AmigaOS 4.0 released

tmk writes "After five years Hyperion announces the availability of AmigaOS 4.0: 'Amiga OS 4.0 is the most stable, modern and feature-rich incarnation to date of the multi-media centric operating system launched by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) in 1985 with which it still retains a high degree of compatibility.' But there is a snag: the new OS supports only the AmigaOne, which is not available anymore. According to Hyperion, the new hardware platform will be announced by third parties early 2007."

Comments

HAHA

[Anonymous Coward]

A broken POS os for Broken POS hardware that you can't get anymore. PERFECT!

Re:HAHA

[Anonymous Coward]

flamebait my ass, this is the fucking truth.

Ooh

[Greyfox]

A new release of AmigaOS! A new release of OS/2 can't be far behind!

Re:Ooh

[drinkypoo]

I'm still waiting for my CP/M update... Curse you, Amiga users! All three of you will burn in hell!

Re:Ooh

[IdleTime]

Well, I for one, am waiting on the new graphical OS for my Sinclair Z80. I hear it's going to kick some ass, the only problem is the boot time of 2 weeks from cassette tapes.

Re:Ooh

[Kazymyr]

I have a prerelease copy, but can't comment on it. I got a "R Tape loading error" on day 10 and had to start over. Still loading.

Re:Ooh

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

I heard that 'Duke Nukem Forever' will be released exclusively for AmigaOS!

Re:Ooh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... and the tragic part of it is yhat both of these were far superior to the most used OS... several years AFTER they were declared dead !

Re:Ooh

[ConceptJunkie]

At least you got something... I'm still waiting for the new release from Microsoft, "Windows Forever".

Re:Ooh

[rbanffy]

I will wait for the new BeOS.

Re:Ooh

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a prerelease copy, but can't comment on it. I got a "R Tape loading error" on day 10 and had to start over. Still loading.

Quatsch. Sure, the ZX Spectrum had room in its bloated 16K ROM for text error messages, along with all that unnecessary eye-candy (colour graphics? 256x192 resolution? Compute-and-display? A Jedi craves not these things...) The most plausible error message would have been '4/0'.

Re:Ooh

[milatchi]

Well Serenity Systems released eComStation 2.0 Beta 3 this month. So you shouldn't have to wait too
much longer for an update to OS/2 Warp ;-)
eComStation is an IBM licensed version of OS/2 Warp. The last version of IBM OS/2 Warp was
4.52 (I think). So when eComstation 2.0 comes out it should technically be OS/2 Warp 4.54 or 5.0

Re:Ooh

[empaler]

I heard that 'Duke Nukem Forever' will be released exclusively for AmigaOS! Hehehe. It's been so long since I've last seen a DNF-joke that it started being funny again.

Re:Ooh

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a prerelease copy, but can't comment on it. I got a "R Tape loading error" on day 10 and had to start over. Still loading. Quatsch. Sure, the ZX Spectrum had room in its bloated 16K ROM for text error messages AFAIR, "R Tape loading error" was a real error message. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum_software.
You would be surprised by the tricks used by Sinclair to hide words in this 16k ROM, as every keyword (PRINT, LET, etc.) was in truth one char long, using the char indexes greater than 127, which were unused at the time...
Which brings the question: Why AmigaOS, and not SpectrumOS? I miss the 26 char sprites and the two colors max in one char...
; p

Re:Ooh

[strikethree]

You know, I keep modding you down and you STILL haven't introduced your sister to me. :)

strike

Re:Ooh

[Hal_Porter]

Hey, I object to that comparison.

OS/2 run on commodity hardware and had passable compatibility with Windows and Dos applications, in addition to reasonable support from major software vendors (including Microsoft) for native applications. Plus it had major OEMs signed on to buy licenses for ATMs, and would be bundled with IBM hardware, back when IBM had the majority of the PC market.

Re:Ooh

[certain death]

Actually, the OS/2 release came about 3 months ago. They actually were first this time :o)

Re:Ooh

[Ed Avis]

Well, I for one, am waiting on the new graphical OS for my Sinclair Z80.

If you mean the ZX81 (not the ZX80, and not the Z88) then there was a new graphical OS released a couple of years ago. SP81 is a backport of the Spectrum operating system to the ZX81 hardware. It's compatible with many Spectrum games.

I expect the Sinclair QL has an alternative operating system written by Linus, if he can find the old disks in his attic.

Hmph

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine.. fork it a few more times could you? I'm sure it's not quite dead yet; Right horse?

Ooh-Beta Blocker.

[Anonymous Coward]

"A new release of AmigaOS! A new release of OS/2 can't be far behind!"

Funny you should say that.

Oh Samwise....

[ancient_kings]

won't you ever give up your quest?

He's dead, Jim.

[Just Some Guy]

I loved AmigaOS. I used it for probably a decade after it had completely stagnated at the top levels, while its huge crowd of shareware developers kept shovelling great software out to Aminet. But come on, folks: Amiga is dead. Not dying; dead. All of the technical elegance I appreciated for so long has now moved into other systems (KDE and its KIOslaves are far cooler than Amiga's "datatypes" ever hoped to be), and other than keeping an emulator available for the occasional retro-gaming jones, I just can't see a single reason for its continued existence.

I'm the last one to criticize people for spending their days working on projects that look insane to everyone else, but this brings me pretty close. Rest in peace, Amiga. You were beautiful at a time when no other computer was, but your era has long passed. Leave us with our wonderful memories, and sleep well.

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[maximthemagnificent]

Alas poor Amiga, I knew him well!

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[gewalker]

So, the real important question is whether or when will I be able to run version 4 on my favorite Amiga emulator? (Other than the even more obvious, what's the point?)

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[corpsmoderne]

If Amiga is dead, it can only mean one thing... P0WN3D BY ATARI!!!!!! W000000000000000T!!!!! errr, forget it...

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[Xugumad]

Yeah... now anyone looking for an elegant, easy to use but over expensive hardware/software combination with a serious lack of 3rd party software now gets a Mac.

(Posted from my MacBook Pro)

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[91degrees]

Indeed. And the OS was only a small part of it.

What the Amiga was was an inexpensive machine with fantastic graphics and sound (for the mid 80's), the ability to be plugged into a television, and a pretty good multitasking OS was a neat bonus. The only other company to make such a cool general purpose computer were Silicon Graphics.

A new OS is quite nice, and there were aspects of the Amiga's UI that I'm still fond of, but unless you have a complete machine, I'm not at all interested.

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[arifirefox]

yeah it's funny that *nobody* cares about atari heh

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[YttriumOxide]

You currently can't... nor will you be able to unless someone adds PPC support to "your favourite Amiga Emulator" (I assume you mean UAE here...) as well as hacking it to make it look like it has the hardware license key (AKA "annoying dongle chip on the motherboard that everyone hates since it forces you to use that proprietary hardware where otherwise you could run the OS on pretty much any appropriately specced PPC system, but is actually a good thing because it prevents piracy, which is what damn near killed Amiga in the first place")

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[YttriumOxide]

It's quite interesting, because I hear comments like this a lot, but my personal experience is quite different. I hardly ever plugged my Amiga in to the TV (too low quality) and have never been much of a gamer so graphics and sound are only a "bonus" as far as I'm concerned. I always liked my Amigas (from my A500 through to my trusty A4000 that I had for ages through to my current AmigaOne) just because the OS is so damn easy and elegant.

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[91degrees]

Fair enough. I'm curious though. What did you use yours for? Mine was mostly a games machine so the OS didn't really matter too much.

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[YttriumOxide]

Back in the days of my later classic Amigas (A1200 and A4000), mostly IRC - I was far too addicted in my youth... Also MUDding, general web browsing, messing around with graphics (in DPaint), music (OctaMED) and learning to code (mostly in C, but meddled with a few other languages as well).

Before all that, I ran a BBS on an earlier classic Amiga (A600), and before THAT (my A500 days) I was too young to do much other than play games.

My current AmigaOne, I regrettably don't use for much serious stuff, but once the Firefox port is finished, it'll likely become my main webbrowser and email system at the very least. As far as email clients go, I already prefer YAM ("Yet Another Mailer" - great software) to most other email clients, but I can't justify leaving the system on 24/7 just for email. When I do power it on at the moment (at least once a week), I have a couple of little coding projects on the go - mostly part of the community effort to get the brand new OS up to scratch with handy little utilities that are needed (check out os4depot.net for examples of the sorts of apps I mean)

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I have seen about KIOslaves, they still miss one area the datatypes had. They don't themselves identify what type of file they are dealing with and the software calling them generally relies on the very stupid extension method for file type identification.

I wish I was more excited..

[GreggBz]

Well, whoopee! Also, in this press release:

Availability of PowerPC hardware suitable for operation with Amiga OS 4.0 will be announced by third parties early 2007.

Which, the folks at Amiga.org are guessing, means a system based on the SAM board. Prototypes of this have been shown. But, knowing everything Amiga, I'll believe that when I see it. It would be nice, as it's a small simple motherboard that runs without the need for active cooling. It would make a unique and interesting web / internet / Amiga applications machine with a snappy OS.

I, myself have a nice PPC Amiga 1200, which I use occasionally for fun. It's a horrible over extended, upgraded collection of cables and add on cards though. We never got substantive replacement hardware, and we just kept expanding the old stuff. It will probably never see OS4 and I'll have to spend $1200 on a new system with the Eyetech board, or this SAM thing... maybe..

And lastly, yes we know it's basically orphaned and practically useless and modern replacements do things much much better and more cheaply, so I'll kindly ask all of you to save your breath, I don't care. It's just interesting how it won't die isn't it?

Re:I wish I was more excited..

[xjerky]

Is there any reason why they can't make it work on PowerPC-based Mac hardware? I'd almost hold onto my Powerbook just for that....

Re:I wish I was more excited..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that SAM board sounds like a nice platform for embedded Linux devices. Check out their web site and didn't notice much about OS support, but the supplied hardware is nice and the I/O ports would be very useful to people interested in Robotics and CNC controllers.

It is nice to see PPC being supported on a somewhat generic board. That doesn't mean much of course with out OS support, but I'd really hate to see PPC die completely off. The XBox doesn't count of course because of the lack of accessibility, at least PS3 has a Linux distro but I'm not even sure that will make it. So for people wanting to implement interesting things it would be nice to see this board take off and sell at a rate that makes it cost effective.

Dave

In related news...

[cmang]

The next release of MorphOS is planned to support hardware that's actually shipping. :)

Re:In related news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, while technologically impressive MorphOS sounds like a big pain in the ass. From their site:

MorphOS has no installation utility for current and legacy applications.
Go to Aminet and download the Installer 43.3. Of course this is a standalone file that you can simply put manually into a strategic directory of your hard disk.

MorphOS has no text editor for modifying startup scripts and plain texts.
There are plenty of text editors on Aminet. You can go there, and search and download what you need. In particular you will also find some editors already ported and compiled in native PowerPC code for MorphOS.

MorphOS has no TCP/IP stack.
Well, go to Aminet and download MOSNet, which is a TCP/IP stack compiled in native PowerPC code, and created explicitly for MorphOS.

MorphOS has no mailer.
The two most diffused mailers for the Amiga are open source. You can download YAM or SimpleMail from SourceForge or their homepages. There are nightly builds created in native PowerPC code for MorphOS, too.

MorphOS has no browser.
The source code of AWeb, formerly a commercial browser, was donated by the author to the Amiga community at the beginning of the millennium. All the upgrades for this browser created by the current development team are available at the AWeb homepage, even in a native MorphOS version.

(Please note that all the previous applications are open source software - except the Installer 43.3 that is freely distributable -. Their use does not prejudice in any way the owner rights of MorphOS and the software packages written/distributed by independent developers and/or software houses for commercial purposes.)

and the most glaring pain in the ass:

MorphOS has a very minimal documentation.
Due to the API compatibility, the documentation of AmigaOS 3.1 covers 75% of all the possible issues. However, MorphOS is not a simple clone of AmigaOS: it already embodies a large number of enhancements, most of which are not immediately visible to the unaware user. Here the community has given again its help with the creation of Le livre du Pegasos (The Pegasos Book), that collects in a single book a huge set of very useful and important information concerning hardware, software, and configuration issues that it is important to know when someone uses the Pegasos/MorphOS pair.

Secondly, I strongly dislike Bush as well, but you're a fool to associate yourself with Ramsey Clark.

From Wikipedia:

On 18 March 2006, Clark attended the funeral of Slobodan Milosevi. He has declared: "History will prove Milosevi was right. Charges are just that, charges. The trial did not have facts." He also described Slobodan Milosevi and Saddam Hussein as "[b]oth commanders" who "were courageous enough to fight more powerful countries."

And who has he defended?

* Nazi concentration camp commandant Karl Linnas
* Nazi War criminal Jack Reimer, charged in the killings of Jews in Warsaw.
* The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Advisory Board during late 1970s and early 1980s
* Branch Davidian leader David Koresh
* Antiwar activist Father Philip Berrigan
* Political figure Lyndon Larouche
* American Indian prisoner Leonard Peltier
* Crimes of America conference in Tehran in 1980
* Liberian political figure Charles G. Taylor during his 1985 fight against extradition from the United States to Liberia
* Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a leader in the Rwandan genocide
* PLO leaders in a lawsuit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer.
* Camilo Mejia, a US soldie

Seriously.

[urbanradar]

If people like working on this, great, let them. But even if it was great in its day, is *anyone* seriously fooling themselves AmigaOS is going to make a comeback of any sort ever again?

Re:Seriously.

[DavidNWelton]

Your descendants will thank the AmigaOS team, when it is the only OS capable of running patched together computers that run the defenses keeping the mutants from the forbidden zone at bay. They will be glad that the Amiga team retreated to The Caverns where they continued to pass down the secrets of the OS from generation to generation, memorizing the entire sequence of bytes in the event of a hard drive failure.

Re:Seriously.

[LiquidCoooled]

Are you saying the Amiga historians are the Rangers?

Re:Seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop recycling my old Duke Nukem comments, thx.

Re:Seriously.

[mcrbids]

Remember that not long ago, it was widely agreed that "UNIX IS DEAD". And now, with Linux, it's rebirthed and marketshare is growing once again.

Good ideas have a "zombie effect" - they tend to stick around and pop back up. Remember the (now totally defunct) NextSTEP guys? Well, they tried to make a user-friendly OS based on Unix and failed... sorta. The company went belly-up, and what they did eventually became OSX - a highly successful, stable, unix-for-grandmothers Operating System.

No, Amiga is not much of a force today - but if the code can be "kept alive" and can evolve fast enough to meet the new challenges (EG: USB) that come out, it can very easily resuscitate and become a viable contender once again, just as UNIX has come back at Windows with a vengeance with both OSX and Linux chipping at its heels.

Due to its simple power, I belive that UNIX will smash Windows over the next 10 years. But, it's quite concievable that Amiga OS will "merge" with UNIX and become a frankenOS, with trats from both, and that it just might kick some serious ass again. Someday.

Re:Seriously.

[ccp]

Remember the (now totally defunct) NextSTEP guys? Well, they tried to make a user-friendly OS based on Unix and failed... sorta. The company went belly-up, and what they did eventually became OSX -

Duh? Talk about revisionist history. Let's see...

they tried to make a user-friendly OS based on Unix and failed... sorta.

They made it, and they didn't fail. For one, the Web was created on this failed OS...
It looks like you have a pretty narrow definition of failed.

The company went belly-up

No, it didn't. Actually, they entered business legend taking over Apple for a negative amount of money. It was the Reality_Distortion_Field's finest hour!

Cheers,
CC

Re:Seriously.

[arifirefox]

lightwave 3d was also created on amiga. They are still around. To me, that is what amiga was really about. Not this.

The comedy continues

[realmolo]

So, it takes them how long to finally "finish" AmigaOS 4.0? And now that it's finished, the hardware it runs on is unavailable?

Just when you think the Amiga saga can't get any more absurd...

I fully expect them to announce that they're starting an x86 port, and it'll be ready in January of 2008. Or January of 2018, whichever comes later.

I had an Amiga back in the day. Loved it. Have no desire to use on ever again, though.

Re:The comedy continues

[Just Some Guy]

I fully expect them to announce that they're starting an x86 port, and it'll be ready in January of 2008.

Spoken like someone who abandoned their Amiga before the bitter end and didn't stick around for the true lunacy. A real Amiga announcement would claim that the new DEC Alpha port would be available for sale in Two Weeks (tm).

Re:The comedy continues

[Cthefuture]

Actually I thought there was an x86 version of AmigaOS 4 floating around. This was the demo/SDK you could boot up in Linux or Windows. Was this a different AmigaOS?

I have in fact been trying to get hold of the SDK for years but no luck (actually just the documentation would be nice). The whole VP code system seemed interesting even if not all that useful.

Re:The comedy continues

[rucs_hack]

Mayhap you are correct. However the programmers involved will have gained enviable experience in systems coding, such as would be useful in VM creation, or console programming.

If it serves no more purpose then to advance the careers of the team involved, then it's done well.

Re:The comedy continues

[LoadWB]

It's called AROS, the Amiga Replacement Operating System, and it's based on compatibility with the AmigaOS 3.1 API. I don't think they call it a "port", though. Check out http://www.aros.org/.

To disagree with some of the posters above... Amiga isn't dead, but it is dying at the hands of Amiga, Inc., for all I can tell. I like reading ignorant and uninformed people spewing forth about how dead it is, etc., when the reality seems that Amiga is one of the liveliest dead platforms around.

"Amiga: Dead and Loving It!"

Re:The comedy continues

[sgtrock]

Nahh. The /real/ absurdity will be when they announce that the Duke Nukem Forever team has decided to start over on the Amiga platform for the nifty programming benefits. :)

Re:The comedy continues

[Cthefuture]

No, there was an official (non-free) version with SDK. This was based on one of the later AmigaOS versions, not version 3. It was part of the "AmigaAnywhere" thing (see amiga.com).

Re:The comedy continues

[YttriumOxide]

Ah, that'd be the famed "AmigaDE" / "Amiga Anywhere" you'd be talking about. It's a long and confusing story which I won't go in to great detail on, but suffice to say it has no real relationship to AmigaOS at all. It's a product created/marketed by Amiga Inc - mostly it's just Tao's elate/intent system with a few extras added to it. I have the SDK and toyed with it a bit, but it didn't really hold my attention greatly.

On the wild rumourmill there has been speculation in the past about "Amiga Anywhere" and "AmigaOS" becoming much closer or even merging in the future, but I see a LOT of technical hurdles that would make that seem extremely unlikely.

As another poster (LoadWB) pointed out, there is AROS, which is an open source x86 AmigaOS clone, but it's not an official AmigaOS and feels very outdated compared to current Amiga systems as it aims for an AmigaOS 3.x look and feel.

It's all been downhill

[Reality Master 101]

I hear RT-11 is about to make a comeback! Damn you, it was one of the most powerful operating systems ever created, and STILL does things that no modern machine can do! It can, it can, IT CAN! Damn ALL YOU HEATHENS TO HELL!!!

Re:It's all been downhill

[cthulhu11]

... if you can manage to get an F/B monitor genned. I gave up after several hours on an 11/04 with RX01's.

This sounds familiar ...

[ScrewMaster]

Let's see ... what other company has recently released an operating system for a hardware platform that doesn't quite exist yet?

Re:This sounds familiar ...

[Chris Mattern]

I believe this situation is slightly different...the Amiga folks are releasing an operating system for a hardware platform that doesn't really exist any more...

Chris Mattern

Re:This sounds familiar ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would that be? (not joking)

Hardware is beside the point

[fm6]

If you're going to create an OS that nobody will use, does it matter whether there's any hardware to run it on?

Re:Hardware is beside the point

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to create an OS that nobody will use, does it matter whether there's any hardware to run it on?

Speak for yourself. I bet Duke Nukem Forever will run on it, and it's slated to be released before the end of the year.

Re:Hardware is beside the point

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I have now achieved enlightenment. Thanks.

Re:Hardware is beside the point

[dangitman]

Software Failure. Press left mouse button to continue.
Guru Meditation #8100000A.8400000C

Fanboys

[Handlarn]

Amiga users are certainly taking the concept of fanboyism to a whole new level.

Hell, I even had an Amiga and bashed Windows and MS-DOS back in the days, but seriously, Windows and the hardware available has evolved a lot since then and Amiga is still on square one. ScalaMM and Deluxe Paint were nice and all, but isn't it time to move on? Now you got an OS which is several years delayed without a computer to run it on. Why oh why?

Re:Fanboys

[Anonymous Coward]

As incredible as it sounds, many people (including me) still consider Deluxe Paint to be the best pixel painting software there is and keep it running through emulators. It's kind of sad that no-one's bettered it in the ten years or so since the last release, and none of the reimplementation/cloning projects even come close.

Re:Fanboys

[YttriumOxide]

You know, Windows is dead. I mean, Word 6 and Internet Explorer 2 were great in their day, but come on!

Seriously - it's these kind of comments that really get to me. I'll be the first to admit that my Amiga (AmigaOne running OS4) is sorely lacking in good modern software in some (maybe many) areas, but judging a new OS release on software that is years old is a little silly. We've moved on since Scala and DPaint!

Re:Fanboys

[Anonymous Coward]

"Windows"

Windows is so slow compared whit OS4, now how many Ghz and how many GBytes for ram do you need to run Vista again?

"hardware available has evolved a lot since then"

New Amiga computers chipsets hardware, PCI, USB, hard drive controllers so your comment is invalid

"ScalaMM and Deluxe Paint were nice and all, but isn't it time to move on?"

They do not work on AmigaOS4, you can run Personal Paint if you most, but way not use Gimp it is ported to AmigaOS4, or 24bit painting program like TV paint, FXPaint.

http://www.os4depot.net/index.php?function=showfil e&file=graphics/edit/gimp_cygnix-src.tgz

ScalaMM is replaced by program called Hollywood now.

"you got an OS which is several years delayed without a computer to run it on. Why oh why?"

There exits a few models, AmigaOne XE, AmigaOne SE, Micro Amiga One, they uses PowerPC G3, G4 600, 800 and 933 Mhz CPU's, the type of CPU you find in older MAC computers from 2000 to 2005, AmigaOne computers are no longer in production, as they are based on the designs from Mai logic, the northbright chip is no longer in productions as chips are buggy and the company designing the chips are no exists.

Now we Amiga fans can only wait for new hardware if we are going to upgrade, just like any other PC user out there :-)

Most appropriate hardware? easy

[marcello_dl]

The playstation 3.

Programming for Amiga

[robvangelder]

I'm not certain that it was the Operating System that made Amiga fun, but it's hardware and community.

I participated in "the scene" where you got to advertise your warez group by posting a miniature presentation before the game loaded.
These were called "intros" - some of these were a very impressive collection of code, graphics, and sound.
I used to write the code behind many intros in my early teens for programming exercise and to support my group.

The scene also released and supported an open source (free source?) soundtracker player that became the de-facto music player format for Amiga. Soundtracker (and forks of) were widely available with a huge library of samples and mods (mods being the completed song). Any non-musician could load some sound samples and start banging qwerty to hear tunes.

The Amiga's architecture was a very good for the first-time-asm-coder. 680x0 is quite an easy assembler language and Amiga's hardware, particularly the graphics (and copper), was easy to write for. So, the rewards after the first hour of programming were there and learning curve low. It made you want to poke around and look for more effects - with a few Guru Meditations along the way.
I mean, 1985 and it had 3d graphic capabilities built into the hardware - standard.

Put together, Amiga produced some of the best eye-candy I've ever seen.

I really miss the Amiga scene. I believe it's gone for good. The majority of use have grown up - moved on.
I don't believe a new Operating System is going to revive the community - the community that "made" Amiga what I remember it as.

Re:Programming for Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga didn't have 3d hardware fyi, just lots of 2d hardware acceleration for blitting polygons after a normal 3d -> 2d projection.

Re:Programming for Amiga

[Thumper_SVX]

Wow, am I getting nostalgic reading this thread!

I would tend to agree with you here. I was also part of "The Scene" way back when. The community was built up around people who tended to take what the manufacturers said their hardware could and could not do, and attempt to prove them wrong. Some of the slickest bits of code I ever saw in my life were in 68000 on the Amiga and Atari ST. The former had the advantage of nice hardware, but I saw some awesome code on the latter trying to overcome its limitations and making it more like the Amiga in software. Truly wonderful times.

That community doesn't have a chance in the modern computing world. The code these days is too obfuscated from the hardware to really push it in the same way that you can with assembly. On the other hand though it's increasingly difficult to code anything impressive because of the wide arrange of hardware that's out there. You just can't write a demo or intro that'll run on everyone's machine without going through an API layer (operating system), and then you just can't push the hardware like you want to.

This is why when I grew up I got involved a lot with embedded systems. While you don't have the in-built audience that you got with "the scene", embedded shops are screaming out for talented coders who can whip out awesomely efficient code on a known hardware platform. Although the audience is smaller, you will get a bunch of embedded geeks looking at your code and saying "Cool!" when you've done something truly amazing within the limits of the hardware. Then you get to see your code in the marketplace making stuff really work... or in the ultimate example launched into space and doing unexpected but wonderful things on another planet. Now there's a reward that the scene couldn't match :D

Re:Programming for Amiga

[Bert64]

Although HAM mode was originally designed for a virtual reality system of some kind...
The 3D abilities of the Amiga were rather rudimentary, it could do flat shaded polygons well, but texture mapping was actually made more difficult by the way the Amiga dsplay system worked. However when the amiga was made, everyone played 2d games anyway.

Re:Programming for Amiga

[rmart]

The demoscene DOES still exist, even on Amiga, Atari ST and so on. Just see sites like Pouet and scene.org. The focus has obviously moved away a bit from pushing the hardware, instead creating very visually appealing productions.

Re:Programming for Amiga

[Pienjo]

This is why when I grew up I got involved a lot with embedded systems. While you don't have the in-built audience that you got with "the scene", embedded shops are screaming out for talented coders who can whip out awesomely efficient code on a known hardware platform. Although the audience is smaller, you will get a bunch of embedded geeks looking at your code and saying "Cool!" when you've done something truly amazing within the limits of the hardware. Then you get to see your code in the marketplace making stuff really work... or in the ultimate example launched into space and doing unexpected but wonderful things on another planet. Now there's a reward that the scene couldn't match :D

Amen to that, brother.

Re:Programming for Amiga

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

That community doesn't have a chance in the modern computing world. The code these days is too obfuscated from the hardware to really push it in the same way that you can with assembly. On the other hand though it's increasingly difficult to code anything impressive because of the wide arrange of hardware that's out there. You just can't write a demo or intro that'll run on everyone's machine without going through an API layer (operating system), and then you just can't push the hardware like you want to.

Apparently, you haven't heard of the TI-89 (12MHz M68000 / 256k) or the TI-83 (6MHz Z800 / 24k). There are plenty of students who have them (particularly the 83+, but also the 89), and you would never believe how much they loved to play calculator games - particularly good ones.

Re:Programming for Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

There is still some amazing scene stuff going on, but instead of pushing the hardware, the scene is now about pushing the boundaries of programming languages and algorithms. .kkrieger is a well-known example; it is a 3D FPS that uses only 95KB on disk, thanks to procedurally generated content.

I'm not dead yet

[edwardpickman]

Talk about beating a dead horse. I know there are still devoted fans out there but it would take a herculean effort to get the OS semi modern and even then it's pointless. What made it unique was the combination of OS and chipset. If they want to resurrect the spirit of Amiga they need to develope chips that had a similar approach to graphics intergration. Anything else is feeding off nostalga and is completely pointless. You might as well get excited because some one was bringing back DOS. There actually would be a reason for that. Not to the average user but it was far easier to program devices on DOS. There are motion control machines still running DOS. Although they have largely gone the way of the dinosaur there would be need for an updated DOS but without the hardware to go with Amiga is pointless. If they are simply adapting it to an AMD or P4 chip it'd make as much sense as putting a modern engine in a model T. One day you just have to accept it's dead and move on. I just wish one of the chip makers would team up with some one like a Linux developer and come up with a system that used the same approach. Could you imagine an OS with targeted graphios all on seperate cores? Even parts of the OS embeded into the chip architecture for processing graphics within the chip itself. There's no way a traditional approach to computer design could come close. The laws of physics would prevent it. Transferring data will always cost you speed so localizing functions will always be faster. Quantum computers may change that but I probably won't live to see that.

Re:I'm not dead yet

[couchslug]

"You might as well get excited because some one was bringing back DOS."

http://www.freedos.org/

Re:I'm not dead yet

[tablebeast]

" ...without the hardware to go with Amiga is pointless. If they are simply adapting it to an AMD or P4 chip it'd make as much sense as putting a modern engine in a model T."

Well, people do put modern engines in Model T's, have been since at least the late 1940's. They're called Hot Rods. I think it would be a more appropriate analogy to say its like putting a model T engine in a modern car, something only a nut would even attempt.

Re:I'm not dead yet

[techno-vampire]

There are motion control machines still running DOS.

A friend of mine is into packet radio and much of their software is still on CP/M. It works, the hardware doesn't wear out(except for disk drives) and there's no reason to port it to anything more recent.

Re:I'm not dead yet

[Vintermann]

Dosbox is more fun.

Re:I'm not dead yet

[YttriumOxide]

The problem with the idea of new custom hardware is just that it wouldn't cut it. No single company is going to be able to product sound better than the dedicated sound card companies, graphics better than the dedicated graphics card companies etc etc etc and tie it all in to one dedicated system. Even if they did pull off such a miracle, then the entire system would be obsolete in a year or so anyway since the rest of the industry would move on and they just wouldn't have the resources to do so.

If they went down the alternate path of dedicated chipsets made by the major manufacturers, well, that's really no different to what there is now. You can write software that REQUIRES an X1600 for example if you really want to... but why would you?

Basically, custom onboard dedicated chipsets in desktop computers are history.

Re:I'm not dead yet

[adrianmonk]

Talk about beating a dead horse. I know there are still devoted fans out there but it would take a herculean effort to get the OS semi modern and even then it's pointless. What made it unique was the combination of OS and chipset. If they want to resurrect the spirit of Amiga they need to develope chips that had a similar approach to graphics intergration. Anything else is feeding off nostalga and is completely pointless

It has already been done. It was called BeOS. Even it is pretty much dead at this point, which just goes to show you how completely dead AmigaDOS is. Although once I say that, undoubtedly some BeOS zealot will explain why I'm wrong about BeOS being dead. And that will just prove my point that BeOS is the spiritual successor to AmigaDOS. :-)

And yes, for what it's worth, I had an Amiga 2000. I bought it back in 1989, and it had 1MB of RAM, polyphonic stereo sound, and 4096 colors at a time when my MS-DOS counterparts were still beating their skulls against the 640K barrier and using EGA, if they were really lucky. And yeah, you can say that it was only really 32 colors, but you're wrong for 4 reasons:

1. Half-bright mode.
2. HAM mode.
3. Sliced HAM (SHAM) mode.
4. Dynamic HiRes.

Oh. My. God. Dynamic HiRes. The first time I saw that demo which showed the full 4096 color photo of those pebbles at nominal 640x400 resolution but with overscan (making it more like 700x440), I just about couldn't believe what I was seeing. There I was, looking at a piece of software that made my computer show an image in a video mode that had been believed (by most) to be impossible for the hardware to accomplish.

Worth it

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Its worth it just to see all these guys whine about letting it die, or about how its already dead.

Long live the Amiga!

Re:Worth it

[Fogbank]

I saw Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa in a supermarket yesterday.
They were giving away copies of the new AmigaOS.

Long live the Pelvis!

Next Up

[VonSkippy]

Rotary Phone 2.0 baby!

Re:Next Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Its called touch tone.

This is just pathetic!

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched from Amiga to DOS simply because the GUI was so fucking sluggish in CLI that I couldn't stand it.

Re:This is just pathetic!

[YttriumOxide]

Ummmm... huh? Booting with WB loaded to a basic intuition screen with a CLI in it was SNAPPY on every model of Amiga ever. Sluggish is hardly a word I'd ever use to describe any aspects of AmigaOS except on severely underpowered systems with every fancy add-on under the sun (which you can hardly blame the OS itself for)

Re:This is just pathetic!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use my Amiga to develop software, listen to music using my sound blaster live 5.1 sound card, while playing games on my standard radion graphics card, often transferee images from my camera or mobile phone to my Amiga using USB, I use it look at the movies in divx format works just so fine and smooth thanks to overlay support, I use it to listen to pod casts, and number of other things.

AmigaOS4 has done the impossible; it is efficient at same time modern, boots fast acts fast on any command you give it, for OS (not) in development for so long time, it not that bad, now we need OS4.1 and 4.2 to clean up anything missing inn the package (drives from TV cards, drivers for printers and scanners)

The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[Sloppy]

..is that it was only available on limited hardware and wasn't being maintained. (Having software that is ten times faster than the competition isn't a real advantage if the hardware is twenty times slower.)

And the reason that happened, was because it wasn't Free.

AmigaOS 4 is truly following in the steps of its forefather. If the people in that project want to know how much marketshare AmigaOS 4 will have, they just have to look at the marketshare of AmigaOS 3.x.

As for me, I run software that I know will be maintained and updated. I don't have to take anyone's word for it; it requires no faith at all. And that's good, because I don't have any faith anymore: my Amiga experience killed it.

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[cybpunks3]

The soul of the Amiga was its chipset. Slow by modern standards, but still "cool" in the same way people still enjoy tinkering with the Atari 2600. Once you drop the chipset, all you are left with is an OS with no software support. You really have to concede that the legacy software is outclassed by modern equivalents. By hitching their wagons on PPC and taking so long they are now an entire processor family behind the times as Apple has thrown in the towel and gone Intel. The fact that Apple had to leverage Unix to bootstrap OSX should indicate how difficult it is to get a new OS off the ground. I don't see how any alternative OS can succeed unless it's built on top of a Linux or Unix kernel and can run at least some of those apps.

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[Bert64]

I did the same... It wasn't just the OS tho:
Basic networking software on the Amiga cost money, a web browser, an ftp client, an irc client, even a telnet client cost money... Every other platform had these basic clients available for free. When i was first using the internet, i did so from an amiga, and very quickly got frustrated by the ridiculous pricing for the most trivial of programs.
And the attitude of a significant portion of the Amiga community when you pirated these programs... Many would shun you, claiming you were "destroying the amiga" and most of the networking software had backdoors that would be exploited to punish you for pirating these apps.
Piracy did not kill the amiga, piracy MADE the amiga, at least in europe... Most of the people who bought amigas for gaming did so because it was easy to copy games, people bought them for their kids so their kids could share games with their friends in school.
And then, when the amiga was on it's last legs, commodore bankrupt, users leaving in droves, rather than trying to encourage people to stay on the amiga, they make it so ridiculously expensive to stick with the amiga that it's cheaper to buy a windows or linux based pc.
Now the same thing happens with AmigaOS 4, artificially restricting what hardware it can run on with their proprietary rom-based dongle... Making it so ridiculously expensive to use that they will never attract new users, as the few remaining amiga users keep dwindling in numbers.

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[Squozen]

I bet the developer community wept for days, losing a good customer like yourself.

Back when I used an Amiga on the internet, I paid for my software.

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[Eli Gottlieb]

So you want the Unix virus to claim *another* victim?

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[Anonymous Coward]

When i was first using the internet, i did so from an amiga, and very quickly got frustrated by the ridiculous pricing for the most trivial of programs.

The Mac is the spiritual successor of the Amiga in this regard.

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[YttriumOxide]

So if I told you the OS now includes a TCP stack, ftp client, telnet client, web browser etc, you'd come back to AmigaOS?

I assume not, but since this discussion is about AmigaOS4, it's a little pointless to complain about the lack of stuff in the past doesn't it? I mean, should I say I'm not going to use Windows because Windows 2.x didn't have any of that stuff either?

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[Bert64]

You are precisely the kind of user who's sanctimonious attitude drove away a large number of amiga users.
Users of other platforms never had to pay for basic internet software, why should amiga users? Having to pay for such basic tools is a very negative point against the amiga.
Having to spend so much on software, leaves far less money to buy hardware, and the total cost is just ridiculous, you can buy a functional PC for the same money and get everything you need to get on the internet included or for free.
It's pure greed that these people tried to wring every last cent out of what little remained of the amiga community, providing yet more incentive for people to abandon the platform for the sake of making a mere few dollars.

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[Bert64]

It's not about the fact that it didn't include these things by default, that's to be expected considering the age of the OS...
What the complaint was, is the fact that virtually all of these tools were only available as costly commercial packages.
I was just trying to find examples of the prices, but it seems all these programs are no longer available, you can still download the shareware versions but you can't register them, and they were virtually all rather harsh crippleware, shutting down after 30 minutes for instance.
I recently dug my old amiga out of the attic, and tried to get it online.... I couldn't get any software for it, either legitimately or through piracy... I could only get the crippleware versions which timed out after 30 minutes. In the end, i intalled linux/m68k on the machine so i could transfer files in and out of it. With linux, i get a free tcp stack, browser, and all the other standard internet tools, and they will still be downloadable and useable 10 years from now.

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[Bert64]

And for your information, i was buying amiga hardware, and software while it was sensibly priced...
I was still in school when the amiga was popular, and we never had that much money... My parents bought me an amiga because they represented good value for money, i could play games on it and do my homework, infact i bought plenty of games (still have most of them) and a few apps like wordsworth.
Later i bought a modem, so i could get online, which was all well and good... But then to be told that i needed to buy (trying to remember pricing):
A TCP Stack - £30
A Web browser - £30
An IRC client - £20
A mail client - £25
A telnet client - £25
An FTP client - £30
The MUI gui toolkit that most of the above apps required - £30

All this added up to more than twice the cost of the actual modem, and then you had to pay for updates when new versions came out too... Even microsoft don't screw their users this hard, and they can afford to alienate their users because they have plenty more.
And then the attitude of inserting backdoors into programs to attack people who pirated them, totally immoral and just shows what a bunch of cowboys they were, ripping off what little remained of the amiga community.
Not to mention that various groups of people actively tried to scupper efforts to produce free alternatives to their programs, for example the amozilla project which aimed to port netscape to amigaos back when it was first open sourced, even netscape 4 as it was, was a far more advanced browser than anything else available for the amiga, and ran at a more than acceptable speed on amiga hardware (the mac version ran very well under shapeshifter)

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[Squozen]

Actually, users of other platforms in the early 90s did have to pay for internet software. Windows 3.1 did not come as standard with a TCP stack or software (google for 'Trumpet Winsock'), and early versions of the Mac OS similarly needed 3rd-party applications (FTP, Telnet, ping/traceroute/dig).

What you should be complaining about is that Commodore dropped the ball on Amiga OS development, not that third-party developers attempted to earn a living from developing tools to allow you to use the Internet. OH MY GOD, THE INJUSTICE!

Re:The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS..

[Bert64]

There were several free TCP stacks for windows and macos, and those that were non-free didn't have such ridiculous 30 minute timeouts on them, neither did the applications.
mIRC - a popular windows irc client, is still shareware but it doesn't stop you from using it by disconnecting you after 30 minutes.
Netscape had a paid for version, but the free version was still fully functional

At last!

[Anonymous Coward]

An operating system that will give Vista a run for it's money... Balmer is no doubt shaking in his boots right now.

Cart before horse

[Tx]

Releasing a new OS before the hardware is available is one of the most ass-backwards things in the entire ass-backwards history of the Amiga. And I think it's pretty shocking that they don't support the add-on PowerPC cards for classic Amiga hardware, since IIRC that's what they were developing on. I guess they want their new hardware to sell (if and when...), but you'd think an OS with so little to commend it in this day and age would want to pick up every possible scrap of userbase, no?

Re:Cart before horse

[GURU Meditation 8000]

oh, but they DO support the classic PowerPC addon cards for A1200 and A4000. I myself have a 4.0 prerelease
working on A1200 with BlizzardPPC and a Mediator 1200 SX. its a frankenstein of a system lash-up and I'd hoped
the standard new Amiga platform would have been for sale way before the 4.0 release.

My refrain...

[kabdib]

My refrain from 15 years ago:

"Sell your Agima! Move out of your parent's house!"

seems even more apropos now.

Ahem. Of course, the 25+ year old vintage microcomputers that I'm currently mucking around with (restoring digital tape drives, making MP3s of old audio cassettes, cleaning the muck off 1Kx1 RAM chips...) are not a waste of time, because . . . well, because. :-)

Re:My refrain...

[Anonymous Coward]

My refrain from 15 years ago:

"Sell your Agima! Move out of your parent's house!"

seems even more apropos now.

Ahem. Of course, the 25+ year old vintage microcomputers that I'm currently mucking around with (restoring digital tape drives, making MP3s of old audio cassettes, cleaning the muck off 1Kx1 RAM chips...) are not a waste of time, because . . . well, because. :-)

That's only because you worked for Atari. Do NOT make me sick the forehead bulging job interviewer on you again! ;)

Re:My refrain...

[kabdib]

Of *course* I worked for Atari (on the ST . . . and other things). We had the Flying Tramiel Brothers Invasion Corps and Marching Band and an OS scraped together over a weekend by Digital Research. The Amiga guys had multitasking, blitters, bouncing beachballs, compilers that didn't suck . . . and Kiki Stockhammer. My living God, we were jealous.

Ah, but who went out of business first? [Actually, I couldn't tell you. Don't bother me with facts; my false sense of superiority works best in a vacuum]

Funny how later I ended up working for one of the guys who shipped the first Mac. Silly Valley is small, *way* small: Don't piss anyone off unless it's really worth it. And when you ship, make sure you have a beachball.

Dupe?

[MrLogic17]

Only on Slashdot could an OS be listed as both Vintage and New Release - in the same day.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/26/08 31250

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=213634&cid =17366606

mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

First they had hardware but no software; now they have software but no hardware. LOL.

hold everything

[mgabrys_sf]

Does this mean Duke Nuke-em is going to come out? Holy crap - someone borrow some ice from hell.

AmigaOS on PPC Mac

[IL-CSIXTY4]

The main obstacle to getting AmigaOS ported to anything other than the AmigaOne is Amiga, Inc's licensing program. They license out the right for a board to carry the Amiga name and run AmigaOS, by virtue of a ROM "dongle" that gets integrated into the motherboard. This means that anything running AmigaOS has to be specifically designed to run AmigaOS. According to messages on the AmigaWorld.net and Amiga.org forums, the company hasn't been very good at getting back to the few people who have emailed them asking about licenses. I can't see value they see in holding such tight reigns on something with such a small market.

Then, there's the matter of developer documentation. The folks at Hyperion who are coding the OS want solid documentation for the hardware they're targeting. They don't want to just look at the Linux Mac code and just trust it works the way it should.

But that second point is largely irrelevant, as they'll never get the chance to do it given the current situation with Amiga, Inc.

Re:AmigaOS on PPC Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

They license ... by virtue of a ROM "dongle" that gets integrated into the motherboard This isn't working for Apple, why would it work for Amiga? Or are Amiga hackers just not a clever as Mac hackers? [Iinsert picture of Nomex-clad ass diving into rad-hard bunker here]

Re:AmigaOS on PPC Mac

[Seehund]

More on the insane licensing scheme here. As long as Amiga, Inc. refuse to let AmigaOS be sold for hardware that people already own or would actually consider buying, the whole AmigaOS4 project is a complete waste of time, money and enthusiasm.

(Yeah, yeah, I can hear the "it'd be pointless no matter how it's sold" comments already...)

Hwardware Vaporware

[Nom du Keyboard]

Hardware vaporware. That's a new concept for an Operating System.

Mod mod parent up parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, this guy makes about as good of a point as the top parent.

Funeral ceremonies were held today for the Amiga..

[mmell]

In attendance, her children: Agnus, Denise, Paula, Gary and Sid. There was a blit of a disturbance, but a copper quickly sorted the situation out.

I miss getting video toasted! Waaah!

CHRP

[mr-mafoo]

Im an OS junkie. Im the guy that installs AthenaOS on his computer for no good reason. I even had NeXT Step v3 running for a while. And I've done the rhapsody and most subsequent builds. I must have installed about 5 diffrent linux distros on my 266mhzPowerbook G3 - wiping the HD each time to set up the sugested swap/usr/root partitions. I even did A/UX and OS/2.

I was excited 5 years ago about the MorphOS/AmigaOS (henceforth called AO/S) when the CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) was promising cheap PPC boards with Cheap PC connectivity compared to the macs available at the time.

It has to be said, when you compare A/OS to vista or any incarnation of OSX it comes up lacking. I've used workbench under UAE for some time for random OS Porn, and the new version actually looks worse than 1994 A/OS.

Unless they can find a reason why A/OS is better - and it was for multitasking/threading a while back - its not really worth perusing the project further, unless for past nostalgia, which is a perfectly valid reason from a hobbyists' perspective.

BeOS had the multimedia aspect as its selling point, and then it upped and went to the embedded side, which put the final nail in the coffin. Amiga OS doesn't see to have any funky buzzwords associated with it. Its all about buzzwords in this marketing ; consumer based society.

Amiga is not (yet) vaporware

[guruevi]

A lot of /.-ers complaining that Amiga is vaporware. Not yet. Amiga is still used in existing installations especially in the music/theater world for DMX/MIDI and other computer-controlled light- and music sets as well as real-time effects on lights, video and music. The fact that most controllers are hardware based and don't need any processing by the CPU is a great thing as compared to the latency even top-end video- and soundcards on PCI produce. It has a great open-source fan base and it is (still) stable as hell in all the applications I've seen and especially in real-time performances not really a task for (Windows) PC computers.

Re:Amiga is not (yet) vaporware

[banerjek]

A lot of /.-ers complaining that Amiga is vaporware. Not yet. Amiga is still used in existing installations especially in the music/theater world for DMX/MIDI and other computer-controlled light- and music sets as well as real-time effects on lights, video and music. There are also people who still use all kinds of old hardware. Just a couple years ago, we migrated one of our services off a 20 year old VAX machine. Having said that, I wouldn't characterize the longevity of that system as being based on a great OS and great hardware.

Instead of the Amiga, they need to revive the Vic-20, the most powerful computer in the world. This wonder computer was produced by the same company a full 5 years before the Amiga. Come to think of it, I knew a lot more people that worked with the Vics and C64s than the Amigas even though everyone liked them.

Then again,

Re:Amiga is not (yet) vaporware

[coaxial]

Yes, yes. We all love Video Toaster.

I know they used to use it back in 1993 or 1994 at the Riverport Amphetheater (Now UMB Bank Pavillion), but I haven't seen it used there or anywhere since then.

Re:Amiga is not (yet) vaporware

[dfn_deux]

Too bad that the software release they've announced won't run on any of that equipment and the hardware is only vapor...

Re:Amiga is not (yet) vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

and the color of the sky is your world is...

Re:Amiga is not (yet) vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of info tv channels that still use amiga+scala as well. And why should they not? It use less electricity, is silent, stable and even runs smoother than on a more modern pc. This is due to the fact of both the OS being very lightweight and due to the custom chipset. The amiga can scroll 2d graphics completely smoothly even if the cpu is hogged up with different tasks. On a pc this would lead to jerky scrolling.

The AmigaONE+OS4 has sadly lost that advantage, due to the fact that it is completely standard hardware. The OS is in my opinion very nice though, due to the fact that it is so responsive. Both linux and windows does seem much less responsive even on top modern hardware and linux running with a lightweight window manager. Why should i use my pc for lets say sending emails when my amiga can do the same task much quicker? I dont think AmigaOS will ever compete with Windows, Linux or OSX but there are loads people who prefer it over other oses. OS4 is not just OS3.1 with a bunch of third party hacks but has infact been improved alot upon and even in some parts been completely rewritten. The orginal OS lacked both virtual memory and memory protection, but it has now full virtual memory and partial memory protection.

Re:Amiga is not (yet) vaporware

[YttriumOxide]

Hmm... My AmigaOne isn't vapour!

Okay, true... NEW hardware is currently vapour, but my Micro AmigaOne isn't THAT old yet (bought it shortly after it's release - don't recall exactly when, but only a couple of years back now)... I'll get at least a couple more years of service out of it yet (and hell, there are still MANY people using their Classic Amigas - now THAT'S old hardware)

Re:Amiga is not (yet) vaporware

[YttriumOxide]

Being posted by an anonymous coward, the parent may go unnoticed by many. If any mods notice this comment, please mod the parent up! (informative or interesting - it's both!)

I dunno that just seems.. stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

They must want this project to either fail or never pay for itself with tactics like lets make an OS and then lets figure out how to make actually sell it afterward.

Amiga back now that dual CPU's have finally caught up to the original Amiga, but WTF is the point. How far behind is the platform at this point. They should have just coded a new OS to run on modern hardware from the ground up and told Amiga hold outs to switch.

What we need is Amiga for the ps3. Hey maybe I'll go buy an Amiga off ebay so I can try out their new OS.

In the age that is spawning WebOS's Amiga remakes AmigaOS for a 100% legacy hardware platform. Man I hope they made their core exceptionally portable. Do you think they will have .net for AmigaOS ? heh

Re:I dunno that just seems.. stupid

[YttriumOxide]

Hmmm... might want to read up a bit more - it doesn't run on Classic Amigas. If you buy an old Amiga from eBay, don't expect to run AmigaOS4 on it! (it'd be somewhat similar to expecting to run OSX on a 68k Mac)

Re:I dunno that just seems.. stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

You can with a classic equipped with a ppc accelerator.

Re:I dunno that just seems.. stupid

[unother]

Erm... no, you can't. All the PPC upgrades were 601 upgrades, and were sold for a specific subset of models. Apple stopped supporting those with MacOS 8.5; OS X has always only run on G3+ hardware. There are some hacks to do this, but it would fall back into the "hobbyist" category.

Your moment of Zen

[Rob T Firefly]

If an operating system is released, and there's no hardware around to run it, does it make a sound?

Re:Your moment of Zen

[benjonson]

If an operating system is released, and there's no hardware around to run it, does it make a sound?

The sound of one hand clapping, Grasshopper.

Re:Your moment of Zen

[Eli Gottlieb]

So AmigaOS 4 makes the 'cl' sound.

Software Failure. Press less mouse button to conti

[Tumbleweed]

Guru Meditation. Amiga not found.

her

[Shawn is an Asshole]

Amiga == feminine
Amigo == masculine

Re:her

[amigaguy]

Think you got that translation wrong... Amiga = Girlfriend Amigo = Boyfriend... You can have your Amigo for yourself...

RAM Disk

[MtlDty]

One of the features I most missed when I migrated (perhaps downsized) from my beloved Amiga to PCs / Microsoft Windows was the RAM disk. http://www.amigaos4.com/index.php%3Foption=content &task=view&id=9&Itemid=0&limit=1&limitstart=2.html How come Microsoft didnt copy this feature I wonder? The ability to temporarily store files to ram (rather than having some temporary disk space that you had to remember to delete) was a great feature for me that I really missed in the early days of my PC use. For example, to copy files from one floppy disk to another in the Amiga OS you would use the ram disk, but on DOS / Windows you had to create a temp folder on hard disc, copy stuff back and forth then delete it all.

Re:RAM Disk

[vadim_t]

Microsoft had it in the form of RAMDRIVE.SYS in MS-DOS. Not sure how support of that was in DOS.

The Linux kernel supports it easily:
mount tmpfs -t tmpfs /mnt/tempdisk -o size=32m

The Linux version is dynamic, and unused space on the disk isn't wasted.

Re:RAM Disk

[AnyoneEB]

DOS had RAM disk support. I usually had one enabled whenever I was using DOS. If I remember correctly, the command was ramdisk. I believe that still worked in Windows 9x, although I do not remember. The lack of built-in RAM disk support in Windows NT certainly surprised me too. Maybe someone will reply to this post and tell me I just have not found it, but Google comes up with a lot of third party solutions, so I doubt it. Of course, on Linux you can always just use tmpfs, although tmpfs is not like a normal RAM disk in that when it runs out of space instead of paging it simply starts deleting files. According to the wiki page, ramfs is the Linux filesystem for a normal ram disk.

Re:RAM Disk

[Galactic Dominator]

device=a:\dos\ramdisk.sys /kbtouse=xxx #Up to 32000KB

Re:RAM Disk

[Anonymous Coward]

These is a single size ie non-explanding Ram: Disk available from Microsoft, sorry, can't remember what't its call or a link off hand, as I'm writting this from my Amiga OS4 computer, not the Windows 2000 one.

I think there's a couple of other third part programs that does something similar, I tried the MS one, didn't work half as well as the old Amiga version, which wasn't a great suprise.

And what's with you lot of big Bullies picking on a small defenceless little minoity OS, it works well as OS, sure some of the software software browers for example are a little old fashioned, you could say the same thing about the Linux's Office Applications not being as good as those available to MacOS X or Windows.

Re:RAM Disk

[Crizp]

RAMdrive worked well in DOS, I used to copy Second Reality to the RAM drive before running it, making the load times much faster.

Later, with more RAM, the same was done with DOOM :)

Re:RAM Disk

[EvilIdler]

DOS and Linux RAM drives aren't persistent across reboots, though.

There was a tricky one for DOS that could survive and boot, but it worked by disabling
the normal boot process and using its own.

Re:RAM Disk

[vadim_t]

I remember that QEMM's quick boot feature had that side effect. My wild guess is that memory wasn't cleared, and boot was repeated exactly the same way every time, so when ramdrive allocated memory, it happened to be exactly the same chunk where the filesystem was.

Re:RAM Disk

[Travy.b]

There definitly was a ram disk from the DOS days.. I always had a 4mb ram disk configured at boot via config.sys back in the 80's.

Re:RAM Disk

[xjerky]

Bear in mind, that with the Amiga you could set up a RAM Disk that survives a reboot! How cool is that?? I don't think anything in PCland can do that.

Re:RAM Disk

[YttriumOxide]

Essentially you still have to "set it up" and "give it a size" though. AmigaOS's RAMDisk is a bit different. It's "just there" and doesn't have a size per se. It's whatever size you're using. When it's empty, it takes no memory. When you put 256MB of data in it, it's 256MB. When you delete 50MB of that, it's now only 206MB. Basically it's completely dynamic and requires no user management.

Re:RAM Disk

[Anonymous Coward]

AmigaOS also had something called a rad disk, which is even more impressive. You could install the whole OS on this rad disk and even boot from it! This disk even survived reboots and even upto 20-30seconds after power off.

Re:RAM Disk

[vadim_t]

The Linux one works exactly that way. The size is just an upper size limit, which defaults to half the system RAM, IIRC. You could specify the size to all the available RAM, but then you could make the computer grind to a halt if you used too much space.

Re:Funeral ceremonies were held today for the Amig

[Elevator_Inspector]

Just going from memory I think Sid was a C64 chip and Paula actually handled the sound on the Amiga. Recovering Amiga addict with an A1200/060 in the closet to prove it. Anyone know where I can find a clean 3000 to put my Phase V Cybervision64 card into?

Atari ST

[slapout]

Not to restart the Amiga/Atari ST wars, but....

It's not as nice as the Amiga stuff, but the Atari Running On Any Machine (aranym) project is continuing work here: aranym.org

Re:Atari ST

[master_p]

"Not to restart the Amiga/Atari ST wars, but...."

Well, yes, but my Amiga had a blitter, whereas your Atari did not have one until a very late model.

Amiga also has better sound than the Atari: 4 channels over 2.

And Shadow of the Beast has more colors and levels of scrolling, and it is smoother.

Revive the Old Amiga?

[RAMMS EIN]

Reading this thread, it seems to me that few people are waiting for this new Amiga OS or the new Amiga hardware, but the old OS and hardware were lots of fun to hack around with, and reasonably easy to get started with. I wonder how well a revival of the old platform would fare. Perhaps an open source re-implementation of the old Amiga-OS? It seems we know how the hardware works, and lots of people have hacked it. I'm not one of them, though, so all this is just my uninformed observations.

Re:Revive the Old Amiga?

[vidarh]

There is already an open source attempt at reimplementing AmigaOS sort of: AROS. It's been around for years.

Re:Revive the Old Amiga?

[Bert64]

There is an open source clone of AmigaOS, called AROS...
Infact, the "official" amigaos actually uses some components from AROS.

I see.

[Anonymous Coward]

My ideas intrigue you and you wish to subscribe to my newsletter.

Yeah, I loved my old C=64 as well...

[mmell]

Pure 6502 goodness, and raw 68000 power! Yeah!

TOS

[ElephanTS]

heh. And I'm still looking forward to the new version of TOS.

Re:TOS

[Chris Mattern]

Wasn't that TNG?

Chris Mattern

Re:TOS

[ElephanTS]

No that was the new version of Star Trek ;-?

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

when is Duke Nukesem coming out

I still have mine...

[Anonymous Coward]

and it's sitting under a desk, downstairs. Gonna put it, the 1802 monitor, and the 1501 hard drive back together at some point.

Amiga: ALIVE and KICKING!

[UED]

I've still got my Amiga 500+ (Modded) and you're never gonna take it from me, EVER!!

Re:Amiga: ALIVE and KICKING!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have my original A500 ( modded ) and my A1200 ( Upgraded ) but i can't for the life of me get the fecker working anymore, but I am in the states and the machine is originally from the UK but you'd think i could get it working with all the hardware and stuff i got lying around but no, all i get is a black screen and no life! Arghhhhhh! I just wanna play SkidMarks and Carrier Command!

I'm with you buddy, you won't evan pry them from my cold dead hands!!!!

Re:Funeral ceremonies were held today for the Amig

[Tim C]

I don't remember Gary being in the Amiga either; of course, it's been a good few years (more than I care to remember, to be honest) since my Amiga500 was put out to pasture, so I could be wrong.

Re:Funeral ceremonies were held today for the Amig

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember, Gary was the AGA replacement for Agnus (Or Fat Agnus if you're looking at the EGS chipset)

Give them a friggin' chance

[suv4x4]

Can I ask the Slashdotters to stop with the superficial bitter remarks of how Amiga is dead and so they better not try: give them a friggin' chance.

As people who are more involved in the matter at hand, they probably know better ways to capitalize their efforts than try to cater to Slashdot readers that had Amigas who put their efforts down before they've even seen the thing.

Competition is nice: there's place for Amiga. Why? Well there's place for a hundred Linux distros some of which are majorly incompatible with each other, for bsd, unix, windows, why not another one?

If it has practical applications it'll be used, never mind what you geniuses have to say about it.

There's only one thing that left bad taste in my mouth... They entire AmigaOS site is splattered with the infamous 3D demo ball... Understandable, but still, let's hope they don't rely on that ball saving the day ;)

Re:Give them a friggin' chance

[NeuroManson]

IMO, the problem today is that there is no unified effort to resurrect the Amiga. Hell, even in the case of the AmigaOne motherboard, you had to have an original Amiga to hook it up to, in order to utilize the existing graphics chipset. It was made by a relatively unknown company (presumably the lowest bidder) for a barely existant company (ditto), and died because they couldn't even find a vendor for a decent northbridge chipset. Frankly, with this amount of discordant practice, it's a miracle they made the AmigaOne board to begin with.

Instead, what is needed is a company that can handle all aspects from fabrication through coding, which before Commodore was plowed into the ground (ironically, by the same guy who later plowed Atari into the ground), was what they had. Only without the guy who would plow it into the ground.

Ironically, the one company that technically could do it (and open up a whole new arena for their multimedia capabilities) is Apple. It's a pity they don't buy out the Amiga rights altogether (and a touch ironic to boot, since Amiga was their chief multimedia competitor for many years).

For that matter, who owns the rights to the Amiga graphics chipsets these days? Why not just restart fabs on those, incorporate them onto a PCI card, with a modern kickstart rom? The chipset should be easy enough to make with modern equipment, if not cheaper, or even just combining the lot to one single chip. All hypothetically speaking, mind you.

Hell, they could easily update it to use in their new videogame console project, maybe it'll even fare better than Pippin.

Re:Give them a friggin' chance

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

Hell, even in the case of the AmigaOne motherboard, you had to have an original Amiga to hook it up to, in order to utilize the existing graphics chipset.

Actually you *can't* do this with the AmigaOne. It was originally planned to have that capability but when they didn't have the time to engineer something like that they just went with designs from the northbridge vendor (and later commissioned a new design that was smaller with integrated graphics).

The Amiga custom chipset (only OCS so far, but AGA isn't such a stretch from that) has been revere-engineered into an FPGA implementation. A PCI card that lets a new Amiga use the old chipset is theoretically possible now (though it would take some juggling of memory maps and some interesting glue logic to make it work right).

Er, 4.0 was released in 2004

[Morky]

I RTFA and it said this was the final update to Amiga 4.0, originally release in May 2004.

Re:Er, 4.0 was released in 2004

[IL-CSIXTY4]

The 2004 "release" was a "developer preview", originally meant to get AmigaOS 4.0 hardware and software in the hands of the few remaining Amiga developers so they could start pumping out apps while the OS matured. The original AmigaOne boards were also meant as developer boards, with the intent of selling the platform as a mobile/PDA platform once everything was completed. This new release is the "end user" release, meaning anything added to it after this point is a bug fix or "icing on the cake".

how much ram to run it now?

[blackest_k]

The Original Amiga OS managed without a swopfile with 512k of ram shared with the graphics hardware and a rom of 512k

My A1200 had 2 meg chip and 8 meg fast ram and my original harddrive loaded with applications was 52 Meg and I got on the internet with that.
just compare those specifications with what you are using right now.

I have to wonder how much overhead is in version 4. Has it grown as bloated as windows, linux or osx.how would it be if it was ported to x86 hardware (and having the complete source code its not impossible). Probably it's ideally suited for embedded systems such as satellite and cable boxes.

When you look at what vista does encrypting and decrypting data as it moves it between the subsystems,
Amiga OS would be giving a much bigger bang for the buck.

What actually is an OS for and how much of your processor time should be spent running the Os shouldnt it be running your programs?

Isn't it embarrassing that we need so much more power today to do, what exactly? I read my email went to websites chatted with friends all in 10meg of ram doesnt seem possible does it?

It makes me wonder if the One laptop per child project shouldnt be using something as compact as Amiga OS the point of the project being to bring information to the children and on the original amiga web pages worked RTF documents worked. even spread sheets were useable in amigaos.

The Amiga was fantastic for its time the custom chips which made it all work ultimately limited its progression
I don't quite understand why people feel so smug when current hardware and operating systems are so inefficient,
but then again I liked beos too.

Re:how much ram to run it now?

[Anonymous Coward]

An OS that doesn't offer much functionality uses less resources. Once you start adding back the facilities we take for granted, the OS and its resource requirements grow. Amazing, isn't it?

Re:how much ram to run it now?

[Dan East]

Not to be persnickety, but it required only 256k of RAM. My Amiga 1000 has 256k internal RAM, plus an optional add-on 256k module that attaches inside the front of the unit.

Dan East

Re:how much ram to run it now?

[blackest_k]

what are these facilities you speak off?

The Amiga's desktop was fairly basic but with mcp, magicmenu and magic workbench most of what we have on modern desktops was there.
plus some we don't such as snoopdos which monitored a programs calls and told you where it failed.
I also liked the way an amiga would record in the icon file where a downloaded file came from.

The Amiga OS has had a difficult time, several owners, lost source code, confused rights who owns what, finally there is a complete set of source which means it could be turning up on all sorts of platforms PDA's Phones Digital TV boxes DVR's, maybe PC's and Consoles.

It wasn't the OS that killed the Amiga.
The real problems were
1)inability of commodore to make any further money from you once you had bought one.
They relied on an expanding market to survive, millions of satisfied customers but nothing to sell them.
2)The inherent limitations of the hardware Aga was about as far as it could go.
3)Motorola's inability to produce faster compatible processors.

The release of version 4.0 is a major achievement but where to from here is the really difficult question.

Re:how much ram to run it now?

[YttriumOxide]

I have to wonder how much overhead is in version 4. Has it grown as bloated as windows, linux or osx

Well, the ISO image of AmigaOS4 I downloaded from Hyperion (the guys that wrote it) is 46MB... so it's a LOT larger than AmigaOS3, but still tiny compared to many other modern systems. I'm not at home right now (live in Australia, currently on holiday in Europe), so memory usage I can't check, but I vaguely recall that of the 512MB I have in my AmigaOne, only about 20 or so is used once the system is booted, services are running (yes, I run a webserver, ftp server and VNC server on my Amiga) and all my random startup apps are going.

Re:how much ram to run it now?

[virtual_mps]

My A1200 had 2 meg chip and 8 meg fast ram and my original harddrive loaded with applications was 52 Meg and I got on the internet with that.
just compare those specifications with what you are using right now. Similar to my palm phone, which is great for such a limited platform. For my desktop, I'm gonna want a whole lot more resources--just the frame buffer for my display is gonna take more than 52M.

Re:how much ram to run it now?

[Anonymous Coward]

"1) Inability of commodore to make any further money from you once you had bought one."

Maybe, but they also did do quite well whit the Amiga500,

What I think killed Amiga where 16bit and 24bit graphic cards and SoundBlaster 16 for PC, Amiga computers where designed for planar graphic (2D from 2 to 64 colors on Amiga500, 2 to 256 colors on Amiga1200 and some hack modes called HAM 4096 colors on Amiga500), Amiga graphics where cool for large horizontal / vertical scrolling bitmap, and layers of bitmaps scrolling on top of etch other, like on platform games, but for general pixel plotting, like in games like DOOM it becomes to slow, even so they did get DOOM ported and running on Amiga, and layer they even ported Quake I required a graphic card, Quake II how ever did required a add on graphic card and CPU upgraded 604e/603 PowerPC, (assembler optimized code).

But also management stopped number of projects, that might have become a success, like to commodore flat screen (they simply did not have any fate in that becoming a success), and the next generation of graphic chipset for Amiga computer called AAA that where to replace AGA.

So way did it not end there, because of 3rd party developers and companies started making add on cards for Amiga using PC graphic chipsets and sound chips, and adapter cards for all kind bus boards, CPU upgrade kits using later version of the 680x0 series of CPU's and PowerPC 603 / 604e CPU's, at this point Amiga become an expensive hobby.

I did once a calculation on how what it will cost be to buy an Amiga4000 and upgrade it, I came to the conclusion that it did not make economical sense, spending 3 times the cost compared to buy a PC, now a AmigaOne motherboard cost maybe two times what PC motherboard do whit the same specifications new, the rest is none expensive PC parts, like standard ram, hard drives, sound cards and graphic cards.

What's new in OS4 is that AmigaOS4 do not need any commodore chips to work, and it's fully PowerPC native, support PCI, AGP, USB common PC standards, so now we do not need to depend on some 3d party Amiga hardware developer to make add on cards, and the internals of the kernel has improved too, better memory management, memory pools, some kind of limited memory protection, new standard API's for game controllers, you can compare it whit Windows 98 I think.

Features they plan for OS4.1/OS4.2 is SMP, new workbench (maybe even 3d based)

Re:Funeral ceremonies were held today for the Amig

[IL-CSIXTY4]

Gary is a GAte aRraY in the ECS chipset, used for I/O & glue logic.

Duh!

[Perseid]

Of course they can't release the hardware now. They can't release it until AmigaOS 5 has been announced, you see.

Re:Funeral ceremonies were held today for the Amig

[dangitman]

I miss getting video toasted! Waaah!

That's why I modified my bread toaster with an extra-wide slot. Unfortunately, it's not compatible with my genlock.

Re:Funeral ceremonies were held today for the Amig

[dotgain]

Gary was in the early A1000 / 500s, he was a glue chip and floppy controller.

Why is Amiga a German obsession?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont understand! Are they passionate about Amiga only in West Germany? What about the Ossies? Are they crazy about Amiga too?

Re:Why is Amiga a German obsession?

[Whiteox]

Listen here mate!
Amigas are OK, but if you want a REAL computer then the Australian made Microbee is the one to go for!

My collection includes:

1 Apple GS (mint condition)
Microbee(s)
about 7 working Apple 2 and a few ][+ clones
Commodore 64s and Vic 20
One or two Amigas
An original IBM PC with 9" green screen
and a Radio Shack Mark II (no drives unfortunately, but has a cassette port).
Plus a stack of printed materials.

Who knows! One day I'll make my fortune on these antiques!

PR#3 for 80 column mode

Re:Why is Amiga a German obsession?

[YttriumOxide]

I live in Aussieland (although I'm not really an Aussie) and am fairly passionate about my Amiga... that said, I'm really more or less OS agnostic. I'll use whatever suits the task at hand best. Which means my Windows boxes for games/wordprocessing/development(work), my Macs for browsing/chatting/graphics/ftp-serving/music, my Linux box for serious network tasks and my Amiga for actually having fun and messing around with stuff.

Once the Firefox port is finished, I'll likely switch to my Amiga for all general webbrowsing, email (I already prefer YAM to other mail clients, but don't use it right now) and other basic internet usage... just lack of a decent browser like Firefox is holding me back from that.

Yes, Amiga may be dead ..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. but the demo-scene soul that lived within Amiga and C64 has a right to live, that spirit has not carried on into another platform.. So maybe just maybe there is an opening for the Amiga Soul regardless of its redundancy in technical areas .. ? Amiga developers; go for the hobbyist,geek niche !! Give us custom hardware that is FUN TO PROGRAM ON !!! It dont have to be "Geforce G80 class raw power" but just some nice hardware that we can bang directly ! Opensource graphics chip with FULL DOCUMENTATION ! I dream ... And folks keep pestering Hyperion with a A-OS4 PS3 port willya !!

Re:Yes, Amiga may be dead ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a GP2X, or LaMothe's console. If you're not too fussy about documentation or support there's a number of consoles you can hack on (GBA, DS, PS1, PS2, PSP, Saturn, GC etc.)

Not available?

[Anonymous Coward]

But there is a snag: the new OS supports only the AmigaOne, which is not available anymore

I still have one, with original box and all ;-) and no I am not putting it on eBay

BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to run some form of BSD on Amiga hardware? That way you can use a dead OS on a dead platform.

I'm Kind Of Excited

[FreeRadicalX]

As goofy at this news is, I'm actually kind of excited. I was born in 1985, and my family's first computer was introduced to our home about the same time I was- an Amiga, the first color computer on our block! My uncle John videotaped my first birthday. Unfortunately there's probably more footage of the Amiga on it than there is of me. After hearing this news, perhaps there's hope that I'll finally be able to once again play Mindwalker, the trippiest game ever.

VM anyone?

[foniksonik]

Is it possible without too much effort to get a working VM of the hardware spec going? It would be momentous to release an OS that is targeted at a virtual machine only.... running on the latest commodity hardware around for hobbyists and only on dedicated hardware for those with a real business interest in using it commercially.

Choose your witty response (patent pending)

[deusdiabolus]

1. Does this mean that we'll have more kickass demos again soon? 2. Most people who still own an Amiga know where it is, but they don't know how much they'll have to spend to get it working again. 3. Hey, if this means I can get that box of FFS-formatted 3.5" floppies with all my MODs on them to work...I'm all for it.

Re:Choose your witty response (patent pending)

[Anonymous Coward]

I left Linux behind, to run AmigaOS4, I do no longer use Linux for any thing, whit the exception getting online bank, AmigaOS4 need good web browser to be more successful then it is now, and more developers to push it forward, there exist no other place for developer if they like to get awarded for there work like the Amiga community, unless you like to get money your work :-) lets face it GPL code is not that easy to get many from ether.

"if this means I can get that box of FFS-formatted 3.5" floppies with all my MODs on them to work...I'm all for it."

You can but you need a Catweasel pci card to do that have a look at this site:

http://ami.ga/indexe.htm

maybe they should...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they should rename the OS to Amigo OS, just so the Amigos will like it!

SAM to the rescue

[garlicbready]

bah that is so 1980
sounds like you need the latest and greatest SAM Coupe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_coupe
the super spectrum, with 16 whole colours and lightpen and surround sound (sort of)
and a cool looking robot logo to boot

yes I actually have one of these in the attic, sat along side my amiga and spectrum with the duff keyboard and stack of Format / Crash / Sinclair User magazines
(never try to solder to a spectrum's keyboard membrane, the contacts are as thin as paper)
when you were drawn to a game not based on the screenshot, but by how good an artist they'd hired to do the front cover on the box

they often chat to one another about the good old days, when men were men
forget CD's or your fancy smancy cheat codes you'd type a 1000 line listing over 3 pages in a magazine (in a tiny font) just for infinite lives in jet set willy

Re:SAM to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

never try to solder to a spectrum's keyboard membrane, the contacts are as thin as paper

Heh. Clearly you never read my 1980s article on repairing membrane keyboards. Uhu-glue (NOT SUPERGLUE, depending on the membrane composition you might get exothermic depolymerisation hilarity) aluminium foil over the worn contacts with a thin layer of glue. Uhu (an epoxy glue) also remains slightly flexible. The aluminium foil may micro-tear a bit when flexed, but that's okay.

Works on modern membrane keyboards found in mobile phones and TV remotes etc., cheap way to extend their useful life. In fact, for really cheap devices where the contacts start out kind of crappy from day one, it's a cheap way of improving the device.

Why do people do this?

[WheelDweller]

Sure, the Amiga was a machine I fondly remember drooling over, when my kids were in diapers...it had some amazing features that made the PC/XT/AT seem pretty two-dimensional by contrast.

But why would someone invest the time writing an OS for hardware that can mostly be found by accident? Hey, I love the Amiga like pancakes, but this is kinda crazy, isn't it?

I used to have friends that played Napolionics; thousands of little lead minatures. And they could tell by scarfs and coats whether a figure was from the 23rd dragoons, or the 171st bandoliers or whatever. Line and column formation-fighting ended before the civil war!

It always struck me that this kind of research, and knowledge of the former art of war would never again be used, in any way but this game. It bothers me that so much antique-polishing is going on...there's a bigger, more important search to take, and it means so much more; that'd be the search for God.

Re:Why do people do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

just STFU preacherman

Re:Why do people do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It always struck me that this kind of research, and knowledge of the former art of war would never again be used, in any way but this game. It bothers me that so much antique-polishing is going on...there's a bigger, more important search to take, and it means so much more; that'd be the search for God."

Sanity isn't one of your freinds is it? How does one go from Amiga as a subject and end with god?

Jesus christ, the platform attracts lunatics like moths to a goddamn fire.

Re:Why do people do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

A Scene from Coupling: Series 3: Faithless by Steven Moffatt
Crazy beautiful JANE, who reports traffic from a helicopter, has her eye on hunky JAMES, the host of the radio station's religious program. In order to get closer to him, JANE has accepted a Friday night invitation from JAMES---to a religious discussion group that he holds at his church.
James - OK, everybody, say hi to Jane.
Others - Hi Jane. Hi Jane.
James - Jane, like all of us, has a keen interest in her faith and how it relates to all aspects of her life. Don't worry Jane, it's all very informal. Don't be scared.
Jane - OK.
Man - I'll just sit next to Jane then, shall I? Don't worry. I won't bite you.
Jane - Oh? I won't break your neck then.
James - OK, well, we're all getting to know Jane, so have any questions for her?
Older Woman - Jane, I was wondering, have you been religious all your life or is it something that's happened to you quite recently?
Jane - Ummm ... both.
Older Woman - I don't think I quite understand your answer.
Jane - Oh, I'm sorry. Both!
Man 2 - Can I just ask, what aspect of the religious experience most appeals to you?
Jane - What aspect?
Man 2 -Yes.
Jane - Of the religious experience? Of the many aspects of the religious experience?
Man 2 - Exactly.
Jane - Is my favorite? Well ... I'd have to say ... God.
[lifts up her hands]
Man 2 - God?
Jane - He's good, isn't He?
James - Well, I don't think you'll get much argument out of us lot.
Jane - Ooh, and that was just my first go!
Andrew - Ah, can I ask something?
Jane - [leans forward with a lot of cleavage]
You go right ahead, dear.
Andrew - What do you think of the crisis of faith?
Jane - Sounds fantastic!
Andrew - Sometimes I findwhen my prayers seem to go unanswered and it's so very hard to find God's love in my lifethat it's difficult to keep believing that God is still a real force in the world, watching over us. I find doubt so often in my heart.
Jane - You know, [turns to James] perhaps I can help here?
James - Sure, go ahead. That's what this is all about.
Jane - [back to Andrew]
What's your name?
Andrew - Andrew.
Jane - Andrew, lovely! Well, Andrew, there's something I probably better explain. God is just a made up person. You can't expect Him to be answering your prayers if He's not real, can you? That's a bit like writing to the characters of a soap opera and expecting a reply, Mr. Silly Sausage.
James - Ah, Jane?
Jane - Yes? James.
James - We are of the opinion that God is in fact real.
Jane - No!
James - Yes!
Jane - He's not, is He?
Man 2 - You don't believe in God?
Jane - Well, I suppose I never found Him very realistic.
James - Well, here we all adhere to the idea of one true, loving God, I'm afraid.
Jane - Oh no, that can't be right.
James - I'm sorry?
Jane - You see they've got different gods in different countries. You should've checked that.
James - Well yes, obviously, there are other faiths
Jane - What if they're like MPs? And there's different gods for different areas, and they all sort of report to a sort of head god. Thor, or somebody.
James - Thor?
Jane - Thor! The thunder god! The one with the hammer. We did him in school. He was totally my favorite. You know, I'm not that easy, but show me a muscular blonde who can control the weather, and this girl's on all fours.
James - OK, let's move on, should we? Does anyone else got something they want to discuss?
Older Woman - Perhaps we should go back to what we were discussing last week.
James - Ah yes, we had a very lively debate last week, didn't we?
Jane - Really? What about?
Older Woman - Sex before marriage.
Jane - Ah! Now you're talking my language.
Older Woman - We're against it.
Jane - I'm sorry?
Older Woman - A number of us feel that premarital sex is a very bad thing.
Jane - Well, you're so wrong. Shagging's brilliant! Take it when you can get it is what I say.
James -

Re:Why do people do this?

[Vintermann]

The Amiga must be the most hideously mis-managed platform in computer history. I mean, Commodore made some numbingly stupid decisions which doomed them (and made for such interesting quirks like that the 1200, state of the art in many ways, shipped without a clock, because they couldn't afford them), but that's nothing to what's happened afterwards. Now the rights holders are trying to ship an expensive, closed-source "Amiga" operating system for hardware that doesn't exist - yup, they're keeping up the old traditions!

Re:Why do people do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the poster was being (partly) sarcastic.

No longer interested

[Anonymous Coward]

I know some people will be excited, but I am no longer interested. The Amiga 1000 I bought in 1985 (gawd that was a long time ago...21 years and counting...) still runs. I have the original genlock, keyboard, mouse, etc. I think even the boxes... But I'm no longer interested. The Amiga had really cool hardware when it came out, and beat the snot out of everything else. One of the original hardware developers --Jay Miner-- died in 1994 (12 years ago). At the time, 4096 colors sure beat 16, but now, 16 bit color (16777216 colors) is giving way (in some hardware) to 48 bit color (281,474,976,710,656 colors). There wasn't even DirectX support (let alone OpenGL). Coprocessors on the mainboard have lead to much bigger parallel running graphics engines on video cards and broadband processors capable of much more. It was the best at the time, but I wouldn't go again. I really loved it at the time, and talked it up a lot in '85-'88. But I put it away by '92 and really haven't done anything with it since. It was a really great intro at the time, but no longer gives me the joy it once did. Someone will be happy about the new OS, but not me (even if it did run on my old machine).

Re:No longer interested

[gitarman]

I don't know, but Thank the GODS there is slashdot, so people who don't care about a subject can run down a few people who do. what would we do without them!

Re:No longer interested

[YttriumOxide]

Yep - judging MacOS, Unix and Windows from 1985 specs, I'm glad I don't use any of those platforms either!

Re:Funeral ceremonies were held today for the Amig

[Anonymous Coward]

In attendance, her children: Agnus, Denise, Paula, Gary and Sid.

I think you'll find that Sid was Amiga's father, he was a musician by trade.

Re: Net Machine

[TaoPhoenix]

So if I put a browser on it, and it can figure out how to save onto a USB drive, then I can surf the net without viruses? Wheee! Nothing like an UnDead OS to freak out OS targetting malware! Oh wait - are my .mod songs native now??

3d graphic capabilities????

[Joce640k]

Which "3d graphic capabilities" were those, exactly...?

Re:3d graphic capabilities????

[Vintermann]

I believe the 1200 had hardware support for texture mapping. I remember seeing a demo of a colorful picture of a parrot mapped onto a cube - apparently it had more colors than the texture-mapped PC games of the day or something. But that was just before the end...

Re:3d graphic capabilities????

[Explo]

The Amiga built-in graphics hardware (including the AGA machines) had fairly little support for 3D. While blitter did have support for filling areas and drawing lines, that was 2D operation. Thus, all fancy operations such as rotation, texture mapping, scaling and such had to be done by the CPU and blitter only did the final 2D drawing.

(Blitter was also actually slower doing those operations than the faster 68k CPUs, although it could be used in parallel with the main CPU.)

DId anybody ever use the OS?

[Joce640k]

I'm sure the Amiga would have been 99.9% as successful without the OS. All I ever saw anybody do with one was stick floppies in and watch the "demos".

I did all my editing/assembling on an Atari ST and sent it across a printer cable to the Amiga. I had an Amiga 1000 - the only true Amiga.

Re:DId anybody ever use the OS?

[Explo]

While I was using the A500, I mostly just played with it. However, with the later Amigas (which didn't have as much glamor as A1000/A500, due to the other machines starting to catch up, but they had *much* improved OS) I was enjoying the functionality provided by the OS quite a bit, or perhaps I had just starting to want more than gaming and nice demos. Datatypes, AREXX control ports provided by many applications for remote control and friends were truly nice things to have, as was the better-than-most multitasking. In many ways the OS continued to be a significant advantage longer than the custom chips.

Re:just one question

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like someone who abandoned their Amiga before the bitter end and didn't stick around for the true lunacy.

When was that exactly?

You all missed the point, Workbench 4 is not Linux

[erkan_o]

Wow, how depressing, there are almost no positive comments here about Workbench 4.0. Now I myself prefer Workbench 3.1 and classic 68k Amiga hardware but it is great that a new OS is comming for the Amiga. OS4 is a lightweight fast and flexible OS. If it is half of what WB 3.1 was then it will be so much less complex than Linux will ever be even though that bloated Linux install is running a fat KDE desktop manager.

Re: Net Machine

[YttriumOxide]

Browser: Check (although not a very good one by most people's standards until the Firefox port is finished)
USB key: Check
Safety from malware: As long as it remains a niche OS with hardly any users, I'd say yep - safe as houses. .mod files native: Well, as native as they were on any platform. They weren't a "native" format for Amiga, just very popular!

Pretty

[BeaverCleaver]

The screenshots on their website actually look pretty cool - it has an Amiga-ish feel but looks uncluttered and easy. A few of the features sound like a good idea too, like the instant-on and instant-off, multiple screens, RAM disk etc... I'd definitely play with it given the chance...

AmigaOS on PPC PS3

[bill_mcgonigle]

They license out the right for a board to carry the Amiga name and run AmigaOS, by virtue of a ROM "dongle" that gets integrated into the motherboard. This means that anything running AmigaOS has to be specifically designed to run AmigaOS.

Gah. They should port it to the PS3 and do a USB dongle if they have to. Sell it for $129 or so.

Snoopdos has a close equivalent on Linux

[Explo]

For snoopdos-like functionality on Linux, strace is a quite similar nice application. Like snoopdos, it's pretty useful on debugging why application fails to start/does something insensible without using a real heavy-duty debugger. I'd assume that something similar would have been done for Windows.

The biggest hurdle that eventually led to downfall of Amiga was IMO the damn management that didn't quite appear to be able to make any decisions, or if they managed to decide something, it was apparently a result of consuming significant amounts of drugs (A600, the cheaper replacement for A500 that ended up being more expensive... A4000, a more limited machine than A3000+ that could probably have been out earlier as well... and so on).

Re:Snoopdos has a close equivalent on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Strace is nice when you need to know what when wrong in your code, you can't use it on striped executable file, and whit no debugs info, strace will normally fail if your program is multi treaded.

SnoopDOS is more general for system mongering, it will monitor all programs in the system, it's a nice program to find problems whit system variables or file locking, opening closing and when you find problems way a program can't open dynamic library (almost like .so files)

Ldd can do some of the thing SnoopDos is doing for Amiga users, but I do not know of any program that can do what SnoopDos can on Linux, snoopdos depends on hacking system library structures, so it can intercept what's going on in the system, you can't do that on linux because Linux is server OS, and is always online whit lots of potential security holes (or network services) that needs to bulletproof, while AmigaOS is more a client OS not so easy to hack that using a remote terminal, when you have no telnet or ssh service running he he ;-)

Quickly followed

[Snaller]

By Duke Nuke'em forever!

Amen

[Snaller]

Poor Amiga.