Slashdot Mirror
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."
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)
Advice: on VPS providers
In the end it will likely end up a "special edition" Dell laptop with nothing special other than the price.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
Insert pithy comment here.
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?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
http://www.videoweed.es/file/xllqh0qgbs4v1
and i assure you, if it was out as a board game, i might have considered playing it.
Read radical news here
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?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Everything since has been just a name.
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.
We`re all equal
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.
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)
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
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?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
Oh come on man. I loved the workbench but be real. It's 2011.
Amiga PPC's are not compatible with the original ones
What problem is this solving?
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.
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.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
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... )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
thatsthejoke.jpg
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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?
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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.
David Gay, who spent a lot of time programming his Amiga 1000/2500...
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
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.
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.
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...
You are welcome on my lawn.
systems that seem obscure to you were mainstream to them.
So the European computer buyers were all hipsters?
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It's just the biggest single market in the world.
I suspect that would be EU.
This is something that sounds interesting.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
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.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
Oh well.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
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.
> 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.
egypt urnash minimal art.
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.
sustainable living
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dude! Full motion video! On a laptop! That's friggin' crazy!
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Is that not a sufficient reason?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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 :-)
Wrong. Actually, it does run on x86.
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?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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!
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).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
cat
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
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?
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.
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.
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