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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."
Amiga OS had both those in 1985, IIRC.
I'm not trolling here, but Linux is useful. What are the real world modern uses for an Amiga machine? I recall they were used a lot on TV stations for titeling, but that was a while ago.
I always respected the Amiga a lot, and i still think it should have done better than it did, specially considering how advanced was in it's time. But other than the geek factor, what's the big deal over a new AmigaOS?
Running the OS and all its apps completely in memory provides a very different user experience than one is used to from modern operating systems. Switching applications is instantaneous, as is switching screens (providing you are running separate screens at the same monitor resolution, otherwise you have to wait for your monitor to resync).
Scrolling is about as fast as on my 2.4GHz P4 PC. While the PC clearly blows away the AmigaOne on pure CPU performance (for example, unarchiving files, or ripping to MP3), for general use they "feel" about the same. The A1 feels much faster than my 733MHz Pentium 3 running XP, and makes my poor 500MHz G3 iBook running OS X feel like a pig stuck in molasses.
The author obviously never tried RiscOS : on my 33MHz RiscPC (bought in Dec94), there's still nothing that can match its responsiveness... except a 202MHz Strong-ARM RiscPC.
You just don't have time to even think about taking an espresso when you double-click a directory folder.
But yes, that's right : RiSCOS is cooperatively multitasking, hence the quick interaction.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
But this isn't what the Amiga was.
The Amiga was a great games machine, with cool custom chips taking the load off the generally-not-too-great CPU, a highly consistent architecture, and an adequate, quirky OS which was good where it mattered for the applications it was used for.
Custom hardware was not something that was seen in commodity PCs at the time. Neither were good quality graphics and sound. It wasn't a better machine. In many ways it was inferior. It was a very different machine, and that's why it suceeded where it did.
AmigaOS 4.0 is simply another OS. Perhaps it's a very nice OS. BeOS was as well. But a nice OS doesn't make it better.
Donate free food here
One of my favourite demos with my old Amiga 2000 back in 1989 or so was to have a C program compiling on the Bridgeboard, a Pascal program compiling in a shell window, and then drag down the Workbench screen about halfway to reveal F/A-18 Interceptor running behind. I'd then play the game (with no slowdown) while the compilers kept churning away.
:)
For its time, it was an amazing bit of hardware.
I always liked AmigaDOS because it combined the best features of UNIX (in the shell, and with AREXX scripting) and MacOS's GUI features.
Nowadays, the GUI on Linux has gotten to the point where it is far superior than anything the Amiga ever had. A modern RedHat/Fedora box really is the spiritual successor to the Amiga.
The only thing I miss (two things actually):
1) Every Amiga application worth its salt has an AREXX port, because it was trivial to implement. That meant you could script EVERYTHING, including moving data back and forth between applications. It was awesome; you could batch-process every single application on the box.
2) The speech synth chip. This was awsome in Netrek, because you could play the team chat window through it and turn it into a radio - get all the team communications without having to take your eyes off the galaxy map.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
> All that said, it's kinda sad to see you sitting here begging for whatever name-branded Amiga scraps you can get.
/ webapp/sps/site/overview. jsp?nodeId=018rH3bTdGZj9N58582822
Huh? I'm not begging for anything. I have a good job designing chips for a living and can easily pay for whatever I desire.
Also, when other Amiga users were drooling over the shiny new Voodoo3 drivers, I was scratching my head not understanding the obsession when Radeons and GeForces were on their second generations. Instead of begging, I made a proposal to Nvidia for an NDA, I'd do all the work, support,e tc. all they'd have to do was put hardware on the shelves at the local PC emporium, which they already did. They didn't even respond with a polite "no thank you", they completely ignored us. ATI responded to my proposal with an NDA contract and some documentation. We do all the work, support, etc. and all they have to do is put Radeons on the shelves at te local PC emporium, which they already do.
I didn't beg for anything. I made a business proposal acceptable to ATI, and AmigaOS4 now runs nicely on Radeon cards.
I discussed the convenience of AmigaOS on a laptop, and thus iBook hardware with other developers, but there doesn't seem to be a business agreeable to all involved there. I'm now investigating the feasability of developing a PowerPC laptop of my own, which if it is a viable product will make an open-platform system as much as I could, and allow anyone write their own OS, drivers, etc. which is an obstacle to some extent when looking at Macs. Is this a feasable idea? It may not be, but this hasn't been proven to me yet.
Hey, Gentoo and Freescale seem pretty happy with the "other Amiga motherboard", the Pegasos2 AKA "Open Desktop Workstation" PowerPC motherboard. Wouldn't they be happy with a more easily portable PowerPC board as well?
http://www.gentoo.org
http://www.freescale.com