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."

Comments

More on AmigaOs4...

[Andreas(R)]

Here's more info in AmigaOS4, features, screenshots, etc. Looking forward to this!

Re:What is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a PowerPC native port of AmigaOS.

It's a standalone OS, which runs on the new AmigaOne motherboards and is currently being worked on, to work with the older dual CPU (68k&PPC) add-on cards by phase5. (One of which, I have in my Amiga 1200)

The whole of AmigaOS and Exec (kernel) have basically been overhauled and modernised and given memory protection (which will work with new OS4 native programs that make use of it) and can be turned off for OS3.x compatibility. Not to mention a new file system, virtual memory and everything else a modern OS should have. (without needing a shutdown procedure)

68k programs are emulated via a JIT emulation system, to be fully integrated into the OS itself, so "classic" retargettable programs such as Wordworth, Final Writer etc all work without problems, at super-fast speeds :)

As for a reason for it to exist, AmigaOS is an OS of such efficient nature, I've been using it for years on this "old" hardware of mine. If it's fast on a 25mhz 68040, what do you think it's like on an 800mhz G4? That's just one reason...it does what you want it to do, and it runs circles around anything else I've used.

http://os.amiga.com for more info and features. And the url provided in the topic too, of course :)

AmigaOS4 is going to rock :D

Re:Now

[Seehund]

Nope. Amiga, Inc. sells trademark licences. Well, they were trying at least, until it was announced during a lawsuit that they had transferrred the AmigaOS + "Amiga"(TM) rights to something they call "KMOS, Inc."

Since there won't be any more Amigas, AmigaOS will run on old Amigas (with old PPC expansion boards) and third party hardware. The first hardware to be supported are the Teron CX (discontinued), Teron PX and Teron Mini motherboards designed by Mai Logic.

Amiga, Inc. got "consultation" from the UK computer shop Eyetech to decide that we should still have to pretend that there is "Amiga hardware". I.e. in order for AmigaOS to run on (be ported to) a piece of hardware, that hardware must be sold on a separated "Amiga market" by a distributor with a licence from Amiga, Inc. AmigaOS will not be available for sale, except as in a bundle with licensed hardware (and later on for those ancient PPC-equipped Amigas).

Only Eyetech have been granted such a license, and are now (well, since two(?) years) selling the Teron boards mentioned above with an extra 60% on the price as "AmigaOne SE", "AmigaOne PX", and "Micro AmigaOne", respectively.

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.

Re:Good timing

[mdwh2]

AFACT, this is the first bit of non-vaporware out of the Amiga world in about 10 years.

As long as you ignore the OSs AmigaOS 3.5, AmigaOS 3.9 and MorphOS; the OS/emulator Amithlon; the PPC motherboards Pegasos and Pegasos II, yep there's been none at all.

How many failed Amiga Resurrection Projects have there been? 6 or so?

Who cares how many failed ones there have been - it's the non-vaporware ones that are important. There were plenty of delays (Copeland? Rhapsody?) before Apple finally moved to OS X. Anyone can make a vapor announcement, I don't see why the fact that various PC companies were hopeless with doing anything with the Amiga should detract from what other people manage to do.

Shows how much you lot know

[jerg_smiler]

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.

Re:What is this?

[Seehund]

- Is this a standalone OS, or a modified Linux / BSD system?

Standalone. It's a direct update to AmigaOS 3.x.

- Does it run on Amiga hardware, PowerPC, x86, or something else?

It's for PowerPC. It's initial target are the current Teron series by Mai Logic (a.k.a. "AmigaOnes" when sold with a new trademark licence by the only distributor that AmigaOS4 users are allowed to buy their hardware from).

See this post and this introduction for more info (and opinion).

It will also be available for old Amiga 3000/4000 computers if they've got Cyberstorm PPC accelerator boards.

- It is compatible with the old Amiga software, API's, etc?

Yes. It will have a JIT 68k-emulator integrated too (think of when the Macs and MacOS went 68k to PPC). Most system friendly software is said to run fine. If your old software bangs the metal (depends on Amiga hardware) it's not likely to run, however.

- What is the compelling reason for this to exist? What does it do better than all the other options available?

What's the compelling reason for any OS besides Windows to exist? ;)
Sadly Amiga Inc/Eyetech have killed any chances for AmigaOS4 by throwing a definitive and unnecessary stumbling block as their "Amiga hardware market" invention on the race track, but that's just a business decision that's easily revoked with a stroke of a pen. It has to be.

Re:Good timing

[Simonics Zsolt]

MorphOS, Pegasos and PegasosII are NOT Amiga Inc. Products, they are the competitor of AmigaOne and OS4.