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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."
...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.
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
Kind of reminds me of that knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The one that keeps taunting the King even as his limbs are being hacked off. Yeah, Amiga won't die. :P
Pity they didn't do something interesting 15 years ago when it might have mattered. I really liked my 2000. :(
The only analogue I can think of that would show what Amiga would be in today's market is some hybrid of the Playstation 2 graphics and sound with a Mac OS desktop and Cocoa programming.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
The BeOS source was purchased by Palm; it's still closed.
There is a need for hardware, even if they can't fill that need, or go bankrupt trying to.
Without hardware, they're just a trademark (and marginal OS software) company, of which there have been multitudes, all now dead, or at least out of those businesses.
The real trouble is, that for a 3rd platform to be at all viable, it would have had to have mostly continuously been available and evolving. With a what, decade long gap there, what's the point?
The OS has little in common with its namesake, the hardware even less. Hell, if they had even just included an amiga-compatible floppy controller on these mainboards, able to read the old media (if for no other reason than shits and giggles), they could have at least claimed some kind of heritage with real amigas, albeit a token one. But they didn't. And there sure as hell isn't a ZorroII slot on the thing.
Now, before all you zealots start ragging me about wanting obselete hardware, I don't. A new amiga shouldn't be using recovered 680x0's. There should be PCI slots, and hdb15 video ports, not abominable db23s. No quadrature mouses, give me standard USB. (But also sell a USB keyboard with Amiga "A" keys, and not make me use one with windows keycaps) But c'mon, a single ZorroII slot inline with the PCI? The bridge logic would fit in a single, cheap FPGA. Hell, just for one generation, so there could be some kind of continuity. Or like I said earlier, even just a floppy controller.
The new "AmigaOne" is no different than any PPC sbc, nor any cheaper. Some Amiga fanatics would buy Amiga-branded toilets, if McEwen sold them, and would tell everyone theyre the best computer in the world. Just slapping their legal trademark on the damn things doesn't make it an amiga in any true sense of what the computers used to be.
"So what's the "raison d'etre" for Amigas, now?" /*insert your favorite car here*/?
I dunno, choice, maybe?
Because it is being offered and some people perceive it as better value than other offerings?
As long as they have willing, paying customers, I say more power to them.
In a car analogy, why would anybody want to drive anything but
The OS has little in common with its namesake
Backwards compatibility, source code compatibility, based on the same source code I believe, runs Workbench, similar look-and-feel, yep little in common. Meanwhile, "MacOS" and "Windows" are names which have got used for two and three entirely different OSs respectively (well, in Windows' case, I don't think the original Windows series even counts as an OS in itself, more of a GUI for DOS?), but no one complains.
But c'mon, a single ZorroII slot inline with the PCI? The bridge logic would fit in a single, cheap FPGA. Hell, just for one generation, so there could be some kind of continuity. Or like I said earlier, even just a floppy controller.
Do I get a Nubus slot with my Mac? And I can't find the ISA slot on my PC.
I don't understand what you mean by "just for one generation", when obviously the Zorro Amigas have already appeared for at least one generation. If you mean one generation running OS4, then grab a Zorro A4000 with PPC and run OS4 on that.
Given how dated many Amiga Zorro cards are, I imagine it would be cheaper to buy brand new PCI card replacements (I mean what are we talking about, 20 quid for a graphics card?) than to pay the increased cost for a motherboard that has a Zorro slot.
As for a floppy controller, get a Catweasel. I don't see why, in an age when for years many computers haven't had a floppy at all, when even on Amigas Amiga-formatted disks have rarely used for years (I gave up on Amiga-formatted floppies about '95-'96, and only rarely used PC-formatted floppies after that), why should everyone have to pay the increased cost to include it as standard?
Some Amiga fanatics would buy Amiga-branded toilets
Maybe they would, but most people are just glad to save development time and their money by doing away with ancient hardware.
Although that the AmigaOne-XE is currently relative expensive compared to PC hardware, this is mainly due relatively low expected volume sales as the AmigaOne-XE board is mainly targeted at the current Amiga communnity of powerusers and developers. Therefor sales aren't expected to reach more than a few thousand. There are significant development costs for designing the hardware and well as the software which comes with it (such as the 30 months of hard work for AmigaOS4).
Also any hardware company can negotiate a license for AmigaOS4 (however currently PPC only) and offer an Amiga branded product. The classic Amiga market has been moving to standard mainstream hardware for more than a decade now and so this process seems to be just a natural continuation of this.
There are hardware offerings in the pipeline designed by Eyetech and Mai Logic which will be targeted at larger markets, opening up the possibility of cheaper solutions. First up is the MicroA1 which is a Mini-ITX (17cm - 17cm!) form factor board and is already being demonstrated running Linux and AmigaOS4.
The AmigaOne-XE and AmigaOS4 Developer pre-release is already an excellent product for developers to start developing for AmigaOS4. As a development platform the current AmigaOne-XE solution is relatively cheap (especially compared to Mai's Teron evaluation boards, the boards Seehund likes to rave about as being so "cheap" (also coming without an AmigaOS4 license).
The new Amiga platform is already gaining widespread coverage. Yesterday AmigaOS4 was the highlight of a German TV show (3SAT/ZDF) demonstrating the product. You can download the show from here or go here for more information.