Slashdot Mirror
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?
that's better than Microsoft is managing right now. :)
Here's more info in AmigaOS4, features, screenshots, etc. Looking forward to this!
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?
...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.
"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
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
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?
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 ?
The AmigaOne has been selling for over a year now IIRC.
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
Something along those lines, anyway.
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.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
...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.
Anyone thinking of moderating the parent troll up please be aware that Hyperion have a good relationship with the FSF, have done plenty of work with GPLd software before and have always complied with it 100%.
In addition, their modifications to GCC are already submitted to the main branch and will be included in the next release candidate.
Hardly "GPL Infringement", more like making full use of a resource in a legal and honourable manner, much in the same way that Apple use GCC as well.
Yes, WinUAE and Fellow are Amiga emulators for the PC (and Linux).
Or you can get everything legally from Cloanto Software for $60 or so, in the new Amiga Forever 6.0 software package that includes lots of software, the latest 68k OS version (3.9), and so on.
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.
... 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?
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
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 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?
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
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.
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?
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.
That's why we need this ported to x86 hardware right now!
[Bitchslap] Ow...!
All interpreted languages are abstractions over Lisp
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.
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.