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

What is this?

[-tji]

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?

Re:What is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://os.amiga.com/os4/OS4FeatureSet.php?p=2

68k emulation: both interpreting and JIT emulation available (see below), JIT for speed, interpreting for compatibility.

AND

Limited memory protection: Critical memory areas can be protected: Kernel memory areas, all code areas, unused memory (also unused free memory). Applications can use the MMU interface to protect their memory from others.

Timothy

Re:What is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have a hard time reading?

Feature lists are nice, but what is on the actual CD counts.

The list is what they *would like* to have in the final version.

JIT is not in this *pre-release*.

Oh, and calling "write protecting code" for "memory protection" is misleading at best. It is very far from what people in general consider as memory protection.

Not terribly useful to old-school Amiga fans?

[JessLeah]

"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, 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 .... well, you get the point.

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...

Re:Not terribly useful to old-school Amiga fans?

[BESTouff]

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.

No they can't. Even if they had access to source, all games were written in assembly and directly hit the hardware (the famous blitter and copper), most of them didn't even use the filesystem and had a custom trackloader on-disk. Even if the AmigaOS was quite good, directly programming the Amiga hardware was a joy and was really the preferred way of coding. Aaah, those were the days ...

let it lie!

[polyp2000]

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 ...

Re:let it lie!

[Flamingcheeze]

I agree, polyp. I always look back at my Amiga days as some of the most satisfying computing in my life. I also recall my sadness when I had to retire the old girl in favor of the far-inferior Windows OS, simply because "that's what the world uses."

As I recall, a lot of the efficiency of the OS had to do with its shared architecture, which used several chips to do the work that Apple and PC computers did with the single CPU. I don't see how that kind of efficiency could translate into our modern architectures. (Although, with graphics and sound cards, there is a parallel... but Amiga had cool stuff like a sub-system for I/O.)

Anyway, I agree that we should let the once-mighty Amiga OS remain a great memory, instead of tarnishing its legend with clumsy-looking updates that will always lag behind as a closed-source model.

Re:Gone gold?

[lvdrproject]

No, 'gold' in the software world means that it's ready to be shipped. When a beta or something 'goes gold', it's reached its final production version and is ready to be sold to the masses.

Something along those lines, anyway.

serious question...

[GooberToo]

...and this is not a troll.

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 /. 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.

Can someone help me understand why this platform is still getting development effort? Please!

Re:Shows how much you lot know

[Anonymous Coward]

'Amiga' OS3.5 and OS3.9 were BOTH done by Haage and Partner of Germany. OS4 is being done of Hyperion Entertainment of Belgium. Amiga Inc. haven't written a single line of code themselves. In fact, all OS4 has in common with the original Amiga is a brand name.

ram disk

[broothal]

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.

Re:Shows how much you lot know

[Seehund]

Wrong, on as good as every point.

Amiga Inc. (not "Amiga", that's a dead computer platform) have had nothing to do with developing AmigaOS 3.5/9. Thank Haage & Partner instead.

"AmigaOne" is not a new computer. It's a trademark owned and used by one distributor (Eyetech) to sell Mai Logic's Teron series motherboards. They've been trying to sell these for two years now (but the Teron CX model first appeared in 2001, later a.k.a. "AmigaOne SE").

"AmigaOne" once was the name of a project for a new Amiga, managed by Eyetech but designed by Escena (Eyetech does not design hardware). This is the motherboard you're talking about that was supposed to take your A1200 as an expansion card, not the "new" Terons. It failed to even reach functional prototyping stage.

The Amiga has been dead for a decade and nobody is planning to bring it back. Now the question is if AmigaOS will be killed off as well.

to moderate or to reply??? that is the question...

[3seas]

... 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?

Re:What Is The Purpose of Having Amigas Anymore?

[John_Booty]

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.

I'm not saying that there shouldn't be choice - I'd love to see more choices on the market, as well as cheap PowerPC hardware, like I said. But it's also a marketplace reality that you need to do *something* better than others in order to stand out, and for the life of me I can't figure out what on Earth Amiga supposedly does better in 2004.

Windows - Market share, lots of apps, retail presense, game support Macs/OSX - Sleek and sexy, superior OS, killer apps for certain markets such as Final Cut Linux - Open source community, corporate support from IBM, etc AmigaOS - ???

I'm not saying that it shouldn't exist... I'm asking what's the appeal?

Re:Good timing

[Squareball]

Ya know thinking about it, are there any VM type programs I can run on my mac.. that DON'T emulate x86? On Windows and Linux I can run VMWare which gives me a virtual machine to install another OS on but on the Mac I don't know of any that will give me a virtual PPC machine to install say YDL or even Amiga on. Other than installing Linux and running MoL that is (which I don't want to do). Any one know of any?

Re:AmigaOS

[Bunji X]

...and the rest of us, still in our teens back in the late 80's and early 90's also used it for..

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.