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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."
Does it have true multitasking and memory protection? It surely looks like a great modern OS, but is it more than just a toy?
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...
While I loved my Amiga in the day, I can't justify spending $1375 for a G3-800 system basd on the new Micro systems.
This is from softhut, but I don't want to direct link since it is slow anyway:
AMIGA ONE PRECONFIGURED SYSTEMS
Micro A1 System:
First True Luggable / LAN Boy Amiga System !!
See Case Images
Micro A1-C Motherboard with OS4
750fx G3 Processor @ 800MHz
Built-In Sound
80GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
DVD/CDRW Combo Drive
2 USB Ports, 10/100 Ethernet
Keyboard and Mouse
------ $ 1375.00
All completely installed, tested and ready to run
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.
Amiga users are my mortal enemy! Long live the AtariST
ahh warm and fuzzy.
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.
dude, did anyone else spend hours using ray-tracing programs? well, actually, you used the program for about 5 minutes, and then waited about 40, and then used it for another 5, and then waited 40...
ah, the 1980s!
m.
It always amazes me to think that
1) The Amiga, though marketed as a gaming machine or play-with-graphics machine, had an operating system so capable and Unix-like
and
2) That business never realized the huge potential of a multitasking, windowing, command-line integrated OS to run spreadsheets and wordprocessors on instead of the clunky program launcher that was MS-DOS.
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
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.
Well, it's very interesting about how the Amiga has managed to continue on in the back waters of computing for the last few years. However, it's not the only one!
Thos of you who remember the Sinclair QL (ie. people such as Linus Torvalds and some of the early AmigaDOS authors who worked at Metacomco) might like to know that some people are continuing the development of both the hardware and the operating system..
eg. Q40 and their latest Q60 motherboard designed to fit in a PC case.
What's old is new again!
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
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.
Again it seems like its time to mention AROS. Its Amiga like, it has less features, less applications, it looks bloody similar, but, its open source. I feel if the future of Amiga lovers lies anywhere, it'll be here. It wont happen over night, but it will happen (if there is an amiga future).
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
No sweat. =)
You can buy a Catweasel. Or alternately, you can pop on eBay and snag an old Amiga for about 50 bucks. Find a Fred Fish disk with a terminal program...buy a null modem cable and move the files over.
Currently that's what I do. I DMS a disk into a file, and then null-modem it to my laptop. WinUAE runs 99% of the images I make that way.
Hope that helps. BTW, my Amiga 500 was my first C programming experience too. Aztec C. Loved it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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?
Its resting....
I'm very very sorry - but i just couldn't help myself...
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
Cloanto also offers a data transfer service if you don't want to buy a new piece of hardware for a limited data transfer job.
AmigaOS is a microkernel; drivers run as tasks separate from the kernel. So it's just a case of running a GPLed program on a non-GPLed operating system.
-Stephen
In 1985 the A1000 blew everything out of the water. I still have my A1000 in a box somewhere. One of the coolest PCs ever built the entire team signed the inside cover (including Jays dog).
Processor:
An 286 was state of the art and the 68000 compared more than favorably.
Graphics:
Heck EGA was just recently introduced, Macs were monocrhome. Amiga had extraordinary high colour capability (up to 4096 colours IIRC) and custom co-processor to accellerate 2d operations
Sound:
A basic PC beeped. The first soundblaster was still 2 years away. The amiga had multichannel digiatal waveform sound with co-processor support.
OS:
PC had Dos or Windows 1.0 (steaming pile of dung).
The amiga had a small efficient GUI OS with true pre-emptive multitasking...
The Amiga was a revolution of HW and software. What killed it was stagnation. It remained relatively unchanged for years allowing competition to catch and surpass some of its basic specs.
Personally I moved on when Win95/OS2 VGA/ 486/ Soundblaster finally made PCs tolerable.
Why would they have to license the entire OS under the GPL because the shipped a GPL'd driver with it?
Oh, they wouldn't. They'd just have to release the code that they added to the driver.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Having swap in RAM defeats the entire purpose of having swap space in the first place.
Several virtual memory management apps were written for the larger of the classic Amiga's and worked fine, but most of the time we made do with a few MB of memory and the lack of a vmm was rarely an issue.
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.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
> 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
GET A LIFE!! Move out of your parents basement! You! Have you ever kissed a girl? (now me) For the Love of Christ people! I had an Amiga 500, 1000 and 2000. I played games, I had fun, I even took one apart and spliced an op amp into the sound board so I could run negative voltages through it (try that with a pc) to run my laser graphics cards. BUT IT'S OVER! DONE WITH. Get a grip and let it fucking DIE already! I'm sure the architecture and OS were ahead of their time, but unless they were more than 18 years ahead of their time, then their still over the hill. Go outside and work on your car! or Go inside and work on your girlfriend! I don't care that one of the hotkeys looks like Bob Dobb's. Throw the fucking thing away, upgrade your PC or Mac and GET A LIFE! Amiga...it's over.
Jay would ask the dog whether to include a gate or not, and if the dog barked, the gate would go in -- otherwise not.
Wow, now that's impressive. The best I've been able to get from my dog is for him to ring a bell when he has to go outside to take a crap.
Basing Mac OS X on UNIX worked because there wasn't anything to the old Mac OS that was worth saving, except the applications, and they were able to transit the applications to a new OS reasonably cleanly over years WHILE maintaining sales wit hthe old OS.
This is a completely different situation. The old Amiga OS was the closest thing to a real-time microkernel desktop environment that's ever been released to the general public: QNX dropped out of a retail version of Photon, and the only other candidate, OS/9 (no relation or Mac OS 9) on the Radio Shack color computer long predated anything like a desktop OS. If Amiga went that way, well, they would just be another Linux distro... and one that didn't run a lot of important Linux software because it's not an 80x86 and so it won't run binary-only packages.
I'm amazed that this seems to have maintained almost everything that was good about AmigaDOS, including the wonderful infinitely configurable message-passing OS architecture. Until this moment I had written off AmigaOS as another doomed Linux clone. It may be doomed, but if so it's doomed with style.
Part of the *nix philosophy I believe is interoperability and choice provided by source compatability, the ability to compile software on any OS that complies with POSIX and other unix standards.
I ran the Amiga sources newsgroup for some years, and did several ports of UNIX applications to the platform. Even back in 1986 it was already a very UNIX-friendly and UNIX-compatible environment. I can't imagine that it's moved away from that since.
they need to support POSIX, X11 and other Unix source compatability standards
The first web browser I ever used was UNIX Mosaic, running on my Amiga using a local X11 server from a UNIX box running at my ISP. The text editor I used was "elvis", one of the classic "vi" clones, and porting it to AmigaDOS was almost trivial compared to what I'd had to do in other ports.
This is why we see so many different filesystems avialable on Linux for instance
The Amiga had user-written user-mode file systems, including some amazing ones like a RAM based file system that survived reboots, long before Linux existed. The Amiga API is VERY well designed for this kind of thing... and needless to say no applications had to be rewritten to make it work!
This is nothing but good news. Please do some research before dismissing this amazing OS because it's not based on Linux.