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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?
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?
"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
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
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
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.
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.