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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
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.
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
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.
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.
--- Uh... by that definition, ditto win9x.
Correct also. What is the best OS for games? Windows. Games are just really interactive toys, nothing more.
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.
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...
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.
My 14MHz A-1200 still seems more responsive than even some high end wintel boxen.
Yes, I have to agree. My amiga was as fast as any system made yet in terms of the windowing. It never slowed up, never ground down. Given that it did what it did as fast as it did it, I can't see how any OS can be faster in terms of user interaction than it was.
Of course, I don't think it would decompress MP3's on the fly.
Say what you like (I'd love to see them back, but if BeOS didn't fly, cant see how AmigaOS will) about it being a piece of history - it was a good piece of history.
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
Yes, its a fault and a feature. A CPU is so flexible its cheaper to make one fast one and spread it around than 50+ hardware widgets. Having said that, more things should be on the motherboard these days - like soundcards, modems, and some general logic unit to decompress MP3's and DVD's.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
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
> 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.
> Why would anyone want to buy an AmigaOne just > to run MacOS???
:P
:)
Did you even read the story summary?
The AmigaOne runs Linux. There is this prorgam called "Mac-On-Linux" that lets you run Mac OS from *within* Linux. Like VMware on WinDOS or Linux, it emulates/proxies some hardware devices, but does not need to emulate the CPU, so it runs at almost the same speed as if it were running as the real OS.
That is, you're not just buying an AmigaOne to *just* run Mac OS. You're buying an AmigaOne to run Linux, Mac OS, and Amiga apps.
Go back and read the summary and maybe even the article. Mac OS doesn't *replace* Linux or AmigaOS on the AmigaOne. Amiga Inc would have no more motive for making this not work than it would making it so you couldn't run AbiWord. Mac-On-Linux and AbiWord are both just applications that run on Linux.
I believe it is against the EULA on Mac OS 9 to run it on non-Mac hardware. I'm not positive though, but I won't be surprised if/when Apple does try to stop this though. They may not care much as long as MOL can only run up to Mac OS 9 within it's cage, they are fading it out. As soon as Mac OS X is runnable via MOL on *non-Mac* hardware, you can trust that Apple will definately take an interest. Mac OS X is one of the most important reason for buying a Mac, and the best thing Apple has to brag about.
Similarily, if one got Apple's Darwin running on the AmigaOne, which is open source, one could totally run Mac OS X on an AmigaOne. Drivers for the AmigaOne video and input devices would have to be written of course.
That is, who the hell would want to run yet another crappy Linux distro that has built-in AmigaOS emulation when you have Mac OS X!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
The point being that Betamax's 1 hour tape length (designed to record network broadcasts) wasn't long enough to contain the material that consumers wanted to rent - porn.
Much of the article you link to makes sterling sense, but how many porn movies really need to be over an hour long? I would argue that Betamax might have proven quite the boon to the porn industry, by helping to focus their screenwriting and editing efforts toward producing films with tighter dialog and more efficient plot development. No, I think in this case the consumer lost :)
Of course, I don't think it would decompress MP3's on the fly.
:)
:) This happened a while after the death of C=, so it's certainly an excusable offence :)
:)
Oooh, how wrong you are on this one
There's a good CLI-based MP3 player for the Amiga called MPEGA. I think I had to combine to MONO to play back at 44/48Khz, but there is even a neat little "hack" for the Amiga called 14-bit dynamic sound. There are a couple of methods, but it gives the Amiga essentially 16-bit quality stereo sound by combining the 4 stereo channels into 2
more things should be on the motherboard these days
Agreed, but none of them should be "stealing" memory or clock cycles from the system
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.
But, the AmigaOne is desigend to run the New AmigaOS, not Linux...
... as I said before ... Amiga, Inc. doesn't want the new Amiga hardware to become a "cheap Linux PPC box".
... but looking at it from the side of Amiga, Inc., they don't want someone running Linux/MacOS on their system any more than Netpliance wanted ppl running Linux on their systems.
Linux is being used as the development OS for coding and hardware design (like the replacement firmware)...
So, in the end, only developers should be running Linux on the AmigaOne, and I'm sure that
Yes, there will definately be a Linux distro on whatever the new hardware ends up being
I was just pointing out that neither company wanted this to be happening.
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.
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
The hack for the original Amiga to create higher fidelity stereo playback uses the 8 bit sound samples and 6 bit volume in conjunction with each other to simulate "14 bit" sound. It's not truely that high quality, but it does sound much better than simply 8 bit.
...
It is true that it does cut you down to just 2 channels, though. Left and Right. For playing back sound samples, that's all you need. For playing back anything else, such as MODs or OctaMEDs, it doesn't help you in the least bit -- but
I've actually used the hi-fi sound hack, whatever it was called and I was very impressed. I don't think it was exactly practical, but it did allow me to listen to 16 bit WAV files which was all I really needed to do at the time anyway.
Oh, and it ran fine on all three of my Amigas without any modification. An A2000, an A1200, and an A4000.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
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
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
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.
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!
I think maybe AmigaOS is an RTOS, so you don't end up with messages stuck in queues and such, waiting for things to happen after you asked them to? Not sure.
An RTOS is not faster; average kernel latency is actually higher, but it's entirely predictable.. so user interfaces can be designed to be have precisely how you want them to.
I agree.. an old amiga still feels really responsive. It's amazing.
Yes, I have to agree. My amiga was as fast as any system made yet in terms of the windowing. It never slowed up, never ground down. Given that it did what it did as fast as it did it, I can't see how any OS can be faster in terms of user interaction than it was.
Well, I didn't have any problems causing a truly bad slowdowns with for example running DeliTracker and using pseudo-14 - bit playback for 16/32 - channel modules with some back-then-neat visualising genie running. That was on A4000 with 68040/25 MHz...(which I still have and even occasionally use) And of course a workbench with eg. 64 colors using AGA was a very easy way to cause major GUI slowdown. It's not a bad machine for its age, but even a lightweight OS can't 100% prevent slowdowns if the running tasks are heavyweight for the hardware.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
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
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.
Good point, but history has shown that if something is worth paying, then people will.
Then ,there is a little of choice:
Your three choices would be viable if you're talking about someone who reads slashdot and wants to do those sorts of things. However outside in the Joe Bloggs world they care very little about those points. Most people want one single consistent desktop and user interface. Why do you think Microsoft interface guidelines exist? Why do you think that most Windows based software makes it easy to find things like print, preferences, saving and loading? The whole idea of learn-once-use-anywhere applies here.
You're assuming that everyone else in the world is as tech savvy as yourself and wants to do the things you consider important. That is not the case.
In our office, a large number of people consider a new screen saver and desktop picture "customisation". Being able to customise their window managers, desktops and kernels wouldn't rank highly on their list of things to do.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Of note though, I've noticed that the same types of folks that embraced the Amiga way back when, seem to be embracing Linux today. I'm not sure what that means.
... evil, slow, poorly written, etc). In the mid 90's, after C= died (when alot of Amiga ppl left), there was only 1 popular alternative ... MacOS.
... and personally, MacOS has never seemed quite as powerful as AmigaOS. There's also the CLI (based on UNIX)...until recently, MacOS didn't have a command line and still doesn't come standard with one.
I think it's fairly simple. Most Amiga users don't see M$ as a good choice of OS (for whatever reasons
Which meant buying a Mac and remaining tied to another proprietary hardware platform
Also, alot of Amiga users already owned Macs for whatever reasons. And, quite a few also owned a PeeCee box as well. I think Linux was a choice because it was in the right place at the right time. X86 boxen were cheap (Macs are anything but), most Amiga users were already well versed in the basics of software development, Linux was not only good, but it was also cheap. Which was Jay Miner's origonal vision for the Amiga anyhow...
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
Why not just let it die and for those interested in the Amiga concept simply go to the open source (Mazollia like Licensed) project called AROS and found on sourceforge.
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.
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
Yes, every mac "comes standard with on." No, you don't have to use it (nor did you have to use the CLI). It's simply an app in the utilities subfolder of the Applications folder. Oh yeah, and unlike the Unix-like CLI, the mac terminal IS bsd unix.
Where do you get this stuff?
I wasn't aware that OS X was being distributed with a Shell...I was told that it must be installed seprately...anyhow, OS X as you said is BSD. And the fact that the Amiga was "unix like" rather than UNIX didn't hurt it for all of those Amiga users.
I dunno, you can get a g4 mac with 17 inch monitor for under $1100. That's the same price as an A500 + 14inch monitor in 1989 dollars. It always amazes me that people keep spouting this stuff. Yeah, yeah...you can build your own PC for a few hundred less, but you could never do that with the Amiga.
Lets not compare it with the A500, compare it with an A1200. The A1200-HD could be had for well under the origonal price of the A500, and came with a harddrive. I think I bought my A1200-HD for $599 in '92, and you can't compare the price of a monitor (monitors get cheaper as time goes by). Compare it to what was available at the time...
And the monitor issue is interesting, as I belive that most Amiga monitors could be converted to a PC monitor using nothing but a $20 cable.
I think the truth of the matter is alot of the "last" Amiga users wanted to escape the propreitary hardware thing because they were looking at a proprietary platform with no real support. And lets not forget that M$ has backed Apple as well (which for some would be just as bad as going to Windoze)...
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.
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
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
No, it's not. I've done a bit of Amiga programming and you have to deal with queues all the time; not just in the OS, but also in the copper chip (although there the queues tend to be pretty short :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
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.