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

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

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.