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Ars Technica Reviews AmigaOS 4.0
Amiga Lover writes "While tales of the troubles behind the Amiga's ownership abound over the last 10 years, work has been going on in the background for newer releases of the operating system that powered some of the most desirable computers from the 1980s. You can now buy brand new Amiga motherboards, and the operating system is very close to a final release. Jeremy Reimer from arstechnica reviews the current developer preview of AmigaOS 4.0, going over this new small and fast OS in thorough arstechnica style."
I always hate seeing Amiga come up on Slashdot. To all you guys, no, it's not dead. It's small and not popular. AmigaOS is to Linux what Linux is to Windows. Remember how many Windows users out there think you're crazy for using Linux and truely believe there is nothing to use Linux for except for server stuff before you post your "Amiga is dead" stuff, as you will be exactly correct as all those ignorant Windows users are in their comments about Linux and Linux users.
Thank you for your respect. And to the article poster, we're not welcome here, please don't bother Slashdot again...
from TFA... ...Many people have asked whether or not they can install OS4 on their Macintosh, since both use PowerPC hardware. The answer is no, as OS4 requires a custom ROM embedded on all AmigaOne motherboards in order to boot. This was done under agreement between Eyetech and Hyperion, in order to cut down on piracy and to reduce the number of hardware combinations that Hyperion needed to test and support...
I was pretty interested until I got to that "custom boot rom". Hell, guys, even Apple tossed that requirement when they went to NewWorld.
Severely limits the usefulness of the hardware and software in my eyes. Guess I'm not the target audience then.
The Amiga was a great games machine, with cool custom chips taking the load off
Which makes it kind of ironic that it was games that ultimately led me to leave the Amiga in favor of the PC. There were all these cool games I was seeing at my friends' houses, that I couldn't play. It sucked to switch, but the gamer in me just had to.
This would have kept the Amiga minimally relevant in 1994, but not in 2005. There were really two real markets for the Amiga in 1994, the time of Commodore's demise: Creative professionals and hackers/nerds/hobbyists.
The Amiga's greatest challenge in 1994 was really CPU power and system architecture. It was tied to the 68K series processor and the custom chips which made it powerful in 1985. If these PowerPC based systems and OS came out ten years ago, it would have saved the machine, at least to be a niche player.
The Amiga's primary advantage over other machines for creative users like videographers, artists and the like was the fact it was NTSC synchronized for adding titles, and for driving devices like the VideoToaster. That assumed a world view where the computer stayed as outside of the signal path, modifying analog video somewhere between source and recorder VTRs.
The world changed very quickly--and the desktop video world instantly picked up on nonlinear editing. Suddenly everything, given enough power and bandwidth, was INSIDE the machine. Certainly NewTek responded with the ToasterFlyer, but this was still a rehash of using the Amiga between playback and record devices. By 1997, even the cheapest desktop PCI NLE board was processing effects in the digital domain: The Amiga couldn't keep up, tied to the 68K series alone and was doomed in the video market.
The OS was very much suited to media applications: It was lightweight, quick and supported multiple resolutions plus had a lot of built in file formats like ANIM, 8SVX, IFF ILBM etc. But with enough CPU power and memory, this becomes a non issue: Through the brute force of a Pentium with a PCI video bus, and I don't care how bad the OS is, it's still going to be more powerful than an overheating 040 with bandwidth limited Amiga custom chips or a late model VL bus VGA chip slaved off on the Zorro II bus.
The hobbyist market was also lost when Commodore died. A lot of people, myself included, had piles of fun learning about how the Amiga worked. But when CBM went bankrupt and it's later owners died as well, most of us turned elsewhere or plain well gave up on "playing" with computers. Many turned to Linux, BSD, BeOS and the like.
There is no real market for this device, at least not a serious one.
In the end, this will be a curiosity, primarily like the cool Jeri Ellsworth C-One board. Most people buying it will be the truly hardcore. Few hobbyists will be interested, as the casual computer enthusiast will be turned off by it's high price and low feature count.
I and others have posted about the problems before... There's nothing new here.
OS4's now years behind schedule.
You've been able to buy motherboards for awhile. In fact those that purchased early were promised the OS and a T-Shirt if I recall. As of now, nothing's shipped other than a beta release of the OS for these early adopters. In fact, just the OS4 motherboard and a G3 CPU is more expensive than an entire Mac Mini system, and is inferior in about every way.
Any hype they've managed to build for the new Amiga has long since faded away, as have their missed dealines. Anyone remember the "Amiga Anywhere" promo blitz? Partnerships with Microsoft... Going to put an amiga on every machine, etc. Never happened.
I am a former Amiga user, and was really interested in the new Amiga when it was first announced (3 years ago? Memory's kinda faded, as has the Amigas allure). I've long since wrote them off though...
As I pointed out the other day, the Mac Mini would make an excellent Amiga OS4 box, but Amiga won't license the OS to run on non-Amiga hardware, so you're either stuck paying way too much for an underpowered machine, or you move on to a "real OS", and write off the Amiga as a dead-end, as most of the computing world has already done. Why Amiga, who need as many users as they can get these days, refuse to license their OS for other PPC hardware is beyond me.
Their excuse is to prevent piracy, which was a problem for Amiga in its heyday, but come on... Paranoia is no excuse for a bad business plan. And really, what is there to pirate? I don't see a ton of companies getting ready to shove Amiga warez down our throat. There's probably what? 2 dozen titles at the most currently shipping for Amiga?? That's probably about one title per user when you get right down to it.
In short, I think we'll see a BeOS come-back long before an Amiga come-back.
Its now 20 years on. Theres little point trying to relive the past because its never as good as you remember and thats all this company is trying to do. AmigaOS is vapourware more or less and besides, the good thing about the Amiga was its hardware, the OS was pretty much an irrelevance other than as a boot loader for the apps. Hardware these days is so far beyond the hardware of 1985 its not even funny. Whats the point?
Trollbot certainly is a fitting name.
Now, that supposedly sub-Mac GUI was in fact at least as advanced as that of the Mac while it was actively developed. In fact draggable screens with multiple resolutions, proper multitasking and so on made the Mac look pretty sad in comparison.
Yes, games were a strong point of the system. However too few followed programming guidelines and that's what the cost is today: they don't work. Tough. Get over it and use them with E-UAE which will most likely integrate fully with the system at some point and you can run all the old games there and run the modern ones within the OS. Best of both worlds.
That said SDL-ports of games are the most interesting things these days except for a few commercial ports. It's still early days for OS4 and it's always easier to critizise something that hasn't even gotten off the ground yet. Sure it may never do so, but no reason shouting it won't - that won't change a thing either way.
As someone already posted.. the microkernel issue might change this, but a monolithic kernel can't just use a GPL'd driver, because the GPL does NOT allow linking with closed source application.
You are not allowed to use a GPL'd library as part of a closed source application even if you open up your changes to the library.
You are however allowed to ship GPL'd software together with your closed source OS (like Apple does), as long as all the applications are seperate entities. (Although Apple also releases the source of their BSD/Mach-based core).
If the driver is run as a usermode application (which may very well be what happens with the driver in the AmigaOS microkernel, I'm no expert) then it can be distributed without opening the kernel.
It was touched upon in the article, but I think they are really missing the boat on resurecting the Amiga (and have been for years). It would be nearly impossible for Amiga PC's to compete today. They need to go where the AmigaOS, in today's hardware market, could shine: PDA's. With modern Coldfire processors (very fast 68k compatible, low power, embeded cpus) you could easily build a PDA that would run AmigaOS screamingly fast.
Even better, if they could make a custom graphics chip that could emulate AGA and maybe add some new features, this PDA could double as a great game machine (and you have all the old amiga games to run on it). There's two markets right there.
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