Hyperion Promises An AmigaOS Netbook

An anonymous reader writes with a report that an employee of Hyperion Entertainment has disclosed (but not officially announced) that there is a new portable computer with the Amiga name on it in the works, quoting: "Supposedly, the new netbook Amiga is will be 'sourced in a special configuration from an OEM.' The manufacturer in question is, just like the price tag, the launch date and the hardware specifications, currently unknown paving the way for further speculation and rumors. The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985."

Comments

AmigaOS

[afabbro]

For those who didn't read TFA, it states the netbook in question will be running AmigaOS.

(When I read the summary, I'd assumed someone had bought the trademark and was going to slap it on a Windows 7 Starter Edition laptop)

Re:AmigaOS

[the linux geek]

You mean like how at the top of this page, it says "Hyperion Promises An AmigaOS Netbook"?

Re:AmigaOS

[ozmanjusri]

Give the guy a break. The shills have to get their product mentioned at every OS discussion. Otherwise, they don't meet KPI and teams lose their bonuses.

Re:AmigaOS

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The slightly-tangled-and-mostly-software history of "Hyperion Entertainment" doesn't fill me with worlds of confidence; but there doesn't seem to be anything architecturally implausible about shipping a genuine "AmigaOS netbook", except that volume makes slapping a sticker on an Atom based system cheaper.

Despite ARM having pretty aggressively filled the 'consumer-visible stuff that isn't x86' market(not quite sure why they cleaned up so hard; but they did), there are still plenty of PPC SoCs around that have adequately low power demands and support a reasonable number of modern peripheral interfaces. There are a few desktop-ish boards built around them, no reason you couldn't shove one in a notebook, other than the price efficiencies of volume...

Re:AmigaOS

[the linux geek]

The PPC 460 family is common for AmigaOS boards, but it's pretty slow and products with it always end up extravagantly priced ($1k vicinity for a board that doesn't reliably outperform the Atom) purely by virtue of it being sold to nostalgia-crazed hobbyists. I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up the same way.

Re:AmigaOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise, they don't meet KPI and teams lose their bonuses.

It's boni.

Re:AmigaOS

[amiga3D]

The talk is somewhere around 500 dollars but I'd be happy with 600 or so. I'm still running an Amiga 3000 but it's 20 years old now. I bought it when 286 powered peecee's were the rage and it ran circles around them plus it actually multi-tasked easily. I look at it now and it's amazing what it can do on that old hardware. So far ahead of it's time and mismanaged by idiots like medhi ali and irving gould was Commodore Business Machines. A billion dollars to zero in 5 years.

Re:AmigaOS

[hairyfeet]

Actually I'd say that was a legitimate concern seeing as how we recently had a Commodore released that was just your standard Atom nettop in a commodore case.

As for TFA I wish them luck. I'm sure that Amiga fans are a tiny niche but that doesn't mean they can't be a profitable market to serve. if these guys can make a good living by giving Amiga fans what they want? More power to 'em I say, variety spice and all that.

Re:AmigaOS

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what SHE said!

Re:AmigaOS

[Stormwatch]

Indeed, I suggest watching The Deathbed Vigil , a documentary about the last day at Commodore. It explains how they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Reading this piece also explains some things. It's disturbing, they had some truly good tech, all destroyed by the absolute incompetence of those at the very top.

Re:AmigaOS

[amiga3D]

I remember a skit about ali and gould playing golf. They're talking about the company wondering what it is they sell. One asks the other about it, "what is it we sell again?" and he replies "computers", to which he says "oh, so how are those doing?" The small shareholders actually had to hire a private detective to discover where the shareholder meetings were being held so that they could attend to give them hell about what morons they were. You gotta love it. They ran Jack Tramiel off which I kind of understood but then they brought in the clown show to make Jack seem like businessman of the Millenium.

Re:AmigaOS

[Scarletdown]

Otherwise, they don't meet KPI and teams lose their bonuses.

It's boni.

BZZT! I'm sorry. That answer is incorrect.

The GP had it right, and X gets the square.

Re:AmigaOS

[jaminJay]

"Variety spice" sounds promiscuous...

Re:AmigaOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I am all for resurrecting the Amiga. The biggest thing that I'd change would be the platform CPU that uses it. Last time, it used a Motorola 68000, but this time, they should have it running on the PPC. Also, is the OS still 16 bit?

Re:AmigaOS

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There may well be some nostalgia-gouging going on; but low-volume PPC boards fast enough to not be a complete joke on the desktop are likely just not that cheap.

Looking at the Applied Micro parts that prior Hyperion-supported PPC boards have used, their own dev boards(hopelessly ill-suited to desktop work, for want of RAM and a video controller; but with JTAG and suchlike dev goodies) seem to run ~$1,000 in quantities of one, even for the ones with relatively weak CPUs(the 333-800MHz single core stuff).

I can't find the eval kits for the newer single or dual core 1GHz-1.5GHz CPUs, but distributor prices for those(with a minimum order 120 units) seem to be ~$110 for the bare CPU.

Given that, I suspect that the margins probably aren't zero by any means; but that the business of building PPC desktop boards is just expensive, and will remain so unless the market magically expands. Now, given the power efficiency and interesting feature set for certain flavors of embedded packet-slinging, the CPU might be competitively priced for what it is; but as a desktop processor, let's just say that it wouldn't want to meet an i3 or a Phenom in a dark alley, much less a $1k PC build... Not a huge surprise, I suppose. Apple stopped caring about desktop PPCs in 2006, which both suggests that the sector was already troubled 5 years ago, and means that there have been only a tiny number of niche customers, certainly not enough to drive new designs oriented in that direction, for the last five years...

Its an unfortunate historical quirk, for Amiga enthusiasts, that PPC is the architecture they are tied to, while ARM is the one that is really getting much more promising for non-x86 desktop/laptop/etc. applications. Anybody know why PPC seems to have retreated and ARM to have advanced?

Re:AmigaOS

[hairyfeet]

It is a shame you posted AC but just in case you look back I have to ask, why PPC? Why not ARM? It seems like using PPC would significantly jack up the prices and Apple DID switch away from PPC for a reason, it was because those chips are simply too hot for mobile while having decent speed.

OTOH something like the Tegra Kal El would seem like a perfect fit for amiga. Plenty of threading, powerful GPU, and low power so you could make nice laptops and netbooks with it. so what advantages do you think PPC would bring over ARM?

Re:AmigaOS

[Joce640k]

Last time, it used a Motorola 68000, but this time, they should have it running on the PPC.

Later they can transition to Intel x86 and the circle will be complete.

Re:AmigaOS

[Joce640k]

There may well be some nostalgia-gouging going on; but low-volume PPC boards fast enough to not be a complete joke on the desktop are likely just not that cheap.

At this point in history they should be using an emulator on standard hardware. No really.

Re:AmigaOS

[james.mcarthur]

"At this point in history they should be using an emulator on standard hardware. No really."

The writing has been on the wall for PowerPC since before Apple jumped to Intel, but Hyperion and some of the Amiga community still want to believe.

Want to see rabid fanboi's? Post on AmigaWorld or Amiga.org asking why there isn't x86/ARM based Amiga's.

Re:AmigaOS

[MiggyMan]

It is, and has been, PPC based for some time now, dating back to the classic range in fact.

And as for still being 16 bit, we're talking about an entirley different generation of software here.

Re:AmigaOS

[raddude99]

why PPC and not ARM? Because AmigaOS has already been ported to PPC. And it'll give them a "why not use a different CPU architecture?" selling point. Just because Apple switched from PPC doesn't mean everybody should.

Re:AmigaOS

[robthebloke]

That sounds like a punchline to a joke involving bono and a pony.

Re:AmigaOS

[AmiMoJo]

There would be more fans if it wasn't for decades of mismanagement and false hope. If the Amiga had become a retro platform the moment Commodore died I think there would be a lot more active users today.

Re:AmigaOS

[catmistake]

The writing has been on the wall for PowerPC since before Apple jumped to Intel, but Hyperion and some of the Amiga community still want to believe.

There are still a few PPC iDevices that remain popular.

Re:AmigaOS

[DrXym]

If this niche were profitable we wouldn't see the Amiga brand pass from one failed business to the next every few years. The reality is that anyone looking for nostalgia could avail themselves of an emulator to get it. Anyone looking for a native Amiga experience can get it with AROS (and open source AmigaOS compatible workbench & API). I don't believe this niche would stand to make much money if any.

Re:AmigaOS

[elrous0]

I suspect the "AmigaOS" will just be a slightly customized version of Android, ChromeOS, or some other non-Windows OS. They're just trying to wring some nostalgia value out of the name. Some company was doing this with the Commodore 64 a few years ago, selling a "Commodore 64" that was nothing more than a custom case around a conventional Windows computer.

Re:AmigaOS

[hairyfeet]

But i'm sure you'll agree that mobile is not only the future, its the present as well. i probably sell 5 laptops or netbooks for every desktop anymore, even folks that frankly won't ever go farther than a power cord will reach always seem to want laptops.

I'm sure Jobs saw this as well, and it isn't like apple didn't give IBM plenty of time to fix the problems but they simply couldn't. there is a reason why the POWER arch is only used by IBM for blades, its because along with speed it cranks out the heat, which is fine when you have some serious number crunching to do but i doubt those that still like Amiga will be trying to build the next video toaster out of the thing like they did in the old days.

Finally I'd point out that Kal El is a hell of a lot closer to the spirit of the original Amiga than the current PPC chips. what really set Amiga apart back then was its multithreading and GPU capability while not needing fans that sound like an F16 taxiing on the runway which Kal El fits better than PPC. While i'm not saying it would be a trivial task if these guys are serious about keeping Amiga alive (which I assume getting this far they love the OS like the fans do) then they really need to be on ARM to secure its future.

I have a feeling that desktops are gonna end up being more workstations/ gaming rigs than everyday appliances, at least from what i'm seeing here at the shop, and folks are more willing to give new mobile devices a fair shake than desktops. if they come up with a cool amiga based ARM netbook or convertable they could actually carve out a niche for themselves, but with a PPC they'll be locked into desktops and that appears to be a flat growth sector. ARM just makes more sense from a technical, power efficiency, and cost standpoint IMHO. Oh and from what I've seen you ain't getting PPC chips at affordable prices friend, they tend to be more than a little on the high side.

Re:AmigaOS

[hairyfeet]

People make money with a "free" OS every single day, so why not Amiga? all those failed businesses prove is that they had lousy business plans, that's all. if it were me I have NO doubt i could make it profitable. Oh I wouldn't be making no dell or HP money, but enough to pay my bills and keep a few employees working? its doable.

I would port the UI and "feel" if not the whole OS over to ARM and be looking at a "triple threat" approach. you would have the 1Ghz snapdragon single core for your entry level Amiga netbook, probably with 512Mb but upgrade-able to 1Gb of RAM, for the midrange a dual core Tegra tablet/netbook convertible with a low end SSD and probably 2Gb of RAM, and for the high end a Kal El Tegra quad core convertible with docking station and 4Gb of the fastest DDR3 and a lightning fast SSD.

That would give them a price point for every market, from sub $300 up, give the users as well as enthusiasts plenty to be excited about and by having an entry model you could probably help spur new app development as well. Finally I'd set up an app store with VERY developer friendly pricing and rules (probably something like a 90%-10% split in favor of devs) and make it clear that like Red hat the money you spend helps to make a better product and community.

Frankly I think it could sell, again not some iDevice breakaway best seller, but enough to keep a roof over your head and keep your employees from living in their cars. Its just gonna take someone at the head of the company that can see things long term and have vision, which sadly is all too rare in the business world right now.

Re:AmigaOS

[DrXym]

As I said you can already have a free Amiga OS. It's called AROS. It's a portable, open source implementation of the Amiga workbench and libraries. It even runs on original Amiga hardware and is binary compatible when it is. Why wait for some branded netbook to appear when you could just install AROS right now only any supported hardware of your choosing and achieve the same?

Re:AmigaOS

[tehcyder]

"Variety spice" sounds promiscuous...

No, I think that was Ginger Spice.

Re:AmigaOS

[StikyPad]

That's weird, I thought good tech came from having a charismatic, visionary CEO with a God complex and a penchant for perfectionism and absolute control, and the engineers only exist to execute His will.

Re:AmigaOS

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hyperion"? Isn't that the name of a sewage-treatment plant operated by the Los Angeles Department of Public Works?

Re:AmigaOS

[hairyfeet]

Because how many people A.-Want to do the work installing the thing, and B.- Even know how to set it up, much less make it run decently?

I get paid decently well to build computers. This is something they could easily do themselves, hell there are step by step pictures with all the new motherboards, or they could buy a prebuilt from Dell and save some money, so why do they pay me? Because they would rather pay than deal with the bullshit, either the bullshit of DIYing or the bullshit of cleaning all the crap on your average Dell PC. With me they hand me the money, tell me what they want on it and like subway i build it fresh just for them, with the hardware and software customized for what they intend to do with it. The print shop has me load their graphics and printer software, the engineer his solidworks, and for joe and Jane average I have all the codecs, a full free AV, all the tweaks and settings are done, I even add the user accounts if they tell me how many will be using it.

I take out the bullshit and folks are willing to pay for that and the same goes here. How many could find a Snapdragon ARM based netbook that will even run AROS? Hoe about a tegra dual or quad? How much time would you waste finding the hardware, getting it set up, and dealing with the shit that didn't work? I know that at my average $35 an hour it really wouldn't take long for the bullshit to cost more than paying someone else to do it and THAT, that right there, is how they can carve out a niche. i might enjoy an Amiga netbook but I sure as fuck wouldn't go through the trouble of setting it all up and getting it working and i'm sure many feel the same.

Re:AmigaOS

[fyngyrz]

I was in the Commodore booth as a guest developer, at the 1986 (I think) spring COMDEX in Atlanta, just after the machine's debut. We'd produced a Amig based CAD system, and since it was actually shipping, CBM was pretty happy to throw us in the booth with an Amiga. Put us in the brochure for the Amiga too, that was fun. Still have that on the wall, in fact. I had very high hopes for the Amiga, hopes that were very well justified by the original hardware and the OS. And over the next few years, we did well, but CBM... man. We went from hopeful, to worried, to developing for Windows, because... well, those people were seriously misguided. And sure enough, they screwed that pooch till hell wouldn't have it.

We had a saying: Had CBM owned the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, they'd have marketed the product as "lukewarm, dead bird."

Re:AmigaOS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's AmigaOS4.1 an upgraded version of AmigaOS3.x which runs on PPC.

http://www.amigaos.net/

Re:AmigaOS

[DrXym]

In answer to your questions I would suggest A) The majority of people actually interested in an Amiga desktop are likely to be hobbiests and would figure how to install it, B) See A.

I'm not sure why you mention an ARM netbook. You could buy an Atom powered netbook off the shelf from $200 up. Install Linux, e.g. Ubuntu and then follow instructions on the AROS site to slap the desktop on top. Or download the AROS live CD burn to USB stick and do the same. I don't think AROS makes the process as simple as it could be but neither does it sound especially hard either.

I'd also argue that if Amiga had a spirit that it has long disappeared. It's embarrassing watching how people attach their hopes to one business after another who think that slapping the Amiga / Commodore moniker on some OEM hardware is fooling anyone. Instead what happens is said business goes bust and the assets get sold on to be part of another doomed venture.

Re:AmigaOS

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I did a little poking; but I'm still not wholly clear: is it correct to say that all "POWER" based systems(in reasonably current use) implement all the instructions and features needed to qualify as "PowerPC" systems; but that "PowerPC" devices lack some of the more advanced capabilities that the "POWER" devices possess?

Re:AmigaOS

[gl4ss]

you wish.

if it actually was something like you describe, they could bundle amigaforever with it and be faster, cheaper and actually useful to boot.

instead it's a .. well. not an amiga. not an pc. it runs amigaos though, but rather pointlessly.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see little point in making one other than nostalgia and/or geek rep...

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Workbench is a much better UI than GNOME 3 or Unity. That alone is a big enough reason.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

OSX is a much better UI than workbench. That alone is a big enough reason to close down AmigaOS.
the other reason is this abortion.
http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware&pid=7
for two grand you can have your very own 1.5GHz amiga with two whole gigabytes of ram and sixty four billion bytes of disk space.

Re:Why?

[Osgeld]

I disagree, while it was hands on tits better than anything in the late 80's and early 90's, it has never really progressed past then and is IMO quite antiquated in its post Amiga days. Since I did not grow up in the sheer awesomeness of Workbench in its prime I am not tainted by nostalgia, though I do appreciate what it was and what it did back then, its more modern versions just feel like an old outdated system being shoehorned onto more powerful hardware.

That was with v4 on power pc Amiga systems, and I just stopped looking then because it required special hardware, and I could not just toss it on a old Mac, this sounds exactly the same, old crap no one can find at ease, running on specialised roms, trying to shoehorn a very old computer into modern life.

They would have much better luck actually updating the OS to run on modern systems, till then its a few grand I dont want to spend to get lower performance than an emulator. Amiga is dead, Amiga PPC is a pointless waste of time as its mostly incompatible with the real deals, and its expensive for what amounts to hardware junk with a very outdated system.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Workbench is a much better UI than GNOME 3 or Unity. That alone is a big enough reason.

Windows 95 is a much better UI than GNOME 3 or Unity, but that doesn't mean I'd want to use it.

Re:Why?

[bonch]

Yeah, but Slashdot has decided to hate everything about Apple since they became competitors with Google in the mobile space.

Re:Why?

[amiga3D]

That's really the reason. It's for nostalgia and geek fun mostly. Owning an Amiga was always an expensive hobby. I paid 2 or 3 times the prices for stuff for my Amiga than my friends did for their peecee's. They always oohed and ahhed over how amazing it was but few people wanted to spend the money to own one. They were happy enough with windows since their was plenty of software available for it, mostly games that they wanted. All the big Amiga titles got ported to the peecee to start with and then later as the hardware started to slip behind and windows became more of a real operating system than the buggy crap it once was the games started coming out on peecee's first then ported to Amiga. It's hard to explain to people now just how bad the peecee was back then. I had been spoiled by my Amiga and I couldn't understand why people bought the clones when they crashed continuously, couldn't multi-task and had shitty sound and laughable graphics and animation. I now know why but I still would have done the same thing. The Amiga is why I enjoyed computing and if it hadn't been available I probably would have done without until 95 or so. As it was I hung on to the Amiga until 99 when I finally broke down, bought a used dual PII/333 server and installed linux on it. It was tough for a year or so but I couldn't go back, the hardware was just too slow to do the things I wanted. I still boot the A3k occasionally just to remember how much fun it was.

Re:Why?

[Osgeld]

yea it has nothing to do with apple patenting no shit ideas, charging a premium for it, then dropping their customers in hardware support like clockwork.

personally I don't have the time or the money to deal with a spaz computer platform like it was 1980 all over again every 5-10 years.

Re:Why?

[amiga3D]

Oh come on man. I loved the workbench but be real. It's 2011.

Re:Why?

[Dogtanian]

I don't really understand why anyone is trying to resurrect a proprietary platform that died out eons ago and that even most geeks didn't buy back during its heyday. [..] Nobody cared about the Amiga back then and even fewer people care now.

Oh Jeez, not this **** again! Look, I know it's hard to believe, but the US market is not the be all and end all, nor is it always reflective of the rest of the world.

Sure, it didn't sell well in Buttf***, Illinois, but the Amiga enjoyed *massive* mainstream success in Europe in the late-80s and early-90s.

That said, though it was amazing and ahead of its time 20-25 years ago, the Amiga is way too long gone to serve any meaningful purpose in bringing back now. Things have long moved on.

But to be honest, this product is really aimed at the obessive hardcore Amiga fanbase, not Joe Public, and that's where it makes business sense (if it does)- a very niche market.

Re:Why?

[hairyfeet]

And the fact that some folks are willing to pay 2 grand to run AmigaOS over OSX bothers you.....why exactly? hell i knew a guy that would pay frankly crazy money for authentic 70s bell bottoms in his size, why? because he REALLY liked bell bottoms and thought they were worth the money to him.

And that's capitalism 101 friend, if there are enough folks willing to pay the cost (I bet even at 2 grand those guys ain't making much of anything off of those simply due to the fact they are buying in such low quantities) to keep those guys afloat and it makes them happy? Good for them. I have a customer that is having me keep an eye out for a Commodore 128 and i'm sure he'll end up paying more than a new PC to get it, why? Because he LIKED his 128 and misses it.

If there are enough folks out there that miss Amiga enough to keep a little shop open selling new Amigas personally i'm all for it, I wish them nothing but luck. our whole system is based on finding a market and making a profit by serving it, sure they won't get rich but if they can pay their bills and make a few bucks why not? Hell there is a bunch that sells cassette players for PCs, if there is a market and a little money to be made somebody will make it, why not a classic OS company?

Re:Why?

[Kagetsuki]

That's your opinion. I hate window behavior in OSX, I hate the dock, I hate the menus being at the top of the screen instead of in the windows, and I hate the pager/multiplexer system, I prefer sloppy focus and I love semi-transparent terminals. While I still prefer GNOME 2 I'd take GNOME 3 Shell any day over OSX.

Re:Why?

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah, but Slashdot has decided to hate everything about Apple since they became competitors with Google in the mobile space.

Our hatred goes back farther than that, friend. Walled gardens are inimical to the nerd ethic and those precede Google's entry into the "mobile space", to use your business media parlance. But we bide our time...

Like the old saying goes, we know if we wait long enough we'll see the body of our enemy floating down the river.

Well, not literally...

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

s/nerd/freetard/g

Geeks love technology. Apple is having success because they were there pushing the technology forward: better battery life, easier to use interfaces, smarter phones, silent running computers. Geeks are using iOS devices, geeks are using Androids, macs and Linux because they love the technology. The freetards are sitting there sulking in a corner fiddling with their compiler flags wondering why only they and their moms can see how wonderful they are waging their imaginary jihad against the great Apple satan.

Re:Why?

[raddude99]

Huh, Just because it doesn't have a better UI than MacOS we should close it down. So we should shut down Linux and Windows as well then? Also, did you RTFA? Why blame the OS for being on expensive hardware (made by a seperate company) when the original article was about new hardware for the OS that is fixing the very problem you are complaining about? The new AmigaOS Netbook is going to be in the $300 to $500 range apparently.

Re:Why?

[RevWaldo]

Dude! Full motion video! On a laptop! That's friggin' crazy!

.

Re:Why?

[Hatta]

Is that not a sufficient reason?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

better battery life, easier to use interfaces, smarter phones, silent running computers

These are hardly technological breakthroughs. Two of these are "ergonomical" achievements, and the other two are incremental improvements over existing tech.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could ask that question about any type of human endeavor - because it's obvious that the stuff we have *isn't* as good as it could be, and some people would rather use something else than try to live with an existing mainstream OS. Specifically regarding the Amiga, it's sort of like the single speed Schwinn I rode from 1966 until 1978 - it was simple, dependable, it worked. I grew up on that bike. The Amiga was my next "bike". It was "fun" in that it was easy to personalize (using today's terminology), and basically blew the pants off your friends' PCs and Macs. For the money, at the time, nothing could beat it. Referring to the handful of classic Amigas I personally own/use, in some ways it still can't be beat considering they're still running over 20 years later when brand new machines show up DOA or die within the first months. As far as software, I think the tack the MorphOS people have taken is pretty good - create a new OS which JIT compiles old 68xxx code so you can run the old stuff if and when you want to, but allows for the development of modern PPC-native software.

(But we'll probably all be moving to the cloud soon anyway, so why run an OS at all? :)

From what I know of the current "Amiga", I'm not expecting much.
CBM (don't get me started on that mess..) gave me a lifetime hobby.
The only thing I ever got from Amiga, Inc. was a $50 t-shirt. 8P

appropriate captcha: hooked

 

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

No one ever said you should get an Amiga. This is for those that already like how this OS works.
Again I don't get why people here on slashdot seems to act like they are trying to compete with major platforms. This is for us users who just like the way Amiga OS works and for that purpose it is successful and has kept the platform profitable enough to give us new hardware and OS updates.

If you are not one of these people then Amiga is clearly NOT for you.
I use it because i still like some features like amiga screens, datatypes, responsiveness, boot times and so on.
I use a modern system running linux for some tasks that i cannot do with my amiga, while i use my "next generation" amiga for everything else.
But thanks to the development and new hardware over the last years i can use my amiga more and more as a main system.

It is not our fault that this is posted on slashdot like it is big news to the world. It is big news to people like me though .;P

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pure enthusiasm. If you need to ask why, it's not for you. I can almost guarantee you won't like it.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a fly speck. It's a true microkernel system. It was developed during a time when memory was expensive and CPUs were slow, and yet it had a graphical user interface and preemptive multitasking. In 1985.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's a fly speck. It's a true microkernel system.

No, "micorkernel" doesn't simply mean "small."

Exec ran in user mode in the same address space as applications. It provides more services through its own library rather than user process daemons. It's object-oriented and fairly modular, but I wouldn't call it a microkernel.

Re:Why?

[fyngyrz]

Not that it'll make your day or anything, but semi-transparent terminals work fine under OSX (in 10.5.8 Leopard, anyway.)

Wanna know what *I* hate about OSX? Only GUI one app can take keyboard input at a time. So if, for instance, app A is active, but you want to send keystroke commands from it to app B... you're screwed. I agree with you about the menu at the top, that's seriously inconvenient and wrongheaded, but at least it works if you adjust to it. The keyboard input problem I describe, on the other hand, can't be worked around.

Re:Why?

[amigabill]

It's something for Amiga fans. For the most part, anyone that does not already want a portable Amiga can disregard this notice. You don't care, that's fine, don't trash talk those of us that do. I hate seeing Amiga news on Slashdot, while it does seem to be rather nerdy news, it's just not an accepted topic here. But being portable and relatively cheap for an Amiga platform today, maybe some who have drifted away might consider spending a few hundred bucks to check it out and enjoy Amiga again for a bit. No one thinks we'll be competing with Android on local superstore shelves with this thing. Amiga fans still around today may make Apple fans look like tremendously lucid normal people, but we aren't stupid to think we'll just walk into BestBuy or Fry's and sell millions of units. So don't go thinking this is anything we're expecting to see with this thing.

I myself would really prefer to see a higher performance laptop with optical drive, 15inch screen, and a Freescale AMP or the PA Semi chips they somehow got their hands on for the X1000 tower. I'd really prefer they port x86 or ARM so it's easy to get whatever hardware to run it on. But this is the only portable choice we've ever really had. As I haven't used a tower in years, they're buried in storage with no desk space to be hooked up on and I don't want to be tethred to said desk in some room anyway, I'm very happy about this tiny netbook thing. But that's my hobby interest. Nothing practical. Nothing useful to you. Just fun for me. And however many other Amiga fans are still around for it. And that's plenty good enough reason for me that this (will) exists.

Re:Why?

[Kagetsuki]

Oh I'm sure there are terminals with alpha on OSX, but I'm not interested in using it long enough to try and find one and the default OSX terminal just looks atrocious to me.

As for the mouse, I believe you are talking about exactly the same thing as me: sloppy focus (without auto-raise).

I could actually go on, for instance I hate XCode, library management on OSX is "clean" but also "incompatible and extremely impractical", package management is (or was?) a mess, and on and on. Of course this is from someone who's been using a variety of *nix distributions [primarily Debian or Debian based] for the last 15 years, so to me OSX just seems too artificial and dumbed down with a variety of unexplainable design quirks. So to me OSX is like having to work with mittens on and I only get a set of shiny plastic toys, while Linux would be the bare handed metal-tool equivalent.

Re:Why?

[fyngyrz]

Again, not to put too fine a point on it, but the default terminal, that is, the one that comes with OSX, supports alpha backdrop.

WRT XCode, I just wrote a library for OSX (to be clear, its used in an OSX app developed in XCode... but I never touched XCode because I wanted the library to be portable) using a terminal editor and GCC. XCode is "a" development environment for OSX. It is not the only development environment for OSX. You'd be amazed how close OSX is to linux, when you work with it at the same level.

Finally, wasn't talking about the mouse. Was talking about inter-process communication. App A has the focus; that means app A can't send keystrokes to app B. Only app A can receive keystrokes. If app A tries to send keystrokes to app B, they'll just come right back to app A. It's very annoying.

Re:Why?

[derblack]

Hello there. Maybe you could check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1RsvEm7UrU The submitter made another one prior to this (in 2009). It makes interesting points on why someone would want to use amigaOS in these modern times.

I just simply want to know- why- and for what motivation there is for "yet another OS".

It's not yet another OS that is being thrown out there just now. OS4 has been out for several years and people like it. It is clearly still an OS for hobbyists though.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just simply want to know- why- and for what motivation there is for "yet another OS

Why is there yet another OS??? Because we are geeks and operating systems and different hardware platforms are fun!!!! Variety is the spice of life. When VW relaunched the beetle, or BMW the mini did we say "Why is there another car, we have enough cars"?

I drive a 1976 Ford Capri as my daily driver. It's not as fast or as safe or as fuel efficient as a modern car, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to drive, and adding modern gadgets to it like electronic ignition give me a lot of nerdy pleasure.

No one is saying AmigaOS is going to take over the world, or compete with Windows/MacOSX. The target market is computer enthusiasts.

With better management by Commodore, the Amiga could be what the Mac is today. If Amiga OS had been open sourced in the early 90s it could be what linux is today. Neither of those things happened but what we have is AROS, MorphOS and AmigaOS4. If you are just a computer user none of these are going to be for you, but if you are an enthusiast then you can see that they are very clever Operating Systems and lots of fun to use and develop for.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is there yet another OS??? Because we are geeks and operating systems and different hardware platforms are fun!!!! Variety is the spice of life.

I drive a 1976 Ford Capri as my daily driver. It's not as fast or as safe or as fuel efficient as a modern car, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to drive, and adding modern gadgets to it like electronic ignition give me a lot of nerdy pleasure.

No one is saying AmigaOS is going to take over the world, or compete with Windows/MacOSX. The target market is computer enthusiasts.

With better management by Commodore, the Amiga could be what the Mac is today. If Amiga OS had been open sourced in the early 90s it could be what linux is today. Neither of those things happened but what we have is AROS, MorphOS and AmigaOS4. If you are just a computer user none of these are going to be for you, but if you are an enthusiast then you can see that they are very clever Operating Systems and lots of fun to use and develop for.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Therfe is no reason just the fact you can be different and be part of the Amiga Community is enough for me

MorpOS and AROS are other resons to jump onboard too

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right just to makes things clear, Amiga the company has nothing todo with the development of anything named AmigaOS or AmigaOne, they have only exported the licence to Hyperion entertainment after loosing the court battle.

quote 'There are no 21st century applications written (that I know of) for the Amiga'

You havn't looked hard enough, anything that is open-source has a potential to be ported, stuff like Blender, Firefox( project Timberwolf) and many others.

As mention at AmiWest, people who use and will be interested will be current next generation, previous classic users and those who have been away for many years and love to get back in (thus nostalgics). Theres no intention to take over the world.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Osgeld - " apple patenting no shit ideas, "

I strongly disagree. I think a lot of iOS ideas are shit.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2490508&cid=37817118 - "easier to use interfaces,"

Easier to use than what? The worst desktop GUIs I've used, maybe. I prefer the rest of them to iOS, which I'm using & swearing at every day. Running on a 412MHz CPU & GPU with 128K RAM & gigs of Flash EPROM doesn't make it as user responsive as a 7.16MHz Amiga with enough RAM. Hiding data files, (as did Palm & Newton), is a shit idea to me! Sure it does things they can't, but to me the iOS interface is a big step back from a Lisa, Mac or Amiga & a significant step back from an old Palm.

Meh, its just a name

[damn_registrars]

In the end it will likely end up a "special edition" Dell laptop with nothing special other than the price.

Re:Meh, its just a name

[Tacvek]

It run AmigaOS 4.x, so that makes it special. AmigaOS is still somewhat of a toy operating system though, considering that at is core is Disk Operating System (not unlike the various x86 DOSes), albeit one that supports preemptive multitasking, but only cooperative memory protection. It has a GUI system named Workbench, which has a visual flavor most reminiscent of Mac OS Classic.

Re:Meh, its just a name

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is "cooperative memory protection"?

Re:Meh, its just a name

[Jeremi]

AmigaOS is still somewhat of a toy operating system though, considering that at is core is Disk Operating System (not unlike the various x86 DOSes)

Oy! AmigaOS is completely unrelated to MS-DOS/PC-DOS/etc. The only thing they have in common is that they were both used in the 80's and 90's.

albeit one that supports preemptive multitasking, but only cooperative memory protection.

"cooperative memory protection"? You mean "no memory protection".

Re:Meh, its just a name

[MimeticLie]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking#Cooperative_multitasking.2Ftime-sharing

Re:Meh, its just a name

[Anonymous Coward]

That's cooperative multitasking, which has nothing to do with memory protection.

Try this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_protection

See the word "cooperative" anywhere in the body of the text? No.

Re:Meh, its just a name

[unixisc]

Will it be based on the x86? If yes, then it's fate is likely to be the same as the Silicon Graphics Magnum, which was built for Windows NT but ended up running Irix, due to the lack of NT support for RISC. Similarly, if Hyperion builds these netbooks using either Atom or Nano, at the end of the day, they'll end up running Windows or Linux.

If OTOH it is based on PPC, then it will remain an Amiga, except for those who get it to put Linux. One thing though - if the idea is to have it on the same sort of cheap hardware of the 80s, most modern standards, such as networking, just won't run on it, and it's use will be restricted to non-networked applications. If the idea is to get a modern box and then put the Amiga on it, they'd need to update it w/ modern features, but that would beg the question - what would it bring to the table that's not already there w/ Linux, BSD and even Haiku?

Re:Meh, its just a name

[hesiod]

"cooperative memory protection"? You mean "no memory protection".

Exactly. The programs must cooperate with their shares of memory, or I take my red and white checkered ball and go home, and none of us get to play.

Re:Meh, its just a name

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Hyperion, not Commodore USA. It's a PowerPC netbook, I don't believe Dell make them...?

Re:Meh, its just a name

[Tacvek]

I'm honestly not exactly sure. It is listed on both the Amiga and AmigaOS 4 pages as "co-operational memory protection" and "co-operative memory protection" respectively.

The best I can guess is that perhaps the OS removes the write bits from the pages that do not belong to the current process, thus preventing them from inadvertently scribbling over other processes memory. That is completely a guess though, since I have no clue what is really meant.

Re:Meh, its just a name

[Tacvek]

AmigaOS is still somewhat of a toy operating system though, considering that at is core is Disk Operating System (not unlike the various x86 DOSes)

Oy! AmigaOS is completely unrelated to MS-DOS/PC-DOS/etc. The only thing they have in common is that they were both used in the 80's and 90's.

It is completely unrelated to x86 DOS systems, but it does consist of AmigaDOS with Workbench (the GUI) running on top of it. AmigaDos uses similar syntax to x86 DOSes (despite not sharing code, and having incompatible kernel calls.) Thus I worded it "Disk Operating System (not unlike the various x86 DOSes)".

albeit one that supports preemptive multitasking, but only cooperative memory protection.

"cooperative memory protection"? You mean "no memory protection".

Ah but there is some form of limited memory protection. The Wikipedia calls it "co-operative memory protection" or "co-operational memory protection". Only part of other processes memory space in mapped into the memory space of other processes, permitting the existing message passing IPC convention while limiting the damage a runaway process can do to other processes. I'm not really clear on the exact details.

Re:Meh, its just a name

[Anonymous Coward]

In the end it will likely end up a "special edition" Dell laptop with nothing special other than the price.

As Amiga OS won't run on x86 hardware, it couldn't be a rebadged Dell. If you read/ watch the announcements you'd find it's a PPC netbook already running a basic trial version of the latest AmigaOS.

Portable Amiga?

[Anonymous Coward]

The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985."

Since when was the Amiga 1000 considered portable?

Re:Portable Amiga?

[Megane]

thatsthejoke.jpg

Re:Portable Amiga?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol the 500 was portable, and actually smaller than the Apple II (but larger than the C64)

The Amiga was probably the best platform for games (other than the SNES,) as that was the only platform with true stereo DAC. The Sound Blaster was mono, and the Sound Blaster Pro was stereo, but only when the sound blaster 16 and various other 16bit cards came out was the audio capability on par with the Amiga. Music however, never improved on PC's. Hell, even emulating a x86 game with DosBOX only gives you the crappy FM sound and not the MT-32 music that the games were designed to use unless you seek out a third party release of dosbox with it.

It wasn't until Windows 98 that games on windows became tolerable, and even then, some of them did some truely terrible OS mangling for DRM (ohwhygodwhy EA/Origin, Ultima 9 was completely unusable after Windows 98. It's like they didn't learn from Ultima 7 and Ultima 8, it's like EA wanted fail.)

The era we're in now, you have MacOS and you have Windows, and no excuse not to port between the two since the hardware is exactly the same. Not unlike the Amiga and original MacOS. It's kinda funny how the Wii, NDS/3DS, PS3 and XBOX360 all wound up adopting the terrible OS habits that were first introduced in the Amiga, and MacOS, and Microsoft wants to push us back to it with the Metro interface.

ick, anyway, the future is going to be the walled garden approach, you can blame the IE4 bundling in Windows 98 for that, it's been all downhillhell from there. What's going to happen is that the consumer and anyone who doesn't pay for high-end equipment is only going to be sold walled-garden devices. Anyone who wants to be a hacker has to buy the more expensive "open" hardware that has user-installable keys. That will keep the idiots from being able to download malware. App stores will have users look on the app store first instead of downloading whatever cruft their bozobuddies tell them to run.

Re:Portable Amiga?

[91degrees]

The A600 was probably the most portable. Small enough to fit into a backpack. there were even backpacks made for the purpose. External PSU was a bit of a nuisance though, and I'm fairly sure the A600 still kept this.

In related news...

[narrowhouse]

Hyperion Entertainment announced that they will be launching a new media campaign for the Amiga line staring their new mascot, Biggie Bigfoot. No word on where they will be appearing, but Hyperion gives their assurances that the ads do indeed exist.

Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary?

[Brad1138]

I remember that the Amiga OS was fundamentally different than other computers of the time, is that still the case? I had an Amiga 500 and it was so far ahead of its time. Does it really bring anything to the table now though?

Re:Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary?

[Anonymous Coward]

At the time Amiga OS was "revolutionary". It had preemtptive multitasking (better than cooperative). It was fast. It had graphics (and sound) processing in silicon. It didn't have legacy bloat. But somewhere between windows 95 and windows 2000 the wintel world definitely caught up.

And it's been a while... I have fond memories of that OS. It was slick, customizable and fast. I'm a FreeBSD guy now!

Re:Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. We'll never see another system that far ahead of other PCs - the world's a different place now, and PC tech is driven by the Windows world. The best you can do is adopt state of the art white-box tech and run your own OS on it. Plus, the early things that made the Amiga unique - multimedia, digital sound, accelerated graphics - these are all commodities now.

Amiga OS was also ahead of its time, but it's been long surpassed by Linux, OSX, even Windows.

It's great for nostalgia value, but it's not possible for them to be so far ahead ever again.

Re:Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary?

[Belial6]

As others said, preemptive multitasking was one of the reasons that Amiga was so far ahead. The other piece was that it had separate audio and video processors. Today, PCs and Macs both have multitasking and dedicated Video and audio processors. As much as I love the Amiga, the PC caught up to it with Windows95 + Voodoo + Soundblaster.

Re:Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary?

[Anonymous Coward]

The generic architecture they're using has no redeeming qualities over normal computers. The classic Amiga architecture did, but they chose to abandon that.

Re:Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary?

[Vecanti]

The "OS", not the computer system (hardware) still brings a lot of things to the table. Though it many ways (software) it is behind.

What drives the interest for me (not a daily OS for me or anything anymore) is the simplicity of the OS.

The concept is this. A Single User OS.

The entire OS is not "installed". It's simply in some folders. Commands in the Commands folder, Libraries in the Libraries folder, Drivers in the Drivers, etc.
The entire start up process is a Text file, that you can easily look at and modify.


How is this good?
It's easy to control your OS. Want to back up you OS? Just copy it to a thumb drive. Heck run it from a thumb drive. Run it from a network drive. There is no registry for software. All software is separate from the OS, like "Portable Apps".

Why is this bad? Probably bad for security if it ever did get popular. Harder for companies to use DRM.

Re:Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary?

[gman003]

Why is this bad? Harder for companies to use DRM.

That's not a bad thing at all.

Re:Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary?

[hot soldering iron]

Sadly, I don't believe that AmigaOS has anything to offer, anymore. The multitasking, graphics, and audio, were so far ahead that they smoked everything else out there, at the time. When a technology is so good it embarrasses everyone else, then it won't be long before everyone else has it, or something comparable. No one likes to be embarrassed.

AmigaOS did prepare me for UNIX, though. It was so very much like single-user mode, you can't help but think that it was modeled after it. That may be why I fell in love with UNIX/Linux. Linux isn't as sleek, or graceful, or fast, as AmigaOS, but with a lightweight window manager it's close.

I wonder how many AmigaOS fans migrated to Linux? Besides me, that is.

Re:Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary?

[DZign]

Also my opinion.. I loved the Amiga.. about 20 to 15 years ago. It's part of my youth. Whilst cleaning up my basement yesterday even still found a box full of Amiga Format magazines - still don't want to throw them away, reading back some gamereviews brought back good memories.. I even still have the last AF issue upstairs between my collection of books.

But the Amiga nowadays as a system ? It's nostalgia, but not something I would invest/waste time on anymore.

Re:Is AmigaOS still that different/revolutionary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga Format game reviews? Pah, amateurs!

Remember now: Bob is a hamster. Natch.

Hyperion ? Thats the only hyperion i know :

[unity100]

http://www.videoweed.es/file/xllqh0qgbs4v1

and i assure you, if it was out as a board game, i might have considered playing it.

Re:Hyperion ? Thats the only hyperion i know :

[aaarrrgggh]

Well... It is a sewage treatment plant in Los Angeles... Complete with a special surf spot known as "shit pipe".

Re:Hyperion ? Thats the only hyperion i know :

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't be the only one that's waiting for Anime to die a fiery death. Maybe it's just because people hype up the crappiest of all of it to be something greater than gold.

Re:Hyperion ? Thats the only hyperion i know :

[unity100]

no. its because the humor and craziness in many of them surpass the best 'comedy' that hollywood can bring to muster.

Re:Hyperion ? Thats the only hyperion i know :

[Anonymous Coward]

pew pew

Re:Hyperion ? Thats the only hyperion i know :

[Anonymous Coward]

In the anime, or in the fans..?

Re:Hyperion ? Thats the only hyperion i know :

[unity100]

hahaha funny.

no. in the people that write the scripts and do the animations. for, such paranormally hilarious stuff can only be produced by minds that are rather cracked inside.

reality is, you are missing a lot of high quality humor and accompanying laughs.

Just Wow

[Frosty Piss]

From Wikipedia:

Hyperion Entertainment was founded in February 1999 after Belgian lawyer Benjamin Hermans wondered why no one had ever tried to license PC games to do Amiga ports.

Because very few people really want to play PC games on AmigaOS?

Re:Just Wow

[Skuld-Chan]

So you have a profitable company that has been around for 11+ years doing what?

Re:Just Wow

[Osgeld]

no one said they were profitable, they probably float by on subsidies much like Uwe Boll, where they get a "nice try" check for failing.

Re:Just Wow

[amiga3D]

They actually managed to make a little money at it. It's a niche market but hey, it's a market.

Re:Just Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet this company is still alive and well today when mainly doing development for amiga systems.
Same thing with acube that is responsible for the latest "next generation" amiga systems.
There is still profits even when it comes to niche platforms.

If it wasnt for hyperion now concentrating all efforts on Amiga OS, they would still be doing game ports today.

Re:Just Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet this company is still alive and well today when mainly doing development for amiga systems.

I'm not sure you could call what they've been doing "alive and well" at any time in the past, oh, ten years or so. They've relied on hordes of unpaid "contributors" to do a lot of the development on AOS 4 for a very long time, and in recent times seem to have finally lost the Frieden brothers, instead turning to Stephen Solie to run the project (a laughable move, as ssolie is a wide-eyed unrealistic fanatic; the Frieden bros., for all their faults, from time to time showed at least some awareness of how hopeless the Amiga ecosystem is). And if you run a few numbers, there's no way Hyperion has been making it as a real company. Their announced sales figures multiplied by their prices haven't summed up to enough money to support even one full-time employee over their entire existence, even before you account for costs other than salaries.

Same thing with acube that is responsible for the latest "next generation" amiga systems.
There is still profits even when it comes to niche platforms.

If it wasnt for hyperion now concentrating all efforts on Amiga OS, they would still be doing game ports today.

Profits? Heh. Early on in Hyperion's existence, they tried to break into the Mac game porting market to make money to support their Amiga game ports, since there wasn't real money on the Amiga side. They turned out to be totally incompetent and soon destroyed their reputation, resulting in no more Mac porting contracts. On the Amiga side, where they had essentially no competition, they still didn't have a viable business. They had to act as a publisher in the Amiga market since no mainstream publisher was going to bother, and that meant they had to pay a licensing fee to get the game title, not just pay royalties. As soon as sales dropped too low, they couldn't so much as make back the licensing fees, so it was all over. It was about that time that they started agitating to take over AOS, and proclaimed themselves the only ones who could move Amiga forward because they were the Experts at porting games, or BS to that effect.

Ironically, the competition they hated (MorphOS) ended up with better 3D performance than AOS despite Hyperion's supposed expertise.

Hyperion is what you get when all the competent people have left to go work on things which matter and buffoonish fanboys take over.

If this is is true, I'll buy just for nostalgia!

[Anonymous Coward]

I still own several amiga including the 1000

Why?

[sjbe]

The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.

Even if true, so what? The Amiga was a fine machine 20 years ago. It died. Things have moved on rather considerably since then. I don't really understand why anyone is trying to resurrect a proprietary platform that died out eons ago and that even most geeks didn't buy back during its heyday. If all they are doing is slapping the Amiga brand on a more modern system, again I have to ask why? Nobody cared about the Amiga back then and even fewer people care now.

Agnus, Denise and Paula made the Amiga Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything since has been just a name.

Re:Agnus, Denise and Paula made the Amiga Amiga

[amiga3D]

You forgot Gary.

Re:Agnus, Denise and Paula made the Amiga Amiga

[j-turkey]

I loved my Amiga, but I'm under no illusion that current PC technology hasn't far surpassed everything that the Amiga was.

Re:Agnus, Denise and Paula made the Amiga Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because he's a guy, and isn't gay.

More stupidity

[AdmV0rl0n]

Amiga inc since it left Gateway has been a complete mess. Marketing a name and products, but offering nothing but rip offs, shambles and diabolical product plans.

Hyperion, peddlers of junk and broken software. Originally the two pitched up with a third entity, Eyetech and produced the Amiga One platform. A broken junk pile of crap unworthy of being unleashed on the poor unsuspecting public. The broken hardware all backed by a warranty system designed to be malignant and to rip people off because they were 'developer' boards.

Hyperion have failed to deliver a proper product, and its riddled with issues. Its carried on leaking with its foul stench across a very short list of PPC equipment, and now apparently you'll too be 'lucky' to be offered a new 'Netbook'. They are the only member of the original three still trying to peddle this garbage and primarily each time they find some new victim-able hardware they can hang their hat on, they start making pronouncements.

I have no idea how this 'news' got pitched as being tech news of any kind on Slashdot. Whoever thought it was worth posting as an item_is_wrong.

The standing advice remains. Steer clear of anything from this bunch of cowboys.

Re:More stupidity

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

I was not an Amiga fan back in the day, but I have followed the story of Amiga on "x" hardware for quite some time now, and you bring up an interesting point:

Mainly, I keep hearing about the resurrection of Amiga, but have yet to see anything ever shipped, much less a review or a place to purchase this new "Amiga".

Do you, or anyone else out there in Slashdotland, have any practical experience with anything of the "new" Amigas?

Re:More stupidity

[damnbunni]

Yes, I have one. It's a Sam440ep-flex board, currently running AmigaOS 4.1 update 3.

It's not very fast (I can watch a DVD on it, but that's about the most CPU-intense thing I can do) and as you can imagine, getting software for 'modern' computer tasks can be a pain. (There's a good web browser, but no Twitter clients, for instance.)

On the other hand, other than sheer number-crunching tasks it feels pretty fast when I'm using it. AmigaOS was always very responsive on slow hardware.

But mostly, I use it because it's fun to screw around with. Much more plain _fun_ than the Win7, Mac, or Linux boxes I have here. Each of those has a task that I use to do some sort of work; the Amiga is a hobby.

As for a new Amiga for sale, ACube has been selling AmigaOS capable motherboards for a couple of years. There's an AmigaOne 500 for sale built on one of those; I think vesalia.de stocks them.

They're expensive. I'm not going to claim a Windows PC isn't cheaper. After all, no matter how they were priced they're not going to sell many, so they need to make more dough on each unit. I think the new AmigaOne X1000 systems they're taking preorders for now are too expensive. Yeah, they're much faster than the one I've got, but the base price is $2600 and that doesn't include the OS.

On the other hand, people spend that kind of money on toy cars, so maybe they'll sell more than I think.

Re:More stupidity

[gwgwgw]

I'm astonished at your reaction. I was one of the purchasers of the 1st run of the AmigaOne and has been THE computer I have used these many years. It has never needed repair. It was been upgraded on two separate occasions.

Mark me at the complete antipodes of your experience. Do you have hands on experience?

Re:More stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go:

http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware&pid=7
http://www.softhut.com/cgi-bin/test/Web_store/web_store.cgi?page=catalog/hardware/amiga/amigaone.html
http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=software&pid=1

Re:More stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

who upvoted this rubbish!

Hyperion makes a very good operating system, it installed for me perfectly on my 19 year old amiga 4000, and allowed me to run loads of software that my old 3.9 system couldn't. It boots quickly, runs everyhting I want and rarely crashes. It's far from riddled with issues, I don't know where you would get that idea (except from maybe a few morphos trolls who jump on the slightest AmigaOS4 bug).

Re:More stupidity

[MiggyMan]

I wonder if he's a morphos guy :D

Re:More stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

These hardware/software upgrades are meant for people who are already amigans and want a more powerful and modern system.
What is wrong with providing the things that the community wants?
And if you actually bothered to do your research, you would find out that we have plenty of hardware offerings now that is rock solid.
OS4.1 is also more stable than the classic OS ever was and now even got some new modern features like hardware composition, virtual memory, partial memory protection and will in future also have support for SMP and full memory protection.
And i say this as a person who own hardware from this company: http://www.acube-systems.biz/
It is overpriced yeah, but faulty??? Cant expect pc prices in a niche market where hardware is produced in low quantities.

And where is the failure to deliver a product?? By the sounds of it you are either a troll or a fanboy of one of the other camps.

It was never supposed to gather to the mainstream public, which is where have been no marketing.

Re:More stupidity

[aliquis]

Indeed the best Amigas are those not called Amigas at all.

Best classic Amiga - UAE
Best modern Amiga - MorphOS

Without all this AmigaONE crap, Amiga Inc, Eyetech, and so on Genesi/bplan would probably had an easier time and MorphOS would had been more successful.

So yeah, thank you Amiga Inc. for killing the better (done way earlier and with much cheaper hardware) and working solution.

I don't feel sad for the idiots who bought anything beyond AmigaOS 3.1.

Re:More stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga.. Whatever =P ... divide the market of 2000 Amigans?

In the words of shoenice22:
- Thaaank you!

Re:More stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

Amigaos running OS 4 came out in 2005. Since then we've had the Sam 440ep and 460 to keep AmigaOs going.
Remember this is NOTHING to do with CommodoreUSA, this is actually AmigaOS.

Re:More stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

While Amiga Inc contracted EyeTech (contracted Mai Logic for awful board) none of that was really a Hyperions deed.
They did the software port and after odyssey of their own with AmigaInc now they are free to develop AmigaOS and
use AmigaOne name for far better and reliable hardware.
Real cowboys are Amiga Inc selling Amiga name and logo to such ripp offs as "CommodoreUSA" (pretending to be CBM)
and iCoin (pretending to have Amiga line by slapping Amiga logo to almost anything).
Amiga is AmigaOS, and its developing in 2011

Pointless if there are no apps.

[bartron]

Most people I know that are nostalgic about their Amiga's (and C24's etc) have a perfectly capable emulation environment available to them that runs orders of magnitude faster than the original hardware, on even moderately powered netbooks.

But even if they get new hardware out and AmigaOS is fantastic, where are the apps? What's the draw to get people to buy this thing other than the nostalgia of having a computer with the Amiga stamp on it? It can be the best damn OS in the world but if it hasn't got apps then it hasn't got anything.

BeOS was pretty cool back in the day and kicked Windows to the curb in terms of performance but it died because it didn't have apps. Making an AmigaOS laptop today makes about as much sense as making a dedicated BeOS laptop (yes, I'm aware of various efforts to resurrect BeOS...still makes no sense)

Re:Pointless if there are no apps.

[Anonymous Coward]

You could say the same about Linux, yet here I am running it.

Re:Pointless if there are no apps.

[Osgeld]

Linux has apps dumbass, linux has a good amount of name brand apps (java flash, firefox), and a metric ton of apps that are just behind the A+ name brand stuff.

What web browser are you going to run on BE or Hiku? Office? I mean if all you need is a notepad on a pentium 3 with a riva TNT2 then BE would be fine.

Re:Pointless if there are no apps.

[Stormwatch]

Not the same thing by a very long stretch. Linux is freely distributable, doesn't require overpriced esoteric hardware, and has tons of software available.

Re:Pointless if there are no apps.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember netbooks? "All you need is a web browser" concept (though of course they get loaded with apps in practice), still being pushed by Google with ChromeOS. Haiku would be ideally suited for this, in fact I ran it for about a year on a 1st-gen EeePC -- bloody fast. AmigaOS or AROS would be fine, too -- why drag the weight of a full multiuser OS to run a browser.

Of course, almost all "netbooks" are bought as featherweight PCs, a cheap version of the old thin-and-light or ultraportable machines -- the market for a true netbook is there, but quite small.

Re:Pointless if there are no apps.

[Hatta]

where are the apps?
Here.

Other portable Amigas

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it's time to update the Amiga Portables page.

Amiga was light years ahead of its time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Id buy it for no other reason but to own one... but this might be a big break to progress the OS to modern standards. Its not that far off from where OSX is.

Re:Amiga was light years ahead of its time...

[amiga3D]

It's not going to happen. Windows is running on momentum, OS X on style, and Linux on Freedom and Excellence. The Amiga just has Nostalgia. OS 4 isn't anywhere close to being able to compete with a modern OS.

Fond memories

[msobkow]

I loved my Amiga 500. In it's day, it was so incredibly powerful with it's hardware-accelerated GUI, sound hardware, and rich OS API. Incredible to think that the core of the OS was written in a matter of weeks by a British student.

But there is nothing special about it any more, save fond memories. Everyone has hardware acceleration and a GUI nowadays, even the cheapest of smartphones and netbooks.

The OS was not complete, and missed many features we now take for granted. There's no point itemizing the details, because they don't matter. Suffice to say that the glory days of the OS are lost in the sands of time. The world has moved on.

This new machine will either be running a completely different or seriously upgraded OS. If that new OS provides POSIX APIs and other interfaces that are important, it might see a new community of ported software. But if it's the old Amiga OS API, why would anyone want to develop for a proprietary OS with zero market share?

Wind is filling in the footprints that the Amiga trod in the sands of time. Soon there will be nothing left but dunes. All that's left is a brand name.

Re:Fond memories

[LWATCDR]

I have to agree. I was a real Amiga fanboi in the day. Frankly that is what cured me of being a fanboi. The Amiga was so much better than the PC of the day and yet it couldn't get any traction. Heck the Atari ST was also better than the PC of the day but also floundered.
Only the Mac held on with it's large margins and much better marketing.
I wrote an early Virus Checker for the Amiga as well as the AREXX bindings for TDI Modual-2 "terrible compiler btw".
This is just like a Zombie Amiga... Well it is the right time of the year for that.

My balls

[Anonymous Coward]

I just sniffed my balls, and they smelt really nice.

Re:My balls

[Anonymous Coward]

They taste nice, too!

No thanks

[Cloud K]

I recently said on another story's comments that brands are important because you can tell known good stuff from bad, but that some just abuse the fame of a brand (which got to where it was by being great) to produce overpriced crap.

The new Amiga is one of those cases.

Go on, how much will this Atom based netbook be... £1500? No thanks. Frankly, shove it.

Re:No thanks

[Osgeld]

Its not even that, its a 800 Mhz PPC microcontroller. SO you have a Power PC thats not compatible with the 68000 chips the original systems were based on with a 3rd party "re-vision" of how Amiga OS would have developed (it runs like a junky linux desktop from 1997)

As a computer its lame
As an Amiga its incompatible
As Amiga workbench, its FLTK with amiga icons and borders

and yes it will cost a pile of money, the older PPC desktops did as well (with all of above), if you could find someone to even make one

Re:No thanks

[christurkel]

If you read the TFA you would have seen it will be around 300 pounds. Probably something like the LimePC which is a PowerPC laptop. You can't run the AmigaOS on x86.

Re:No thanks

[fnj]

300 pounds!!! Jesus. That's not luggable by anybody except the incredible hulk.

Re:No thanks

[raddude99]

If you had read any of the article you would have found out that the machine is going to cost in the $300 to $500 range, so not a "pile of money". And if you knew anything about AmigaOS 4.x it's actually very compatible with software from previous versions of AmigaOS.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

£300 is british currency you insensitive clod!!!

Re:No thanks

[Osgeld]

500 bucks for a decade old computer is a pile of money. And sure its compatible if you only want a word editor and a few other standard issue programs, start running demos on it and let me know

Re:No thanks

[raddude99]

It'll run demos very smoothly with "RunInUAE", compatability is not an issue. And the OS is the direct decendent of the original Commodore port of TripOS. And a pile of money for a niche computer it is not, and besides the Amiga has historically positioned it's low end machines in exactly the same $300 to $500 bracket. If that's not enough for you, then I'll leave you to you own definition of what "The One True Amiga" is. For the rest of us, the definition of an Amiga has moved on, if the mac could move from 68k to PPC, then why can't the amiga, and a "junky linux desktop from 1997" it isn't. AmigaOS has kept is light weight and responsiveness along with it's other nifty features like the system-wide scripting language and datatypes etc.

Re:No thanks

[Osgeld]

so I am going to use a emulator why would I want to run it on a 800Mhz PPC for 500 bucks when it will run on a 1.6ghz 199$ netbook?

Also mac moved on becuase it had support from Apple, Amigia was well dead buried and whored out before PPC models got shoehorned in.

This is not an amiga, its no where close to anything the originals were in terms of hardware, and (yes) that junky 1997 OS is a hobby project in order to sell nostalgia freaks a badge for retarded prices.

Re:No thanks

[raddude99]

You're not going to use it regardless I suspect. I on the other hand will use it because it will run the majority of my non-game applications without platform emulation. Applications that will fly on a 800Mhz PPC. Using an emulated amiga is missing the whole point, with just the AmigaOS between you and the hardware you retain the Amiga's legendary responsiveness. And the Amiga was not "dead" when PPC was added and moving to the PPC itself was hardly done without support. It was well know that Commodore was planning to move the Amiga platform to HP's PA-RISC chips, but with the demise of commodore (and PA_RISC), the owners of the Amiga added official PPC support to AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9, then the OS was fully ported in versions 4.0 and 4.1. Just because you think that a change of hands should kill a platform does not mean that I should think the same thing. And yes, it is a hobby system, what is wrong with that. Just because a number of people enjoy using an updated version of a 1986-era operating system does not make them freaks, or retarded. They enjoy using a system that is light weight, yet easy enough for regular people to understand, and one that is different from the orthodox Windows/Mac/Linux triumvirate. I suspect you would be seriously shocked if you ever left your narrow web-surfing confines and visited a site like osnews, where many people engage in the heretical acts of discussing, using and building alternatives to mainstream operating systems. Regardless of what you think about the Amiga, AmigaOS has survived the demise of many owners and it continues to improve, just deal with it.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

AROS which is an open-source re-implementation of Amiga OS can run on x86, I don't see why the real Amiga OS couldn't be compiled for x86 too, the only issue would be lack of compatibility with the PPC Amiga software.

Amiga History References

[msobkow]

I found a couple of very nice write-ups on the history of the Amiga out there:

The History of the Amiga
AmigaOS - Wikipedia

The Amiga 500 was released to the public at the January 1987 Consumer Electronics Show. The Macintosh 128K was released to the public January 1984. Just in case anyone thought I wouldn't give credit to the first commercialization of Xerox PARC's research.

Re:Amiga History References

[Pence128]

The Amiga 1000 was released in July 1985. The 500 was a cost cut version.

Re:Amiga History References

[beanpoppa]

The Amiga 1000 (the first Amiga) was released with 256k in the Summer of 1985. It had preemptive multitasking, and 4096 colors, and 4 channel, stereo sound while the Mac was peddling along with black and white. It truly leap-frogged the Mac in every respect, except for the business and marketing sense of those in charge.

Re:Amiga History References

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga 500 was released to the public at the January 1987 Consumer Electronics Show. The Macintosh 128K was released to the public January 1984. Just in case anyone thought I wouldn't give credit to the first commercialization of Xerox PARC's research.

You're not giving the appropriate credit anyways. Xerox commercialized its own research before anyone else did. In 1981, they introduced the Xerox Star workstation, and sold it and its descendants (hardware and software) for something like 10 or 15 years thereafter. They didn't have much success with it, due to a variety of factors (many self inflicted), but they did get to market long before Macintosh.

As for Apple, it's popular to dramatically overestimate how much influence there was from Xerox. The software architecture was radically different (Mac: 68K assembly plus compiled Pascal, Xerox: Smalltalk (object oriented with bytecode VM)), the hardware was different (Mac: low cost 68K microcomputer system, Xerox: high priced workstation), the target markets were different, etc. Due to HW/SW constraints and the completely independent line of development (all the Apple guys were able to take away from the famous tour were memories of what they saw, no source code or design documents), the Mac UI design ended up being quite different too. As this guy (who was at both PARC and Apple) puts it, early Windows and Mac were much closer relatives than Xerox PARC technologies and Lisa/Mac:

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt

Re:Amiga History References

[Anonymous Coward]

" ... the first commercialization of Xerox PARC's research." I suspect you're just trying to placate Apple Fanb-iOS but it's at the expense of accuracy.

Xerox sold Altos even though it was intended as a prototype. Then they sold Star/9700s. And licences to companies including Commodore. Visi On & Perqs & Apollo DN100 & Apple Lisa were all out before the Macintosh 128K. The Mac sold a lot more, especially much later models with color & expansion slots (a refutation of Raskin's & Job's standard hardware concept). The Amiga 500 set a new record for fastest selling computer model over a certain period. Microsoft Windows from version 3.0 onwards sold even more & some version became the GUI system most people used. Apple II* GUIs, GEOS, GEM & Acorn's GUI systems were popular too.

Like religious folk who try to write questions to fit their favourite answer, Apple fans keep trying to come up with things that Apple or Jobs did first or most. So they keep picking steps near the bottom of a staircase & say "THAT step was THE important one"!

Apple was often among the pioneers & the best & the most,- it's sad & wrong their fans try to rewrite history. Not only do their heroes get too much credit, it's credit stolen from those who deserve it.

Re:Amiga History References

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that Smalltalk was intended for users. The Alto's system development language was BCPL, like Tripos. Hence AmigaDOS ended up with similarities in eg. file size limits as both used a 16 bit number. Lisa software was written in Classcal & some of that rewritten in assembly for the Mac. /www.guidebookgallery.org/ etc let us visually compare a lot of different GUIs & see what design concepts were original & what adapted.

Not British

[Anonymous Coward]

Carl Sassenrath was born in California, not in Britain.

Re:Not British

[msobkow]

Really? Here all these years I thought it was a UK Master's thesis project.

I'm glad you mentioned his name. The original reason I was searching the Amiga history pages was to try and remember his name so I could give him a little credit and maybe find out what he's doing today.

Could someone please mod parent up so people know who the creative mastermind behind the OS was?

Re:Not British

[msobkow]

A friend of mine corrected some misunderstandings on Facebook.

AmigaDOS was actually based on a Motorola 68000 port of an earlier effort called TRIPOS.

TRIPOS was originally developed started in 1976 at the University of Cambridge in the UK. The M68000 port that became AmigaDOS was at the University of Bath, also in the UK.

So if Carl Sassenrath was born in California, he must have been a student in the UK.

Once you start down the rabbit hole of computing history, you soon realize that no matter how creative you think you are, someone probably came up with idea first.

Re:Not British

[davidgay]

AmigaDOS was the shell / file system component of the whole AmigaOS, not the core of the OS. Not sure what fraction I'd call that (maybe 10%?). And yes, that part was based on TRIPOS. The core was Exec (message passing, threading, scheduling, memory allocation, etc), which is the bit written by Carl Sassenrath.

David Gay, who spent a lot of time programming his Amiga 1000/2500...

Re:Not British

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is about the software that was replaced by Dr Tim King's quick port/rewrite of Tripos.
See Carl's comment on the bottom why CAOS didn't happen.
  www.thule.no/haynie/caos.html

Re:Not British

[Anonymous Coward]

There's some surprises in this interview with Carl, who seems unaware of Commodore's many business computers, fairly popular in Europe. http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwsassenrath_en.php He went from Commodore to Apple & contrasts them.
(Don't get Google to translate this, it just becomes worse English)

This below is Carl's website. I can't agree he introduced multi-tasking to personal computers without some more qualifications. Sounds like self-fandom, but he has a lot to not be modest about.
http://www.sassenrath.com/

Re:If this is is true, I'll buy just for nostalgia

[Osgeld]

Amiga PPC's are not compatible with the original ones

ok

[Quiet_Desperation]

What problem is this solving?

Re:ok

[Osgeld]

The problem is that the hard core Amagia users that never let go AND (this is the important part) still want their system in a modern world need to have their wallets relieved from that stress.

Listen I love my retro computers, they are great machines that still manage to do amazing things. But I am not under an Illusion that a totally different arch, with 3rd party developed software is the real thing. Amiga PPC is.

Re:ok

[Anonymous Coward]

And what is wrong with using a system you like?
I still use AmigaOS, because i just like how it works. I still love the idea of datatypes today, i love how it only takes a few seconds to boot, i love how for basic computer usage it is actually faster which lets me be more productive and this is on a low end system.

Even my really low end Sam 533mhz running OS4.1 runs faster and is more responsive when it comes to basic computing than my high end systems running linux or windows.

What is wrong with offering choices?? It is clearly not for you, but why not let us have our fun instead of bashing us for it?

And for me it is the real thing, since it is still the same OS based on the same sources. It behaves and works like i would expect from Amiga OS, except that it now has more modern features and run on semi modern hardware.

It is people like you here on slashdot that seems to have unusual high expectations for a niche/hobby platform or whatever you want to call it.
We amigans have realized years ago that it will remain this way for at least the foreseeable future. At least now it is healthy and growing niche platform that is profitable enough to keep giving us users new updates and new hardware.

I also don't care anything about the name and would still be using it today even if it did not have amiga name in it.

Why not rebrand AROS and throw it on there?

[seandiggity]

AmigaOS has already been cloned and improved, and the driver support doesn't seem half bad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS

I'm not saying a netbook with an obscure OS would sell, but at least all they would have to do is slap some Amiga logos on there and push the product out, rather than resurrect software that is long-dead.

Re:Why not rebrand AROS and throw it on there?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga platform was a good decade or more ahead of its time. It was a joy to run a sleek os with independent audio/graphics while pc users were just graduating from EGA!
I gave up on the platform after juicing my A4000 to the max and fearing that there were no replacements if something failed!

Amiga forever allows one to run a fairly good emulation of the original on standard intel hardware.

I agree AROS is the best of the bunch, but nostalgia aside, Linux embodies many of the same os philosophies (small footprint, easily configurable). I do miss dragging down screens though and how quick reboots were!

Re:Why not rebrand AROS and throw it on there?

[Anonymous Coward]

AROS already runs on netbooks, so why port it to a more expensive and low end hardware?
And AROS is sadly nowhere near as mature or stable as either amigaos 4.1 or morphos at this moment.

All three amiga oses are doing fine under their own name anyways, so why rebadge it?

68xxxx CPU?

[nurb432]

If not, its not really a "portable Amiga". Instead its yet another PC running a remake of a classic OS with a microscopic market.

( and of course it isn't... )

Re:68xxxx CPU?

[Bambi Dee]

PowerPC... if I'm not completely confused, even the classic Commodore Amigas could be souped up with those (OS 3.x/AGA generation, anyway?)

Re:68xxxx CPU?

[Belial6]

Commodore never sold a single Amiga with a PPC processor. They did sell Amiga's with x86 processors on board though. Dos could be run inside of a window on the Amiga with the proper setup.

Re:68xxxx CPU?

[Bambi Dee]

No, Commodore didn't (and most of their Amigas were infuriatingly low-specced), but there were expansion boards both with 680x0 and PPC CPUs. Here's one for the Amiga 1200: http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=154

Re:68xxxx CPU?

[nurb432]

Amiga never left the 68xxxx series. Atari tried once with the transputer.

And while with the 'port' of either OS to x68 ( or via emulation ) you can get the 'feel' of them, part of what made these machines what they were was the hardware. Sure it runs tons faster, but its still not the same, its still PC.

Re:68xxxx CPU?

[Bambi Dee]

There were PPC expansion boards, at least for the A1200 and A4000.

Re:68xxxx CPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

And AmigaOS4.1 runs on classic Amiga1200's and Amiga 4000's (Probably Amiga3000 too). that have one of those accelerators.

It's time for Hyperion to Stop.

[amiga3D]

Enough already. It's time to stop dragging the Amiga name down. Open source the OS and free it. Quit trying to revive it as a competitive proprietary OS. It should have been freed back in the 90's, it's past time now.

Re:It's time for Hyperion to Stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the problem is that those groups (Hyperion, AROS) made some really awkward changes to the OS design that make it worse than it actually was ... had it been open-sourced, scores of people would be able to work on it, probably finding better solutions to problems. For instance, AmigaOS 4.x doesn't have multiprocessor support, despite a lot of effort has been put into supporting virtual memory and the like. Enforcer, a program for the classic AmigaOS, supported virtual memory without altering the kernel. There's of course many more issues, and a free and open OS would encourage discussion about actual implementation and encourage changes to be made. AmigaOS is a microkernel OS and its original design was magnificient. I still think it (the original version) could be modified in an upward compatible manner to support everything a modern OS needs.

Re:It's time for Hyperion to Stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree!

Re:It's time for Hyperion to Stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you`ll find Amiga delaware has brought their own name down, AmigaOS on the other hand is not trying to be competitive, not once has hyperion entertainment said that, and no real amiga user expects that. Its an alternative platform.

As a Amiga OS4 user on the AmigaOneXE I personally enjoy using it and developing applications across AmigaOS4, Windows and Linux.

Oh wow a 800Mhz PPC

[Osgeld]

Power PC with a custom rom and dreadfully slow in this day and age, probally will cost 2 grand, as we have seen before in PPC Amiga's... which are non functional with the real deal amiagas.

Gee, where do I sign up to be fucked over?

Amiga Always Was And Always Will Be Garbage

[VisibleSchlong]

Being briefly forced to run some tools that my company allowed some Amigatard write only for his machine it is the only operating system that has ever made me overjoyed to get back a DOS machine.

What A Fucking Loser

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder the computing world despises the Amiga and its tiny number of loser fanboys.

Finally!

[mykie242]

I'm just glad that Amiga enthusiasts are finally able to leave the basement, untethered by the power socket, able to enter the world and see the sun, and spread their wisdom among us...

...on second thought, I've changed my mind. Kill this thing with fire, and lots of it.

All three remaining fans

[sjbe]

Oh Jeez, not this **** again! Look, I know it's hard to believe, but the US market is not the be all and end all, nor is it always reflective of the rest of the world.

It's just the biggest single market in the world. Nothing important there. [/sarcasm] The Amiga did not sell well enough anywhere and it died. Has nothing to do with the US or any other single market.

Sure, it didn't sell well in Buttf***, Illinois, but the Amiga enjoyed *massive* mainstream success in Europe in the late-80s and early-90s.

And yet it still died. Must not have really been all that popular in "Buttf***" Europe either.

That said, though it was amazing and ahead of its time 20-25 years ago, the Amiga is way too long gone to serve any meaningful purpose in bringing back now. Things have long moved on.

I'm pretty sure that was exactly my point. Thanks for repeating it.

But to be honest, this product is really aimed at the obessive hardcore Amiga fanbase

All three of them

Re:All three remaining fans

[Stormwatch]

No, the Amiga was hugely successful, so it's just ignorant to say that nobody cared about it back then. The computer market in Europe was vastly different from the USA, systems that seem obscure to you were mainstream to them.

Re:All three remaining fans

[MimeticLie]

systems that seem obscure to you were mainstream to them.

So the European computer buyers were all hipsters?

Re:All three remaining fans

[shutdown -p now]

It's just the biggest single market in the world.

I suspect that would be EU.

Re:All three remaining fans

[hot soldering iron]

I'm going to guess you weren't around in the 80's when the Amiga was huge? I was. It was the system that made many of the SF/fantasy/cartoon tv shows possible to produce on a weekly basis. It got bought by the thousands for modelling and raytracing, and with the Video Toaster ushered in a whole new era of graphics capabilities that FORCED everyone else in the market to compete. It was the fastest horse in the race, and suddenly everyone else making bank on "traditional" text-based DOS number crunchers, or exotic SGI graphics workstations, was in danger of losing their business (and homes) because of some upstart that came out of nowhere.

Don't assume that marketing and management failures were caused by technical weakness. Most people bought the system IN SPITE of it being made by Commodore.

Re:All three remaining fans

[BeaverCleaver]

No, it was very popular, and sold very well. It was ruined by spectacularly, probably criminally incompetent management. If you've spent _any_ time here on Slashdot, you would have heard many tales of great engineering ruined by stupid managers, well the Amiga saga wrote the textbook on that. Tragic.

I still fire up my A1200 now and again.... and if I hadn't killed my SX32 card for the CD32 I'd have it plugged into the TV right now.

Re:All three remaining fans

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as ONE of "them", let me give you an inventory:
2- A1000s
2- A2000s
3- A500s
1- A600
1- A4000
1- CDTV

With the exception of the A600, which I'm in the process of re-capping, ALL of them work just fine. In fact, I used the trusty A4K to backup all my floppies to CD. Out of ~5-600 floppies, I only had about 8 that wouldn't read. How many PC-formatted AOL floppies can say that?

So, why would I still run an ancient system(s)? There are things these babies can do that STILL haven't been replicated, even in Linux on modern hardware. I still can't find a decent DTP that works as well (or efficiently) as PageStream 2.22 (it'll even output to Gerber for billboard-sized vinyl signs!). The only reason I keep a Windows box around is for running IrfanView - I haven't found anything that compares to it.

So, if Hyperion - or anyone - can push out some portable 'Miggy goodness, I'm all in. ...and don't get me started on all my 8-bitters.

Re:All three remaining fans

[Dogtanian]

It's just the biggest single market in the world. Nothing important there.

Strawman. I didn't claim that the US market wasn't significant, I said it "wasn't the be all and end all". And your other fallacy lies in assuming that because the US is a major *single* market, the Amiga can't be a success regardless of how much it sells on other markets.

And this depends how one defines a "market". Europe as a whole was- and is- in the same ballpark.

The Amiga did not sell well enough anywhere

The fact that it was manufactured for almost a decade shows that it must have sold "well enough". Actually, it sold significantly better than "well enough", but whatever...

and it died.

Eventually, yes- just like the original PlayStation or NES, which no longer have any mainstream support. By your logic this means that they were flops too.

I'm pretty sure that was exactly my point

Go back and read what you wrote then- you made two distinct points:-

(a) That the Amiga was a supposed flop even in its heyday (transparently wrong and the part that was disagreed with) and
(b) That it's long dead and there's no real purpose to bringing it back now.

Problem is that some idiots tend to get the wrong end of the stick and assume that disagreement with part of their argument means you disagree with all of it. My response was clarification and expansion on this front.

But to be honest, this product is really aimed at the obessive hardcore Amiga fanbase

All three of them

Funny thing is, if the rest of your response hadn't been so trollish in intent, I'd probably have found this a humorous (but reasonable) exaggeration of the current situation.

Yep- you're right. These machines are aimed at (what I assume is) a very tiny proportion of obsessive hobbyists who never let go and are still interested in a "new" Amiga hardware and OS (*). Not remotely mass-market by x86 standards, but obviously enough for some people to figure there's money to be made.

Personally, I don't see the point as the new models are neither fish nor foul. AFAIK the new machines aren't directly hardware compatible with the old Amigas- just the Amiga OS- and the OS itself has probably been long superseded.

As I said, they're niche products aimed at obsessive hobbyists. Actually, IMHO they're more intended to *exploit* such hobbyists... but it's their money.

(*) As opposed to the "retro" Amiga market, which I assume is a somewhat different demographic

Re:All three remaining fans

[Dogtanian]

I'm going to guess you weren't around in the 80's when the Amiga was huge?

In some ways you still have a US-centric view. *You* mean "huge" in terms of relative video industry importance in the US.

My point was that the Amiga was "huge" in actual *mass market*, pure-numbers, "every teenager in his bedroom and his dog owns one" terms in Europe.

Re:All three remaining fans

[Dogtanian]

So, if Hyperion - or anyone - can push out some portable 'Miggy goodness, I'm all in.

I might be wrong, but AFAIK these "new" Amigas AFAIK aren't directly compatible with old Amiga software, and definitely not anything that comes close to hitting the hardware directly. They don't run the 68K, they are (again AFAICT) just custom machines that run a new version of the Amiga OS.

AFAICT they're aimed at the tiny hardcore who never gave up the faith even when it meant moving away from the original Amiga hardware.

But given that any need for "classic" Amiga OS compatibility in a new OS has been rendered irrelevant by the sands of time (any software of industry note likely being well over 15 years old, and having been long migrated-away from) and I doubt the updated AmigaOS is that great by modern standards given that it basically wasn't upgraded for well over a decade and was already getting long in the tooth before then.

Seriously, it was fantastic in its day, but that day was 20+ years ago and a different era. Things have moved on- let it go.

Re:All three remaining fans

[Oswald McWeany]

Not exactly- but different products made it big there than in the US.

I know kids my generation in the US grew up mainly with Atari and some a Commodore 64. In the UK, for example- not many people had an Atari- and the Commodore was only one of many computer platforms.

Almost everyone I knew had a Spectrum of some kind.

Spectrums are fairly obscure in the US- but then- we (for the most part) didn't have Atari game consoles instead... our computers were our game consoles.

Re:All three remaining fans

[damnbunni]

AmigaOS 4.1 does a pretty good job of running old Amiga software. It has a 68k emulator built in much like the early PPC MacOS.

There are a bunch of old games that don't work, but there are a bunch that do, too. Basically, if it'll run on a 68K Amiga that had aftermarket graphics and sound cards, it'll work on a PowerPC running AOS 4.

There's actually a fairly high demand for classic Amiga app support; while the people who buy this sort of thing are certainly not Diehard Amiga Purists, we do want to run our old crap, too!

Re:All three remaining fans

[Alioth]

The Amiga *was* really popular in Europe. In around 1990 or so, if you had a modern personal computer in your home, it was most likely an Amiga or an Atari ST, the IBM compatibles were far too expensive for most people and had very poor graphics capabilities.

It died out because the PC got a lot cheaper and gained all the things that the Amiga had, but that wasn't until around 1994-1995 when the PC finally had what the Amiga had for years.

(I have no horse in this race, I never owned an Amiga back in the day. I managed to get a clearance deal on an 80386 in 1990 or so. I was more interested in trying to get something that would run something Unixy in 1991, rather than graphics).

Re:All three remaining fans

[Dogtanian]

There's actually a fairly high demand for classic Amiga app support; while the people who buy this sort of thing are certainly not Diehard Amiga Purists, we do want to run our old crap, too!

I suspect that you'd have to be pretty diehard to actually buy a new non-PC computer that has no prospect of mainstream success or use, pay an inflated price for it, and learn to use it, just to use your old apps under some marginally more modern hardware! And is the "need" to run your old software actually enough to warrant buying a new computer to run on? I suspect that *technically* it would be quite feasible- and probably more sensible- to run it under some sort of Windows emulation layer.

I think I'd be right in guessing that any business that ever relied on the Amiga would have long, *long* (like 15 years ago) been forced to migrate away from the system- even if reluctantly- to the point that Amiga compatibility is almost utterly irrelevant to anyone except, er... "diehard hobbyists". Sorry :-)

Re:All three remaining fans

[damnbunni]

There's a subset of Diehard Amiga Purists who refuse to use anything past Workbench 3.1, on Commodore-produced hardware (a few might deign to use QuikPak-produced 4000 T/68060s, but not many.)

But pretty much anyone interested in AmigaOS as a hobby is going to want to run at least *some* old stuff.

Re:All three remaining fans

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another arrogant slashdot memeber that knows nothing about history. The only computer that was more succesfull when it came to sales number was the c64. Even the a1200 when it came out in 93 just before commodore collapsed sold so many units that the factories could not keep up with demand here in Europe.
It died because of some really bad business decisions.

I write this by the way on my acube system running Amiga OS 4.1. ;P

Re:All three remaining fans

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but according to Jeremy Reimer's research, the Amiga didn't sell all that well. They sold about 4 million computers between 1985 and 1995, about 1/5 the number of Macs sold. At its peak year in 1991, Amiga sold half as many units as Macs.

http://www.jeremyreimer.com/postman/node/329

Re:All three remaining fans

[Algae_94]

The EU compared to the US is really rather close in size. It's just asinine for the GP to write off the EU (and everything non-US) as not mattering at all. I think he is also wrong about the popularity of the Amiga in the US.

Re:All three remaining fans

[manoweb]

Seriously, it was fantastic in its day, but that day was 20+ years ago and a different era. Things have moved on- let it go.

Yeah sure, now we have Gnome 3 and Unity.

Re:All three remaining fans

[Anonymous Coward]

"And yet it still died. Must not have really been all that popular in "Buttf***" Europe either."

At one point Commodore Germany called in stock from other parts of Europe, including other countries where Amiga's were selling well.
How,- I don't know. Why? Because the American HQ hadn't ordered enough custom chips since Amigas weren't selling well in North America by then, & therefore manufacturing couldn't meet worldwide demand.

Eventually demand was tapering off but Amigas sold long after Commodore had been pulled to bits. Then at some point supply was chopped off & I guess that frustrates those who then CAN'T buy what they want. Some still want to buy an updated Amiga system. I'd rather see better more Amiga-like Free/Opensource systems & wish Amiga IP rights-holders would let go. If it wasn't nailed to that perch it would 'ave ....

Re:All three remaining fans

[Dogtanian]

Urgh, what the hell is that mess? Lots of graphs where it's unclear which markets they're meant to refer to, and a mass of badly-formatted text.

The fact that the ZX Spectrum sold almost as many *units* worldwide as the Apple but doesn't appear on any of the graphs make me suspicious. Maybe they just missed it out... in which case, the graphs are still crap.

Re: $300-$500

[Anonymous Coward]

A related forum post says it's estimated to be between $300 and $500. As far as I know Atom isn't supported by AmigaOS.

Let it die already.

[aristotle-dude]

I was an Amiga user from 1989-95. I accepted that the Amiga platform died in the mid 90's and moved onto Window and from there to OS X.

The Amiga platform was amazing for its time but we are now in the 2010's. Nobody except crazy nut jobs want to use 20 year old technology. Let the Amiga platform rest in peace.

I was part of a local Amiga user group that had the developers behind "Amoeba Invaders" and I hosted the user meetings after the local Amiga dealer went out of business. Move on people. It is dead. It is really dead and not just pining for the fjords.

Re:Let it die already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn straight anybody who doesn't want to use Window/Mac/Linux is a "Crazy Nut Job".

Homogeneity Rules!!!

Re:Let it die already.

[zyzko]

Nobody except crazy nut jobs want to use 20 year old technology.

Ummm.... I thought this was a nerd-site, not a site for "what is the best way to do your spreadsheet / home movie authoring / etc.".

What's the harm tinkering with technology, be it dead, buried, cold, still barely breathing or a rising star?

If popularity dictates what your hobbies are we are going to live in a very, very dull world. I don't know what plans for this machine mentioned in the article are - I don't really care if it succeeds or not, but it is news for nerds. Although I agree that Amiga news and what actually has happened regarding commercial products under the Amiga brand have turned almost always in the past 15 years into tragicomic-facepalm-mess.

There are user clubs still for all kinds of legacy systems, even if they have been "dead" for long by all external measurements.

I like very much to game on PS3 and Xbox360. They are wonderful pieces of gaming technology. But I still occasionally fire up my A500 or A1200, hook it up to my TV and play some old goodies (no, emulator doesn't do it) or tinker with the A1200 (how awesome it is with CF flash card as HDD...). And I refuse to be classified as a "crazy nut job". (Typing this on a Mac, a very impressive laptop for this type of thing.)

Re:Let it die already.

[jgrahn]

I was an Amiga user from 1989-95.

1990--1996 in my case.

I accepted that the Amiga platform died in the mid 90's and moved onto Window and from there to OS X.

The Amiga platform was amazing for its time but we are now in the 2010's. Nobody except crazy nut jobs want to use 20 year old technology.

Right -- we Unix users prefer 40 year old technology.

Re:Let it die already.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was an Amiga user from 1989-95. I accepted that the Amiga platform died in the mid 90's and moved onto Window and from there to OS X.

When Jay Miner died, the "real Amiga" died with him. RIP to a true original.

It won't be an Amiga

[dammy]

It won't be an netbook "Amiga" as Hyperion does not have a license for the "Amiga" name for hardware. Hyperion can only use "AmigaOne" as it's official name for it's hardware series. The only company that has an official license to call their hardware Commodore Amiga is http://www.commodore.net/ who are using a customized Mint OS distro.

Re:It won't be an Amiga

[Shemmie]

Quoting from their site, the official Company Information appears pretty old-skool too.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla blandit leo enim, eget malesuada turpis.

As a huge Amiga fan 'back in the day', it's sad seeing its corpse being desecrated with such regularity. It died. We have to accept it.

It's called AROS

[dammy]

There has been a open source version of AmigaOs in development since the late 1990s and it has several distro like: http://www.icarosdesktop.org/ AROS runs on x86, x86_64, PPC, M68000 and ARM (hosted).

Re:It's called AROS

[amiga3D]

It's not an open source version of AmigaOS. It's a reimplementation of the Amiga API's sort of. There's no Amiga codebase in it. Basically they're writing something that works like the Amiga OS on X86. It's cool but it's a work in progress with no end in sight.

Re:It's called AROS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not an open source version of AmigaOS. It's a reimplementation of the Amiga API's sort of. There's no Amiga codebase in it. Basically they're writing something that works like the Amiga OS on X86. It's cool but it's a work in progress with no end in sight.

Exept that it will not run on X86, but on PowerPC.

Re:It's called AROS

[MaxEvans47]

Wrong. Actually, it does run on x86.

Re:It's called AROS

[amiga3D]

To be exact it runs on both PPC and x86 and there was a 680x0 version at one time as well although I don't the state of that. It's usable, at least the X86 I used was, but there is tons of work left to make it fully complete.

Like I said fun to play with. They also could greatly benefit from the release of Amiga source code.

Apparently it's a 400MHz PPC Limebook

[dammy]

It's a 400MHz PPC Limebook as per: http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=34459&forum=33&start=140&viewmode=flat&order=0#634010

Magic times

[Weaselmancer]

Exactly, brother. Exactly. The Amiga made me love computers.

I'll never forget the first day I had my 500 hooked up. I ran the demo that drew boxes. Then ran another copy, then another, then another...had dozens of them up. You could watch the OS switch attention between dozens of them. I was amazed. My previous machine was a C64. The leap was magical, amazing...I would simply watch the Amiga run demos and be blown away.

Learning m68k assembly...aaah. I'll still say it is the most beautiful and elegant machine code out there. Reads almost like english. It was beautiful.

I hacked the 86 pin port on the side of my A500 and installed a GVPII card. Put a 120 meg hard drive in there and 4 megs of memory. It was my first serious hard hack. Worked like a champ too.

Being an Amiga person back in the early days was a time of pure magic. Nothing since has even come close. I've got an i7 2600k with 8 gigs of memory and a 300 dollar graphics card. It came with a graphics demo of islands in an ocean of water, and it looks perfect. And for some reason it's just not as impressive.

Re:Magic times

[fyngyrz]

Learning m68k assembly...aaah. I'll still say it is the most beautiful and elegant machine code out there.

6809 was actually better. But as an 8-bit random logic design, it ran into the performance wall because it couldn't be clocked reasonably, and of course Motorola never went the obvious route of taking it to 32, then 64 bits. Real shame. Best 8-bit microprocessor (keeping comparable clock rates in mind) ever. By leaps and bounds. The 68xxx series was more orthogonal simply by virtue of having more registers, but it did lack some of the things that would have made it truly great, particularly in the area of addressing modes, where the 6809 was the absolute king.

Holy 1999 Batman ! cool !

[gearloos]

This is something that sounds interesting.

Re:Does it really bring anything to the table now?

[TaoPhoenix]

Where does it stand on the Malware front? On one hand I'd think it would let users ride ROFL-Copters over the virus writers. On the other hand it might be really vulnerable to 2012's exploit methods.

About 20 years too late

[Snaller]

Oh well.

Amiga and Emulation (Linux.)

[Zombie Ryushu]

Boutique Computer systems like the Atari ST, Amiga, and Sharp X68000 are some of the most insufferable tasks one can undergo as far as emulation goes.

I will say this now. The Amiga and Atari ST were fine products for their time, but now, their only usefulness is as gaming consoles. The games they had that were unique to their platform and superior ports produced really were a sight to see, and have withstood the test of time in this era of retro-gaming revival.

Atari ST Emulation is tolerable under Windows and Linux.
Amiga emulation is absolutely insufferable, especially under Linux where the emulators just seem to get worse with every port produced. Even under Windows, Amiga emulation is a complicated abysmal mess, with dozens of archane rom versions, Disk insertion and image issues, and emulation bugs.

The gaming library from the Amiga era is the only thing it has going for it, and is why Amiga programmers should do their best to make Amiga games fully playable on Linux platforms.

Re:Amiga and Emulation (Linux.)

[jampola]

"make Amiga games fully playable on Linux platforms." Love how you casually left out Windows and OSX in this sentence! You're alright in my book ;)

Re:Amiga and Emulation (Linux.)

[ledow]

I think you're over-egging the situation a little.

Even back in the early Pentium / DOS days, UAE was a perfectly capable emulation, able to play just about any mainstream game you threw at it. Hell, they sold it on disks with thousands of commercial ADF's and even Gremlin used it on their CD releases of their Amiga games for PC.

WinUAE took some time to get to the same state, mainly because of system requirements, but it was there. Sure there are a million and one arcane configurations of the top-end Amiga's and a handful of games where the emulation isn't accurate enough to run them but we're really talking niche usage and extremely powerful PC's required (even DosBox can only approach a 486 and that's running on the same damn instruction set as it's emulating!). You've been able to buy commercial-quality emulators for Atari and Amiga for over a decade.

I think your experience is tarnished somehow. If newer emulators are really that bad, I have a ten-year-old copy of WinUAE that'll run almost anything you throw at it, like every other emulator for every other platform on the planet (Hell, technically, even ZX Spectrum emulation isn't "complete" in any emulator at all).

Now I don't know the Linux situation but that has no bearing on how emulatable the Amiga is.

Re:Amiga and Emulation (Linux.)

[pantaril]

Amiga emulation in linux is perfectly OK using either e-uae or winuae under wine. I use it quite often for retro gaming and i have yet to see a game i can't emulate correctly.

Uh... No thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll wait for NATAMI.

There was never a portable Amiga.

[Peganthyrus]

> The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.

This sentence is confusing. Is it trying to say that the A1000 was portable? Because I had one and I can assure you that it was not.

Re:There was never a portable Amiga.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is relative, I guess...

Re:There was never a portable Amiga.

[gl4ss]

yeah the summary is funny since a500 was way more portable..

Re:There was never a portable Amiga.

[jgrahn]

> The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.

This sentence is confusing. Is it trying to say that the A1000 was portable? Because I had one and I can assure you that it was not.

No, that's not what the article was trying to say. It's just a funny way of sneaking in the name and birth year of the first Amiga.

Possible options for Amiga

[unixisc]

How is being a single-user OS good? When I first got XP and was showing it to my wife, she actually liked the fact that every member of the family could have different accounts and profiles, so that aspect of NT (and Linux, BSD and the other unixes) has by now more or less come to be accepted.

I like the fact that drivers are in the Drivers folder, commands are in the Commands folder and so on, but it sounds like a mess if one were to want to uninstall anything. Instead of just uninstalling say, Myst, one would have to go to the libraries folder and look for all myst libraries and delete them, and do the same everywhere else.

The thing I heard is that Amiga's scripting language REXX was awesome, and it later moved to OS/2. That too was a rather good OS, and complaints about its overusage of memory was misplaced, given that NT far exceeded it when it XP replaced the Win95 family.

Which brings to mind an idea. How many of you have heard of OSFree? It's an FOSS version of OS/w, where they take the L4 microkernel, put the Presentation Manager personality on top of it, so that they have an OS/2 that is lightweight, but preserves all the advantages that OS/2 had. Since it's on a widely ported microkernel, this OS/2 would also be portable to any CPU architecture that L4 exists on, not just x86. And it wouldn't be a nightmare like IBM's Workplace OS attempt was.

Similarly, the Hyperion people could do something similar - take a microkernel, maybe L4, and then port the Amiga UI to it as a personality (just like Presentation Manager in the above example). After that, target netbooks, but instead of restricting netbooks to Atoms or Nanos, use other processors as well - ARM, MIPS and PPC. That way, they can have boxes that just run their OS (although some people will run them w/ some Linux or another), but in which case, the Amiga OS won't be behind all modern OSs in terms of capability, since it'll be able to incorporate and use all services available in modern OSs.

Re:Possible options for Amiga

[Vecanti]

How is being a single-user OS good? When I first got XP and was showing it to my wife, she actually liked the fact that every member of the family could have different accounts and profiles, so that aspect of NT (and Linux, BSD and the other unixes) has by now more or less come to be accepted.

I like that last word. Acceptance. Just because it has become accept doesn't mean it's good. How is being single user good? Well, it's not good for everyone for sure. But for me it's my computer. Why did I need all the over head that comes with "multiuser". No registry, no software "installing". Program is in folder. I want to back up a program, I copy the folder. I want to backup the OS. I just copy it.

I think it is ridiculous that you need "Special Software" to back up your OS on Windows. or that is it almost impossible to back up a program in Windows with out reinstalling it. (Sure there are some programs that are an exceptions)
But a lot of that has to do with it installing 1000s of keys in the registry in case multiple people might use the software.

Re:Possible options for Amiga

[hesiod]

The thing I heard is that Amiga's scripting language REXX was awesome

On the Amiga it was ARexx, but yeah it was pretty sweet. It could interface live with just about any program that was open (plus launch any it needed) and operate them without your intervention, so it had similar power to Linux's shell scripts, but had the potential to be somewhat graphical and it was far easier to learn than figuring out the complicated command-line syntax of every program under the sun.

Re:Possible options for Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing I heard is that Amiga's scripting language REXX was awesome, and it later moved to OS/2.

I believe it was the other direction -- IBM created REXX and deployed it on OS/2 (and possibly some other places), and somebody ported it to Amiga. This is why the Amiga guys call it AREXX; the port was "Amiga REXX".

Which brings to mind an idea. How many of you have heard of OSFree? It's an FOSS version of OS/w, where they take the L4 microkernel, put the Presentation Manager personality on top of it, so that they have an OS/2 that is lightweight, but preserves all the advantages that OS/2 had. Since it's on a widely ported microkernel, this OS/2 would also be portable to any CPU architecture that L4 exists on, not just x86. And it wouldn't be a nightmare like IBM's Workplace OS attempt was.

The ideas sound similar to Workplace OS. What makes you assume that a tiny OSS project will succeed where IBM's funded project failed?

And frankly, why OS/2? What's the point? I'm not sure Presentation Manager had any real advantages which would still hold up today.

Similarly, the Hyperion people could do something similar - take a microkernel, maybe L4, and then port the Amiga UI to it as a personality (just like Presentation Manager in the above example).

Amiga was microkernel-ish, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's simple to jack it up and slide in L4. The big one is that AOS has zero memory protection, and lots of the AOS APIs were designed to take advantage of it to enhance system performance. For example, processes end up swapping pointers to linked lists via the GUI APIs, and subsequently walk through said data structures without going through any APIs at all. This means you can't hide the ugliness by changing the OS to imitate the old behavior at the API interface. There are also explicitly globally shared data structures. To modernize this kind of stuff, it would be necessary to make API changes which would completely break old applications.

What you'd get in the end is a new OS which can't run any classic Amiga programs natively (*). IMO this would be a bit pointless because there isn't any compelling reason to resurrect & modernize classic Amiga APIs... even aside from the issues outlined above they're looking more than a little dated these days.

* - native in the API sense, not the instruction set. It's usually much easier to port to a new CPU holding the APIs constant than to port between APIs holding the CPU constant.

After that, target netbooks, but instead of restricting netbooks to Atoms or Nanos, use other processors as well - ARM, MIPS and PPC. That way, they can have boxes that just run their OS (although some people will run them w/ some Linux or another), but in which case, the Amiga OS won't be behind all modern OSs in terms of capability, since it'll be able to incorporate and use all services available in modern OSs.

See above. IMO, there is essentially no momentum left to get the important software ported to a new system, so if they build it, probably almost nobody will come.

At some point users of an obsolete computing platform have to accept that time has passed it by and focus on enjoying it for what it is. Unless they like frustration.

Re:Possible options for Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the fact that drivers are in the Drivers folder, commands are in the Commands folder and so on, but it sounds like a mess if one were to want to uninstall anything. Instead of just uninstalling say, Myst, one would have to go to the libraries folder and look for all myst libraries and delete them, and do the same everywhere else.
-----
Or you could have Myst in your Games directory with the necessary library inside a libs directory in Myst directory and simply delete the Myst directory.

Re:Possible options for Amiga

[unixisc]

The thing I heard is that Amiga's scripting language REXX was awesome, and it later moved to OS/2.

I believe it was the other direction -- IBM created REXX and deployed it on OS/2 (and possibly some other places), and somebody ported it to Amiga. This is why the Amiga guys call it AREXX; the port was "Amiga REXX".

Thanks for correcting me here

Which brings to mind an idea. How many of you have heard of OSFree? It's an FOSS version of OS/w, where they take the L4 microkernel, put the Presentation Manager personality on top of it, so that they have an OS/2 that is lightweight, but preserves all the advantages that OS/2 had. Since it's on a widely ported microkernel, this OS/2 would also be portable to any CPU architecture that L4 exists on, not just x86. And it wouldn't be a nightmare like IBM's Workplace OS attempt was.

The ideas sound similar to Workplace OS. What makes you assume that a tiny OSS project will succeed where IBM's funded project failed?

And frankly, why OS/2? What's the point? I'm not sure Presentation Manager had any real advantages which would still hold up today.

It's not quite the same. Workplace OS was a completely new product, not a port of OS/2. It borrowed certain sections of code from both the existing OS/2 and AIX products while using an entirely new microkernel code base and adding major features including a system registry and a new driver model. However, a project was launched internally to evaluate the looming competitive situation with Microsoft Windows 95, the major code quality issues in the existing OS/2 product (resulting in over 20 service packs, each requiring more diskettes than the original installation), and the ineffective and heavily matrixed development organization in Boca Raton and Austin. That study revealed untenable weaknesses across the board in IBM and a decision was made to scrap the project.

In this case, the microkernel is a second generation L4 already ported to different platforms, and it would have different personalities on it that one can choose. The scope seems far less - just have Presentation Manager ported on L4. The OS also has a Neutral personality, which is the real OS API. It is a set of servers for various services. All other personalities need to work via this personality. The device driver model will presumably be available here, and from it, all personalities can access it.

As for why Presentation Manager, the project team had this to say:

OS/2 has one of the most stable, robust and high-performance kernels. Written in assembly language, it is highly-optimized and uses all i386 architecture features very extensively. It's modular design allows to easy replace components with more featured/less resource-eating/cut off GUI, or customize system to fit user preferences. It is highly configurable. We like its compact and clean API, it's easy to use and intuitive powerful true object-oriented user interface. It's uses one of the best general purpose scripting languages named REXX as operating system scripting service with API available to any application. OS/2 was advertised by IBM as “DOS better than DOS and Windows better than Windows”. It is true – it's VDM was the best ever existing. And not only DOS/Windows. It had Java and XFree86 support very powerful too. So, we started loving OS/2 as powerful integration platforms on top of single desktop. It has been used by marginals and non-conformists for years and always had its own way. We want to continue following this way :) We can sleep peacefully knowing that it is not popular between hackers and virus writers, they like mainstream.. But we can't stay this way – starting at De

This is not Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Hyperion does not have the Licence nameing a product "Amiga". They only managed to get a licence for the name "AmigaONE" through a lawsuit. This will never be the first Amiga laptop, it will just be an AmigaOne Laptop.

And for the AmigaOS, you can get AROS, a AmigaOS API comnpatible OS for free and install it on a 300$ x86 Netbook with more power and more possibilities. Or you can get an used Mac G4 laptop and buay MorphOS the Amiga like OS from a longtime competitor with higher stability and performance.

Re:If this is is true, I'll buy just for nostalgia

[unixisc]

The thing about the Amiga - one of the things that sunk the platform - was that no new version of the Amiga was compatible w/ the old one. That was something whose importance Amiga's management and marketing never figured out. Even if one is a complete Amiga fan, one can't appreciate having to start from scratch again when he gets a new Amiga, and not being able to install existing software on the new platform. If you can't leverage any of your past purchases, how much sense does it make to support that platform, when every other platform out there - PCs, Macs, even Unixes - did a better job supporting their predecessors? (Yeah, I'm aware that today, win64 breaks some compatibility w/ win 16 and doesn't go back all the way, but there is a difference b/w breaking compatibility after several generations, vs breaking compatibility b/w successive ones)

Amiga 1000 portable?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced"

In which way was the Amiga 1000 portable in any other way than other non fixated object like toasters, anchovies and cupboards are?

Re:Amiga 1000 portable?

[JockTroll]

In the sense, loserboy nerd, that since the Amiga 1000 was the FIRST Amiga and there have NEVER been commercially made portable ones, this is the FIRST Amiga to BE portable. As for definitions of "portable" you should be lugging an Osbourne 1 uphill in the snow both ways with the eyesocket-raping hellhounds of doom on your back to see the light. Dismissed.

Re:If this is is true, I'll buy just for nostalgia

[raddude99]

Wrong! My 19 year old Amiga 4000 runs both the original AmigaOs 3.0 (as well as 3.1, 3.5 and 3.9) and it also runs the very latest AmigaOS 4.1.

Re:If this is is true, I'll buy just for nostalgia

[raddude99]

Where are you getting your information, you could not be more wrong. I can run a lot of my original AmigaOS 1.3 software on my new install of the recently released AmigaOS 4.1.

Re:If this is is true, I'll buy just for nostalgia

[unixisc]

Recently released? Then that's a new policy, and a non-Commodore one at that, where a new AmigaOS has to be compatible w/ something Amiga, since Commodore is not around. But w/ Commodore, from one generation to another, the various OSs were not compatible w/ each other - that's one of the main reasons Amiga failed. Yeah, now OSs from Hyperion or anyone else who makes AmigaOS clones would be expected to be compatible, so that they can have some credibility of running original Amiga software. But did your AmigaOS 2.x or 3.x support your 1.3 software, assuming you had those successors?

Re:If this is is true, I'll buy just for nostalgia

[uglyduckling]

I think they were partially compatible. Plenty of application software that was written "correctly" was compatible across OS versions, but many games were not because they directly accessed hardware and used OS routines from the ROMs which they expected to be memory-mapped in certain locations. There was a big aftermarket for putting older OS ROMs into newer machines with external switches in order to run legacy games.

Re:If this is is true, I'll buy just for nostalgia

[raddude99]

Again, You are completely wrong, where are you getting this mis-information? AmigaOS has always had forward compatability. Not Commodores policy, can you point me to a link that says that Commodore wanted to ditch compatability with each OS release. Yes, AmigaOS2.x did indeed support the vast majority of 1.3 software. And there were very few instances of software working on 2.0 but not on 3.x. And now with AmigaOS 4.x it will run most of the 3.x stuff. Sure there were a few examples of software that would not work on new versions of the OS, but that's the case with all operating systems. And the Amiga did not fail, Commodore did :-)

Why?

[Oswald McWeany]

OK- not bashing amiga- nor praising it.

I just simply want to know- why- and for what motivation there is for "yet another OS".

I know the OS has a long and glorious history- but it will essentially be like starting from scratch in this day and age. With the market already saturated with Windows, Apple, and many flavours of Linux- do we really need another OS?

Is there some niche that Amiga can hold that none of the other OS do well at the moment? There are no 21st century applications written (that I know of) for the Amiga- so initially choice of software will be decades old- or a meagre line-up from Amiga themselves.

Does Amiga have some "trick-up-their-sleaves" that we don't know about- or is this purely a nostalgia product?

If it can run Windows apps or Mac apps or Linux apps- or maybe a combination- maybe it will stand a chance.

I have no beed with Amiga- or any ill-feeling towards them- but I simply can't see the purpose of it- can someone enlighten me please and tell me why I would want or need an Amiga?

Waste of time and money

[kimvette]

Up through about 2000 every story of a new restart for Amiga caught my interest - I loved the Amiga and it had a ton of amazing games. This article kind of caught my interest, but it is going to run AmigaOS4 (or Linux - why bother? I have a ton of x64 Linux boxes and PPC Linux sucks for playing media) - with no provision for backwards compatibility. I would buy one if I could make use of old software I have kicking around, but it can't do that (probably won't be able to read the disks - probably won't even have a floppy drive), and the UI is still stuck in the early '90s.

If I bought one, what would I get? AmigaOS on a generic PPC (nothing particularly special about the hardware) running an OS which has much of the look and feel of the original Amiga (which today is dated), but totally incompatible (even through Petunia). Sure, I can use UAE to run original Amiga software, but my PCs can do that just as easily. What's the appeal? If it were a turnkey, backwards-compatible (including floppy drive) Amiga, I would probably buy one, but not if I need to jump through the same hoops as I need to on my PCs.

Re:If this is is true, I'll buy just for nostalgia

[Osgeld]

oh you mean your 4000 with a 68k CPU? no fucking shit it still runs original OS, its still using a 68K cpu with is not Power PC

Why does using an Amiga mean you're "obsessive"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an Amiga user. According to this forum:
I'm an obsessive because I like using an Amiga more.
My hardware is all broken, and the OS is broken (despite the fact they work just fine thankyouverymuch)
AmigaOS should die a death because it's not the same as it was in 1994, despite the fact I enjoy using it.
Nobody wants AmigaOS any more except for the "3 fans", Which is strange given the amount of people on the forums.

I use AmigaOS because I *enjoy* it. Not because I'm an obsessive compulsive geek with a social disorder that means I can't let something go just because the parent company dies.

I hope people can respect this for what it is - AmigaOS is my hobby. I enjoy its responsiveness, I enjoy programming for a minority platform which is clean, simple and easy to code for. I enjoy using it. I enjoy keeping up with people developing the OS. I enjoy having an OS that's free of DRM and such nonsense. I enjoy using a platform that's efficient with its limited hardware.

I enjoy using my Amiga. Is that so wrong? And even if it is, I'll still carry on using it because I enjoy it....

THIS IS THE BEST NEWS OF 2011!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting THREE of them!!!!!

350$ A great price to try AmigaOS4

[Anonymous Coward]

This netbook is a cheap and great way for old Amiga users that liked using AmigaOS to try how much AmigaOS have advanced through the years. It's aimed at current Amiga users and old Amiga users as well. Amiga world needs more software developers and every single person counts.

Pure vitriol

[OldAmigan]

I really can't understand the absolute rubbish that's being posted here and the really nasty vitriolic comments by people who obviously haven't researched anything beyond the headline statement. AmigaOS is, these days, a hobby OS. However, it's been (and is still being) improved massively from the old days of Commodore. Enough to keep a good few AOS fans wanting to see it prosper and move forward some more. And enough to keep a lot of those fans wanting better hardware to run it on. As it's inevitably going to have a small user base, it's going to cost more than the equivalent in Intel (x86) hardware. AOS fans realise that and a good few of them (us) are prepared to pay for it. After all, if no-one buys it, the dream dies. One of the most requested pieces of hardware is a netbook or laptop - so Hyperion, who have put their money into the Amiga OS - have sourced one. Again, compared to a piece of x86 hardware, it's going to cost a bit more and will be a bit slower. Amiga OS being quite a nippy piece of software will most likely perform more than adequately, in terms of speeds, on this. The high end hardware that's coming out, the AmigaOne X1000 is very costly but this time has been designed by a top class company, Varisys. It will be a dual core PPC computer. Again, the OS will perform well on this hardware. One of the things people often remark at is how nimbly the operating system and software packages perform, compared to other OS's running on many times faster hardware. Yes, to start with it will only use one of the cores, but that will come in the near future. There is, indeed, new software being written still for this OS (and even for m68K Amiga OS) The point is, Amiga enthusiasts are willing to pay for the hardware and software to keep their (our) platform alive, and, regardless of the points of view of those of you who can't understand why, that will keep on happening. There are enthusiasts of other platforms who are also willing to pay good money to see their chosen OS prosper. What's it got to do with those who don't like these alternative platforms what people do with their own money?