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Amiga Sells AmigaOS
rocketjam writes "Amiga, Inc. announced today that it has sold the Amiga Operating System to KMOS, Inc., a corporation which 'develops and distributes enabling technology.' The deal included 'all of Amiga's right, title, source code, and all versions, from the "Classic Amiga Operating System" through AmigaOS 4.0 and all subsequent versions.' A spokesman said the sale would have no adverse affect on the release of a consumer version of AmigaOS 4.0 later this year. Amiga said it made the move in order to focus on the growing mobile market. The long saga of AmigaOS 4.0 continues."
Reader Da writes "there're always other options should the Amiga curse continue. Also mentioned on OSNews."
Memories, memories. At the time, my Amiga 500 could kick any PCs ass.
This being said, I do think we'll see another Amiga platform in the future... Just in time for that new version of Duke 'Nukem to be ported to it... =(
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
AROS
The Amiga isn't Dead its UNDEAD.....
:)
and this happens at the same time as "Dawn of the Dead" released in theaters? Coincidence?
...for KMOS, inc. to announce suing AROS users because of "millions of lines copied from the AmigaOS source code"
I wish they would release the old amiga os versions into the public domain.
UAE would benefit from being able to ship the roms with it.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Whom is gonna buy it? Which industry segment is going to use Amigas?
I spent the 90's and early this century waiting for AOS4 but every time I go to their website I see "coming soon" banners. The last time http://os.amiga.com/os4/ was changed was Oct 15, 2003. I'll keep looking, but in the meantime the best way I'm able to use AmigaOS is via emulation.
I preused the article and no mention of how much they sold the OS for.
Anyone else think that it would have been better to have open sourced the OS rather than keep it closed and sell it?
The OS had great potential in it's early days. I think the open source community could do great things with the OS if given the chance.
WAREZERS would benefit from being able to get the Amiga ROMs for free.
You can use AROS with UAE today if you want a free version of AmigaOS, you just can't run games with it, which is all you really care.
Why should Cloanto should relinquish a profitable revenue stream? For a warm, fuzzy feeling inside? Why should people who would otherwise contribute nothing to the Amiga get a free ride?
Posting anon so as to not take a karma hit, but they used VxWorks, which has all these weird filesystem file count limits, so on mount it encounters the VxWorks exquivalent of a kernel panic when there are too many files, and the watchdog reboots it, causing what we say with Spirit.
Elvis and his rock 'n' roll buddy Roy Orbison, with help from ultra-karmic George Harrison, are rumoured to be working on a new Amiga OS. So radical is its design that it's being developed in the closely-guraded, and officially non-existant, Hangar 18 at Area 51, and incorporates innovative Aleph-1 algorithms developed bby the Greys. Bob Lazar is skeptical. "Without an abundant supply of ununpentium, I don't see how it'll get past single-user mode. And the threading model is too much like the NT kernel to be taken seriously." Jesus was unavailable for comment since he was taking his new trans-dimentional hyper-warp saucer interceptor out for a test run.
Stick Men
I was an Amiga zealot back in the day. I owned two Amiga's. I absolutely loved them. They introduced me to 3D graphics/animation and photo retouching.
But their day is gone. The Amiga was great in it's day because it did some things no other computer could do at the time, but not anymore. Some people, a VERY small number of people, are trying in vain to hang on to this platform. You just have to know when to let go. You have to know to say goodbye.
Let the Amiga go...let it fade into computer history. It's time to pull the plug and take off the feeding tube. Yes, it's sad to see it go, but all good things must end.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
The year is 2018. The Amiga ethusiasts can't wait for the long awaited AMIGA OS release 24 years after the last release by Commodore. The Amiga Inc. promisses to start shipping the final product at the end of year after some unexpected delays.
The REAL legacy of the Amiga OS and its platform is NOT the hardware or software. It's the PEOPLE! It's programmers and users and enthusiasts!
Many people in the Open Source/LINUX/BSD community came out of the Amiga world. Learned their programming skills and attitudes from hacking the Amiga. I'm sure what those people learned have had an effect on the LINUX and BSD worlds. And of course there is one important person we should never forget who was a fan/programmer of the Amiga...
Linus Torvalds
Would LINUX exist or how would it of evolved differently if Linus had learned to program on DOS or a Mac?
Yes, once again something of the Amiga dynasty has been sold off. Hopefully to a better place where it'll get it's due.
I still have Amigas and use WinUAE. I look forward to OS4 coming out. And I plan on buying the new mobo too. The fact that Amiga IP has changed hands more times then someone with OCD changes their underwear, doesn't bother me in the least. I have faith and that's all I need. IMHO, many skeptics will be proven wrong.
---- You have been programmed by the Illuminati to not see the word ""!
Even though everyone slags off Amiga, someone always buys it when it goes up for sale.
Summation 2
Forgive me if wrong, wasn't Amiga cursed by the BladeRunner curse? Are these the same thing?
You're trolling, right? Come to /. for duff grammatical advice...
Science fiction for grown-ups...
It's about the Amiga. It's not Offtopic. Troll, maybe, but Offtopic?
http://www.mindrelease.net/amiga-thendic/
Scroll down to the bottom and check out some of the stuff dated March 15/04.
Somebody wanted the OS (not the HARDWARE!) real bad already, and it looks as if that isn't going to happen as he envisioned it.
From what I can find on the internet - KMOS in San Fransisco is a TV station. Can't find any other reference to it.
There doesn't seem to be a business plan or strategy in place here - just knee jerk reactions to what is perceived as currently profitable, or upswinging markets.
It's sad, but Amiga has been kicked to death by a bunch of inept owners...
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
It wasn't Amiga that was cursed by Blade Runner. It was Texas Instruments. There were neon TI 99-4/A logos on the rooftops.
haha! Wish I had modpoints for you, FUNNY MAN.
Not true, there's no effective filesystem limits in VxWorks. "too many files"? I mean, really, what a load of crap. I hate it when people make stuff up.
You really didn't believe there was going to be an Amiga OS `Next Generation`??? I gave up hope when Commodore gave up hope. Sure it was a great machine with a great OS - in its time. Move on.
Amiga Necrophilia.
AmigaOS includes too much copyrighted material from third parties. It was not well documented. Although there were serious doubts, if the complete source of AmigaOS is still available for the owners.
Every time any news of AmigaOS reaches mainstream news portals, there is at least one person crying "Just let it die". Well, if you don't want to use AmigaOS, then don't, but its my main operating system, and I love it.
I love using it, I love developing for it, and it doesn't bother me that I can't play the latest games. I use it for the internet (web, irc, email, msn, web development, etc. etc.), programming, music composition, graphics, all sorts, and i'm not alone.
If we want to use AmigaOS, how does that hurt you? If companies want to invest in it, its their money not yours. If anything else, it provides an interesting soap opera.
I'm one of the beta testers of the new version, and I for one am happy that my OS of choice is undergoing continued development by a small, but highly skilled team.
I have been racking my brains, trying to think, WHY would anyone pay a dime for this out of date, under a tenth of a percent market share product. The only thing that makes even the remotest sense would be if somehow it had code that could have been incorporated into Linux.
But I rejected that option as the sheer paranoid ramblings of my tortured mind. Until I saw the post one up from this. LINUS was a fan, Lots and lots of open source hackers learned by hacking Amiga's.
Oh damn, and did they take the code snippets they found, and the methods and techniques they learned with them? Could this be Microsofts second front? Please somebody, tell me I just need to lie down and let this delusion pass!!!
But if thats not it then WHY would anybody buy this klunker? Why, why, why???
If there is any Amiga source code in the Linux kernel;-)
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
NOooooo!
it's AT&T all over again!
stop it!
The terrorists at Guantanamo were caught in the act of committing crimes.
Which must be why those four British guys were released without charge just last week. Clearly the U.S had such a concrete case against these terrorist bastards that they just had to let them go. Right. Of course.
Well when Acorn went down in 1998/98, RISC OS also seemed to be up the creek without a paddle. Then out of the blue in late 2002 a little-known UK company suddenly released a powerful RISC OS computer called the Iyonix. Mircals can happen, sometimes. I've been using PCs since 1995, and I am sick of them. I miss my Amiga. If Amiga became re-extablished, I'd actually consider going back to them. But ten years of bungling seems to have evaporated the chances of that happening. It is a pity too, as if someone competent had taken over Amiga in 1994, then it'd easily be several times bigger than Apple is today.
The late 80's to early 90's were a fun time for Amiga users. In college, it was Amiga vs. Mac vs. PC vs. Atari ST. The Amiga could do things those other machines could only dream about. There was a thriving online community dedicated to the thing. BBS's had tons of REALLY GOOD shareware available for it. And games? The Amiga was THE gaming platform of the time. PCs were for those who just wanted a glorified typewriter. But the Amiga was for those who really enjoyed computing.
Sigh...
The better technology doesn't always win in the end.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
[The Amiga500's CPU was 7.14MHz.] The curse of the Amiga is how Europe's #1 computing platform could go down the drain because of sheer incompetence in corporate circles. The curse of the Amiga is how it could go for a full 10 years, bouncing from owner to owner, without actually coming back to the market despite the clear demand. The curse of the Amiga is having used one and now being stuck on a PC with a #$%^ motherboard with chipset bugs because my old Amiga500 just doesn't cut it anymore.
AmigaOS is now KMOSOS?
I never had an Amiga; did have a ZX Spectrum though - with its tape-drive and joystick...
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
Am understand it right ? Amiga going for mobile market? Want to push Amiga OS as a new mobile platform ? As if we have not enough platforms already - Palm, Linux, Symbian, Java, WinCE and that is not counting gaming handhelds...
I left the Amiga scene about ten years ago but it was the fact that it was a fun machine to "tweak" and play with that got me fully into UNIX/Linux & made me realise what a "boring" OS that Windows is from the point of view of customisation/optimisation.
I even picked up a couple of Amigas on Ebay a couple of years ago and still have fun with Workbench and some of the classic games like Speedball.
Sure, AmigaOS is never going to mainstream again and I'm never going to use it in preference to Linux but Amiga users were a fun community to be in, just like the Linux one is now - unlike the non-existent Windows community.
Before people criticise the Amiga, they should be reminded of a couple of things:
1. "Home computers" like the Amiga, Atari ST, etc were platforms that were costly to upgrade and, as a result, not upgraded by most users. This meant that software developers for those platforms had to push the limits of those machines as far as possible - in turn, this lead to some great feats of programming. These days, hardware is cheap so it's easier to upgrade but programming today can be done sloppily because of endless APIs and languages that weren't so available or widespread then.
2. The Amiga was a superior hardware platform to the IBM PC for many years - it had better graphics, sound and multitasking. The fact it did not take off was due to inactivity on the part of Commodore to match Amiga development to the IBM PC as well as clever marketing on the part of Microsoft to get Windows onto every desktop. Please remember that while most IBM PCs were working in a single MS-DOS shell, Amiga users were working in multiple CLIs in a text or GUI environment.
It seems to be very easy for certain readers on Slashdot to label anyone who is not part of the deemed mainstream as a "zealot" without realising that software is not just about Windows and what runs on it - it's actually about what's
usable
by a particularly person and, more importantly, what's fun to use .Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
`"too many files"? I mean, really, what a load of crap.'
int fd = 0;
while( fd < INT_MAX )
fd = open( "file", O_RDONLY | O_CREAT );
printf("fd exeeded INT_MAX, out of files!\n");
'course I have no idea if that'd happen on VxWorks
What ticks me off is that all these companies that buy Amiga IP simply don't have a clue what to do with it. Yes, Gateway had it for a while (my guess is they wanted an easy "home multimedia center", but couldn't get their heads outta their as^H^H Windows), but dropped the boing ball.
This was the same mentality that Sierra had. They were so used to doing things the DOS way, that the total concept of multi-tasking escaped them. Amigans stopped buying their games, and Sierra (instead of learning how to program) dropped Amiga titles. Many others followed suit. I found lots of brilliant UK and European programmers as a result, though.
Believe it or not, I rarely play games (even Bill Gates refered to Amigas as "just a game machine"). I have still to find a program that does what Softlogik's PageStream does (for the money). Until I do, my A4K is still a fast and fun platform, 11 years old and aging well...
A4000 040/25 24MBram 2.5GBhd OS3.9 iBrowse YAM
A2000 030/25 9MBram 540MBhd OS3.1
3-A500s, 2-A1000s, 1-A600, 1-CDTV
(Don't get me started on the 8-bitters!)
A spokesman said the sale would have no adverse affect on the release of a consumer version of AmigaOS 4.0 later this year.
The same "later this year" Amiga OS 4 has been due out is since 2000.
Probably, given that it runs pretty well on near-calculator hardware. Personally, I'm waiting for a RISC-OS hand held PC ;-)
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
The curse of the Amiga is how it could go for a full 10 years, bouncing from owner to owner, without actually coming back to the market despite the clear demand.
Who was the "clear demand" from? The hardcore fans or the public?
I remember that, by the start of 1993, *before* C= (Commodore.. I'd almost forgotten that pictogram) went bankrupt, the focus had shifted to the PC. People at my school were exchanging PC games, not Amiga ones.
Well, I'm no Amiga expert, but it seems that if C= had come up with something like the A1200 circa mid-1990, they might have stood a better chance. The momentum towards the PC was already significant by the time the A1200 was announced, and good though it was, I don't think it was revolutionary enough to make people change their minds back.
I don't understand what they were playing at with the moronic A600. The A500 Plus had pretty much the same OS, and although the A600 had a better spec in some ways, it was also *worse* than the (essentially) 5-year old A500 in certain respects, so was no better on balance, but couldn't use half the A500 peripherals.
In short, in a Red-Queen world where you have to keep moving forward, the A600 was a step backwards, and a pointless diversion from the A1200 6 months later.
They should also have included the A1200 technology in the CDTV (Amiga-based rival to Philip's CDi)... but would that have justified UKP 500 (US$750 or so at the time)? No.
So, was there really a massive demand for Amigas when C= went bankrupt? I'm not convinced. I saw the light when Escom wanted to charge *more* for the new A1200s (same spec as the year before). *No-one* was going to pay that for an aging machine in 1995 except the core fans.
If whoever owns the Amiga rights comes up with something cool, then good luck to them, but I'll judge it on the basis of something new.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
AROS is a portable and free desktop operating system aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS 3.1, while improving on it in many areas. The source code is available under an open source license, which allows anyone to freely improve upon it...
I mean, the AmigaOS (as has all things Amiga) has been through hell since 1993, and I just dont see how this can be a good sign - unless it's a spinoff of the OS division, and I see no indication of that being the case.
:(
Only more delays, excuses, no-shows.... sad
(I'm an Amiga user since 1990, I might add)
Amigac
b
Commodore
d
Escom
f
Gateway
h
Ite
j
KMOS
anyone see a pattern here, or is the stupidity of the linux lusers just rubbing off on me?
Is J-sus some kind of new rap artist?
KMOS, Inc is filing suit against SCO for patent infringement, claiming that its Unix and Unixware products are based on Amiga source code.
This deal has already happend in April 2003!
Great information politics, Amiga Inc...!
Their only capital is the trust of some spirited, hard core nostalgians. These politics trash this completely..
rpp3po
You know what this means, don't you?
KMOS
l
Microsoft!
Still, it'd be at least one non-crappy product that they'd own.
It's Amiga so it can't be as simple as just a plain sale.
Check out the press release. Amiga announced it sold the property on April 23, 2003, not yesterday.
Note the name Garry Hare as CEO of KMOS in the press release. Then look at this scan of his Amiga Inc. CEO business card dated April 29, 2003. http://www.amiga.org/modules/myalbum/photo.php?lid =970
There was some discussion back in April 03 about Mr. Hare replacing Bill McEwen who according to this press release was still CEO this week. Or at least thought he was, whilst the person in charge of ordering business cards was the only one who actually knew he was out. :-)
I hadn't heard about the whole "is he or isn't he CEO" news until this slashdot artile prompted me to check out what's happened in the Amiga community in the last few years. Enough strange things have happened that it's like a bad TV movie. Who is going to play Al Haig in the movie?
I remember an Apple II emulator running on Amiga which performs 1.5 times better than same cpu running Apple.
;)
It was real hard to use it though, especially near impossible for warez people. Needed Apple disk drive and Apple rom chips.
I now own an Apple G5 and using OS X, with 768mb ram... Guess what? Sometimes a question pops into my mind, what would happen if Amiga Inc. was well and alive (speaking about days they ship 1200,4000 etc) with THIS kind of cpu, hardware?
I bet we would be still joking
That the true blue amiga zelots will actually give me a copy of workbench 3.x without giving me the speach that piracy will kill any chance amiga has for a comeback?
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
And the Amiga Boing Ball bounces once more yet to another company! When will the madness end?
Every time I see an Amiga article, I can't help but remember what has to have been the coolest game I ever played: Robocop on the Amiga 500. You could be the big other robot from the movie, and the graphics & playability were just amazing.
stuff |
How could we have an article about AmigaOS and not mention the great language itself: BCPL!
Here I am, writing a compiler for BCPL and no one seems to care...
Front end for GCC anyone?
Get a life
The famed "Curse of Amiga" seems to have more to do with having idiots in charge than anything. Commodore had one of the most powerful computing platforms ever conceived of in the mid 80's, but instead of focusing on it and making it better (eg releasing the AAA chipset in the late 80's as originally was planned) they decided to enter the PC market. Duh. Then Escom had its own problems and went belly up. Next up, Viscorp's cheerleaders / board of directors decided to pull out at the last minute (so the people who thought up the buyout went on to start Genesi). When Gateway bought out the IP they were only looking to fend off a possible buyout by having a larger amount of IP in their vault. The current Amino / Amiga Inc crew originally wanted _nothing_ to do with the "classic" platform, they wanted to use the name to sell PDA games, changed their minds after the community rebelled, and in the end back-stabbed everyone the worked with and are about to go bankrupt.
If only... if only Viscorp's directors hadn't pulled out... if only C='s management had realized what they had and not gone stupid. Bah.
Damien
The damn systems keep Overheating
I know because I got to speak with George Bush, our President and one of our nations greatest leaders. He told me that he wouldnt let the liberals take over the nation. He told me he had a plan. He said that the godless, child-molesting liberals would never again rule the white house because the average AMERICAN is too smart. Too smart to believe the child rapist's lies. Out President knows that Satan works through the liberals, liberals like John Kerry who is pushing his homosexual agenda. Homosexuality is important to them because it undermines Families, and that's what they want, that's what Satan wants. George Bush is not going to let Satan win, he told me himself.
I have to get back to hitting my bong now, thanks for listening!
I wonder how long it will be before KMOS Sues IBM and RedHat for AmigaO/S code being "copied" into Linux... and sues SCO for selling it...
Both for the atariST and amiga scenes, it was that the hardware was so far ahead of its time.
Each respective OS was nice in its own way ( personalites were different ), but were eventually surpassed, just as the hardware was.
However the requirments for the OS/apps also increased, almost negating the advances in hardware.
Its sad to see how little we have advanced over the years.. when you look back at what we did with so much 'less'.
I myself keep an old ST around just to show the 'kids' how things used to be. ( and an old 8080 to show even farther back... ) History is good for you.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
After all, the bits 0 and 1 have touched the UNIX source and so, according to SCOthink, are now the intellectual property of SCO ... and Amiga's OS makes flagrant and repeated use of these bits.
Nah, he's probably some right-wing fundie. He probably gets a hard-on thinking about Bush. Anybody see Curb Your Enthusiasm Sunday? Cocksuckers are the only ones who get all flustered when Bush is mentioned. Apologies to Cady Huffman.
It's DYING!
(except that, in this case, it's really more like the walking dead)
Good for you censored those swear words. Now all we need is to get religion out of politics and were home and dry.
Religion as caused most of the suffering that goes on in the world
Lucky bastards, I'd have to pay money for that.
Bob Goatse is the Goatse Guy. He's best known as the illegitimate son of Richard Stallman. Also known for setting a record for stuffing 6 billiard balls in his anus.
You can have a LOT of fun with people hopelessly mired in computer nuances. Watch this. Hey! Has anyone seen the mouse to my Amiga??
Tom: Oh! Hahaha! Amiga!! Ha hah!
Crow: Amiga? Oh come on!
Both (hails of derisive laughter): Hahahaha!!
Tom: Now THERE'S a machine for you...Hahah!
Crow: Hey! Has anyone seen my FAT ANGUS drive?? Hahah!
Joel: We'll be back.
Magic Voice: Commercial sign in five...four...three...two...commercial sign now!
Tom: 'Unrecoverable appilication error'?! This is really cute, Crow! I suppose we'll have to re-enter the entire spreadsheet now, huh?!
Crow: Noooo, no, no, no. Just rewrite the 'autoexec.bat' file and stick in a memory manager, that's all. Just take a minute. Don't worry!
KDE has dCop, which nearly all apps support. dBus is coming along that GNOME is likely to support (I think they have their own version already COBRA or something?) Combine that with scripting language of your choice (python has KDE bindings so that might be easiest) and you have must the same thing. There is even a REXX port for Unix somewhere if you like REXX.
Mind I've never used an Amiga so I'm not sure if they are used the same, but they could be.
What really killed the Amiga was the price. By 1992, when the new AGA Amigas finally came out, PC clones with hard drives and VGA cards and everything were getting pretty damn cheap. But Amigas were expensive as hell. Plus, about 1992 is when the "cool" games started being released for the PC, not to mention the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Once the Amiga was no longer the best game platform (and even the AGA Amigas were only about equal to a Super Nintendo for gaming ability), it was all over.
The plan is to come back in 3 years and sue them for contributing parts of Amiga to Linux.
The Amiga was great in it's day because it did some things no other computer could do at the time, but not anymore.
I used to love that feature. Pull down a low res screen and there's a high res screen hiding behind it. In some ways it was easier to use than these multi-desktop managers in that you could swicth to different resolution screens for doing different tasks. Does any OS have that?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
America sucks: 911 terrorists get free hookers!
Come on, compare their capabilities to PCs, remember once Amiga was racing with SGI on their own market.
PC with CGA or VGA? And SB sound? To race with Amiga?
It was all commodore's greedy bosses I say.
What! Other options?!? Is this just an Atari troll, or have I really be living under this stone too long?
The Amiga was originally a hallmark of innovation. We all know that. There's no reason to rehash it all. But this bizarre ten year saga of attempting to revitalize the Amiga...well, it's somewhere between sad and pointless. "Amiga" doesn't even mean anything any more. It's an OS without hardware? It's a PC-like box that uses the PowerPC? The interest level here is zero.
If the people involved in all of this have passion and drive and a burning desire to innovate, then by all means do so! The world needs a new home computer! The world needs a computer that's several orders of magnitude simpler overall than a typical Linux or Windows box, one that fosters creativity and doesn't suck your soul dry like everything else out there. But PLEASE, let's stop pouring time and money down the Amiga hole. It's dead and gone.
(Aside: To be fair, many UNIX hackers were thinking the same thing about their pet OS back in the late 1980s. UNIX was getting a reputation as a dinosaur, a bloated relic from the 70s. At the time, it looked like it wouldn't take much to boost much simpler perating systems, such as that of the Mac, which had a major edge in usability at the time, and extend them enough to subsume traditional heavy iron OSes. But then much to the surprise of old hackers like Stallman and Raymond, the web--and to a lesser extent Linux--brought UNIX back into the limelight. Imagine if all of a sudden the C64 made a huge comeback. Just think of all the old C64 hackers that would be dancing in the aisle. When I see such people evangelizing Linux, I always keep this in mind.)
Ack. The curse is that people don't GET what the Amiga was. Commodore died because they didn't get it, and Amiga Inc. will die because they don't get it. I'm not even sure what the others were trying to accomplish :/
Amiga was NOT about hardware. It was great hardware, but that only played a support role to the OS. It wasn't even the OS. Again, the OS played the support role, as a good OS should, to getting things done. AmigaOS was WAY ahead of it's time for performance and usability. It was just natural to work on. When some 'gets' THAT and builds a similar modern equivalent by taking the PRINCIPLES of AmigaOS, they'll go places.
Pix:
- inside, well lit
- It's alive!!
- A few stylish ones in an open dir
Good stuff...blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Amiga was never in competition with SGI. Newtek and the Video Toaster/Lightwave were. And as great as the Video Toaster was, it really had little to do with the Amiga. The Amiga was just a convenient interface to the Video Toaster. You're probably thinking of the much-vaunted use of Video Toaster/Amigas/Lightwave to render special effects for TV shows and movies. Which was true, but the key word is "render". Amigas could NEVER display those high-res images. Not even close. In later years you could buy add-on video cars that included SVGA chipsets (as seen on the PC!) so you could have a high-res 24-bit display. But those weren't available in 1992. I'll say it again- the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis put the final nail in the coffin.
Well, I don't know about you, but when I had my Amiga, I was still a child and didn't give a flying fuck about video editing. Why is it all you people are so fascinated about fucking video editing? Is that all you ever do?
The Amiga was a great gaming machine back in the days tho, and that's what I used it for.
"We made out like frickin' bandits," President Bill McEwen was heard to chuckle as the screen door of his double-wide mobile home slammed shut.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Actually (S)VGA was far superior to AGA, and SVGA was a reality on the PC scene in 1992, even earlier.
CGA sucked, of course, but it was early 1980's technology.
Original Sound Blaster wasn't that great, but soon after came dozens of improved sound cards, from Creative and other manufacturers. Especially one to mention is GUS (Gravis Ultrasound), which was THE sound card to own in early to mid 1990s.
WTF is "enabling technology?" Marketing Reps are killing this industry. :)
--AC
How do I get into this camp?
Custom screens. Multiple programs running on virtual screens in various resolutions, with *instant* switching. No re-draw, as they were all always being drawn.
"Sure it was a great machine with a great OS - in its time. Move on."
People are moving on. They're creating a new platform with a new OS. The intimate hardware/software bond works well for Apple, and the same formula will work for Amiga[1]. Windows/Linux has commoditized the computing market, but there's still room in this world for a smaller platform that's not everything to everyone. That also relieves them of a lot of "performance pressure" issues, and they can concentrate on what it does best. I look forward to innovative designs (hardware and software) that will come out, exactly because it's not following the "in" crowd, and their "legacy". Maybe Amiga will be the new R&D lab others look to, to copy.
[1] This same formula worked for UNIX workstations.
I think they plan to sue duke nukem for infringing on their vaporware patents..
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
This will certainly be the Year Of Amiga
Huh? My submission of this story (under the title 'Amiga, Inc. sells the family silver') was rejected about six hours before this one hit the main page! Different editors? Submission history (rocketjam has 17 successful submissions, Swarfega has 0 - and I've only ever submitted two)? I dunno!
Great games: Speedball 2, Alien Breed, Stunt Car Racer, Lemmings, Xenon 2, Chaos Engine
Great animations: Eric Schwartz's Aerotoons & Amy The Squirrel, Tobias Richter's Star Trek animations
Great demo groups: RSI, Kefrens, Fairlight, Rebels
Great apps: Lightwave, Directory Opus, CygnusEd
Great multi-tasking hardware: e.g. opening four CLI windows, typing "format df0:" in each one and watching the Amiga simultaneously format the same floppy disk four times over! (Try that on a PC!)
Well-written OS: e.g. Workbench took the trouble of reading file-header information and using datatypes to decide whether a file was a JPEG, GIF, ANIM, etc. and didn't care what the file extension was. (Try that in Windows!)
Good memories that I'd be happy to return to...
...but for everything else, there's Linux.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
(no text...)
Who owns the Amiga hardware these days?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not forgetting that if you bought one of the higher end Amigas - 1500/2000/2500/3000/4000 you had the pay for a monitor on top. PC owners got a monitor thrown in with the sticker price which was frequently lower than the Amiga. By the time the 4000 came along - shoehorned into a PC box it looked ridiculously overpriced to all but those people who desperately needed an Amiga.
My 4000 still works, but none of my monitors will synch to its frequency. Sigh - the march of progress.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The fools !
I'm thinking that with compositing engines becoming popular, this will be easy to emulate (not certain how Amiga did it). Take a high resolution and "emulate" lower resolutions within using OpenGL.
AGA was superior to (base) VGA (8-bit color 640x480 60Hz noninterlaced). IIRC, the AGA chipset could run in VGA mode; it wasn't used much because most Amigas used NTSC-based monitors which couldn't handle the signal. Somewhere in my crawlspace I have a dongle I built which allowed you to hook up a standard VGA monitor to the Amiga's video port.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
the first time I downloaded pr0n...sniff.. sniff.. It was on my Amiga 500... Ah those were the days, only took 23 minutes to DL.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Nope. VGA/SVGA of 1992 gave similar colors and resolution. But the bit clincher wasn't res or colors. VGA had it's own frame buffer, which could only be accessed through video card registers and at the maximum bandwidth of ISA. AGA, like most other home computer graphics systems was directly memory mapped to CPU memory address space. AGA was therefore much faster especially for games.
"It will have no adverse affect on the release of a consumer release of AmigaOS 4.0"...nothing to worry about, AOS4 will STILL not be released.
Most anticipated vaporware ever.
Braddock Gaskill
What you say is correct, but I disagree with some your conclusions. As someone who remembers the silly excuses for OSes like CP/M and AppleDos, I'd say the consumer sector is overdue for a new hardware paradigm, not a better OS. I also remember speculation on how APL terminals be rented like utilities by mainframe owners- PCs leapfrogged that concept. The PC OS should be completely transparent to users, and of little interest to nerds either, but Microsoft needs to build on its brand, however, partly to sell MS Office.
Another thing, similar in some ways to Datatypes, that I liked on the Amiga, was the XPK library: A (defacto) standard way of handling compression and symmetric encryption. Write an XPK plugin thingie (I forget what they were called) for AES crypto or some new compression algorithm, and dozens of programs retroactively/magically got the ability to use it, just like with Datatypes.
Some clock-cycle-counting uber-hacker writes a DES that is 10% faster? All your software get to take advantage.
That is the way software components should be integrated! Very good design.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
As a onetime owner of a A2000, which I got as a HS graduation present back in 89' - which I kept current through tons of cash in upgrades (1MB Agnus, de-interlacer, SCSI hard drive controller, 68040 accelerator and a bunch o' 32MB memory which was a lot circa the early 90s, and upgrading the Kickstarts through 3.1), I finally succumb to evil (Intel) empire in the mid 90s selling the albatros for a brand spanking new PPro 200 with Windows 95 which ran a bazillion Mhz faster, ran the software I worked with, and most importantly played the latest and greatest games.
;)
I still have fond memories of the Amiga. Who can forget the elegant OS and GUI, AmigaBasic (care of Microsoft), AREXX (care of IBM?), multimedia capabilities beyond any of it's peers (again circa late 80s yearly 90s), and a clean/usable CLI/Shell which rivaled anything UNIX had at the time. And how can you forget that this platform was capable of running the original VideoToaster (for those who had enough cash, unfortunately not me) which brought "broadcast quality" video editing to the masses, had fully capable authorware via AmigaVision, and ran all the best 3D packages (Lightwave, Imagine, Caligari, Sculpt 3D). And last but not least, the games. Sure none took advantage of HAM, but those custom chips were far and away superior to anything that the PC or Mac could offer at the time. And most ran smooth as silk on the plain jane 7Mhz 68000 processor which power-ed/s most Amigas.
But to see the Amiga evolution has been comical and sad. Now that we're on 10+ years of companies not having any idea of what to do with the Amiga, I think it's lost any relevance it had left in the alternative platform space.
In the multimedia niche, the Amiga now needs to contend with PCs and Macs which have kept pace with technology improvements. While the Amiga revolutionized the industry when introduced, does anybody really believe it can do it again in this arena?
In the video niche, I think NLE killed this niche for the Amiga a while ago.
In terms of cool factor, there have been a couple of attempts (BeOS comes to mind) to build a better mousetrap, but I think Linux fills this niche now.
And finally in the games niche, the consoles took this niche and will likely never give it back to PCs.
So again I ask the question of relevance. I honestly hope that the new OS owners release a product, don't get me wrong, but it's just a matter of time before the inevitable fade into obscurity... Unless Microsoft buys it for their XBox II
I can see which camp you were in..
Being from the Atari camp, i dont agree with any of the statements that it was 'just CPM' and ' gem was already available'.
It was a much more advanced version of Gem ( PC gem was painfull ) and TOS was not 'just CPM'.
Though i agree about the goal to make it a reasonably priced 68k based system with more advanced features than was common in those days, which was met.
However, at this stage of the game, its all irrelevant anyway.. both camps lost out to time, and shortsidedness..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yeap back in 1987 i was the only 7 year old to have a 16bit arcade quality machine in my bedroom.. Nintendo? Pha.. pedestrians. Kids around the 'hood would line up just to bathe in its glory! I road the wave of triumph and was the object of fawning for miles and miles! Auugghh oh what happened!? come back! I have snacks! Free snacks for all! Ooohh lord who am i.. I am cold.. so cold..
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
I was never wowed by all the fancy multimedia hardware -- not my interest -- but I remember being wowed by the fundamental platform, which did seem to be a lot more advanced than MS-DOS or MacOS. I came from a Unix background, and I considered true pre-emptive multitasking (as opposed to bogus "voluntary" multitasking) to be a fundamental OS feature. It would be a very long time before Microsoft or Apple offered this feature. AmigaOS offered it from day one. And on cheap hardware! It was obvious to me that apps written to the Amiga API would be drastically more stable and robust than similar apps on competing platforms.
So why didn't Amiga succeed? Not a curse, not bad luck. They were just late to the party. In 1985, computers that an ordinary person could afford to own had been around for almost a decade, and the novelty had worn off. It was just a couple years too late to introduce a new platform and expect it to succeed on technical brilliance alone. In order to survive, the Amiga needed to acquire a critical mass of users that would keep the platform healthy. And quickly, because an industry shakeout was imminent. I'm pretty sure the people who created the Amiga didn't understand this. But even if they did understand, they didn't really have enough time to pull this off.
In 1986, my brother-in-law asked for advice on buying his first computer. I strongly recommended the Amiga, mainly because it had MIDI hardware that he needed, and that he'd have to pay extra for on any other system. But despite the extra cost, he got a Mac. Why? All his friends and colleagues had Macs. His publisher used Macs, and if he didn't get one, he'd have a hard time sharing files with them.
By 1986, the user base Amiga needed was already committed to other platforms.
WTF is "enabling" technology? Is that SV-speak for a company with no direction, no products and thus, no sales? So this is where all the "facilitators" went, to start "enabling technology" companies? No wonder jobs are being sent overseas....
With the new Amiga hardware and OS a lot of that is a moot point now as the hardeware is now PCI video based and does not use the video-centric custom hardware anymore and the software is being re-coded to support that.
So now the Amiga is just another me-too multi-media/internet/gaming/set-top whatever wannabe with an even smaller software library then Linux or MacOS... and no Killer App. They may be getting back on-par with the times but unless there is something really exciting about it... who really cares?
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
OMG I have used many types of BASIC over the years, but the MS BASIC given with the A500 was crap. Not so much the language, but the tools themselves.
Good manual, though. Nice lay-flat spiral bindings.
Shock Trooper
(back in the day)
Commodore marketing sucked in the UK too. Amigas were more than a match for PCs OR Macs, and they were sold as games machines. And not even games machines for older kids, most of the time :/
they just keep getting sold off to the next highest bidders...
long live the Amiga... Vive le Amiga...
Well... guess what: Apple bought NeXT and more or less *became* NeXT (since all of the NeXT board and Steve Jobs are now running Apple). Also since Mac OS X is basically OPENSTEP 5.0/Mach (in reality...).
:)
So, I guess I was right! NeXT *did* outlive the Amiga.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Sounds like COM objects to me. You can copy data of any registered type into the clipboard, and paste it into any application, assuming the application can deal with OLE containers.
Anything that registers itself with a MIME type can be brought up in IE - such as quicktime, flash, acrobat, etc. And COM objects can of course be used in your applications very easily, especially if you develop in higher-level languages such as VB or Delphi.
Hands in my pocket
> Ok, I'll bite, name one feature that you miss today from AmigaOS.
How about-
-Shuting down by flicking the On/Off switch to Off?
-Easy to set-up services in a system that is free from the PC Worms/Trojans/Virus hazzards?
-Being able to install apps (etc) where YOU want?
-Being able to install services which work WITH the system, and which the parent OS doesn't try to make you use what it wants you to use instead?
There! I've named FOUR advantages.
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Take a good look at the parents list of previous owners of the brand. The Amiga curse; to bankrupt or at least marginalize every company that owns the trademark.
The list:
- "A"miga
- "C"ommodore
- "E"scom
- "G"ateway 2000
- Amiga, "I"nc (weak, I know)
- "K"MOS
Every second letter in the alphabet. After KMOS is ruined, it's time for "M"... Let's hope M stands for Microsoft!I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Hm. I can't try it myself, but maybe the DBLPAL/-NTSC, Euro72 or Multiscan monitor drivers might work (with or without VGAOnly)? At least that's what the WB manual suggests.
I picked up a flickerfixer/scandoubler/VGA-adapter "brick" from eBay for EUR 10 or so. It works fine with my A1200 and the three (non-multiscan) PC monitors I tested it with.
Amiga has been passed on to:
Commodore
Escom
Gateway
Amiga International
KMOS
Notice a pattern? What's the next letter in the sequence? What company could that be??
Tha Amiga spearheaded the desktop video revolution, brought things like the GUI, 3D animation, graphics manipulation to the 'unwahsed masses' that couldn't afford a then-hiperexpensive Mac or underpowered PC, and managed to keep evolving until competitors won by brute hardware force, many years later.
I'll always have respect for the platform and all people involved on its' glory. But we had to move on.
In order to make the same impact today it made back then, a 'new Amiga' would have to be able to do radiosity rendering in realtime, accept, mix & match, and output any kind of video/audio media; do things like flawless chromakeying and virtual sets on the fly, have some kind of emulation layer enabling it to run any MacOS/Windows app, and do it without needing more than a 1Ghz processor.
>Andthat's what happened, back in the Amiga golden years.
Best wishes,
Mike.
People can get a better idea of the Amiga's trials & tribulations by visiting the Amiga History Guide.
There is a large section on the original Amiga Inc., Commodore, Escom, Gateway and the later Amiga Inc.. Most people also forget that Atari were also one of the bidders for the Amiga technology.
It is also interesting that the businesses that own the Amiga follow a pattern - A(miga Inc.), C(ommodore), E(scom, G(ateway 2000), A(miga Inc), K(MOS). Admittedly this series of coincidences became a bit screwy when Amino bought the Amiga in 2000, but at least we're back on track. Maybe Microsoft will buy it next?
> - Assigns: Shortcuts basically. Windows only gets halfway with its shortcut - I can't include the shortcut in a filename, I can only use the shortcut on its own (eg, c:\shortcut\dir_inside_shortcut) - was this fixed in XP?
d e_ori ginal\file.ext
Okay, as for shortcuts... Windows shortcuts (".lnk" files) are still broken in the way that you described. However, the NTFS filesystem supports symbolic links, called "NTFS Junctions," although Windows provides no facility for creating them, and additionally, it's not able to tell them from the original file at all. (Meaning if you delete a symlink to a file or directory within Window's file manager, it deletes the original!)
You can create symlinks on Windows (if your disk is formatted NTFS) with a program called Winbolic.
So anyway, a symbolic link does work the way you're describing, so that you can do:
\path\to\something\symbolic_link\folder_insi
On a Unix-based OS like Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X, of course, you can also create symbolic links--without third party programs. The ln command is what you use. Also, I can vouch specifically that although Mac OS doesn't provide a GUI for making symbolic links, it does understand how to handle them, if you, for example, delete a link. I'd expect the same of Linux and *BSD.
A600 was a good machine, but it broke software compatibility. (The chipset was changed.)
How many of these changes had already happened with the A500 Plus (released late 1991)? (Yes, I know that machine wasn't released in the USA; but they could have)
My point isn't that the A600 was crap per se- it's that it was a pointless and stupid Amiga variant for the time. It came out 7-8 months after the A500 Plus. Yes, it had new interfaces.... which meant that a lot of the old A500 peripherals no longer fitted.
Then (IIRC) when the A1200 came out (which is what the A600 should have been at its price), many peripherals for that didn't work with the A600. Piggy in the middle. Why did they release a new incompatible machine that was *broadly* no better than the A500 series?
As you say, it had a nice IDE interface (good point), but no keypad. This last point is very telling; I heard that the motherboard was stamped 'A300', which was meant to be C='s "budget" Amiga. From that perspective, the A600 would have made more sense.
My point is this. The A600 was more similiar to the A500 than the A1200; the A500 Plus introduced AmigaDOS 2.0 etc and upgraded chips, but was sensible to keep broad compatibility with the A500, because it wasn't an "all-new" Amiga. That "all-new" Amiga was the A1200.
The A600 was a different-but-not-new-and-improved enough distraction at a time when the A1200 should have already been out.
As I said before, in a market moving forward very fast, any significantly new machine with compatibility issues has to be significantly better on balance than the machine it replaced. The A600 wasn't.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Amiga bites the dust again eh? I hope Hyperion had something in the contract about this one.
Hey, you might have noticed the shot to aros.sourceforge.net.
It's actually pretty nice! Actually reminds me of booting up Workbench!
-- I downloaded a recent snapshot ISO and burned it. It booted great on my PC, and I was able to play a bit. It looks like it would make an awesome development platform for anybody! -- they've created something called 'ZUNE' that it a lot like MUI...
For those of you who hate programming for GUI's, amiga was the only system I programmed for that I didn't feel like I was muddling through to make GUI calls work.
It's 15 megs, download it and give it a try!
Click here if you're lazy
- Brett
Exactly! My A1000 with genlock and extra 2.5 MB of memory is all packed away. I haven't touched it in about 15 years. People (me too) really loved those things. Commodore management and business decisions however, were nothing short of craptacular. In 89 they tanked. In 90 I got a pc (cheap). I replaced the PC 4 times since then. The first one I sold, second I threw out. Third and fourth are still running (even right now). Amiga was cool tech in 1985, but just fond memories in 2004.
In what way is it 'given' that the British guys were lying about their treatment?
Dead Horse for sale
Very good deal, was very fast when alive, still has crowd of fans and mourners.
May we never see th
So it's just as good as AmigaOS' RAM disk, but uses virtual memory so it can even grow beyond the amount of RAM you have. Score one point for Linux.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The Amiga yet again fires another owner and moves on to the next one.
Amiga/Commodore have done everything they possibly can to sabotage their own success. Based on the merits of their technologies, they would be in contention for top desktop computer system. However, through a series of neglected cutting edge technologies, horrible promotion, and absolute lack of vision, they've managed to kill one of the best things the computing industry has ever seen. Welcome to the last nail in the coffin...
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
how 'bout RTS game style scrolling of desktop workspace.. in the resolution settings, you specified both a screen size and screen resolution if the screen size was larger than the screen resolution, the screen scrolled, kind of like Mario this made a great accessibility feature for those of us who didn't have 21 inch monitors or fighter-pilot vision
move.l $4, a6
What you describe is the DefIcons system. A very nice system that was packaged with NewIcons.
DefIcons would, as you say, recognize file types without relying on filename extentions, and open the correct program for the file. (If you hadn't done some daft reconfiguring opening text files in DPaint.)
DefIcons was, from AmigaOS3.5 included in the OS.
Datatypes are really an easy way for programs to access files of different types.
Let's say I'm writing an image program and the user opens file xyz.
The filetype of xyz is not internally supported by my image program, but luckily I've written it with Datatype support.
If the user has a installed a datatype for the type of file xyz on his system, my program will open file xyz right away. Some datatypes even allows saving in the new format. (IIRC)
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
They must be replacing quite a lot of them with dirt-cheap PCs and cards now, though? I'd assume that with the move to all-digital technology, there must come a point where the analogue-based toaster/Amiga setup doesn't provide the facilities (and, to some extent, quality) that a modern studio would require. There is no dirt-cheap PC card to do this. The cheapest method is an Amiga with either a genlock or a toaster. Even the PC genlock-style devices just don't have the quality of the Amiga's. The reason the Amiga was great for TV is that it was originally designed as a gaming system, and its internal clocks ran at 60Hz [30 fps, NTSC version]. I have two Amigas, one A3000 with a Newtek Video Toaster (original version - 2000), and one A2500. Television is an analog system, why would you use a digital PC generation method and convert it when the Amiga has analog generation built in?
Video Production Support
What does this mean for Cloanto's Amiga Forever? do they still have the rights to redistribute the old OSes and Kickstarts?
Also, KMOS, Inc., seems to be a new company, which aquired Itec, LLC, who was in agreement with Amiga, Inc.
KMOS seems to be creating a website at this time.
Apparently KMOS's website
Video Production Support
There is no dirt-cheap PC card to do this.
Of course, when I said "dirt cheap" , it was meant to be relative... It's pretty surprising though, I'd assume that someone could have done it at a decent price.
Television is an analog system, why would you use a digital PC generation method and convert it when the Amiga has analog generation built in?
Don't know what like the US is, but in the UK, all new cable and satellite systems are digital, and free-to-view DVB (digital-terrestrial) TV (through your aerial/antenna) is becoming very common (got it myself).
Now, you *do* notice the quality difference between different sources, and I wonder how much of it is down to analogue conversion. Of course, US programs have to be converted to different frame rates and resolutions, so the loss could be occurring there, but some recent US stuff I've seen appears to be *way* better than I'd assume NTSC-sourced material would be (cf. some stuff that still displays fuzziness and analogue artifacts). This may be because it remained digital.
OTOH, I doubt this is an issue for the average US cable operator yet, since they won't be requiring the same standards as a major network.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Even with digital TV, you can't get a cheap card; the cheapest method would probably be some sort of VGA [an analog signal from a digital source] - TV conversion [back to digital again] and that would only be 480p, Digital TV hasn't really taken off in the US yet, the FCC is fighting to move all broadcast tv stations off to digital bands, and failing. Some major networks are simulcasting in DTV, but that's aerial only, most cable companies won't carry it. I know my cable company carries it if you buy their DTV service AND a special HDTV box, but very few networks are carried in native DTV, the rest are converted from analog anyway. Also, US DTV is/will be very compressed (with many artifacts) due to the fact that each company will be able to cram up to 15 stations on one channel, and when one of their feeds needs bandwith, the rest suffer. Even with Cable DTV I notice artifacts amd delays on analog channels because of the cable company's recompression. The UK is much better off with their old analog 'High Definition Television System' [PAL] and their new Digital TV system.
Video Production Support
Also, US DTV is/will be very compressed (with many artifacts) due to the fact that each company will be able to cram up to 15 stations on one channel
When you say channel, do you mean the bandwidth taken up by one existing analogue station?
BTW, there *are* some compression artifacts with UK digital, especially on poor-quality analogue-sourced material. My DVB-T aeriel box *is* better than I remember digital cable being circa 2 years ago, but I don't know how much of that is down to the DVB-T system itself, and how much is down to the box's decoding (you probably know that, for example, PowerDVD gives a *much* better picture than Windows Media Player on DVDs, even though the source is the same).
And yes, there *are* delays compared with the analogue signal, but I'm not sure what can be done about that. The less the delay, the less possibility there is for exploiting differential compression (think about it), and I'm sure that some of the artifacts you see (particularly with fades) could be reduced if the delay was increased. This assumes that encoding is done on the fly; for prerecorded material, it might be possible to use pre-encoded material, but this would have to be mixed with live announcements, etc.
The UK is much better off with their old analog 'High Definition Television System' [PAL] and their new Digital TV system.
Yep.. I have to say that from what I've heard, PAL is better than NTSC- but IIRC PAL was designed with the failings of NTSC in mind and didn't include backward-compatibility (would it be accurate to call it an improved NTSC? I don't know).
I can't fairly compare NTSC to PAL, as I've never seen an NTSC program on an NTSC system. It's often hard to know how much quality was lost in the NTSC->PAL conversion process and how much is due to NTSC itself, but I do remember seeing American programs when I was fairly young and noticing that they looked quite "fuzzy" with weird colours.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).