has been
agressive on such matters even when it's not there
Intellectual Property they are agressive about, but
Amiga based software in general.
This article is about how an Amiga Spec'd system can
run what? A Mac Emulator? on top of Linux?
Yet again, to be able to run AmigaOS4 it will need
the modified Bios Dongle. The sort of thing I've
come to call a "pissmark" like a dog marking it
territory (Dog Released Marking).
We all know how MS wants to place their DRM system
on people and for those who don't know, Amiga was a
participant at some recent show, in the MS booth.
Amiga was listed as an MS partner.....
I'd be real skeptical of Buying and AmigaOne system
with this bios dongle.
But for those who like the AmigaOS and would like to
be able to use
Clone Project that's under a license very similiar to
the Mazollia License (OSI compatable) It's called
AROS and can be found on Sourceforge and it's well
past the halfway mark. Somehow I suspect it might also
end up making a good smart userspace interface for the
Hurd somewhere down the road, As Amiga made user
accessible IPC standard (AREXX "ports") and the Hurd
uses IPC alot.
No, "The Amiga" is not coming back. There will not be any more Amiga hardware, nobody is designing, making, selling or planning any Amiga hardware. Amiga-the-hardware-platform is dead. I don't blame you cbr372 though, this article is really whacked out.
This is not "New Amiga hardware", it's a "generic" POP board cloned from the Mai TeronCX, only its new distributor Eyetech has licensed the "AmigaOne" trademark from Amiga Inc.
Forthcoming versions of AmigaOS running on hardware from third parties like this would be fantastic news if only Amiga Inc. hadn't decided to f*ck things up as usual with some seriously demented distribution policies for new versions of AmigaOS: Any hardware, in order to be allowed to run AmigaOS, must be licensed by Amiga Inc. The hardware vendor must also get a license for himself and his support/financial organisation, he must equip his hardware with a hardware license verification mechanism (although Amiga Inc. affectionally calls it "anti-piracy measures") and he must sell AmigaOS bundled with his hardware. AmigaOS will not be available for sale separated from hardware to us users who wish to choose our hardware and hardware vendors ourselves.
Of course this is unacceptable for independent hardware vendors, especially those who design Open Hardware like POP which is what AmigaOS will run on, and thus Amiga Inc. are killing AmigaOS in a very effective way. If it's intentional it's probably to redirect resources to their "AmigaDE" project. Unfortunately they're at the same time splitting the "potentially AmigaOS compatible" hardware market into "hardware for AmigaOS" and "the exact same hardware but for everyone else".
Please consider signing this petition to Amiga Inc. if you wouldn't like this to happen. There's more info about all this available here.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market