Amiga and Hyperion Settle Ownership of AmigaOS

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.'

Comments

Wow, my clock must be broken

[manicbutt]

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

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[ciderVisor]

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.)

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[sconeu]

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?

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[rho]

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.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hazydave]

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.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[butlerm]

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.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Darinbob]

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.

Re:let the flames begin

[BuR4N]

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

Thats 20 years after Unix was released, right ?

Brutality

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:let the flames begin

[runyonave]

You've obviously never used an Amiga.

Re:What I hate about Slashdot

[imakemusic]

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

Re:let the flames begin

[mdwh2]

"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?

Re:Of course not

[dammy]

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/

Re:A little late?

[mdwh2]

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.

Re:let the flames begin

[MBGMorden]

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.

Re:let the flames begin

[mdwh2]

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!"

Re:Worth the legal fees? Who uses this OS?

[Gleng]

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. :)

Re:let the flames begin

[drinkypoo]

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.

Amiga comeback

[Atrox666]

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.

Re:let the flames begin

[hazydave]

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.