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

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?

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

[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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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: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.)

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)