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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."
A new release of AmigaOS! A new release of OS/2 can't be far behind!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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?The next release of MorphOS is planned to support hardware that's actually shipping. :)
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?
Basilisk Digital
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.
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!!!
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Let's see ... what other company has recently released an operating system for a hardware platform that doesn't quite exist yet?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If you're going to create an OS that nobody will use, does it matter whether there's any hardware to run it on?
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.
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.
..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.
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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.
I miss getting video toasted! Waaah!
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.
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If an operating system is released, and there's no hardware around to run it, does it make a sound?
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Amiga == feminine
Amigo == masculine
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
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?
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
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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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
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There is already an open source attempt at reimplementing AmigaOS sort of: AROS. It's been around for years.
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.
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