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Updated AmigaOS4 SDK Available
Mike Bouma writes "Closely following the update for the AmigaOS4 Pre-release, the updated Software Development Kit (SDK) is now also available. Meanwhile some first people have been able to buy Mini-ITX MicroA1-C boards and last weekend at a British Amiga Party one was even raffled amongst its visitors. Also some first photographs of the Micro AmigaOne Industrial motherboard (aka u-A1-I) have been revealed at the party. For an impression with regard to AmigaOS4's current state of development, within this recent show report there are links to some earlier demonstration videos."
Getting nostalgic for your old Amiga?
The "Back to the Roots" software archive offers free legal downloads of many games, demos, pictures, etc.
Amiga Forever is a polished emulator solution with licensed operating system for sale by Cloanto Software, in a download version or a CD version that even can be booted from Knoppix-style.
There is a reason why this is in the developers section: It's ready for people to develop on, but not for general consumer release. But think about how quick the Amiga OS and GUI was running on 7,14 and 50 MHz Motorola 680x0 processors, and extrapolate that to a 800MHz G4. Of course there's more colours and new stuff, but they've kept the efficiency.
Speaking of which, I should get the newest upgrade to OS 4.0 this week. Been busy. PPC native graphics!
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
My favorite aspect of the Amiga was how well it was laid out, the easy of use, both cli and gui, and it multitasked perfectly. But it had slow disk access, and network access was tacked on, and the colors of the basic workbench needed to be upgraded with a 3rd party addon (magicwb).. Not everything was perfect, but shareware was much better quality than PC of the day.
.conf files, hell, started my hacker track..
But, the new OS4 on PPC is sweet, back to smooth multitasking, easy upgrade path, tons of modern hardware support with special IO ports (via headers). Not sure about the 1 PCI port...
I remember when I got WinNT and a dual CPU box, Finally real multitasking, the system was smoothed by its crippled x86 setup. Even floppy access could pause the system (And still does have interrupt locks on Linux/BSD) Cdrom spinup still ticks me off when its 2004 and a cdrom insert can pause explorer, sheesh.... (no its not autorun, give me some credit)
I picked up an OSX box to play around with, put on darwinports, a fully unix box. And since all my favorite applications are opensource, it doesn't matter what machine I'm on, I have my normal applications. (Ok, I miss putty and Counterstrike, but WC3 works..)
Anyone remember BeOS? That system was a multimedia multitasking monster for its day, but lack of applications and slow gcc port really crippled its acceptance. (Also wasnt this around the time we switched from gcc2.9x?) Humm, it also wasn't free...
I'm rather looking forward to the new Amiga with OS4, see what technology for the interface and inside the system. I just wish we could of gotten here years ago before Commodore sunk the company, and the many years of torture of news tidbits.
Also, Amiga got me interested in Linux, after setting it up for networking back in the day, I learned about compiling slirp, and tcp stacks,
I didnt just say "Back in the day" did I? Damn....