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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."
Since the release of the developer Pre-release earlier this year there's already a steady growing list of native AmigaOS4 software.
The central AmigaOS4 download portal can be found at:
http://www.os4depot.net/
A majority of freely distributable OS4 files can be found at OS4Depot.
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....
Did you have a point or are you just bitching? I just love you guys who come on here and act like anything that isn't a mainstream OS is a mortal insult to you.
The damn board is over 500 USD after you add in the mandatory OS license. Why are they selling it for so much? This isn't an SBC or anything like that, if they want to grow the market they are going to have to lower the price.
Such parties should IMO not be compared to Amiga fairs. These are just some nice gettogethers events where Amiga supporters can talk about their favourite platform. Have a friendly chat at the bar or having a barbecue are somethings some Amiga users like to do.
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Have a look at this video of a Swedish Amiga party earlier this year, to get the idea:
http://www.mhd.mh.se/shoe/os4-party/
As you see it's just people getting together, eating barbecue food, eating AmigaOS4 cakes and truly enjoying themselves. However there are also bigger Amiga parties too like the Alchimie in France or News fYaNICA parties in Hungary. The Alchimie parties have almost as many visitors as real fairs with hundreds of visitors, however the main focuss of these parties is mainly on food and fun and less on selling computer equipment like fairs.
For instance that Swedish party isn't anything like the Swedish AmiGBG fair which was held earlier this year, which also includes after-parties and gettogethers next to the main event:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/features/in