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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.
Making a mac emulator for PC also requires emulating the hardware, which isn't easy to do. There are a few out there, but they don't work terribly well. here is the google directory.
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
Apple has basically abandoned everything pre-OS X, and Steve Jobs has already declared Classic(OSX) dead.
Albuquerque PC
i can't help but wonder how many nasty-grams apple is gonna send out over this one...
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, not just chemistry, reality!
I've predicted this for a long time. The first generation of Amiga platforms were revolutionary, and blew away offerings from other personal computer manufacturers. In fact, it was only recently, with AGP systems, that modern PCs could even match the first Amiga (the A1000) in terms of graphics sync/performance.
The new generation of Amigas will be running on PPC-compatible hardware. (Even older Amgias can get extension boards with PPC chips on them, though), and will truly rock. It's been a while since we've seen a truly good mixture of hardware and software, working together well to build the ultimate platform. That was... hmm - the late 80s and early 90s. The Amiga. The x86 hardware has (and still does) prohibit the PC from reaching this level, and MacOS (up until MacOS X) has been a complete toy operating system.
Just when PCs and Macs are starting to catch up with the original Amiga, the new Amiga is getting ready to be unleashed.
Very timely, actually. Things could get interesting in the next few years.
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
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.
... love Amigas. I remember dreaming about 4000T and even a clone named draco (or something). Slick mean graphics machines with a great OS. I have no idea about the current status, is there any Amiga Os or something or some new *2n*x flavor?
"You laugh at me because I am different. I laugh at you because you're all the same." --Vick Imbornoni
OS X is the perfect marriage between a simple, intuitive, aesthetically marvelous end user interface and the power, stability, and hardcore good geekness of UNIX. Furthermore, the OS is designed to run almost absolutely flawlessly on Apple hardware. So what do you get? You get a Mac, the best computer on the planet, period. Someone figured out how to put Mac OS 9.2 on something else....I think that's really cool, and OS X would be cool too....This will let others get a taste of what an awesome OS it is and further propel them to want the real thing. HAHA, the Mac will eventually dominate the planet as planned! It's almost too easy..... ps. my first post!
How much would one of these machines cost to put together and how does it compare to the current generation of Macs?
There's not many Macs still using the G3, but the G3 iMac is very cheap and doesn't require any hacks to get Mac OS and Mac OS X to run!
I think it's cool that this is happening - it's always been clear to me that with Darwin being open it will only be a matter of time before Mac OS X is running on non-Apple hardware - but I don't think Steve Jobs will be shaking in his boots just yet.
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.
"Mac-on-Linux lets you run MacOS under Linux/ppc. MOL runs natively on the processor, i.e. it is very fast. Unlike most mac emulators, MOL can run MacOS 8.6 and later WITHOUT A ROM IMAGE."
mol-0.9.63.tgz doesn't look like its alpha, let alone vapor...Anybody running this?
---"I've predicted this for a long time. The first generation of Amiga platforms were revolutionary, and blew away offerings from other personal computer manufacturers. In fact, it was only recently, with AGP systems, that modern PCs could even match the first Amiga (the A1000) in terms of graphics sync/performance."
Sounds like you're an Amiga fanboy. Care to back up your "Assertions" with real numbers?
---"The new generation of Amigas will be running on PPC-compatible hardware. (Even older Amgias can get extension boards with PPC chips on them, though), and will truly rock. It's been a while since we've seen a truly good mixture of hardware and software, working together well to build the ultimate platform. That was... hmm - the late 80s and early 90s. The Amiga. The x86 hardware has (and still does) prohibit the PC from reaching this level,"
Care to mention examples? Perfreablly comparing to the Amiga (the old ones)
"and MacOS (up until MacOS X) has been a complete toy operating system."
Agreed.
"Just when PCs and Macs are starting to catch up with the original Amiga, the new Amiga is getting ready to be unleashed."
I'll believe it when I can use it somewhere. I've heard about the "Amiga 1" ever since '98 from usenet. Unless you're talking to the developers, I see this as much fud as the Troll "BSD is dying".
Ever heard of a company called Compaq?
All you have to do is write a work-alike rom that does the same things as the apple one. And since this is mostly being done for the hell of it, and you arn't limited by hardware you can make it as big and slow as you'd like.
You can also patch diffrent versions of the OS to run without the ROM if you want to. Or you can use a combination of the two methods (for example, taking out any verification code in the OS to make sure it's running with a genuine apple ROM)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Oh you did? You looked at the Mac On Linux site and this:
"What Is Mac On Linux? Mac-on-Linux lets you run MacOS under Linux/ppc. MOL runs natively on the processor, i.e. it is very fast. Unlike most mac emulators, MOL can run MacOS 8.6 and later WITHOUT A ROM IMAGE
I didn't add the emphasis, by the way. So you read that and decided it is all a big fat lie. I wish I was smart like you and knew everything about everything.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
It would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that there are really people like this out there.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I have huge respect for Amiga. But I have to tell that I've been hearing about Amiga comming back many times in the past five or so years (including here). And I have yet to see this actually happenning.
- Back off man. I am a scientist
The Amiga motherboard circuitry was designed with a bit more logic (pun intended) than our PC motherboards. Until AGP, the PC graphics hardware had more layers of abstraction to pass through because of the distance from the bus. I don't have hard numbers, but I'll bet this is what he's referring to; they got rid of a lot of cruft when we went AGP.
As far as hardware goes, we're still maintaining backwards compatibility with the 16-bit days (80286). The Amiga is cut loose from that type of restriction because they can use emulation and still achieve a closer compatibility mesh than we can with flipping between our 16-bit and 32-bit registers.
Basically, we're cranking up raw speed in our components, but they're designing for efficiency, after which they can throw money into faster components and end up well ahead of the game. If you've followed the Amiga demoscene, I'm surprised you didn't pick up on this.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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.
I think you're living in a dream world. The best hardware and software, even when combined, don't always win, and even when they do they generally don't do so because they were the best. I would have thought betamax, os/2 and linux would have told you that. Personally I've always considered Apple to be a far worse company than Bill's - they're just nowhere near as competent from a business pov.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Don't get me wrong, this is kinda kewl and all, and assuming this isn't a fake (dunno why it would be) ... Why would anyone want to buy an AmigaOne just to run MacOS???
...
Now, I realize that it is just another OS that will run on the hardware, but Apple has a much larger selection of hardware and then again, there is obviously going to be no support from either Amiga, Inc. or Apple. Both are proprietary hardware (how ever similar they may be) and will require support for things like new firmware, hardware, etc.
I'm sure you can expect both companies to attempt to make this next to impossible (Amiga, Inc. wants to sell their OS as much as Apple wants to sell their hardware)
So, does it really matter that this works for now? This is likely to become something like the PS2 Linux Distro...nice, but not very widely used...
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...
It's just a short story. :-)
But they did tear down the Profecio billboard on the corner of Nishi-shinjuku and Shibuya-ku. This story may not be finished yet.
I don't grab the tissues anymore because I've got about 50 packets sitting on my desk at work. I've just run out of places to put them.
I have been pwned because my
Agreed.
Uh... by that definition, ditto win9x.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
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 looked all through the origonal poster's comment, and couldn't find anywhere that he implied the Amiga would "win".
The Amiga community (as well as the Mac community) realized along time ago that the Wintel platform will be on the top of the heap for along time to come.
But, that's not to say those "enlightened few" can't use the better hardware.
You know there is still a place the Amiga has stayed on top...brodacast video...
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.
So Yellow Dog Linux running on an AmigoOne running an emulation of MacOS 9 is really an emulator running on an emulator running on an emulator?
The speed must be astounding.
I have been pwned because my
errr, actually, the spec listed at Amiga.com isn't very up-to-date.
Here's a manufacturer that is actually shipping boxes that meet the AmigaOne spec:
http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/
--- Uh... by that definition, ditto win9x.
Correct also. What is the best OS for games? Windows. Games are just really interactive toys, nothing more.
This is getting less and less true, so called new world machines only rely on the ROM for booting (all machines since the iMac are new worlds machines). The ROM that contains the toolbox code is basically a memory mapped file (you can see this file in the system folder).
Darwin does not need any special ROMs (how would it run on x86 machines?). And Mac OS X basically runs on top of darwin (this is how unsupported machines can run OS X). The only part of the Mac ROM that needs to be somehow emulated is the open firmware booting code that sets up the device tree and hands it to the kernel. Open firmware is IEEE standard.
So roughtly to run OSX on a unsupported machine, you need to implement a booting system that can hand a device tree to the kernel and write darwin drivers for your hardware / emulation plateform. As far as I know, you can do both legally.
Of course there might be some hidden checks in OSX, but the open source nature of Darwin make this improbable. I don't think that Apple will care about this simply because it does not seem to be a serious threat to their marketshare...
Yeah, haha, being troubled by abysmal sales, etc!!
Juln
It becomes a serious threat to their market share when a company decides to start producing clones... OS X on x86. Dream OS on faster cheaper hardware than Apple offers.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Open your mind and you'll see that the triumph of VHS was the triumph of freedom versus the corporate vision of Betamax, a decision the consumers wisely made. The consumers made the right decision.
Oh Pleeease. Wake up from your dreamworld.
.... 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).
In fact, it was only recently, with AGP systems, that modern PCs could even match the first Amiga (the A1000) in terms of graphics sync/performance.
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.
Just when PCs and Macs are starting to catch up with the original Amiga, the new Amiga is getting ready to be unleashed.
Christ, I dumped Amiga 4 years ago and since then I've been catching up to the rest of the world. The PC's and certainly Mac's surparsed Amiga years ago.
Very timely, actually. Things could get interesting in the next few years.
How so? There is absolutely nothing interesting about the new Amiga. The most advanced feature of the new OS is... *gasp*
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.
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 more open PPC-board.
No, there is absolutely nothing interesting about the new Amiga.
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...
It's highly unlikely that an x86 is going to be running PowerPC code faster than a PowerPC, and since MacOS X is only available as PowerPC binaries, I doubt Apple has much to fear from someone selling x86 machines running MacOS X.
According to this article from long ago in Businessweek, BeOS would have been the foundation of the modern Apple OS had Gassee simply not wildly overplayed his hand. According to the article, Gassee's minimum asking price was rumored to be around a 200 million dollar stock deal. Considering that BeOS's assets were eventually sold for about 11 million, Gassee overvalued his property by about a factor of 20. Furthermore Gassee missed out on the opportunity to be Apple's savior instead of having the honor go to Jobs.
This takes me back to when I was young and full of piss and vinegar. Had myself a distressingly modified A1200 in a tower case with more processing power and RAM than an Amiga was meant to hold - not to mention a big fat fan tied to the gfx card that somehow caused the case to vibrate like a washing machine. That was when computing was done by real men - I sustained numerous minor fleshwounds and a deep fear of hacksaws when I shoehorned that pesky motherboard into my tower case! I still maintain to this day that a computer isn't truely yours till you've bled on the motherboard and smelled the sweet sweet aroma of silicon and burning blood...
One of the more attractive features of this painful experience, apart from the surge of testosterone, was that the bitch could run Shapeshifter, a software Mac emu that was better* than the real thing! I used to spend more time in SS than in AmigaOS, mostly to play with Civ 2, but also because of the joy that the "Eep!" sound effect brought to my traumatised mind. Ahhh.
Happy days...
* - by "better" I mean "slower, unless viewed through the eyes of an advocate, in which case I mean "faster".
http://www.davetansley.com - you proba
MOL doesn't require a ROM. When the original iMac came out (did it happen before with the pre-B G3 towers? I don't know myself) Apple got rid of the ROM on hardware after that. I have no Toolbox ROM in this nice iBook on which I'm typing this. I run Mac-On-Linux (it works quite well, btw), and never once had to do any ROM ripping.
So, if there is no ROM, what happened with those functions? The reason they were in ROM has gone away with much faster RAM, CPUs and disks. So the ROM functions are stored in a loadable library, rather like most function libraries.
Doing research is overrated! Besides, since when has anyone needed to know what they're talking about before they write a post anyway! Oh well, you would've been right if this were 1995. Better than nothing!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Just like Alf!
I don't care if I do get modded down, sometimes an alf/pog joke must be said!
Everything will be taken away from you.
> But, that's not to say those "enlightened few"
:P
> can't use the better hardware.
Indeed. It's surprising when you get that "but it's not as popular as such-and-such" even from the Slashdot community, especially those who spend way too much time and energy promoting Linux, which is still not as popular as that other big x86 OS. Oh well, better just abandon ship then, XP is better now... right?
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Surely the point of the old amiga was that it was graphically amazing for its time and it was available at supermarkets before you could get PCs in the high street?
I had an ST and an Amiga - I got the ST first, so using the Amiga always felt a little unfaithful! But wow, what a machine.
To have the same impact today I think you'd have to have something that made the iMac look ugly and blew away a hefty desktop PC for $300 - in a box - in the supermarket - next to the gamecube.
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.
I've wondered about this and come to the conclusion that ignoring the sort of people that read slashdot and again I state for those people that didn't notice the first time ignoring the sort of people that read slashdot that you'd find that people would be more willing (and likely) to move to OSX because
(I'm definately not saying the Linux doesn't have some of the above, but the steeper learning curve and not as good interface wouldn't go in Linux's favour)
Of course, we know it wont happen, there are far to many issues that would prevent it from happening. But, if OSX could run on Wintel boxes , would Linux ever see a look in if joe public and general corporations decide to leave Windows?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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.
This is just as significant as a post stating that System 7.0.1 will run on an iBook. I got that running at the moment, using the BasiliskII emulator running under XFree86 under MacOS X. It's still emulation/simulation, though.
Revolutionary as the Amiga systems were, I don't think that this new offering has that much of a chance.
Apple's current high-quality/low-price hardware strategy will undercut the demand for this thing before it gets off of the ground. Add to that Apple's new NeXT-based OS, and the chances look even dimmer. As for native apps, I think Be's demise should show where this leads.
The Amiga was killed by several factors. It was a giant leap forward, but after that it languished. Its image was tarnished by the fact that is was available from K-Mart and other discount stores. There were so many games available that the public didn't consider it a "real" business machine.
I am also a little surprised that you consider the Macintosh OS so lowly. Compared to the other GUI's of the time, it was polished and well thought-out. True, multi-tasking didn't come until much later in the game, but it started the DTP revolution.
Actually I'm british.
:o)
And I used to use the Atari ST. As far as I am concerned what made the Amiga a great computer was it's custom hardware - this has been superceeded god knows how many times and so there's no point to have an Amiga computer.
The AmigaOS is a different matter - but as far as I can tell from this it's just "Man runs MOL" not "Man runs Mac OS ontop of AmigaOS"
M@t
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
"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."
I can't believe how accurate and true this statement is. The shifting from planar format graphics, which made scrolling look great, to the now essential chunky in the games industry was definately the falling point. The ability to plot pixels individually with a colour reference was exactly what you needed when texture mapping became the big thing.
"How do you create a modern OS in less than a year?"
If a design is modular enough, components can be written within secure test harnesses. This allows larger groups of people to get more work done individually despite working on a group project. Don't discount how well a piece of software will work just through development time - This is where experience in programming really counts.
"And what about software? There have hardly been released anything for the Amiga the last 8-10 years."
It has always been true that software sells hardware. Without killer applications or a very secure niche market, the hardware vendors will not get enough money to continue development. Drivers are also going to be a problem. A lot of people are lazy and will go out and purchase any old modem or any old GF2 MX. I don't want to go and have to look for a *special* PCI/AGP card to work with the system but I also don't want generic drivers which make my hardware look and fell crap.
If they could find a large sector of industry to sell components to then they may have a fighting chance. If a company requires a specific piece of software to a job, they will buy the hardware to run it, irrespective of cost and availability, the majority are only interested in support and uptime.
I will buy one when they become available which may make my opinion bias. Nostalga drives sales. Bugger, bought some Lego Technic yesterday, drove 50 miles to go and get it to, first time in 8 years. Girlfriend was pleased, she wanted a new dining table! Can't wait to replace the front door with a new Amiga One.
I am not an Anonymous Coward - I just don't have a login I can remember.
Chris Allen.
Heh, Executor way blows. Executor only emulates, reliably, up to Mac OS 6.0.7. Which is older than a lot of readers on Slashdot, literally.
:)
A couple different companies have promised new emulators that can emulate PowerPC, updating their emulators that still only emulate up to a 68040. I know one company that is working on a PPC emulator is:
http://www.microcode-solutions.com/
But they certainly don't seem to be in a hurry. Why? I don't think there's much market at all for a good Mac emulator. There isn't much that runs on Mac OS that you can't get an equivalent elsewhere. For those apps that are like that, the performance isn't good enough to use an emulator- so they jujst get a real Mac.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Am I the only one here that remembers the 9 fingers demo? That was awesome when it came out! Hell, it still is considering what it did with the hardware available, mot 68000, and 3 custom chips, and 1 meg of ram. I downloaded the demo way back when on a Supra 2400 modem, wrote the image on 2 floppies. Put the two floppies in my A500 internal drive, and the other in my A1010 external drive, and booted it up. My jaw was literally on the floor during the whole demo. It looked like a music video on MTV. Granted, it wasn't really video, but it looked damn like it, with music! Ahhh, the nostalgia. Too bad my Nec 3D monitor died, otherwise, I'd hook up the old A500 to watch the demo...wonder if the floppies are still good. Guess its time to search the net for an emulator and the demo disc images.
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.
No, Doom just showed that companies were beginning to not want their games to run on the Amiga, or be bothered to port them. It took less than a week from the Doom sourcecode being released for playable ports of Doom to be released on the Amiga. (Running on the native chipset - something that many had said was impossible) It took about a month for these to be nicely optimised and fast running
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
BasiliskII is awsome. I've tried all of them and BasiliskII is the only one I kept. I love to see my friends freek out when they see the MacOS boot screen on my Sony Laptop. Anyway, I'm assuming that sence you asked about it you actually want to give Emulation a shot, so here's a tip or two. After you download the BasiliskII files(They are hosted on Sourceforge) find a nice person who has a good basic virtual Mac HardDrive file. Sence the Emulator uses a big file to simulate a harddrive you can just boot from that. Oh, I'm sure you wouldn't pirate on purpose, so make sure you only load the ROM of a Mac you already own ($25 on EBay will get you a Mac with a ROM you can use) and buy a copy of MacOS 8, or save a few bucks and stick with MacOS7 which is free from Apple. Oh one final tip, look for the JIT version, It is very well done. I'll stop rambleing now...
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
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
For a time there was talk about a 32-bit PCI Amiga board that would plug into your favourite Intel Pentium or AMD Box, however, after reading the bit about Hitachi and their attempts to make a dual boot box, I can kind of see why this never came to pass... Really unfortunate, as this would've been super happening to have the higher bus speeds and a really decent math coprocessor (the Intel Chip). Used to be offered by Siamese Systems in the UK http://www.siamese.co.uk
Miss my video toaster/flyer system, but such is life...
Rather amazed that Amiga didn't get together with AMD after DEC went under (the Amiga running the DEC Alpha 433 at one computer show was absolutely unbelievable, think that it was also running the AGA chipset for video, but had gobbs o' RAM, too).
Have to wonder if these newer PPC machines you're talking about are going to be running modified PPC Processors, much akin to the older offerings of the Amiga line up relative to the Motorola chips... Have any information on this and/or a release date?
Who knows, maybe Apple might end up saving itself in such a dual boot system... Don't dig their current video editing suites...
Will that be in PAL or NTSC?
SPQR
how can this be insightful when it's completely WRONG? AFAIK, Macs have not needed hardware ROMs since at least OS8.5 - about 5 years ago. At least.
That was classic intercourse!
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.
I'd love you to justify that claptrap. I WORK in "broadcast video" (we call it T E L E V I S I O N, by the way) and the Amiga - limited use that it had - has been long gone since at least 1995. I haven't seen one in a TV company since 1997 - and that one was sitting in a store cupboard full of defunct equipment. Avid made the Mac the dominant desktop computer in video post, SGi STILL rules the high end, and there are HUNDREDS of NT/2000 based systems covering every conceivable TV application as well. But no Amigas. Not anywhere.
That was classic intercourse!
Although the production boards aren't out yet, you can join the "I am Amiga" club for $50, which includes a $50 voucher against the cost of an AmigaOne or AmigaOS 4.0.
Whether this is a good idea or not, I'm not going to comment on, beyond that I'm intending on buying one, but some people have expressed concerns about whether the production boards will ever be released. However the URL of the promotion is:
http://www.amiga-anywhere.com/main.php?prod_id=41
Indeed. Apple's already demonstrated their caution in protecting their ROMS and their willingness to protect them back in the days of the Apple ][, so...
News Flash: Apple loses sleep!
Toss
Turn
Wake up
Call lawyers
Resume sleeping peacefully
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Of course that would only make the Amiga cheaper for him, if he actually waited for all those thousands of friends of friends to buy their Amigas first. And how will he make them do it, if he doesn't do so first? "Hey, buy this here great Amiga!" - "How about you?" - "I'll wait till it gets cheaper."
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
http://amigaone.homeip.net/images/snapshot2.gif
http://amigaone.homeip.net/images/snapshot4.gif
Those who will sacrifice Freedom and Security will get Windows...
Since it's running OS 9, why would apple really care? They're all about OS X now, so I don't see this as some grand victory.
http://www.somethingpositive.net Funny + bitter = comedy gold
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.
All the Apple OS's I've installed other than 6.x and 7.5.3 have a click-through license that prohibits installation on anything other than an Apple computer. Strangely, 7.5.3 doesn't have such a prohibition, so it's a good thing to install on emulators. Does OS 9 have such a prohibition?
Go ahead, mod me down as a troll if you wish... You people don't get it. Apple is a hardware company, not a software company. That's why charge $129 for Mac OS updates instead of the hundreds M$ does. If Mac OS X were ever ported to intel harware, Apple would vanish. M$ would stop supporting the platform. No one is going to buy Mac OS for hundreds of $$ and not even be able to use Office 9which I hate but many people love). I love Apple; let's be realistic here.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Yeah Baby! Yeah!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
3 times better...
Then why did Amiga fail?
And can someone please tell me why this ghost still haunts?
Really! I'm not being facetious. What is on the minds of the Amiga people besides fond memories? Please educate me (sincerely).
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Doubtful. The Amiga ran circles around everything in it's heyday.
;) Yet another cool computer to remember.
I do recall many Desktop-Publishing guys buying Atari-ST machines and using mac emulators, instead of purchasing macs, because it was actually faster than the mac, for less money (and more fun).
I seem to recall the ST was like a half an amiga
Has anyone ever tried getting one of the
PCI G3/G4 upgrade cards to work on an x86
motherboard? I'm talking about the Sonnet
Crescendo cards, which are reasonably priced,
and it seems like you could bypass the need for
PPC hardware emulation if you could get an
x86 bus to talk to it.
Ah, this post must come from the alternate history where Apple's decisive leadership in PReP allows them to innovate and fill new niches, leaving MSI and ABit to worry about the low-quality/low-price volume market for MacOS hardware. Sony's Macs, following the high-quality/high-price strategy, still attract many users on brand name appeal, of course. AppleSoft's tiered OS licensing allows the Mac industry to ship low cost machines while making high margins on licenses to run on high-end hardware. (Taligent's OS has been delayed until 2H03, surprise.)
And about this time, Dell is figuring out that its low-quality/high-price hardware strategy isn't quite working out, and Microsoft is thinking of buying them to get them an efficient supply chain.
Seriously, I think what you mean is "high-quality/high-value". If you mean anything.
- OS X
- Office X
- most of development and productivity software
It all costs money.Then ,there is a little of choice:
- I cannot change desktop manager
- I cannot change window manager
- How about the kernel?
All those themes change almost nothing - it's not a real customization I want as a user. And it's not a level of customization OEM would like either.Finally, it's not scalable down - it requires a lot of hardware resources and cannot work on low-end computer. It cannot be scaled up either - how about network application server? With both *n*x/X11 and M$/VNC it's easy.
Conclusion: Mac OS X is just a default OS installed on last Mac computers to make them more attractive within the sales process. But we all know that atractive-for-sales features are often different from useful-for-real-work features. Mac OS X is just a sales-toy. The more Linux is improved is the more often Linux will be installed after-sales.
Mac OS is the reason of low sales of Mac computers. Mac OS X is a pitty attempt to fix it. But only with modern Linux (pre-installed!)the situation with Mac sales can be improved.
When Steve Jobs will uderstand it, the production cost in Apple Corp wil be dropped and the sales will jump up.
I heard that Bill Gates payed ~$100M to Apple specially to keep them away from Linux. Isn't it true?
Less is more !
yeah, I didn't want to go that far because my brother had a Rev B (266Mhz) iMac that came with 8.5, and his was definitely New World stylee
That was classic intercourse!
WOW! This is one seriously misleading article! It must be pointed out that this is NOT any "New Amiga Hardware". It's a clone of the Mai TeronCX POP motherboard. Nobody is designing, making or selling any "new Amigas", least of all the software company Amiga Inc. The forthcoming AmigaOS4 will run on generic POP/PPC hardware from third party distributors and on old Amigas with PPC accelerators. Eyetech, the distributor of this motherboard has simply licensed the "Amiga" trademark.
Unfortunately AmigaOS4 is being killed by Amiga Inc. themselves before it has a chance to take off. They have come up with an insane distribution policy for all future versions of AmigaOS. In order to be allowed to run AmigaOS, any third party hardware vendor is supposed to buy a license from Amiga Inc for both himself and his hardware, he must modify his hardware with license verification measures (Amiga Inc. uses a nonsensical "anti-piracy" argument for this), and he must sell AmigaOS bundled with his hardware. AmigaOS will not be available for sale separately to users who wish to choose their own hardware and hardware vendors.
Please consider signing this petition to Amiga Inc. to make them at least give AmigaOS a fair chance and to wake them upo from their megalomanic dilusions of trying to control an independent hardware market! There's more info about this dirty business here.
And of course it runs MOL/MacOS - it's a POP board with OpenFirmware and it's running Linux. Is this news?
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
>In order to be allowed to run AmigaOS, any
>third party hardware vendor is supposed to
>buy a license from Amiga Inc for both
>himself and his hardware, he must modify
>his hardware with license verification
>measures (Amiga Inc. uses a nonsensical
>"anti-piracy" argument for this),
It would be suicide, but the Amiga company is so irrelevant you might as well say it is already dead.
Didn't Texas Instruments do this with their TI 99 4/A? You had to buy a license to make stuff for it. Such a policy ensured that no one made anything for it.
What other serious decisions mistakes is Amiga making that will make sure that there is no Amiga renaissance? I wonder if Jack Tramiel and Neil Harass are back at the helm here.
There is a lesson to be learned: open systems are the ones that survive.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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
MOD THAT UP! Not just because he's quoting me ;) , but because he's right. I can't believe the "Zico" garbage is still allowed to be thrown around and cause confusion like the post this AC replied to. Amiga Inc, clean up your act - and your website!
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
How unlike a certain "GNU/OS" which was designed by a bunch of unemployed hackers and only lives in the professional world when moron zealots or cheap bastards decide to use it in place of more established UNIX OS's.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Sorry to rain on your parade, but this isn't allowed due to the EULA for Mac OS. It's perfectly OK to run MOL on Apple hardware, but it isn't OK to run Mac OS on non-Apple licenced hardware.
Just like it isn't legal to run AmigaOS4 (if it ever happens) on Apple hardware.
An old version of MacOS like 7.5 might not have this restriction, I haven't checked.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
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
Somehow I dount Amiga hardware will end up being any of those seeing as the Amiga market is an even smaller niche than the mac one.
I'd have to agree. While OS 9 definitely has its shortcomings, it is by no means a "toy" OS. Its functionality and ease of use are legendary (its not like OS X came along and all of a sudden, Macs were easy to use), it is MUCH more stable than Windows (not as stable as Linux or Mac OS X or any other BSD/*nix system, granted) ... and I am including Win2K as well. While Win2K won't have minor crashes as much, it is MUCH more prone to major reinstallation-to-fix type crashes.
OS 9 is, in my mind, a very incredible accomplishment. An OS than spanned 2 completely different hardware architectures over a course of 16 years that incorporated every major advancement either thru the OS or 3rd party extensions, and, as has been mentioned, IS COMPLETELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THE CONTENT YOU WEENIES WATCH, LISTEN TO, etc. So in 1984 they didn't build it for pre-emptive multitasking or protected memory. Big whoop - it got along fine without it for most users, and now that OS X is here, it has the best implementation of either available.
People need to stop busting on Mac OS 9. If you look at the development and progression of the Mac OS from '84 to '00, you'd be VERY impressed with all the stuff they crammed in by the end. Was it perfect? No. Was it a toy? Absolutely not. Is was a very useful, very intuitive, very quick, very extensible operating system. For servers? No, but then, that's not what the original Mac OS was written to do. You don't use a screwdriver to stir your coffee, and you don't use a swizzle stick to pound a nail into wood. Judge the OS by its accomplishements in its own field, not by what completely different OS's achieved in completely different avenues of use.
First up, MacOS hasn't needed any Apple hardware i.e. Apple ROMs for a long time, probably since 8.x
MOL runs OS 9.2 directly on the hardware, using the PPC's virtualisation features, something the x86 lacks completely, i believe, so PPC apps that do not rely on proprietary Apple hardware (not OS X, obviously) will run at full-speed in the MOL environment, unlike x86-oriented solutions like VMware, where the software has to jump through hoops to give the hosted apps access to the CPU.
And, don't kid yourself. On anything but a top-of-the-line G4 machine, OS X is sluggish. I have a G4 TiBook and also used a 700Mhz G4 Tower, and neither of these machines provided acceptable GUI speed for me. A 600Mhz G3 Ibook is a joke (granted this was the 'from the factory' config, so more RAM would be necessary).
I hear people say they find performance acceptable on these machines.. well, you must enjoy your web browsers not being able to scroll smoothly and waiting minutes for apps to start up, but i sure don't.
Shit, my IIfx running AU/X offers the same level of integration between MacOS and UNIX as OS/X, Apple have been sitting round with their thumb up their ass for the last ten or fifteen years.
Maybe it's just a pointless, overengineered GUI layer, but it still feels damn slow watching that little spinning beachball spin all the time.
Fire up OS 9.2 on the same machine and the speed difference is amazing.
Things happen in 'realtime' instead of at some point in the future after the annoying 'animation effect' has run.
What is really frustrating is that you can't turn the extraneous shit off. Even with TinkerTool, you can't disable all the eye-candy, and even when you do turn everything TinkerTool controls off, the GUI isn't much faster.
My TiBook is pretty much an expensive X-Terminal that continues to run an Apple OS only to support Photoshop.
One day, Adobe will port Photoshop to UNIX, or someone else will step up to the plate with a decent Linux image editor, and my days running OS X will be over.
Obviously, some people like OS X and think it is really neat, but for me it just gets in the way and i'm hanging out for a viable alternative to it.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Woops, you are a troll. Visit Mr. Silver saying:
Linux is a waste of time
you can't run with an ipod"
spam is the fault of people who respond to it
Gator does not interfere with websites
Linux on the desktop is dead Do we have a theme here? Every fifth post, Mr. Silver says something silly about Linux being hard to use, dead blah blah, some Windows thing is what you should use. Stick it, Mr Silver.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think you're living in a dream world. The best hardware and software, even when combined, don't always win, and even when they do they generally don't do so because they were the best. I would have thought betamax, os/2 and linux would have told you that. Personally I've always considered Apple to be a far worse company than Bill's - they're just nowhere near as competent from a business pov.
Betamax lost because the tapes were too short - VHS offered twice the length, and that's what mattered to people.
I'm not sure what the exact reasons for OS/2 losing, but one probably was the OEMs. What OEM wants to pay IBM for an OS? All of a sudden IBM has a huge competitive advantage: they get their OS for free. No, wait, they make money off of their OS from the other OEMs who have to pay them for it!
As for Linux, that battle is not over yet.
I think generally when one product loses that was supposedly better someone's failing to take into account the consumer's definition of better. It's easy to look at just one or only a few metrics of "better", and then decide that one product should win over another, leaving out what the consumer's are really basing their decision on.
Another common example that comes up of this which you left off is QWERTY vs Dvorak. The studies showing Dvorak are linked to Dvorak. There were many contents when the keyboard first came out about those who could type the fastest - these happened on many different keyboards. Dvorak patented his keyboard. There were no offers of retraining, etc...
How about this: it's also unfair
Why do you think Amiga Inc. isn't allowing AmigaOS to run on non-Amiga licensed boards? Because the OS price doesn't support the cost of development. Same situation with Apple.
Pity nobody is willing to pay the true cost of OS development.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Apple's got nothing to fear, people buy Macs because they're "cute".
Yeah but if you compare a new $1600 G4 to a $3500 PowerMac 9500 (running at 132 Mhz) I think you can see that Apple's new hardware is low cost.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Please pardon the comma splice and indefinite pronoun. Long day.
You really bought a Cisco WiFi card for $10? From a dot-com auction? Or are you saying you really can get a $10 WiFi card off the market? I haven't seen anything like this at Compusa.
1/10th of $99, is $9.90. I'm wondering if this wasn't yet another of the exagerations PC people make about Mac hardware being expensive eg "My Xbox has better graphics and was only $200!"
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Unfortunately, other than the idea of Open Source and the Open Source methodology, the market is exclusively about making commodity software.
Linux is a commodity operating system (Unix) running a commodity UI (windows ripoff). It is not the source of innovation.
Making software that does what commercial software does and making it free is great-- but the software is all commodity- ideas that have been around for decades. I haven't seen any new applications "killer Apps" or not- that were really innovative starting on Linux.
Linux *does* encourage innovation, though, because it drives the value of commodity software to zero. If Linux didn't exist, there would still be people charging $1,000 for an x86 Unix install, because they could get away with it. Now if they want to charge $1,000 to their customers, they'd better innovate some value for that money.
Linux helps a lot on that front. And it also works to let companies like Apple opensource the commodity parts of their OS-- and spend their money working on the areas where they can be innovative.
By the way-- while I disagree with what this Mr. Silver said, the only troll here is you. You attack him and do so personally, and probably unfairly-- You don't get to decide the position someone is taking and tell them that they don't believe what they are saying. That's the height of offensiveness.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
And factually so.
The difference in Linux is that you *can't* buy Office for it, but you CAN run OpenOffice on the Mac.
The developer tools are given away free to everyone-- grandma and grandpa too. Out of the box.
Your entire post is a list of factually false statements presented as facts.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Actually, Geeks prefer OSX. Those who actually create code, do engineering- hardware and software- and are technically proficient prefer OS X.
The linux community is composed of a small group of geeks (many of whom are transitioning to OS X) and a large group of people who can't differentiate between an XBOX and an iMac in hardware value and wanted "free software d00d" to replace windows.
Oh, and *all* the effing idiots who poll my webserver for outdated IIS exploits seem to be running Linux.
Geeks like cool, high tech, high performance tools, and the penultimate example of that right now is OS X. And its pulling ahead- as the Unix underpinnings are allowing Apple to innovate faster than they were previously able to.
I do agree with you in one sense-- those who like to style themselves geeks, but really aren't, *do* perfer Linux.
Thus endith the "geekier than thou" sermon.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
hell, they've already obsolesced my _NEW_ powerbook with their new os x 10.2 release.
You can't say shit like this without being called on it.
I run Warcraft 3 on an iMac G4 at 1024x768 with all graphics options turned on and it runs great.
10.2 HAS NOT BEEN RELEASED. And when it is, ALL titanium powerbooks, even my first generation one, are going to be supported.
Yes, newer hardware will see fuller use of the graphics chips for greater UI quality-- but thats not "obsoleting" the older hardware-- the OS works fine on older hardware (it also runs fine on my PowerMac 9500 from, what, 1996?)
I don't see 10.2 taking better use of the graphics card as making your older graphics card obsolete. Sheesh, even the older machines will get a significant graphics boost, in the new OS.
And, of course, the ultimate proof that you're a lowdown troll who is making this crap up is the claim that Mac hardware costs three times as much-- actually, Mac hardware is consistently cheaper than comparable PC hardware.
The people who think it costs three times as much are comparing an Xbox to an iMac G3 and claiming they are "comparable".
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Why do people continue to pretend that Apple isn't providing machines with better performance at lower cost than Intel machines?
The price myth, like the megahertz myth (which are related) hasn't been true since 1990, if it ever was.
Yes, you can buy an XBOX for $200 (but ony because its sold for less than it costs to make it) and a G3 iMac costs $800, but that iMac beats most intel PCs on the market up to $2,000.
Dude! You're getting a dud.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
So ... do you think the PC will come back, or has MS/Intel/AMD killed it off for sure?
Hmmm?
You know, the PC, the present Games computer?
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(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
"twenty years"?
20 years ago it was TRS, Apple II, PCjr, and Vic-20s/C64s! (8Bits)
Show us some other history you've re-written!
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(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
There was a board that permitted the old Amiga to run as a Mac. It required the Macintosh rom.
The old Amiga also ran Dos.. and near the end also ran Windows 3.11 but never Windows 95.
The later trick was done by a bridge board that included an intel processor.. a 8086 or for Windows a 286.
I don't actually exist.
Can you please tell me how the hell this is a troll? Geezuz, thought people might want to see the current counter and all. Some moderator needs to pull his head deeply from within his ass.
Those who will sacrifice Freedom and Security will get Windows...
Well, it all depends on where you stand. Apple has been lowering the price for their equimpment, and a lot of people are (grudgingly) admitting that they are cheaper than a lot of *comparably outfitted* machines. So yes, Apple isn't in the bargain basement, but goes for the "more bang for your buck". (IMO, they have to, especially since Motorola fell behind Moore's Law.)
Apple does pack a lot of stuff in that you could live without at home (such as fast Ethernet cards *and* 56k modems), and is notoriously unfriendly to the "roll your own" crowd. Then again, the hardware is one of the most important aspects of the Mac, as it was with the Amiga. Without this tight integration of hardware and the OS, the Apple woudn't have survived.
And that is another reason why I think this bird won't fly: the Amiga was actually a miracle in *hardware*; the OS was what let it shine.
since AmigaOS can be run on almost any platform now. AmigaOS XL allows it to run on WINTEL systems, and they have AmigaDE players for Linux and Windows. Soon, I expect, they will have an OSX player? Shouldn't be too hard to make since they already have a Linux version.
With some changes, they can get AmigaOS 4.0 to boot on a Mac if they wanted to. Really quite a nice OS as well, much smoother running than MacOS 9.2 and OSX.
Since the Amiga transcends the Amiga hardware and is multi-platform, it is much more valuable and viable than MacOS or OSX anyway. So who cares?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
if someone wrote a Mac compatable ROM, Apple would sue them before they could make any decent money off of it.
The best bet would be to have college students disassemble a PowerMac G3/G4 ROM and write the interrupts and APIs that it supports and then have a second group design a ROM to those specs. Might as well release it to the open source, so that even if Apple sues, someone will have a copy of it out there.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
More than bad management, bad marketing as well. Also they had "Commodore" as a parent company and it gave the Amiga company a bad rep. Many thought that the Amiga was nothing but a new C64 or C128 with slow disk drives and nothing for it but a bunch of games.
If Apple, IBM, HP, or one of the other companies that the Amiga company was offered to had bought it out, history would have unfolded differently.
Plus the Amiga did not keep up with the Mac and PC systems out there. Once they started getting 3D and Accelorated video cards in the early 1990's, the Amiga lost its advantage. Apple had to move to the PPC chips to get more power to compete with the WINTEL systems as the 68000 series had lost steam.
There also was a lack of developers and dealers for the Amiga after Commodore went belly up. Many thought that the Amiga was dead after that.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Because most PC Users do not have a need to emulate Mac stuff on their PC. It usually is the other way around, some DOS or Windows program that a Mac User cannot do without forces them to by PC Emulation software.
So really there isn't any money to be made in making a Mac emulator for the PC, no market, no money, so why do it? The main part is emulating the PowerPC processors, nobody to my knowledge has done that yet, but the 68K processors they have. So we have 68K Mac emulators, but they don't do much business.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.