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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From the amiga website(www.amiga.com),
"We completed the AmigaOne specification three months ago, and dubbed it the "Zico". It is a specification and not a product because Amiga is a software company, not a hardware manufacturer. The ability of the Amiga DE to host itself on multiple hardware and operating system platforms frees us from hardware dependency and gives our partners and our customers the freedom to chose the hardware that best suits their needs and tastes."
I thought that the new Amiga hardware had been made CHRP compliant and that the development team had been looking to the Mac for inspiration.
If I'm right then this story is no more than "Man runs an application of Yellow Dog Linux" - it's really no more exciting than me getting YDL running on my iBook.
MOL developers themselves have been striving for Mac OS X support anyway - it's not as if they've started doing this just becausee the Amiga One hardware can run it.
Also the 600Mhz G3 Amiga One board from a European vendor is 600(euros) with processor, no case, memory, video, sound, monitor, mouse, keyboard.
A 600Mhz G3 iMac - the closest system - is around 1000. So Amiga One hardware is hardly cheap. I can pick a higher spec Intel/AMD motherboard and processor combo up for half thay price.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
The great thing about the Amiga was that the performance of the system didn't rely solely on the CPU + MEM combo.
My 14MHz A-1200 still seems more responsive than even some high end wintel boxen. Now, I know the OS is partly to thank forthis, but the problem with modern wintel hardware is that everything is being designed to run off of the CPU...Softmodems, integrated video, sound, and even integrated IDE interfaces use the CPU and System Memory.
The Classic Amiga wasted as little CPU time on non-mathematical functions as possible. Which seems to be the exact opposite directon the wintel platform is going.
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.
And I have yet to see this actually happenning.
It just needs to be predicted on The Simpsons! Remember the episode in which Bart sold his soul to Milhouse, who then sold it to Comic Book Guy in exchange for Alf pogs? That was a few years back, and of course Milhouse told Bart (about Alf) "He's coming back, you know!" And now he is back! So write to Fox, et al. and have them feature this, we'll have a tangible product in no time!
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
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...
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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.