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Amiga and Hyperion Settle Ownership of AmigaOS

Posted by kdawson on from the if-anyone-was-waiting dept.

HKcastaway writes "Amiga Inc and Hyperion Entertainment announced a settlement over ownership and licensing over AmigaOS 4.0 and future versions. Since the bankruptcy of Commodore, Amiga's history has been littered with lawsuits that have affected the development of Amiga hardware and software. Having a lawsuit-free OS probably will help a great deal to the continuity and recovery of the Amiga heritage. Hyperion also provides AmigaOS SDKs for developers.'

51 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Wow, my clock must be broken by manicbutt · · Score: 5, Funny

    For a second there, it looked like I was reading a story about the Amiga OS in 2009. Ha ha ha! Silly clock radio.

    1. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by R4wBon3 · · Score: 2, Funny

      ..."I love you babe. I love you babe. I love you babe."

    2. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by mdwh2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      For a second there, it looked like I was reading a story about the Iphone being able to check a website in 2009. Ha ha ha! Silly clock radio.

      For a second there, it looked like I was reading a comment from someone still poking fun at the Amiga in 2009. Ha ha ha! Silly clock radio.

      Yep that's right - one Amiga article in a blue moon and the jokes start, yet Slashdot covers all manner of other platforms and systems, whether they're still cutting edge or not.

      Hell, we still have stories about other old platforms too (such as old Macs). The Amiga has plenty of historical importance, but I guess it's sad that the anti-Amiga posters are still here, even in 2009.

    3. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by ciderVisor · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Amiga offered one helluva lot of bang for your bucks back in the day. The OS was relatively slick from both the user and developer perspectives. The graphics and sound hardware was pretty decent, too. A good quantity of third-party software and games. Genlock abilities and TV-standard screen modes made for great video-captioning abilities, etc.

      But come on. Even a mid-spec'ed Windows PC can handle genuine video editing, multi-track virtual recording studios with awesome soft synths and effects plug-ins, 24-bit colour to massive resolutions. All without having to work too hard in order to play nice with other apps and the OS itself.

      Great in the day, but only interesting in a historical context. The same could be said of the Atari ST or Acorn Archimedes.

      (Ex-Amiga 500+ owner and developer.)

      --
      Squirrel!
    4. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by sconeu · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Even a mid-spec'ed Windows PC can handle genuine video editing, multi-track virtual recording studios with awesome soft synths and effects plug-ins

      Yes, but the Amiga did this on an 8MHz 68K with 1MB of RAM. Can you imagine an Amiga with today's hardware specs?

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
    5. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by Z34107 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Zilog's Z80 is still VERY relevant. I learned Z80 assembler to properly program my TI-83 and TI-84 calculators. The TI-89 and up use the Motorola 68k.

      --
      DATABASE WOW WOW
    6. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by rho · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Can you imagine an Amiga with today's hardware specs?

      Yes, it would be "in development" until 2015, and then released to practically nobody, who would promptly sue.

      I've ceased to be excited by the "potential" of any hardware platform. The history of technology is littered with a lot of potentially great things that failed to do anything remotely great.

      If you wanted to sum up Apple's recent successes, it would be "they delivered." Apple didn't promise the world, they merely delivered a continent or two. Here's a product: you can do these things with it.

      --
      Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
    7. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by Haxamanish · · Score: 2, Informative

      Z80 is still in production, no need to "restart" it.

    8. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by hazydave · · Score: 4, Informative

      You didn't video editing on an Amiga without serious add-on hardware.

      Most folks using Amigas for video were doing analog video, too... digital was barely there at the end. You could use a Genlock for titling, other devices to overlay effects on video, etc. but it was still tape to tape. That wasn't for the feint of heart, and while it was revolutionary for a small number of video professionals, it was only a precursor to today's video revolution, which required digital capabilities.

      An Amiga with today's hardware specs would be just like a Macintosh with today's hardware specs: it would be a PC. Guaranteed. Near the end, we were already moving toward using as many commodity parts are possible: PC power supplies, disc drives, etc. Future systems were going to use the PCI bus, and would most likely have been designed CPU-agnostic (look up the "PIOS One" for an example, if there's anything still online... that's the direction I was pushing things before C= failed).

      There was a question, back in '93 or so, about the future of desktop CPUs. So we had proponents of the PowerPC, of the PA-RISC, of the Alpha. But by the time the whole Escom/Amiga Technologies adventure was over, things were changing. Shortly thereafter, Apple guaranteed the failure of the PowerPC on the desktop by cancelling Mac Cloning, and it was obviously clear to anyone who was paying proper attention that x86 was the only game in town for this class of computing.

      And still the bozos at New Amiga or Hyperion Entertainment or whomever kept their sights on the PowerPC (I do not know specifically where the bozos were, but bozos there were, have no doubts). I know a few of these people, not all of them, but the collective functions as a group of wannabes without proper long term vision. I even tried to hit them in the head with a clue-by-four, even going back to the short tenure of this stuff at Gateway 2000, but there was no help.

      The hardware didn't need saving... you need to reinvent computing hardware every five years or so, or it gets too complex to keep advancing. Had Commodore not failed, they would have eventually got out of the graphics chip business, just like Compaq and various other PC companies who once did their own graphics chips stopped. Graphics chips became GPUs, and any one systems company could no more make their own GPU than their own CPU. Everyone who tried either of these failed, in time, unless they built a very strong market well above the level of the personal computer. You could afford to spend $2000 on a CPU for a high-end server or whatever it if went a little faster than the next guy's... you couldn't do that for personal computers. Much less the reality that, without sufficient volume, you couldn't even keep up. The problem Apple so well illustrated with the PowerPC's rise and fall.

      The software needed saving, or at least, it would have made things more interesting. There was real opportunity, if they had assembled a team of top notch OS people, like Be did... but that's not really what happened. So, after spending several times as long on AmigaOS 3.x -> 4.x as it took to get from nothing to 1.0 (or beyond), they now have what... a fairly small incremental improvement that runs on... pretty much nothing. We actually did a real engineering analysis of this upgrade in 1995-1996... moving from AmigaOS 3.x to a version, written for CPU-independence, targeted for the PowerPC, with a proper HAL, was about a two year project for the team Amiga Technologies had started assembling. Along the way, that included fixing many of the system's flaws.

      When this didn't happen, and AT fell apart, we wound up doing much the same thing at Metabox AG, only this time building a modernized AmigaOS-like OS from scratch... AmigaOS enough that things like Voyager and MUI were easy ports. Took about two years.

      The fact that nothing had come of this public Amiga silliness pretty much should drive home what a non-event this is. There's no much of value that can some from this, they're just too far behind.

      --
      -Dave Haynie
    9. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by butlerm · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Everything a stock Amiga did was done with careful programming and a small amount of well designed hardware assistance. In fact, most of what it did outside of the games arena is entirely due to careful programming.

      The original Amiga 1000 shipped with 256KB of RAM and 256KB of (quasi) ROM. With that you got a fully preemptive multitasking OS. You could open smaller programs in dozens of windows. Multiple command line shells, a paint program. That is the kind of efficiency you get when you hand code a simple kernel in assembly language, and have much of your software written by people who are used to working in extremely constrained environments.

      Virtual memory is nice, but it really slows things down. It makes programmers lazy. Most modern machines (and Linux machines in particular, no matter how much RAM they have) aren't as "snappy" as an Apple II with 64K of RAM. Virtual memory is the primary culprit. Walk away from your machine for a while, or run an I/O intensive task and everything ends up paged out to disk, and the system sputters to a start in a few seconds once you start poking at it again.

      And then there is X - terminal independence is nice, but is there any real doubt that X kept the world of affordable Unix graphics about a decade behind systems (like the Amiga) that just used a simple frame buffer? Even today, native X is pretty much useless anywhere off the local LAN. It wasn't designed to succeed in its native element, i.e. as a terminal.

    10. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by Darinbob · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The AmigaOS was relatively simple. Not as simple as DOS of course, but simpler than the Macintosh. The problem, was with having a shoestring budget, fickle investors, revised business plans, etc. Then the big competition problem of going up against an entrenched product. Amiga did "deliver". It was a very functional product from the first release.

      A big snag was that it, as well as the Atari ST and Apple IIGS which came out at the same time, were bridge products between the old style home computers and professional business oriented computers. The market for a "home" computer just was not very large at all, and that never really took off like mad until the web browser. The business market for small computers was solidly DOS based, and issues of colors, video, and sound were not important to them. So these computers grabbed a lot of niche markets instead: programmer hobbyists, video enthusiasts and professionals, musicians, gamers, etc. Remember at the time that the Mac was also very much a niche market as well, and a much more expensive product.

      Of course, I think another huge reason PCs won, is that they had all the clones. IBM didn't lock things down very well, so just about everyone could make a copy and sell something just slightly cheaper than the next guy. If you just needed to print memos and work on spreadsheets, you went with the cheapest no-name option. The "expectations" for the typical PC user were extremely tiny.

    11. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by uglyduckling · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In all honesty, a Mac with OS X is pretty much what I would have expected Amiga to have evolved into. The Amiga CLI was broadly based on BSD, it had lots of unnecessary pretty eye candy on the desktop, was popular with graphics, video and sound amateurs and professionals, and was considered fairly over-priced by many people (usually people who hadn't used one for an appreciable length of time). Every time I download a .dmg file, the massive icons to encourage me to drag the application to the Applications folder remind me of the huge custom icons on the Amiga Format cover disks. The white/plastic MacBook even reminds me of the Amiga 500 - wildly popular and iconic and still in production even when the better spec'ed machines should have taken over a long time ago. I just hope Apple don't drop the ball and go the way of Commodore by resting on their laurels too much.

    12. Re:Wow, my clock must be broken by jesup · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Not all that much of the OS was assembler - the biggest piece was FFS (which subsumed OFS), and honestly probably shouldn't have been in ASM - but space was *tight*. Sure, quite a few of the drivers were in assembler, and performance-critical parts of Exec were in ASM, but that was almost required at the time for low-level HW interfacing. Much of the OS was in C. (I was responsible for removing the majority of the BCPL code (look it up on Wikipedia) used in AmigaDOS for OS 2.0.)

      It was all fairly carefully designed, and a lot of work went into making it bulletproof and snappy. While there are huge benefits to memory protection nowadays, most Amiga programs and certainly the OS were quite resilient to pressures, such as allocation failures, which would crush almost all apps today. Error paths were much more likely to get tested, and the path wasn't the library calling exit(1) for you when an allocation failed.

      That said: it's 15 years behind the times now. No major improvements have been made (some, yes, but nothing major). Dave is basically right - and we were in the last year trying to break with the old hardware design, though there was one last big step left in it that actually got to the early prototype stage (AAA). We hadn't planned out where software would go, but if you look at what Apple did you probably get a hint of what we might have done. It would have been tough, though, since we didn't have the resources to throw at emulation at the time that Apple did. In the last year, the SW group (which I ended up running a good part of) was down to a handful of people ( 10 I think). I think the "OS" group was down to maybe 3 or so. The writing was mostly on the wall by around a year before *poof*, and much of the team left in '92-93 to places like Scala (where many still are, and where I went after bankruptcy), 3DO (which had a strong ex-Amiga and ex-Commodore influence from the start), etc.

      I wish it had been open-sourced back in '95 or so. It may not have survived intact, but it might have formed the core for a strong competitor to Linux/etc and at least pushed them to improve their responsiveness much earlier on.

  2. Re:let the flames begin by BuR4N · · Score: 4, Funny

    is the Amiga platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989

    Thats 20 years after Unix was released, right ?

    --
    http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
  3. Brutality by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is little good in them coming out of their litigation.

    Winding back the clock a little, Amiga Inc came out of the broken bones of the old Amiga organisation. They came up with some plans, most of which broke down.

    What they did do, was ally themselves up in an evil triumverate, with two other companies.

    Amiga Inc, Hyperion, and a third company, Eyetech.
    These three cooked up a goofy plan to ship a half baked OS, on severely half baked PPC hardware, so broken it became an in joke. The worst lunatics in the 'community' bandwagoned this complete junk, and the vast majority of people who fell for it, paid a lot of money for over priced junk. The warranty was worthless. A great many people walked away during this time, and a great deal of friction arose because of these antics.

    The fact that two of these were killing themselves through litigation led to a hope they might destroy themselves, if for no other reason than they be denied the ground to sell their next 'release' on the unwise, the ill educated, or the stupid.

    Putting that aside, its hard to consider Amiga OS, and the hardware choices are appallingly bad (unless you like crippled and old PPC equipment tied to old junk from the PC world) - so unless this 'new' start comes up with very serious improvements in every area, including warranty and support, and merchantable quality in their goods and services, and decent, reasonably priced hardware, then there is no reason for them to even exist. And on past events, they don't deserve to.

    1. Re:Brutality by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If the Amiga has been allowed to "die" back in the mid 90s I think it would probably be in a much better position than it is now.

      Endless promises and outright lies over the years have slowly destroyed the community that was once so strong. If people had just accept that it was a retro system, much like the Archimedes and Atari ST guys I think more people would be interested in the Amiga today. I sold my last one (yes, the "Ami" part of my handle is short for Amiga) in 2004. I was just so fed up with the whole thing I just wanted rid of it.

      The World of Amiga 2001 was the final nail in the coffin I think - we (the organisers) had been promised a new Amiga and OS4 running on it for the show, we even had a full page magazine ad for it. Then they tell us two days before the event that actually they have not even started planning the new hardware and OS, let alone prototyped it. How could we ever trust them after that? We didn't even like what they were promising: a final classic OS update and then something called AmigaOS but otherwise baring no relationship to it at all and running on mobile phones and set top boxes. Even the classic OS update seemed pointless as there would be no new software to run on it and the last chance to keep the few remaining developers with us was fast slipping away.

      Up until that point people were still doing stuff with Amigas, making new hardware and apps and generally getting a lot out of them. On that day people kind of realised that all the effort and energy they put in had been shit on by some lying arse holes who a decade later still have not delivered a single product. All they wanted to do was milk the community for all it was worth while making plans to simply discard all the things we loved and produce a VM that had already missed the boat Java sailed in on by about 5 years.

      The best thing that could have happened to the Amiga would have been for it to die in 1994 and the source to the OS to have been leaked. If that had happened I imagine I may well still be running one today.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. How do they even keep the doors open? by rimcrazy · · Score: 2, Funny

    What are these companies running on besides fumes?

    --
    "TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
  5. Of course not by MikeRT · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If they're smart they'll either work on support for fat binaries for x86 and powerpc or powerpc and arm. If they couple that with a solid WebKit or Gecko-based browser and get Flash ported over, Amiga would be a very competitive platform for netbooks.

    1. Re:Of course not by dammy · · Score: 3, Informative

      There is already a open source version of Amiga OS called AROS which is x86, x86_64, PPC and shortly ARM. http://www.aros.org/

    2. Re:Of course not by hazydave · · Score: 2, Informative

      Some of that's actually going away, slowly. It certainly depends on your workflow.

      I used to have MIDI, with Bars and Pipes, on the Amiga, which led me to Cakewalk on the PC, and one of those MOTU 8-port MIDI devices, all kinds of stuff. These days, while I could record on the computer, I'm more likely to record on my Fostex portastudio, then bring all the raw tracks in for mixing on the PC. If you're in a big studio, you're going to have external digital ADC/DAC and mixing, so the PC itself needs just some good digital ports.

      Curiously, the "PIOS One" project at PIOS/Metabox was exactly the idea of this... a personal computer optimized for audio/video work. Even in 1997, though, it made sense to think most I/O was going to be external. I had a good sound chip (Aureal... another good company that failed, largely do to evildoers from the outside.. I hired some of the Aureal engineers briefly at Metabox USA), with separately regulated and filtered audio power supply. But going beyond four channels, you would hook an external box to the audio expansion port, and bring it in digitally.

      Lots of ports, sure. Firewire was critical to video, but that's going away... tapeless is coming on like crazy, and it's great. I bought a little pocket-sized camcorder awhile back, a Sanyo VPC-FH1, which records on SDHC cards. My goal was to reduce wear and tear on the expensive HDV camcorders, but the video quality out this bad boy is crazy.. and it can shoot at 1080/60p, twice the rate of any Blu-Ray mode. But the real key.. flash memory means fast, totally reliable transfer. There are a number of low-end pro cams doing the same things, and even on the high end, lots of people using SxS cards are loading up two SDHC cards into an adapter.

      For DSPs, I don't think so... they're just not cost effective. This is the same thing Be realized, going from their original Hobbit+DSP3210/07 prototype to the PPC model. Signal processing on the main PC is really fast these days, and you get to use that power for general purpose computing, not just some specialized bits. There are interesting areas of computing acceleration, but I would look at GPU and FPGA computing, not DSP. If you really like DSP, you could always build one in a system with some kind of FPGA resource. Not just build it, but build a different one optimized for the specific work involved. Both of these run into software issues, too... special support not needed for native signal processing work. So the benefit has to be large.

      You definitely want a 64-bit file system, and one tuned to do media well. The last time I built Linux video servers (just over a year ago, eight x86 cores in a 1U rackmount), I got better performance from XFS than ext2 or ext3, which wasn't a shock. I didn't mess around with ZFS, and ext4 was still a work in progress, though they seem to have been moving in the right direction. One nice thing about Linux... all these FS choices. The same thing that optimizes streaming HD video doesn't necessarily optimize a zillion tiny file accesses in a web server.

      The best way to implement security in a multimedia environment is simple: don't connect the media network to the internet. Problem solved. Of course, if you're paranoid, go ahead and run the web browser in a sandbox, that's fine.. you don't want the rest of the system slowed down by VM overhead.

      --
      -Dave Haynie
  6. Re:let the flames begin by runyonave · · Score: 3, Informative

    You've obviously never used an Amiga.

  7. Decades too late... by argent · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Introducing a completely new OS was barely possible in 1985. If the OS had developed with unbroken continuity it might have gotten somewhere, but by the mid '90s the writing was on the wall. OS/2, BeOS, consumer QNX... if an OS didn't already have a committed user and application base, if it wasn't UNIX or Windows, it was doomed... and even then it wasn't anything like certain.

    The operating system is like the roads. Most people don't care how the roads are built, and they're not going to buy a new car just to go down your driveway.

  8. In other news.... by HanzoSpam · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...Ford reintroduces the Model T! All new for 2010!

    --

    Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
    1. Re:In other news.... by vlm · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ...Ford reintroduces the Model T! All new for 2010!

      Maybe not Ford, but in about 30 seconds I found two places to buy new Model T / Model A parts. Not junkyard specials but newly manufactured for the classic enthusiast market.

      http://www.superiorglassworks.com/Ford-Model-T.html

      http://www.rootlieb.com/html_files/ma_spd_kit/ma_spd_kt.html

      Personally I'm tired of cookie cutter cars, and would pay good money for a new model T, just to have something unique. That strategy worked for the "new VW bug".

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  9. What I hate about Slashdot by bigsexyjoe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wake up on Monday morning, do a quick Slashdot check. Then I see a story about the new Amiga OS. From there, I feel compulsed to find out why a business actually developed a new version of Amiga, why anyone cares, etc. From there I found out that not only did this happen but the people involved were actually in a lawsuit for many years. How much could this product be worth that you'd actually litigate over it? I suspect the litigation ended primarily because the parties ran out of the crack they were smoking and realized they should just bring whatever they had to market. Now I'm down on time, confused, and have nothing to show for it.

    --
    Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
    1. Re:What I hate about Slashdot by imakemusic · · Score: 4, Funny

      How d'you think I feel? I just wasted a minute reading your complaints. (apologies to anyone reading this)

      --
      Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
  10. Re:let the flames begin by Gleng · · Score: 2, Interesting

    AmigaKit.com (and a few other resellers I forget the name of) sells OS 4.1 + ACube Systems' 733MHz SAM440ep.

    Yeah, it's not fast, and it's very expensive, but considering that the platform has been through lawsuit/scammer/hoaxer hell for the last 15 years, it's pretty amazing that anything exists at all.

    There's a lot of love for the Amiga out there.

    --
    "Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
  11. Re:let the flames begin by mdwh2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "I know I'll be flamed, but in all honesty, is the Mac platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989, but 20 years later, is it really something all that different?"

    See, if I posted that to every Mac story, I'd get modded down in an instant. Please, mod the parent down, as it's no different a troll. Why must every Amiga story (it's not like we get them often, unlike the three Apple stories a day) be bogged down with these flames?

    In answer to your question - go to an Apple versus Windows debate, note that every pro-Mac argument is simply an argument against Windows, and therefore note they can be applied here in favour of the Amiga too. E.g., you don't have to worry about viruses, DRM, bloatware. Or perhaps borrow from Iphone arguments - e.g., "it doesn't matter that it gets features later, it just does them better. Amiga are a market leader, because other companies looked to them in the past. If it lacks certain features like Flash or Java, that's obviously a good thing, as they're obviously bloated".

    See? I used to have trouble arguing for the Amiga in the late 90s, but now supporting a non-Windows platform here on Slashdot is easy :) A shame the anti-Amiga trolls are still around though - why not moan about the platforms we hear more often about?

  12. Re:We should be happy by Shinobi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Someone who learned programming on the Amiga checking in.

    For me, it was the most awesome platform ever to learn on. Full hardware docs, very cleverly constructed hardware where a lot of stuff could be bypassed etc. Taught me about multithreading, message passing, modularity, the beauty of micro-kernels and similar architectures, and the flexibility afforded by those. Moving on to Windows and various Unix-derivatives/plagiarisms was, and still is, painful, and you run into too much stuff that's obviously created for short-term benefit, but in the long term is just pure trash.

    Considering how, on a global scale, few developers come from the Amiga scene, there's a disproportionate number of us in the top end of many fields, like HPC(Developing Infiniband and similar drivers for example), embedded stuff(software for jet fighters, radar systems etc), graphics and video(Given the niche the Amiga had, this is the least surprising field, especially since the Amiga, with the Video Toaster, kicked off the Small Computer Based Editing Studio before anyone else, even though Apple-tards try to claim differently)

  13. Re:Hardware? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You don't need an MMU, you need careful programmers.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  14. Re:let the flames begin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm an old Amiga user/programmer but you have a good point. For one, all the bankruptcies and bad hardware/software has run enough people off from it to even be able to make a real profit or become relevant again.

    The best thing that could come of this would be to open source the operating system and let the hackers convert some of that goodness over to something usable with Linux or BSD.

  15. Re:A little late? by mdwh2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Indeed, they probably can't, but would they have to?

    Apple realised they were no longer able to compete with their MacOS, or hardware, so now we have Macs that are PC hardware running an OS derived from Next.

    Does anyone mind? On the contrary, Apple fans seem to love the new platform better than the old. They seem to be doing better than before, now they've made the switch.

    can begin producing hardware and operating systems that are going to compete with current market players in any meaningful way.

    But you're conflating things - just because they can't compete on hardware doesn't mean they can't compete. I don't see how it isn't "meaningful", when you can make money and sell computers doing it. The market's moved on - people don't make custom hardware anymore, not even Apple.

    Coleco announces they have a Windows 7 killer in a brand new updated ColecoVision 2009?

    More like Apple announces they have a Windows 7 killer in a brand new updated Mac.

  16. Re:let the flames begin by mikael_j · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...note that every pro-Mac argument is simply an argument against Windows,...

    Of course, the pro-Windows arguments tend to be even sillier (including such classics as complaining about shortcomings that OS X or the hardware it runs on got rid of ages ago, I've encountered people IRL as recently as a few months ago who were utterly unconvinced that Macs supported mice with more than one mouse button, and that they actually ship with mice with more than one button (technically "no" buttons but that's just semantics) was unpossible).

    /Mikael

    --
    Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
  17. Re:let the flames begin by MBGMorden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've looked at that and similar systems for a while now, but honestly, I just can't justify that sort of price premium. In all reality if they had wanted to spur adoption, then they should have built it for plain-jane x86 hardware. No need to support everything under the sun - hell just approve a specific combination of hardware as a reference platform and go from there (for non-gaming applications there are several motherboards where the whole of everything a user would need is right there on the board, making testing easy).

    I mean, honestly, $550+ for a motherboard/cpu that would have been fast-ish about 8 years ago (and is only good for an Amiga), versus ~$125 for an x86 motherboard/cpu that's several times faster and can be used for any other OS if I decide that AmigaOS isn't for me?

    That's a pretty easy decision, and the results don't favor the Amiga.

    Truthfully, if I wanted to play with a vaguely Amiga-inspired OS I'd try Syllable before going for the official AmigaOS these days.

    --
    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  18. Re:let the flames begin by mdwh2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well indeed, in general it's true that most "pro-" comments are simply poking criticisms (usually in an unfair manner) at other platforms. But for certain products, like the Amiga, it gets held to some unreasonable standard of "But you must tell us what this can do, that no other platform can do, otherwise what's the point!"

    I see it with other products too - e.g., Opera. Internet Explorer is disliked, Firefox is loved. But when there's an Opera story, despite it also being a decent alternative to IE, that was around long before Firefox, it still draws out legions of "But tell me why I should switch to Opera when I'm happy on Firefox!"

  19. Re:Worth the legal fees? Who uses this OS? by Gleng · · Score: 3, Informative

    As far as current guessing goes, there were around 1500 AmigaOne systems sold, and there's been around 300 SAM440ep boards sold. (Disclaimer: This is purely what I've read elsewhere.) Those systems run OS 4, so that's about 1800 users. (There's way more users of OS 3.x out there, though.)

    I think Hyperion also do contract work outside of Amiga stuff. I'm not sure what though.

    On the Amiga Inc. side, one of their main financiers, Pentti Kouri, died back in January. Whether this has "encouraged" the end of the legal action is open to speculation. Whatever's gone on in the background though, it's good for the platform that Hyperion have come out on top. Amiga Inc. have done almost nothing productive with it for the past 9 years. There's been a lot of weirdness going on on the Amiga Inc. side for a long time, but that's another thread entirely.

    Why use Amiga OS in 2009? It makes me smile. It's fun. It really is as simple as that. I wouldn't run a business on it, but that's not what it's for. :)

    --
    "Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
  20. Re:Hardware? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If only it were possible to build careful programmers into a few bucks worth of silicon...

  21. Re:let the flames begin by iroll · · Score: 2, Insightful

    DERP

    In one corner we've got a global powerhouse of a company that commands 10% US market share (shipments) of personal computers, with even better numbers if you look at laptops only, and a huge share of the smartphone market. That's about 6 million computers per year. Oh, and their OS has no problems dealing with Windows-centric networks and filesystems, and is POSIX-Certified. On top of that, major software houses produce software for the Mac OS, in addition to Apple's in-house software which (in some cases, like Shake) is recognized as some of the best in the industry.

    In the other, we've got the defunct today, not-quite-dead tomorrow zombie remains of a corporation that was cool but probably didn't ship that many computers in its HISTORY. Oh, and their OS really *is* a niche OS--it's has no developers, no compatibility, and nothing special to recommend it over anything else.

    derp derp derp yeah, questioning the relevance of Amiga is "just" like questioning the relevance of Apple. If you want to try that line of reasoning, you should pick a better target for your angst: drop some trash-talk on FreeDOS, or Minix. I was going to throw in VMS, but then I realized that I actually use VMS all the time and people are paid to use VMS. Amiga, not so much.

    --
    Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
  22. Re:let the flames begin by tverbeek · · Score: 2, Informative

    So it turns out you're an Apple user - I do find it funny when we get these arguments between users of niche platforms.

    Um, one of those "niches" is approaching double-digit market share in the US. By comparison, the Amiga is a "microniche". Which doesn't mean that the Amiga isn't worth talking about, of course. There was a time when Windows was a niche product, after all (I was there, I remember), and will be again some day.

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  23. Re:let the flames begin by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

    You can do that with an Amiga 500 or 1200. There are dozens, hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of these sitting unused in attics and garages around the world. Post a want to buy and you can get one for less than $125, probably from someone in your town.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  24. Re:let the flames begin by Troy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The difference is that what made the Amiga so revolutionary was it's ability to get mid-90s quality media and performance from mid-80s hardware. While the OS doubtlessly played a role in this, the question of the relevancy of AmigaOS in 2009 goes back to that same issue: does Amiga have the potential to out-perform contemporary hardware to the same degree that it did back in 1985?

    Given the people at the helm today and the rate of development of modern PC hardware, I would be kind of surprised if they could. It's a shame, because I upgraded from a Commodore 64 to an Amiga 500 back in 1987, and used it faithfully for several years until I went to college.

    Amiga had its chance to make its mark in the mid-80s, and Commodore unfortunately squandered that opportunity.

  25. Amiga comeback by Atrox666 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'mma gonna let you finish but OS/2 came out with the greatest OS that's going to take over the world. I always hear about these OSes like OS/2 and Amiga OS, BeOS, and Linux that are going to take over everything. I had an Amiga. It was a great machine and it took a long time for the PCs and the Macs to catch up(Long after it was dead). What Amiga taught me most was that you would not win in the computer market by being better. I also learned to let go of past technology.

    1. Re:Amiga comeback by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What Amiga taught me most was that you would not win in the computer market by being better.

      It also taught me that, plus that users cannot rely on proprietary software.

      Sure, I wanted the Amiga to "win," but as a user, what was really important was not whether it won or not, but whether it continued to be maintained and developed. Even with a small marketshare, a platform can totally kick ass and make that minority wonder why they're a minority. But if you don't get a serious update since 1992, then there's really nothing to wonder about.

      When you get down to it, proprietary means "killable," whether killed by competitors or the parent. Linux may not win, but at least it's not killable. The only person who has any say in whether or not I can use Linux forever, is me. The Amiga OS copyright holders (whoever they are), not me, is who decided that I don't get to stay on Amiga OS. Never again will I spend a lot of money on something and remain vulnerable to that.

  26. Re:We should be happy by hollywench · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wish things had worked out differently, i.e. before C= went bust. We know who to blame for that (and not Jack Tramiel.) :-p Some of the Amiga community is still here reading /. I may not own a Miggy any more, may not post all over FidoNet and AmigaNet via dial up or uucp either, and I don't give a damn about Hyperion or Amiga Inc any more... I quit doing those quite a while back.. but I still consider myself a member of the Amiga community. There are a number of people I met via Fido's Amiga echo that I am happy to say are still my friends, 15+ years later. Married one of them, and not just because he programmed in C on the Amiga either. :) I like to think that he's the best thing I ever downloaded. ;)

  27. Re:let the flames begin by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 2, Informative

    I've looked at that and similar systems for a while now, but honestly, I just can't justify that sort of price premium. In all reality if they had wanted to spur adoption, then they should have built it for plain-jane x86 hardware. No need to support everything under the sun - hell just approve a specific combination of hardware as a reference platform and go from there (for non-gaming applications there are several motherboards where the whole of everything a user would need is right there on the board, making testing easy).

    Some of this is a bit of legacy. Back when Commodore went bankrupt there was a lot of talk about moving to PowerPC since Motorola basically EOL'd the 68k series of cpu's and the Mac used PPC chips it seemed a logical path to take. ESCOM even talked about moving to PPC before they went bankrupt, and Phase 5 came out with the Cyberstorm CPU card for the 3000/4000 - which essentially was a 68060 and a 604 PPC cpu on a single board - these machines effectively became a development platform for the next version of Amiga DOS.

    So there is a decent amount of PPC development already done for the Amiga - even though now most of it is obsolete (arguably). The PPC platform has never been a really mature environment - every PREP machine I've ever had (even the Pegasos II) had buggy firmware that took hours to get working just to boot the base OS. Every step of the way you felt like the machine you had in front of you just barely made it out of the prototype stage.

    So yeah I'd welcome a x86 version. Amiga DOS still has a lot of potential for being user friendly, but extremely powerful and flexible at the same time - which there really isn't an OS out there that covers this fully. Even if it means re-writing a lot of software already written to take advantage of PPC cpu's.

  28. Re:let the flames begin by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2, Funny

    There was a time when Windows was a niche product, after all (I was there, I remember), and will be again some day.

    Ze Windows Reich vill last for ein thousand years!!!1

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  29. Re:let the flames begin by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 2, Informative

    When was Windows a niche? The first year of Windows 3.0 sales they sold over 3 million copies of the OS which dwarfed all Mac hardware sales to that date (keep in mind the launch date for Win 3 was 1990 - so outselling 6 years of Mac sales in its first year is nothing to scoff at). I got that number from Cringely's Accidental Empires (decent book).

    I can't find the sales figures for Windows 1.0 or 2.0, but they did go from 140 million in revenue in 1985 (Windows 1 launch date) to over a billion in 1990 (Windows 3 launch date). If it was a niche it was for a very very short period.

    Anyhow as someone who had a bunch of Amiga's (I still have 2 - an A4000 and an A1200 - as well as a Pegasos II) - it was always a niche because the only killer app it had was Video Toaster. The killer app for the Mac originally was Pagemaker, and then Photoshop.

    I have a Mac, and to be honest it doesn't have a single app I use that makes me want to buy the machine over anything else. Its still running 10.4.x, but the UI experience is really honestly nothing to write home about. It never remembers any of my window positions in Finder, and there are situations where its easy to lose dialogue boxes (for example - if a save dialogue pops up in Firefox it will let you click on the Firefox window moving the save window back (this is something MS-Windows will not let you do) - and its really hard to get that save window to the front again...). Even when I worked in the print industry at one point a stronghold for the Mac - however no-one used Mac's there anymore because they were too expensive, and Quark/Adobe stuff ran on Windows just fine and would read all the Mac files just fine. Most all of EFI's stuff runs on Windows these days - Mac's just interface with it.

    Apple has essentially positioned OSX for people who like the software/hardware or people who think its hip to use a Mac. While I agree its gaining marketshare and that is a good thing, I wonder to what end. Its an interesting position really - I don't think any other computer company has been able to sustain a market based on user experience or hipness alone so it will be interesting to see how it all pans out.

  30. Re:let the flames begin by hazydave · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You ARE comparing Apples (sic) and oranges here.

    The Mac platform was revolutionary... well, the software anyway (the hardware sucked from the get-go, despite the pretty plastic). 20 years later, they have actually fixed the OS (eg, went from a fairly poor low-level design to the Mach kernel and some other decent underpinnings), they have a growing user base, you can actually buy one in a store, there are many modern applications, and the company behind the Mac is making gobs of money. None of those things are true about anything related to the Amiga. And don't get on me for Amiga bashing -- I designed a bunch of them, I love the Amiga. I just hate what happened to it. It has gone nowhere significant since the mid 90s, and things were shakey even near the end, between Commodore's slow death and the year+ it took between that and the sincere attempt to bring things back at Amiga Technologies.

    Sure, you may find a few things in AmigaOS that are still better than Windows. You can find that in just about any OS... Windows is an easy target. That doesn't make AmigaOS a useful choice for getting most kinds of real work done today. And it also doesn't remove the fact that the only real platform for AmigaOS today is software emulation of AmigaOS 3.x on a PC, under some other PC OS.

    Telling the truth about something is not the same as bashing it; dreaming about what might have been doesn't change what is. But keep in mind... the AmigaOS has been in post Commodore, even post-Commodore/Amiga Technologies neglection longer than it had existed before this. That's a pretty harsh way of looking, but it's the truth. It was 10.5 years from the introduction of the Amiga 1000 (September 1985) to the functional end of Amiga Technologies (March 1986). It's largely been in the hands of lawyers and bozos ever since. Is there anyone really holding their breath for an AmigaOS re-introduction of any kind, much less one that invites a thriving user and developer community? I'd love to see that, but I don't believe in it.

    --
    -Dave Haynie
  31. Re:A little late? by Darinbob · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, some people mind. I am seriously disappointed that now x86 is the only game in town. It's like if COBOL became the dominant language. All alternative CPUs are essentially only on embedded systems. Even Intel can't manage to get better designs of their own accepted. So we're stuck with a CPU on just about every desktop computer that still has a strong family resemblance to the old Intel microprocessors from the 70s and 80s; the modern versions are instruction set compatible with the 8088, which is compatible with the 8080, which strongly resembles the 8008, which derives from the 4004, which was the first 4-bit microprocessor chip. Seriously, the EAX register is essentially the same beast as the 4004's accumulator if you follow the genetics down the family tree.

    Maybe it's not that big a deal really to the pragmatic engineer side of me, but the idealistic engineer side is disappointed :-)

  32. Not the world as it is... by petrus4 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...but the world as it could be. That has always been the nature of the Amiga.

    I've always had a strange feeling that the Amiga was like something out of an episode of Sliders.

    It was almost as if, with this system, instead of being something from our own world, at some point a brief window to a different and more positive reality was opened; a place where the priority systems of people was aligned with what truly worked, and said place's inhabitants cared more about creativity, and community, and real innovation, and less purely about the profit motive, than they do here...and that for the few seconds said window was open, an A500 fell through it, was found by someone here, reverse engineered, and then reproduced.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_1PjOEFPTk - This is an example of what I'm talking about. A comparison with Linux on a very old machine. The Amiga always demonstrated the kind of performance which logically, just didn't seem as though it should be possible... ...and yet somehow, it was.

  33. Re:let the flames begin by node+3 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "I know I'll be flamed, but in all honesty, is the Mac platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989, but 20 years later, is it really something all that different?"

    See, if I posted that to every Mac story, I'd get modded down in an instant.

    Rightfully so, because it's an extremely idiotic thing to say.

    Why must every Amiga story (it's not like we get them often, unlike the three Apple stories a day) be bogged down with these flames?

    Because Amiga *isn't* relevant today. Since you have such a hard on for Apple, you probably know of at least 10 people who currently own and use a Mac, at least 50 who currently own and use an iPod or iPhone. How many people do you know that currently use an Amiga?

    Media interest, market share, available hardware, available software, retail space (even *outside* of Apple's own stores), their own stores... In which of these categories is Amiga even *remotely* similar to Apple?

    Hell, how many people do you think would even recognize the word Amiga as applies to computers? How many do you think don't know about Apple as applies to computers?

    go to an Apple versus Windows debate, note that every pro-Mac argument is simply an argument against Windows

    I use Macs because of their usability, the quality of the hardware, the overall feel and polish of the apps (both from Apple and third party software), and things tend to "just work". Any "Apple versus Windows debate" will have pro-Mac arguments just like mine. You clearly haven't thought this through.

    [pro-Mac arguments are just anti-Windows] and therefore note they can be applied here in favour of the Amiga too

    Not really, *because the Amiga isn't a modern platform*. An argument against GM in defense of Toyota is not also an argument in favor of a Model T or a Gremlin.

    See? I used to have trouble arguing for the Amiga in the late 90s, but now supporting a non-Windows platform here on Slashdot is easy :) A shame the anti-Amiga trolls are still around though - why not moan about the platforms we hear more often about?

    If you think simply being "not Windows" is sufficient to garner support on Slashdot, you are woefully clueless. There will always be supporters of pretty much *any* platform here, but the hive-mind here doesn't just go, "not Windows, then it's good!". In fact, there are a *lot* of Windows supporters here.

    Your powers of observation are severely lacking.