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AmigaOS 4.0 Developer Pre-release
David Doyle writes "Hyperion Entertainment and
the Amiga OS 4.0 development team announced on Amigaworld.net that after nearly 30 months of painstaking development the Amiga OS 4.0 Developer Pre-release has gone gold and will be sent to the duplication plant on Monday, April 19, 2004. The Amiga OS 4.0 Developer Pre-release consists of a current snapshot of AmigaOS 4.0 for the AmigaOne platform with a straightforward HTML installation guide in English, German, French and Italian as well as the Amiga OS 4.0 SDK. The Amiga OS 4.0 SDK will allow near effortless migration of existing Amiga OS 3.x source-code to OS 4.0 as well as the creation of altogether new content. Full
announcement and Amiga OS4 SDK feature list."
Phew, just in time. I've been seeing reports that BSD is officially dead, so it's a good thing AmigaOS is here to fill the void.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I've only been waiting since '94! I don't know if my A4000 would have lasted another year.
that's better than Microsoft is managing right now. :)
all they need is hardware to run it on. Seriously who sells a motherboard capable of running AmigaOS and what are the advantages?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Here's more info in AmigaOS4, features, screenshots, etc. Looking forward to this!
Ok.. Now we're getting somewhere!
---- You have been programmed by the Illuminati to not see the word ""!
Unfortunately it is slashdotted already, and there were only 10 comments when I tried!
I don't know much about this project, however.
- Jax
Can someone explain to an Amiga outsider what this is?
I am familiar with the old Amiga, and all the cool things it could do long before anyone else. I had a couple friends that swore they were the greatest thing ever, but I never really used one (I was an Apple ][e user). There are frequent announcements about new Amiga stuff... but in today's computing world, I'm not sure what that means.
- Is this a standalone OS, or a modified Linux / BSD system?
- Does it run on Amiga hardware, PowerPC, x86, or something else?
- It is compatible with the old Amiga software, API's, etc?
- What is the compelling reason for this to exist? What does it do better than all the other options available?
Amiga? Ameeeega? Is this a dog breed?
...where are the machines for me to run it on?
I'm not making fun of anyone here, and I seriously would like to know; I've always been hearing about Amiga this and Amiga that here on Slashdot every once in a while, and doing a little sniffing around on the web there appears to be a pretty active Amiga community. Also, they're still developing the operating system, so there still must be Amigas, right? Right?
Well, that's what I was hoping, but after doing some heavy searching on google I haven't been able to turn up a single machine. All of the suspect web sites like Amiga's corporate site and other places don't give any information other than "Contact your local Amiga dealer." Great. Where am I supposed to find one of those? After a little searching about that, nothing good really came up. Most of the sites I found either a) didn't exist anymore or b) didn't really have any Amiga stuff.
Okay, maybe I am just looking in all of the wrong places, but if somebody could point me out to some good resources then that would be great; I always love to try different and unusual systems, and I'm really interested in this AmigaOS. I just don't have anything to run it on.
Fascinating project, if I may say so myself.
I guess AmigaOS will still ignore MMU. With proper memory management Amiga would still rule. ;-)
This is throttled because of its dependency to a dated, broken and very expensive G4 clone. There are already better AmigaOS-like alternatives: emulation, MorphOS, AROS. Look elsewhere.
Apparently they already have issues using GPL'ed code.
a tegory=news&start=101&144
Look here http://www.ann.lu/comments2.cgi?view=1082146175&c
"The Amiga OS 4.0 SDK will allow near effortless migration of existing Amiga OS 3.x source-code to OS 4.0 as well as the creation of altogether new content."
.... well, you get the point.
Well, that's great. So, in other words, they can play their old Amiga games on it... if they can convince the makers to come out of retirement and port them. Or they can run their wonderful old Amiga graphics manipulation apps... if they can convince the makers to come out of retirement and port them. Or
This is going to really really upset the old-school Amiga fans. For all intents and purposes, it isn't AmigaOS at all!
It is as if the Linux kernel received no updates at all for ten years after 2.8 was finished... then suddenly, wow, "Linux 3.0" was announced! But it said that it wouldn't run old apps compiled under Linux 2.x-- oh, but it "would make it trivial to port apps originally coded for Linux 2.x". By which time, of course, none of said source code would even be in general circulation...
How the heck can they call this "AmigaOS" if it has essentially ZERO backwards-compatibility with previous AmigaOSes? Jesus. This is worse than those non-commercial/FOSS efforts to create a "new AmigaOS". I could have sworn one of them can at least run old AmigaOS apps, if only in emulation...
The LEAST they could have done was provide a "Classic AmigaOS layer", like what Apple did with Mac OS X to allow it to run "Classic" (pre-X) Mac OS apps...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
What does this mean? How can a "Developer pre-release" of an OS go gold? I thought that expression was for pop music that sold x number of copies. Is this yet another symptom of "we're Americans therefore we're marketing bots"?
We'll we soon see pre-taste-tested cereals go gold? New color lipstick go platinum? New hip-hop slang words?
I used to program professionally on the Amiga. I was part of the original Video Toaster team at Newtek back in the day. That was a decade ago!!!!For god's sake just die!!
Evil Man
...at how they didn't deal with a bug in OS3.5 that froze my Amiga semi-daily (but occasionally three times a day) for the last year that I used my Amiga.
And how they ignored it as a problem, and how the update that should have had the fix mainly appeared to contain christmasy animgifs.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Remember the movie 'The Sixth Sense'?
Aren't the dead always the last to realize that they're actually dead?
Do Amiga users ever find it, well,... strange that sometimes people in a crowd will walk right up to them and then right through them?
Or are they too busy thinking up new features for the next operating system?
If you're wondering why there's people developing this OS... check out the name of the company: Hyperion **entertainment**
Is AmigaOS free? If so, where can I download it?
Serious question from someone for whom Amigas were games machines as a kid.
Who uses amigas nowadays? People nostalgically playing old games? Is it kick-ass for music or something?
Is AmigaOS designed for modern hardware, and can you do everything with it that you can with other systems?
I see there are a few similar questioning posts. Everyone seems to be like, "Oh, cool, but why..?"
#define struct union
you mean, to all 5 users ?
seriously, isn't a hardcopy a bit ridic here ? They barely sell a copy, so better not waste cash on duplication and offer a download instead.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
This hardware will run AmigaOS, MorphOS, and and PPC version of Linux.h p
http://pegasosppc.com/operating_systems.p
It rocked as a games platform and for video editing. 15 years ago.
i on /commodore-amiga-500_small.jpg
http://computermuseum.50megs.com/images/collect
Today?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It was great, when it came out. It rocked the world with unseen multimedia performance, the perfect integration of OS and chipset. I remember being in aw, seeing the first demo on the A1000, these boing balls bouncing. It was something I hadn't ever seen before. I fell in love with the system.
But all good things come to an end, amiga is well over its due date. Let it rest, let it be in the league of the C=64, old abandonned system with a niche of its own and a bunch of enthousiasts hacking on it. Everything else is just extending something which now looks quite pityful and miserable. Retire her.
AmigaOS 4.0 has been out for months. I bought it about 2 months ago and it's running on a pIII 550.
I had it on a very very very old box before, but I was too young to care. Now I'd really like to give it another go, but the cost of holding me back. I might hate it. I'm not expecting great hardware support OR software, why should I have to pay before I really know anything about it?
Anyone know what license it's under? And is there a free or trial version?
I was an Amiga fanatic for many many years; It is/was an amazing operating system. The way it handles multitasking was something else. It was with reluctancy that i bought my first PC with windows. I always hated windows there were so many things that AmigaOS did better simple things like formatting a disk or the way it handled screens. I've been using linux for many years now. Im glad to be using a decent operating system again.
...
I would love to see AmigaOS succeed in the marketplace again like it once did. But even this new release visually looks very poor and dated. In all honesty they should just open up the source instead of flogging a dead horse. AmigaOS will always live on as a hobbyist OS things like AROS WinUAE and whatever else will see to this. But I really dont think a proprietary OS stands a chance in this world any more. I really cant see Amiga succeeding with their wildest dreams using the closed business model.
Amiga OS still has a warm place in many peoples hearts but not this way. The kindest thing to do is open up the source to the community.
Dont get me wrong though, I wish them all the luck; prove me wrong please do. But id rather see it go the way BeOS did!
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
And you guys thought that Mac gaming was behind the times! Sheesh!
For it's time it was *years* ahead of the competition for multimedia type work. Full gui built in, video, audio, games etc.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Amiga died over 10 years ago. I have many fond memories of playing amiga games, but this is blasphemy.
Please, let it rest in peace!
It may be a little off-topic, but I just discovered a seriously cool Atari ST program.
Atari ST is was a 'cousin' computer popular at the same time (about 15 years ago) as the original Amiga.
It is a powerful sys-ex voice editor for an obscure but magically powerful tone module music synthesizer that I found on Ebay for peanuts.
It only runs through an advanced emulator program that allows old but useful programs for the Atari ST to be run on modern PCs. It's the STeem emulator. Kudos to the people who got it to actually work and have been able to keep the Atari ST programs alive long after the platform has been forgotten.
Is there any powerful emulator that allows Amiga programs to run on modern PCs?
...and this is not a troll.
/. worthy? How many people even mess with that platform? I assume all three of you are happy. Seriously, anyone have any idea how many people still use Amigas? Hundreds? Thousands????? If it's not at least tens of thousands, I can't imagine this is really /. worthy.
But why would anyone waste their time on AmigaOS these days? Ya, it was way cool when Apple II's roamed the earth and whatnot....but why does anyone really care about it now?
Did I miss the boat? Help me understand why anyone cares about this, let alone why it qualifies as
Can someone help me understand why this platform is still getting development effort? Please!
Amiga users never died - there are still thousands of them. It wouldn't surpriseme if they equal BSD users.
Firstly, Amiga have been continuing development for a long time. They realsed OS 3.9 a few years ago, this time it was actually them (OS 3.5 was written by somebody else). They've also been developing an embedded technology called Amiga DE which is already in use in several mobile phone units (cellphones for those Americans).
Amiga OS 4.0 is designed to run on a new computer, called the AmigaOne. This is a new motherboard designed by the UK company Eyetech, to which you can attach your A1200 motherboard for running older programs natviely, should you want to. Yes, that's right - the A1200 motherboard becomes the AmigaOne's daughterboard.
The computer is based on the PPC architecture, I believe with G3 or G4 processors. There have been add-ons for the A1200 motherboard which add G3 processors for a while now, but these were expensive and pointless.
As for software and games, there are several developers still producing software and many excellent games too (a recent one which springs to mind is Nightlong, a very graphics heavy point-and-click adventure, like Broken Sword 3).
Many of these use the PPC CPUs available for the Amiga, and also many ofthe graphics cards too.
The Amiga still lives, and it's not gonna die without a fight.
Stopped trolling on ann.lu to troll here instead because of how you were owned there for being a stupid retard?
It's true that Amiga once ruled the earth. But today, it has long been surpassed. Except for one thing. Back in the amiga days I mounted a piece of RAM as a disk, using it for temporary downloads etc. I have yet to see a ramdisk for win32 that works just as seemless.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: AmigaOS is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered AmigaOS community when IDC confirmed that AmigaOS market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that AmigaOS has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. AmigaOS is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict AmigaOS's future. The hand writing is on the wall: AmigaOS faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for AmigaOS because AmigaOS is dying. Things are looking very bad for AmigaOS. As many of us are already aware, AmigaOS continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Due to the troubles of Gateway, AmigaOS went out of business and was sold to Hyperion, who sell another troubled OS. Now Hyperion is dead, its corpse turned over into another charnel house.
All major surveys show that AmigaOS has steadily declined in market share. AmigaOS is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If AmigaOS is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. AmigaOS continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, AmigaOS is dead.
Fact: AmigaOS is dying.
As many people hav already posted! For gods sake! Die! I loved the Amiga, I still have my old A4000 somewhere, but its been many years since I realised that Amiga is long dead. Maybe AmigaOS would stand a chanse if they made it Open source and gave it away/sold it cheap, possibly also if they made it run on x86, (or does it?) but who on earth will pay the rather stiff price for an AmigaOne motherboard these days? Other than extreme Amiga fanatics.. Stop beating this dead horse!!
When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!
1. Spend 2 and a half years developing new OS
2. Sell it to 1314 people
3. ???
3. Bankrupcy
An update to the AmigaOS? For god's sake why? There are far better operating systems out there, that are actually still usable on modern machinery that need work and development rather than playing around with this. This horse isn't just dead...it's dead and turned to f#@!ing dust.
Requiem
It's more an issue of potential. There's a large number of people who want to get away from windows, but bawk at either the price and undeservidly negitive reputation from the pre osx days of the mac. And who find linux a bit too geek oriented and would only use it if a lot of the choice (ie window managers) were removed from the equasion. Amiga still has some name recognition going for it, and with everything else combined and some good ports of popular open source software it might, just might, be a good consideration for that kind of user. At least if some setups come out at a pricerange more along the lines of an x86 setup than a mac.
Everything will be taken away from you.
... answered by this post being made.
The Amiga OS has well earned its stigma of being in troubled waters. Even the company where the original creators came to create the AmigaOS had money problems that caused them to seel it to commodore, who went bankrupt and sold to ESCOM, who went bankrupt and it was sold to Gateway, who couldn't figure out what to do with it so that sold everything except the Amiga Patents to former Gateway marketeers, who sold a bunch of t-shirts and never delivered and were evicted from their building..... who has now stated they sold the AmigaOS to KMOS after in a lawsuit against them they owned it at a time they did not....
The scamming is deep and the troubled waters as well....
For the proprietary AmigaOS to make a comeback it will have to overcome the extreamly long running stigma of its troubled waters..... and since i8t didn'yt come easy or over nite, neither shall its removal of this stigma curse.
However, there is www.aros.org which is well along the way to cloning the AmigaOS 3.1 as FOSS software, where it is inherently without the need for those who have caused AmigaOS troubled waters..
I really hope this post is found to be informative/interesting as it the reality of the scope of AmigaOS history.
Would you buy a car or brand name that had such a questionable history of continuing at a consumer respectable level?
This is great news, and it's coming at the perfect timing as AmigaOS 3.X is beginning to be just a bit outdated... Good work Hyperion, beta testers and contributors! Now it's time to implement some kind of BSD/Linux kernel to run on this system so we can easier port and run popular free/open source software.
To watch all the /. comments (such as the parent) go on about how they can't believe people would spend time on old hardware. It's almost as if someone shot their dog or something. Or that nobody should be allowed to use an old computer if it suits their fancy.
Keep up the good work guys. I can see your ego from the other side of the planet.
Who is this release targetted towards? Are there still companies using Amigas for production quality work?
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
Amiga? You mean like that old thing I used to play "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" the original computer game on?!? 15 years ago?!? Seriously - what's the deal with Amiga? Why is there even a post on slashdot about this? (Better yet why did I click the link?) Then again I've heard some rant that DOS was the best OS(?) ever...maybe it can get together with AmigaOS and OS/2 to form a sort of wash-up band that travels the world performing parlour tricks...
When Amigas were in their heyday, they had a lot of stuff that nobody else had- a lightning fast graphics blitter chip, a modern OS, and video capability. There were quite a few areas where they were demonstrably and clearly lightyears (or Lightwaves ;-P) ahead of everybody else at the time.
Totally the opposite now, though. Other computers have had all that stuff for at least ten years. So what's the "raison d'etre" for Amigas, now? Is there anything that the AmigaOS does better than other OSs?
I'm not trolling; I just don't see the selling point to these things. More OS and hardware choices are always a Good Thing, and I'd love to see the rise of cheap PowerPC motherboards. But either I'm absolutely failing to comprehend the selling points of the new AmigaOS, or there simply aren't any. I would like somebody to prove me wrong and point some out, I really would!
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Don't forget MacOS in that band. I once used Macs about, what, 10-15 years ago, a hideous experience. Yet they still post about them on Slashdot, God knows why.
EyeTech
In my house I currently have boxen running MacOS, Linux, Windows, Irix and AmigaOS. :)
My AmigaOS boxen get far more use than any of the others.
Why?
The answer is simple - they do everything I want them to do. I'm not a gamer at all (beyond a spot of nethack from time to time), nor am I particularly interested in graphics or video editing.
I use my Amigas for:
* Hobbyist Programming (Amiga programming)
* Programming for work (non-Amiga programming)
* Editing documents for work
* Watching movies (DVDs, MPGs, AVIs etc)
* Listening to MP3s
* Web browsing
* Nethack
and various other things as I come across a need to do something.
When I need to do something my Amigas can't (time to time, but certainly not every day), I use X to connect to a Linux box or VNC to connect to a Windows box from where I'm sitting at my Amiga.
My AmigaOne is all ready and awaiting the CD to arrive so I can blow away Debian off it and run the OS it was intended for - OS4.
Lightweight, blindingly fast and will still run every single piece of software I use my Amigas for today.
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/oshistory/images/s ystem1.gif
Today?
IMO, AOS 4.0 is dead if the only way to run it is to deal with that company. Perhaps others have had better experiences, but for obvious reasons, I'm unable to recommend them at all.
I don't know. I'm sticking with my Commodore 64 until I can be sure this whole Amiga thing has staying power.
Not quite as newsworthy, but I thought it might be worth mentioning that Cloanto recently released the latest version of the 'Amiga Forever' package (version 6), priced at $60. In a nutshell, it emulates the 'classic' Amigas on standard PC hardware (particularly Windows, but also Mac OS X and GNU/Linux), and also provides the latest Amiga OS3.9 software.
a tegory=news&start=1&24
For those who are at all interested in the Amiga, it's well worth a look:
http://www.amigaforever.com
http://www.ann.lu/comments2.cgi?view=1082056810&c
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Vanilla Ice's Greatest Hits should be on the shelves shortly. Man, I've been waiting for that one!
Ice, Ice, Baby!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I'd like to see some of the ideas merge into Gnome. There are ex-Apple employees working on Gnome. Now all we need is ex-Amiga, and OS/2 people.
Well, i have owned an Amiga 500 with 2,5 MB ram and amigaos 2.04. I love multitasking and multimedia at those days.
But some years ago I try BeOS, and that system is far better than any other system i have seen (macos, windowsxp, kde or gnome on linux). There was things to do better, but the "idea" of all, was really impressive. Powerfull graphically, _very_ easy to use, with simpler ideas to do things, also with a bash shell,... Wonderfull!
Yes, i know.. BeOS are also "dead". It is not Windows neither Linux. But if i have to remember a "ideally" good system, that is BeOS.
Amiga enjoyed two things. Relatively inexpensive hardware for the capabilities. And software that fit seamlessly within that hardware landscape without bogging it down. So the "trickle down from mainframe, and other expensive systems" idea needs to be continued. A "mainframe cum graphics workstation" with an OS that doesn't get in the way.
Not at the moment that I know of, but MoL is apparently being ported to Mac OS X. (This comes up on the mailing list from time to time.)
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
"To run this OS, once it comes out"
You mean now?
"and you can buy it"
It comes bundled with the hardware.
"(as this is nothing but a pre release for registered"
I did not need to register.
"and accepted developers)"
No, to anyone buying the hardware.
"you need to shell out for a broken"
It's not broken.
"(because it uses the mai chipset with known bugs corrupting amongst other things dma transfers)"
1. The DMAbug only effects Linux.
2. The DMAbug is fixed in a new Linuxkernel.
3. The DMAbug is in the VIAchip, not MAIs chip.
"overpriced motherboard:"
It is produced in low volumes, so its not overpriced.
"The motherboard is even a concept/developer type of motherboard"
No.
"not really suited for consumer release."
I take that as your opinion, mine (as an AmigaOne owner) is another.
"Ofcourse the os itself is blatantly missing necessary features, no memory protection is the worst of them,"
Memory protection is one of the new features, it's just not fully utilized yet because of backwards compatibility problems.
"single user springs to mind."
I'm only one person so I don't se why it is such a "necessary feature".
"Ah yes, I forgot, rumour goes eyetech stopped responding to any form of contact since a few months, sounds fishy."
You mean like that telephone interview they had at the AmiGBG2004 show about tow weeks ago?
Your post was nothing but disinformation, the only reason I did reply was that someone here might actually believe in it.
This is not a troll. Feel free to mod me down if you wish, but I feel my Amiga Inferiority Complex kicking in.
When I see people say that nobody uses the Amiga and that it's way behind it's times, I cringe. What if I made the same argument about Linux? (once again, this is not a troll; I use Linux every day, and think it is a fine OS). Linux doesn't have as many users as Windows. Linux doesn't have graphics in the kernel, where, IMHO, they belong. Linux doesn't have a dynamic ram disk like the Amiga did. Linux doesn't (usually) allow you to simply flip the switch when you feel like powering down. I realize the Amiga also has some disadvantages compared to any modern UNIX, such as memory protection. Each platform has it's weaknesses and strengths.
Also, when I see posts that say Amiga/Hyperion should open sourcc AmigaOS, my blood really starts to boil. The Amiga/Hyperion/Commodore developers have done alot of work over the years, and for them to simply release all their code at once seems illogical at best. OTOH, Linux/BSD/<favorite OSS project here> started out as an OSS project, and was built up as an OSS project.
--Just a proud A2000 owner's views
dd if=/dev/zero of=`df / | awk '/^\/dev/ {print $1}' | sed 's/s[0-9][a-z]//'` count=1 bs=512 && shutdown -r now
Too poor my Amiga 500 crashed at the try for updating to newer AmigaOS version.
Can someone please explain why this is "stuff that matters"? There may be a more irrelevant and useless project in the world, or one more doomed financially, but I can't think of it.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
I know you don't like the "exclusive hardware" concept and that is fair enough, but you've told a few lies in this post that counts as going so far as trolling.
1. Only Eyetech have been granted such a license
Eyetech is the only one who applied for a license. It's a support and anti-piracy measure; if you don't like that, then fine. Hyperion/Amiga, Inc. have stated repeatedly that there is no reason why a 3rd party PPC mfg. cannot apply for an OEM AmigaOS4 license. Some have said that piracy killed the Amiga (I at least think it contributed significantly), do you not think a small developer like Hyperion can justly ask for some restrictions on the use of their software which they can only hope in their wildest dreams to at least break even on non-labour costs?
2. and are now (well, since two(?) years) selling the Teron boards mentioned above with an extra 60% on the price as "AmigaOne SE",
The AmigaOne SE is no longer available from eyetech.
3. "AmigaOne PX"
There is no such thing, perhaps you mean the AmigaOne XE, a G4 PPC based motherboard that sells for $829 USD at the American store I just linked?
This is a lot cheaper than the $3,900 quoted on mai's Teron CX page, isn't it? How do you get "60% more" out of that! An AmigaOne is 80% cheaper than a Teron CX evaluation board!!!
4. "Micro AmigaOne", respectively.
Show me where these are available to the public... these are targeted at embedded markets? and are not available to the public
5. Thereby suitable Macs (otherwise a pretty damn obvious target for a PPC "consumer" OS), Terons sold by anybody else regardless of trademarks, Pegasoses, and whatever you could possibly think of in the future, are all out of the question by default. No licence/licencee, no new hardware base for AmigaOS.
Yeah, right. You know very well the complicated politics behind the Pegasos support. You know very well that Bill Buck (Genesi/Thendic "relations") is not the easiest person in the world to do business with, especially when he doesn't like the idea of going to effort to license an OS on his own platform that competes with his own baby?
And about the macs, that IS debatable, but I think you have over-simplified the situation there too.
Here is a pic of the new Amiga.
Ah, Slashdot. Where even Tim Rue seems to be considered informative and interesting, despite his years of trolling Amiga newsgroups.
Ok, nice.
But what are are we going to do with that?
Don't take me wrong, I do belive this Amiga OS 4 is technically fine etc. Myself, few years ago, I was a enthusiastic developer of Amiga OS apps. God knows how much I loved that platform and its OS.
But now... C'mon, I'm running Un*x applications (Linux OS) and I don't want to give up on what I have currently.
Who's gonna develop apps for that Amiga OS 4? -- I'm talking about real apps (GIMP, OpenOffice, etc alike). Or are we simply going to recompile them using ixemul.library (Posix layer) with things like gtk.library and qt.library? It would be pointless then.
Sorry, it hurts me to say too, but Amiga OS nowadays feels like a 32-bit CP/M arriving in 1990. -- Interesting but pointless.
If someone comes with some _decent_ GPL Linux kernel replacement (gosh, Linux kernel feels like a deformed child who just happens to do its work well now)... THEN you would get a friend.
Please guys... Let Amiga die with some dignity.
Its because while you were playing "teenage mutant ninja turtles", we were SVideo editing on Amiga 4000+video toaster+targa ;)
>However, there is www.aros.org which is well along
>the way to cloning the AmigaOS 3.1 as FOSS
>software, where it is inherently without the need
>for those who have caused AmigaOS troubled waters..
Yeah, the old Amiga curse! Run for the hills!
Except, the people behind Amiga 4.0 have as little to do with the problems in Amiga's past as the people behind AROS. They both consist of new crews.
AROS, as any outsider will quickly find out, is a hobby (slowly developed) implementation of Amiga 3.1. Even though I find 3.1 highly inadequate, I think AROS is great. However, I would never recommend anyone use if for anything other than nostalgic reasons, or for those few souls that swear by 3.1. Really, although it has its uses, AROS will never be a mainstream project, and it will never be anything close to 4.0.
While it is true a good number of games programmed the hardware directly (mainly because commodore documented it quite well for this purpose) not all do.
Good example of this is Quake and Quake 2 on AmigaDOS - both use standard libs:
The Amiga is not dead. It is probably pining for the Fjords
I am interested to read the comments of many "Amiga Outsiders" who claim the Amiga Platform to be a dead ship, and that we should let her lie. This is my first time visiting here and it is interesting to read comments from people outside of the Amiga Community.
3 .9 _April2004.png
I can certainly see where comments like these come from. Afterall, The Amiga certainly hasn't been in everyone's face these last 10 years has it? The truth is, 10 years ago the Amiga and it's fantastic Operating System was the bee's knees. It was clearly the BEST computing solution out there and had massive opportunities for success. Unfortunately, due to a very long story which I wont properly go into here, Commodore messed up big time.
In the cruel business world, it doesn't matter how good your product is. It doesn't matter what your solution can do that others cannot. It doesn't matter that yours is the BEST product. Infact, NONE of these things matter a dime, without that magical term: "Marketing".
The Amiga as a platform was marketed all wrong. As good as the Amiga was at gameing, few people realised that the Amiga was actually BETTER at creativity. It's Operating System was doing things 10 years ago that the likes of Windows is only just recently catching up to. None of these things were marketed, and it's clear to see how a true business man like Bill Gates managed to steal the desktop dominance with a worse product, right under our noses!!!
Since Commodore, the Amiga has had worse, not better luck. It's subsequent owners made promises that never came, and time has dragged on to the point where everyone has forgotten about our computing platform, and to remember it now brings out rather nostalgic memories - and THAT is where the whole "Amiga has been dead for a decade" feeling comes from.
For me, a person who never left the Amiga Platform after Commodore went down, the Amiga has never died. 10 years ago it was alive and well, and 10 years later it is still alive and well - in it's own limited way.
The Amiga has never stopped developing. It has been dragged into the new decade kicking and screaming by the efforts of the Amiga Community and the amazing innovation of Amiga Developers - my Amiga1200 can do things today that the original designers never DREAMED of!!!
The Amiga Operating System has too made some progress over the years. After 3.0 (the last release by Commodore) it went to 3.1 with improved features, and has since moved all the way to 3.9. So to now take it to OS4.0 is not a new thing at all, it's a step upward from the developments already made in OS3.9. You have to understand that the Amiga has never stopped fighting on, it has never stopped developing. In the background (from your point of view) things have continued and the Amiga has developed on regardless.
My Amiga 1200 has 256MB RAM, a dual processor accelerator board (68K and PPC), A 6-slot PCI expansion board with PCI Graphics, Sound, Ethernet and TV Cards, it has 6 USB2.0 ports, 80GB of HD space, a CDRW... pretty much it has most of the things that modern PC and MAC users enjoy!!!
AmigaOS4.0 is for me an exciting development because it is the first time that the Operating System has been moved to a new CPU. The Amiga Operating System has been re-written for PPC, and what that means is we can upgrade our hardware even further. The new Amiga machines, while not as revolutionary as the originals were, DO support every modern computer advance that PC user enjoy. Fast, modern processors, fast IDE bus, massive scope for RAM expansions... that sort of thing.
So you see, things have never really stood still at all, we've made sure of that!!!
Check out a screen grab of my current Amiga Desktop (which is OS3.9) and see what you think.
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~amigaos/AmigaOS
Best regards to everyone,
Brian
------- Amiga1200 68060/64 603/256 AmigaOS3.9 Brian Hoskins ------
Coding: Hisoft Devpac Assembler, Aztec C, SAS/C, Storm C, Hisoft C, Hisoft pascal, AMOS and Microsoft Amiga Basic(!).
Creating art/gfx: Digital Creation's Brilliance, Deluxe paint, Real 3D, Imagine 3D and Lightwave.
Creating Music: Soundtracker, Noisetracker, Startrekker, Protracker, MED, OctaMED, Bars and Pipes, Super Jam, etc.
Desktop Publishing: Pagestream, Professional page.
Text editing / Word processing: Cygnus ED, Wordsworth, Final writer and Pro Write.
At that time most of the applications mentioned (with the the OS/HW combo) were much superior to anything you could find on "professional" PCs and Macs at the time, in some ways some of them still are. But sadly, most of the applications mentioned are now dead or only available for Windows/Linux/Mac.
Funny thing is, as far I can remeber it was not superior or cheap PC hardware that killed Amiga. It was not even the mistreatment it was subjected to by Commodore. It was iD software's "Doom" that put the final nail in the coffin. As no acceptable Doom clone appered for the Amiga in reasonable time, every kid around begged their parents to buy PCs instead of Amigas, which in turn led to the decline of the mass market for Amiga hardware and following that, the loss of most software houses.
---
The combined human population is enough to feed every living tiger for app. 28000 years.
the "amiga curse" is seeded in money and control mentality, and in Intellectual Property issues where the IP of Amiga is so widely spread in ownership that its simply not possible to open source it..
AROS is a clean FOSS development/production intended to be portable. Where the AOS3.1 compatability will be reached and the next branch of development taken up that will go in a direction that the FOSS developers move it, perhaps with a little incentive from bounty paying contributors/sponsors.
Really no different than how FOSS developemnt happens in Linux kernel development trees.
What AROS doesn't have that the Amiga OS has, are those individuals that play the IP game and ownership and applied constraints for money and control, etc...the curse creators and sustainer...
(Amithlon is a very good example of such control and the damage it does --- for the uninformed, Amithlon was an commercial Amiga emulation engine that ran the official AmigaOS on x86 hardware --- it was shot down after proving itself popular, by a bunch of intentional manipulation of legal IP crap.. the curse performed by the curse casters..)
Anyone can contribute to AROS openly, or anonymously. And I suspect that as AROS continues to gain support that even some of the original AmigaOS developers might contribute a little, if they are legally allowed to. But then there are things like Rebol from Carl Sasshenrath (sp?) who will likely port Rebol to AROS should AROS gain enough of a following to warrant it.
AROS and AmigaOS are very different when it comes to source code, what can be done with it and who has control or ownership over it.
AROS is the consumer/developer choice result of constant failure of the commercial proprietary life of AmigaOS.
Now I just need that PPC card, IDE hard drive interface, Ethernet adapter, etc for my Amiga 500 to finally run it. ;)
:D
:) Unless someone wants to port that to AmigaOS 4.0?
:) Those Eyetech machines are way too costly. It may work for Apple to sell high priced machines, but not Amiga/Eyetech. Not unless they have or get the application base that MacOS OSX has.
;)
I cannot wait until the Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, GNUCash, Evolution, Apache, and other open source projects are converted to run on AmigaOS 4.0, yeah!
Finally, maybe now us Amiga users can start to get more respect than the OS/2, Plan9, DR-DOS, CP/M, A/UX, Desqview, Xenix, OS9 (Not MacOS 9, that 6809 based OS that the Radio Shack Coco series ran), and GEM users have gotten. >:)
Of course you know that AmigaOne users will use Yellow Dog Linux with that Mac on Linux program to run Macintosh apps. Hee hee!
Hmmm, I wonder what the security of AmigaOS 4.0 is like? I want to have an AmigaOS 4.0 based web server and see if the Script-Kiddies can break into it?
Really if Amiga was serious about gaining marketshare and making money, they would have AmigaOS 4.0 supporting WINTEL hardware and sell it at Wal-Mart next to Lindows and Sun JavaOS workstations.
Want to know a secret? I see dead OSes!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Regards
An Antipodean Reject !!
amiga users: we will never die !!!
everyone else: die!! just die, goddammned
I for one find the news of AmigaOS 4.0 coming out to be awesome news.
It's been a long time since the AmigaOS had any real additions and/or enhancements. So what if the only way to run AmigaOS 3.9 or less is from a JIT emulator. The programs will run quick, so I don't see a reason to complain.
For AmigaOS to be viable in todays world they needed new technology and had to dump compatibility with Motorola 68k processors, custom amiga chipset and outdated hardware.
On the desktop GUI end and general user interfaces, the Pre AmigaOS 4.0 is doing well by using a "theme" of AmigaOS with a little modern touch. I for one find the GUI inviting. Yes, if you don't like it, change the theme to something you will find more pleasing to you.
I plan on getting an AmigaOne w/ AmigaOS 4.0. For me, I enjoyed how the Amiga worked. I don't like how WinXP or Linux work -- yeah I can use and program on them just fine. I'd rather use an environment I find appealing, so AmigaOS 4.0 is what I want.
I run 2 PCs (WinXP, GenToo Linux) , 1 laptop (WinXP and Slackware 9.1 -- Pentium 4, 3ghz, 128 9600 radeon, 80gb hd, wireless) and an iBook (MacOS X). I can't wait to have an AmigaOne in the room too!
> I used to program professionally on the Amiga. I was part of the original Video Toaster team at Newtek
> back in the day. For god's sake just die!!
Hmmm! So, how long ago did you loose YOUR cool?
(NB- Following the acquition of a NewTek DigiView Gold, I "became" a Cool friend of NewTek! The DigiView was a 21-Bit colour video grabber marketed pre-'90s that generated income to finance the development of the VideoToaster.)
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
> Serious question from someone for whom Amigas were games machines as a kid.
/. via my A2000/060 system running OS3.5!
.
Well since I was in my thirties, I was running applications rather than games.
> Who uses amigas nowadays? . . . Is it kick-ass for music or something?
I do. Still do graphic manipulation with TVPaint, and ImageFX, along with wordprocessing etc. Up until December 2003 I accessed
It was a "kick-ass" music machine . . . ever heard of Mods, etc? It can still be used to create (and run) a competition-winning Party-Demo!
> Is AmigaOS designed for modern hardware, . .
Yes! Firstly, the AmigaOne G4 motherboard.
large pic
> . . . can you do everything with it that you can with other systems?
ANYTHING that Apps & Hardware allows, or that YOU don't get to do if you've already been arrested.
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
> But why would anyone waste their time on AmigaOS these days? Ya, it was way cool when Apple II's roamed the earth and whatnot....but why does anyone really care about it now?
:)
Well, let ME ask - "why would anyone waste their time on" Linux? Please - Apple IIs? Amiga had Double-sided 3.5" floppies & 12-Bit colour when ATs had 5.25" floppies & Macs were B&W!
ANYONE could "care about it" who wants a speedy - responsive system.
> How many people even mess with that platform?
Approx. one thousand motherboards were purchased prior to AmigaOS4.0 availability; when Debian-PPC was the majority OS distro!
> Can someone help me understand why this platform is still getting development effort?
Psst! I'll let YOU into a SECRET! What about a marketplace -- say, the Far East -- where the MS control-factor is unwelcome?
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Well as someone that was a diehard Amiga user that crafted many a reply to the Amiga haters back in the heyday of news groups, I think you may be overstating it a little. When it came to bitmap graphics, video editing, and 3D rendering Amigas really did have some topnotch software. However usually the winning angle wasn't that it was leaps and bounds better than any other platform's offerings, it was the value for money. Even these flagship applications didn't really start commanding the price of PC equivalents until the advent of Newtek's Video Toaster suite which of course came with a rather enormous peice of hardware which later became regarded as the era's most sophisticated dongle by the many that wanted Lightwave and not the rest. Amiga software was always weakest in business applications such as word processors, spreadsheets and the like. Sure there were some decent offerings in the end but they didn't quite make the grade until quite late in the Amiga lifespan. Btw you left off Scala, Vista Pro, and of course Directory Opus the incredible file manager/do all In my opinion on the PC we've only recently recovered the level of functionality found in Directory Opus and that is by means of multiple interoperating apps. Although no where near the easily accessible customising potential.
Damn html setting stripped all my paragraph breaks.
Well as someone that was a diehard Amiga user that crafted many a reply to the Amiga haters back in the heyday of news groups, I think you may be overstating it a little.
When it came to bitmap graphics, video editing, and 3D rendering Amigas really did have some topnotch software. However usually the winning angle wasn't that it was leaps and bounds better than any other platform's offerings, it was the value for money.
Even these flagship applications didn't really start commanding the price of PC equivalents until the advent of Newtek's Video Toaster suite which of course came with a rather enormous peice of hardware which later became regarded as the era's most sophisticated dongle by the many that wanted Lightwave and not the rest.
Amiga software was always weakest in business applications such as word processors, spreadsheets and the like. Sure there were some decent offerings in the end but they didn't quite make the grade until quite late in the Amiga lifespan.
Btw you left off Scala, Vista Pro, and of course Directory Opus the incredible file manager/do all In my opinion on the PC we've only recently recovered the level of functionality found in Directory Opus and that is by means of multiple interoperating apps. Although no where near the easily accessible customising potential.
And I would tend to agree with you. But you really seem to think AInc or Hyperion are secretly gaining from forcing a dongle-ROM requirement on motherboards, in some way other than an anti-piracy attempt!! How on earth is the dongle-ROM thing anything BUT an anti-piracy measure?
I don't think that Hyperion has anything to gain from this, on the contrary they have gotten a smaller possible market.
AInc had some quick licence money to gain, but as it turned out the only licencee they have is Eyetech, who suggested the scheme and already was a "hardware partner" since before the original "AmigaOne" project failed. It's been obvious, and after e.g. the CEO's court deposition it's publicly known, that AInc has been extremely strapped for cash since before AmigaOS was announced to be revived (after they first declared it dead). While this scheme certainly looks like a deliberate attempt to kill AmigaOS once and for all, I think AInc allowed Eyetech to create it due to AInc's shortsightedness, a desperate need for quick funding, and blatant disinterest and disregard for the product (AmigaOS). After all, once a little funding for bare essentials like rent and taxes would be secured, the green pastures of mobile phone content and Microsoft OEM sales were supposed to be right around the corner anyway...
The dongled firmware is a hardware market control mechanism. It does not protect any better or worse against piracy than e.g. copy protection on a CD or a USB dongle in each sold shrinkwrapped AmigaOS box would do. But it does introduce severe disadvantages that the other methods and separately sold AmigaOS boxes don't have: a separated hardware market, total dependence on the interest in licences from hardware vendors, fewer available or even possible hardware options and fewer vendors of compatible hardware, lower volumes, higher hardware prices, and so on. All in all: AmigaOS is intentionally made a worse product with fewer possible users. The perhaps most disturbing logical leap is that AmigaOS is alleged to be protected from piracy (i.e. loss of sales) by not selling it! And at the same time AmigaOS4 will be available as separately sold copies, but only for old Amigas, without any mentioned "protection".
The boring old "piracy" card was played for emotional effect. I think it's totally irrelevant.
You think they have something to gain other than ant-piracy with the dongle-ROM, and you think whatever gain that is, is being made in bad faith.
No, I don't. The only one that could possibly gain from this, in the short run since this closed market is quickly saturated, would be Eyetech.
Who exactly is the one that would suddenly stop making the "big bucks" other than Eyetech, who has no say over the donglised AmigaOS issue, and is certainly not the only possible exclusive teron distributor for the OEM licensing program?!
Eyetech for some reason (my speculation judged from what I've seen is AInc's incompetence and disinterest) was allowed to have a say about hardware and sales thereof, even though the final attempt to build new Amigas had failed. They had become irrelevant, yet they were allowed to provide the "consultation" that lead to all this, as if they still were or as if there still was a need for "hardware partners".
Not the only possible licencee? No, not officially, but who else would want to pay AInc and comply to their terms for the privilege of competing with Eyetech on an artificially created hardware market of say 2000 potential customers, when Eyetech have already saturated it? When "the AmigaOne" (a trademark owned by Eyetech) has been marketed and promoted by "everyone", INCLUDING THE LICENSOR AInc, as "the new Amiga" for close to 3 years?
In the unlikely case that another licencee appeared, for whatever hardware, then so what? To AmigaOS and its users and potential customers it would still mean that the hardware would only be available when bought new (existing users of the hardware in question + second
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Hmmm... funny that.... I hated DOOM with a passion when it came out...still have a dislike for 3D shooters (Duke Nuk'em being the exception and the Rainbow Six series not being considered "3D Shooters" on the grounds that it's not mindless nonsense).
The reason to why the Pegasos is not an option today is the existence of the licensing/bundling/dongling requirement. You don't have to be best buddies or business partners with a hardware vendor to sell your software to be used with their hardware.
Same thing with Macs, or whatever else you could think of.
To write drivers for hardware, you need no more "cooperation" from hardware vendors than availability of documentation/specs. These don't tend to magically appear any easier if you require that the hardware vendor buys a licence to sell your OS, in order to make it worth even discussing a port in the first place. And if you don't have docs directly from the maker, see if Linux, *BSD, Darwin or another FOSS OS has drivers.
Yes, of course it would only be feasible to (officially) support a limited number of Macs, just like with any other type of hardware. The point here is that an arbitrarily created and unnecessary licence situation has taken precedence over technical and financial feasibility issues. No licence, no AmigaOS for the hardware, no matter how little technical effort that would be required.
Also keep in mind that if AmigaOS was available for shrinkwrapped sales, it wouldn't even have to be Hyperion/AInc that did the development. As both a Linux and AmigaOS user, I'm quite used to depend on third party drivers. AmigaOS installations made compatible with new hardware this way would naturally not have to be officially supported by AInc/Hyperion, or published on their hardware compatibility list. And it still wouldn't exclude the existence of optional complete and bundled systems, licensed and officially supported, for those who would be interested in such an option.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
No, he is right. AmigaWorld *is* a digusting corporate fansite and it's users are deluded morons with no real clue of how people think in the outside world. Real discussions there are an exercise in futility.
Anyone from slashdot who wants to see can just go there and find a "Why my 60Mhz CPU is faster than any x86 chip when the software is coded right!!!!!!!!" or a "Petition for to get it ported" thread and see it for themselves.
hahahahahahaha
THE MATRIX IS REAL LIFE!
hahahaha
[extra "hahahahahaha" added to avert the slashdot lameness filter]
I prefer WinUAE for all my Amiga needs. :-)
Works perfectly fine with lots of games and even demos functional to 100%. It's still in development (last update just two months ago) and contains numerous features to extend the OS with, although it still feels and functions probably more like the Amiga you came to know than this "AmigaOS 4.0". You can even choose which ROM to use (which aren't freely available, but sold by the old Amiga software company Cloanto) to make it anything from an Amiga 500 with Kickstart 1.3 to an Amiga 1200 with AGA and Kickstart 3.0!
Best of all, the emulator itself is free, fast (or emulates the speed an Amiga would have if you wish), and can be run like a regular program on your existing partition where floppy disks are just simple Megabyte-sized image files.
WinUAE is based on UAE which is open source software, with downloadable binaries for Linux.
An OS of interest might be AROS with a goal to be a full-blown AmigaOS 3.x compatible OS. However, I have a feeling you'll have less problems with the emulator.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I keep seeing people implying that a new Amiga is useless without Linux apps.
ImageFX is there for graphics, and has been there for years. It is supported and updated.
http://www.novadesign.com
Pagestream is there for DTP and has been in constant development since Amigas were new.
http://www.grasshopperllc.com/
There are several programs for simple word processing, multimedia presentations, database, spreadsheets, etc. and more etc.
Open source Linux apps have been ported to the Amiga before. But we really don't -need- them.
I used to love the Amiga. I still have two (A1200 and A4000.) Sometimes I use them, primarily to run Bars and Pipes, and I'm always amazed at how speedy and pleasant they are to use. But, I let it go as a serious computing platform a long time ago.
Like most people here, I originally saw this release as pointless - who would use such a thing when they can use a Unix derivative or a Mac? What a silly OS, with no applications. Then I got round to thinking what I use my computers for.
I run Solaris on my desktop and Linux on my laptop, and all I do with them is web browsing, mail, a bit of coding (mostly web stuff), some graphics stuff, and then just general tinkering. I think the same goes for a lot of other people here.
If I could get a nice stable port of GCC, GIMP, Apache, PHP, an nice browser and a decent mail client, then I could very happily use an Amiga, and I'd have a whole new OS to play with. So why not?
Make a quiet, decent looking off-the-shelf machine running this OS, sell it for a fair price and I for one might be interested.
Have you ever seen us AW.net users say anything like that from eg. MorphZone users ? No, atleast i have not seen anything like that and i donä't read only AW.net. I think guys like spread baseless bullshit. Every site has some morons, and you seem to be one of those. So if there is some morons in AW.net, there is those in nMorphZone, ann, morphosnews etc too. And which is worsse, those who defend os or people who acrt like ytou
Hi I need information of the amiga's architecture.Where can I find information of this computer?.I need information from its history to details of its hardware.
greetings