How Icaros Desktop Brings the Amiga Experience To x86 PCs

angry tapir writes "Icaros Desktop is an effort to build a modern Amiga-compatible operating system to standard x86 hardware. It's a distribution built atop AROS, which is an open source effort to create a system compatible at the API level with the AmigaOS 3.x series. I recently had a chat to the creator of Icaros, Paolo Besser, about the creation of the OS and why Amiga continues to inspire people today."

Comments

Deadest horse

[glrotate]

Evar!

Good luck.

[HarrySquatter]

Yes, but having it run on x86 will alienate the Amiga snobs.

Re:Good luck.

[squiggleslash]

Hardly. Ten years ago, maybe.

I have to say this project upsets me.

Why? Because if it had been completed fifteen years ago, it'd have been something I'd (and millions of other Amiga enthusiasts) would have been able to jump on, and over time it would have grown. The issues with Exec's lack of MMU support would have been, as time progressed, dealt with in an evolutionary way (I have no idea what the solution would have been, but I'm pretty sure it would have come about.) And so the platform would have lived on.

Unfortunately it wasn't completed then, and the mindshare has moved to GNU/Linux. The problems with AmigaOS back in 1994 are still present in AROS. There's no easy way to fix the issues any more, because the people interested aren't tight knit and large enough to actually agree upon a way forward.

Which is NOT, absolutely NOT, to diss the efforts of the AROS crew. What they've produced is impressive, and anyone who thinks all operating systems should either be POSIX or Windows based should, absolutely should, download this and play with it.

What upsets me is that I can't, any longer, jump on something so wonderful. There's no point.

Re:Good luck.

[toejam13]

Ten years ago I might have agreed. Today with every major desktop OS running on x86 or x86-64, not so much. Besides, people are more interested in the Amiga experience as opposed to the underlying hardware. This goes double since the majority of PPC systems in the post-Commodore world have been something of an expensive joke.

Re:Good luck.

[HarrySquatter]

No, the current-day snobs will still decry running their blessed AmigaOS on x86.

Re:Good luck.

[cpu6502]

Amiga's moved-on anyway. OS 3 is obsolete, replaced by OS 4.0 and 4.1. Running version 3 today would be like running a Mac with OS9.

Re:Good luck.

[HarrySquatter]

Just take a gander at this thread from 3 mnths ago.

BeOs didn't succeed with x86. Some developers said that those who has originally used BeOs started to use window/Linux and stopped to support original BeOs apps because everythig was easier with Windows/Linux.

Custom hardware is good choise, there woun't be any benefits to go x86/x64

Custom hardware makes Amiga special and force people who has it to use it. (Yes I know there is linux distro for ppc)

OS4 needs to remain PPC.

No valid reason for OS4 to go to commodity hardware. The market isn't there - niche OS's are free/open source on commodity hardware, Hyperion would have no business model.

It's be just another offshoot hobby OS that could once make a meager earning on the PPC side that is now on commodity HW where there's a plethora of free OS'es for every niche market. Another OS I'd have to run an emulation layer on to run legacy software. Why should I run OS4 x86 vs. AROS, vs. UAE/Amikit/Amithlon?

and those are just select quotes from the first 2 pages. The snobs still exist.

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You see, even the most snobby of snobs is well aware that the only viable CPU architectures right now are ix86 and ARM. 68K is dead outside of the low power (in every sense) embedded world; and PowerPC is a WTF.

Ten years ago, like I said, you might have found a hold out, clinging perhaps to PowerPC as a possible 68k successor, but today? Nope. The CPU wars are over.

Re:Good luck.

[HarrySquatter]

Nope, look at my post below from an Amiga thread from 3 months ago for 3 seperate people in the first 2 pages decrying AmigaOS on x86 and how PPC hardware makes it 'special'.

Re:Good luck.

[squiggleslash]

The Amiga wasn't PowerPC based. It was a popular upgrade, and some of the companies that called themselves "Amiga" after Commodore's downfall produced machines they called "Amigas" with PowerPCs, but those machines were basic PREP (or whatever the term is), not resembling the Amiga range in any shape or form. The only connection was the operating system.

What you have here are PowerPC snobs, not Amiga snobs.

Re:Good luck.

[HarrySquatter]

Only the second person mentioned PPC. The first guy was just saying you should have to have 'custom hardware' because otherwise AmigaOS is no longer 'special'.

Re:Good luck.

[squiggleslash]

Sorry, I thought you were quoting one comment.

That said, it still doesn't really say what you're suggesting. What the first and third comment are saying is that they think the best computer would be combination of AmigaOS and custom hardware. They think AmigaOS should be created for this custom computer.

Now, you'll note a few things. One is that that doesn't specify a CPU. The other is that pretty much rules out the crappy "Let's combine the reference-architecture PowerPC motherboards with AmigaOS" "Amigas" that have been pouring out of companies that have called themselves "Amiga" in the last few years. Because those reference architecture PCI-supporting PowerPC motherboards aren't exactly custom computers either.

I can certainly relate to someone wanting the owners of the Amiga IP to come out with a revolutionary new computer, unlike anything out today. Because that's what we got in 1985. However, I think there's a world of difference between saying that, and saying "Also - it has to have some outdated, crappy, CPU that nobody uses any more". You'd put an ix86-64 in a modern Amiga for exactly the same reason as they put a 68000 in the original Amiga 1000 - it's a powerful, commodity, CPU, the best CPU you can get for the price.

I'd be enormously surprised if the first and third poster didn't agree with that.

Re:Good luck.

[toejam13]

3 seperate people in the first 2 pages decrying AmigaOS on x86 and how PPC hardware makes it 'special'.

An 8-core POWER7 processor is special. Most everything these days from the PowerPC series is not.

Had Commodore actually released a PPC based Amiga themselves, then there might have been a real connection between the PPC and the Amiga. But Commodore folded before they could transition off of the 680x0. So all we have are a few third party PPC processor cards and a couple hobbyist companies tinkering with it after it fell from mainstream status.

To me, I think a lot of people had wishful thinking of what could have been had Commodore followed Apple down the PPC rabbit hole. That is why they're so hung up on it. But for most people, the Amiga died when it was a 680x0 machine running 3.x.

Re:Good luck.

[toejam13]

Define "custom hardware". Not even the game consoles really use specialty custom hardware anymore, and they were the last class of home systems to really do so. Now they just use tweaked versions of commodity hardware. These days, you have to look at big iron and mainframe systems to really find custom in-house designed hardware.

I'm not saying that it couldn't be done, but it really wouldn't be worth the cost. Heck, look at AMD who just licensed an ARM core so that they can get the Trusted Computing subsystem into their x86-64 processors. It was simply cheaper to license something else.

Re:Good luck.

[squiggleslash]

I completely agree with you. I was just saying that "custom hardware" is what the posters quoted were advocating, not "I HATE IX86!!?!"

Re:Good luck.

[HarrySquatter]

You mean other than the 3rd quote explicitly stating AmingaOS4 has no reason to go on commodity hardware and the first one saying there are no benefits to x86/x64? You seem to be trying to reinterpret their clear statements to try to claim they are saying the opposite of heir own words.

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be trying to reinterpret their clear statements to try to claim they are saying the opposite of heir own words

Or perhaps you're a dumbass who doesn't understand English.

Re:Good luck.

[TheRealMindChild]

Not all operating systems need to be, nor should be, multiuser, memory/resource protected, desktop publishing Goliaths. The OS I work on in my spare time is single user, no permissions, no memory protection simple piece of usefulness. I use it to run diagnostics and fix problems and I am proud of how well it does that. I believe your view of what a "useful OS" should be is skewed.

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you wanted the platform to live on so badly why didn't you help?

Re:Good luck.

[Bert64]

Incidentally, by some accounts Commodore were working with HP to transition to the PA-RISC processor and had no plans to use PPC... Had they not folded, they most likely would have moved to HPPA, later moved to IA64 and would probably be in the process of moving again.

Re:Good luck.

[Bert64]

Those quote are hilarious...

BeOs didn't succeed with x86. Some developers said that those who has originally used BeOs started to use window/Linux and stopped to support original BeOs apps because everythig was easier with Windows/Linux.

Nor did it succeed on PPC.

No valid reason for OS4 to go to commodity hardware. The market isn't there - niche OS's are free/open source on commodity hardware, Hyperion would have no business model.

There is no market for a niche OS targeting hobbyists. Niche OS are free or open source and run on widely available hardware because that's the only way any of them has a hope of attracting a user base. Lots of people have old/spare hardware they would play with a new OS on, but very few would buy expensive hardware just to try an expensive os.

That's how myself and many others first experienced linux. In fact, my first experience of both linux and netbsd was installing them on an amiga since that's the hardware i had available at the time.

Re:Good luck.

[Belial6]

If you go and look at the context of those kinds of comments you will find that 'Custom' hardware means one of two things to the Amiga community as a group. 1) The custom audio/video coprocessors that were produced by Commodore. Generally referred to as the "custom chipset". 2) PowerPC motherboards.

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

AROS' version of EXEC is pretty ugly, they took some pretty horrible shortcuts ... that's why it doesn't work properly. I've never seen a version of AROS that worked 100% all of the time (something that AmigaOS did -- as a developer, I rarely saw a Guru Meditation except those caused by my own programs; however, things went downhill after 1.3 ... 2.x/3.x had some bad regressions and bugs).

The boot sequence of Icaros / AROS is a joke, it's difficult to find hardware to run it on, not even the boot manager works properly ...

I always thought the Amiga had created some of the best programmers out there, but those are probably busy with other things nowadays ...

AROS is a far cry from the old AmigaOS ... (btw, same thing applies to AmigaOS 4) ... I wish those guys would manage to properly design new versions upwards, not sideways ... there's absolutely nothing AmigaOS-like about AROS, OS4 or MorphOS ... but I'll shut up now ...

Re:Good luck.

[toejam13]

Yes, with the Hombre system that they were co-designing with HP.

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

"the mindshare has moved to GNU/Linux"

Bingo, and all of it well said. Amiga had (we had) two major camps of geeks. The animators jumped to NT when Lightwave did. The coders went to Linux and BSD.

Re:Good luck.

[turgid]

Had they not folded, they most likely would have moved to HPPA, later moved to IA64 and would probably be in the process of moving again.

The few remaining polar bears are very thankful that IA64 didn't gain momentum...

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is a joke.. Of course there's lot's of Amiga like things in AROS. for starters just open the shell and type list.
But I guess you couldn't be bothered.

  It's also easy to find hardware that Aros works on. It costs you nothing to try, other than a live boot CD if
you want t run it native.

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no point? Then jump in and hone one out. Do you also not eat because you're too hungry or not exercise because you're too out of shape? If you cared, you'd spend your time on it, but you don't, so there wasn't much cause in expressing apologistic "too little too late" sentiments, was there?

Re:Good luck.

[paolobesser]

"What upsets me is that I can't, any longer, jump on something so wonderful. There's no point." Why? The AROS community enjoys spending some of its spare time on this.

Re:Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not just about X86 being more popular the PowerPC or 680x0 CPU, but also because the PowerPC is big endien and so is the 680x0 cpu, also MacOS7 when PowerPC, it was natural choice, when you wonted to run 680x0 program and PowerPC programs on same OS whit bring in a full scale computer emulator, its like difference between running VirtualBox vs Wine in Linux.

x86 denial

[pointyhat]

Well in 20 years, we'll have x86 denial syndrome instead (of Amiga Denial Syndrome that is).

Re:x86 denial

[Chrisq]

Well in 20 years, we'll have x86 denial syndrome instead (of Amiga Denial Syndrome that is).

I deny that

Re:x86 denial

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you don't

68k games

[Hatta]

Can I seamlessly run Amiga games written for the 68000 on it? This would require emulation, but it's been done before.

Re:68k games

[arth1]

The biggest problem with games is the copper. Emulators tend to be "best effort", which is often faster than you need, but not locked to cycles. This might work fine for the blitter running as a separate emulation process, but the copper wears a different fur. A "standard" emulator won't do it - you need a special m68k+copper emulator. that can do things in step no matter what the execution speed is.

This is likely a good part of the reason why some games and demos just won't work with UAE and other efforts.

Re:68k games

[Anonymous Coward]

Take it from someone who used to program Copper every day in the early 90's: It's not exactly a miraculous superchip that is hard to emulate. Games are usually pretty easy, the Amiga demos are harder to emulate 100% thanks to various copper effects.

Sure, Amiga architecture was way different from PC, but these days PCs are so powerful they can emulate 68000+Blitter+Copper easily. I'm pretty sure UAE has this covered pretty damn well by now.

Re:68k games

[arth1]

Take it from someone who used to program Copper every day in the early 90's: It's not exactly a miraculous superchip that is hard to emulate.

No, the copper isn't, but what the copper triggers, when is somewhat harder.
You don't have a lock to scanline in an emulator. For the display effects, you need to emulate every scanline separately and generate a complete image as it would have looked at the end. No biggie when you have fast enough hardware.

However - and here lies the devil - the copper isn't just used for display effects but can also control a bunch of other hardware registers. (Including audio, where waiting until the end before presenting results won't do what you want - a simple example being creating a 100 or 120 Hz tone by doing two equally spaced copper moves per frame. And the CPU.)
And you can even modify the copper list while it is running, triggered from either the CPU or the copper through a copper-scheduled blit, or both. Then it becomes a small headache to get things done in the right order at the right time.

Getting some of it right is trivial. Getting all of it right is not.

Re:68k games

[Anonymous Coward]

This is in the works, more or less. Getting AROS to run on 68k was the first step towards seamless integration of emulated applications, which is WIP at the moment. Games can be run through an emulator, but the emulator itself will be bolted in eventually so you don't see any difference between emulated and native games.

Ooh, my captcha is "grandpa." Give me my Amiga back, consarnit!

Re:68k games

[Anonymous Coward]

Use an FPGA, program the copper onto that it will run at hardware speeds, seriously who emulates in software nowadays?

Flash it to FPGA :)

Every computer should have an FPGA in them (like we all cried for DSP's back in the mid 80s too).

Re:68k games

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you can. It will require emulation, obviously. Unless you pretend to run code written at very low level to hit a completely different hardware from nowadays PCs, which is absolutely impossible. And it was already done, surely. What changes, is that AROS provides its own Kickstart and does not require original Amiga licensed ROMs anymore. You can already use AROS ROMs with WinUAE and some other versions of UAE (it must be updated enough), but the target of Icaros Desktop is not allowing you to play your old games: is ALSO to allow you playing your games, while using your computer for other activities with current applications - like any other OS. What differs from the other OSes, obviously, is the Amiga heritage others haven't.

That's all. Use it if you like it. Use something different if you don't. Simple. =)

kind regards

p.bes

Re:68k games

[paolobesser]

Yep. Games already run on AROS without any Amiga licensed ROM. Just fire up UAE with AROS' own KickStart, and games should run wihout any major issue. We are now working on Jenus-UAE and AROS M68K to completely replace AmigaOS 3.x files, and run old workbench applications (like Wordworth, PageStream, ImageFX etcetera) in a coherent environment. Just think about Windows 7's XP mode, or any OS running VirtualBox or VMware with desktop integration. We can't do otherwise, since classic Amigas had completely different hardware and processor architecture than modern PCs.

Re:First Post

[pipatron]

The x86 architecture is actually still used a lot on the desktop and server market, but I understand what you mean. It's pretty dead in the tablets and cellphone market, the largest market for processors.

Why not use a Linux distribution?

[wvmarle]

I wonder why they wouldn't use a Linux distribution for this project.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I recall from the Amiga back then (a friend had one), and what I have seen here so far, this "Amiga Experience" is all about the GUI, not so much about the underlying tech. Which is no matter what totally different than on the original Amiga for the simple fact that we have so different hardware nowadays. Hard drives, more memory, USB, optical drives, WiFi, you name it. It wasn't there back then, and is standard now.

Already there are themes to make Gnome or KDE look and behave exactly like OS-X, or Mac Classic, or Windows XP or whatever. They can be themed so thoroughly, using different window managers probably even more possibilities, that I'd say this is the way to go.

Take a Linux distro, e.g. Ubuntu, as base, and build your own customisation on it. There are plenty of derivative distros that do it just like that. Ubuntu being a derivative itself. And presto you have the Amiga Experience, with all it's quirks, with all the underlying goodness of modern hardware support etc.

Or am I really missing something here?

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[HarrySquatter]

Because they don't want to use Linux? And, yes, it is also about the kernel, filesystem, etc. according to the Amiga snobs.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Well, according to the cult of the Amiga, you can't replicate the fluidity and responsiveness of Amiga with Linux. Amiga was about the hardware and software. The hardware was quirky, cool, and cutting edge. To use an Amiga in its day was like a trip to the future. Plus it didn't have any memory protection, so a single goof in a program would kill the entire system sadly you can't do that with just a gui in linux. At least not without creating your gui in the kernel.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[HarrySquatter]

Also, if you had finished the whole summary you'd notice how they want API compatibility with AmigaOS which you don't get from Linux or by changing the GUI.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Alan Shutko]

That's exactly what they did. Icarus Desktop is a distribution of AROS, in a prepackaged VM image to make it easy to use. AROS is similar to WINE, in that it can run programs within a hosting OS. It also has native ports, but those progress slowly on the hardware support side.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[idontgno]

Yeah. What we need is a Linux kernel module that traps userland segmentation faults and throws a kernel panic. XD

I love all my Amigas; I fought on the epic frontlines of the Amiga versus Atari BBS flamewars before most of you were an ache in your daddys' groins. I carried the Boing Ball flag into harm's way too many times to count. But the true Amiga experience, as depicted by connoisseurs, requires abandonment of such niceties as memory protection and process isolation.

The hardcore nostalgics forget that the Amiga didn't have memory protection first because the hardware wasn't routinely available, and more importantly because the seamless memory map allowed all of RAM to be a huge playground for the CPU and custom co-processors to accomplish amazing things at less than 8 Mhz. Also, the kernel was blazing fast because there was no meaningful context transition from userland to kernel; everything was memory-pointer based, and all memory was directly mapped and non-virtual.

Therefore, it was also fragile. But that was an acceptable cost for blazing speed and jaw-dropping media performance at a time that MS-DOS machines were single-tasking, playing beeps and boops through a 2" speaker in the system case. and displaying EGA-level graphics.

So, let's not wax too nostalgic. True nostalgists wouldn't want this any more than an intelligent car collector will settle for a kit car body, even if it's on a more powerful and capable chassis than the original 1950s Ferrari (for instance).

Amiga enthusiasts who are curious or interested in one evolutionary path of the old OS might want to see this.

Other than that, I can't imagine this being a very popular product.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[squiggleslash]

Because it's an operating system?

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[jedidiah]

Ironically, Linux is the perfect example of "API compatibility". It shares that with Unix. You could even make libamiga not dependent with x86 so it would run on things like Sparc, and PPC, and Raspberry PI.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Anonymous Coward]

But why do you want the amigaos api anyway? The amigaOS API is an old obsolete piece of shit (I know it because I used to develop on it) devoid of anything interesting in this day and age. If you really wanted to you could emulate it as a layer on top of a proper modern OS, if you really really care about running those three or four ancient amiga applications that amiga users still talk about with tears in their voice.

Really this amount of nostalgia induced blindness is pathetic.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[KingMotley]

I fought on the epic frontlines of the Amiga versus Atari BBS flamewars before most of you were an ache in your daddys' groins.

Most perhaps, but not all. Some of us here on slashdot actually wrote the BBS software that the flamewars went on.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[eternaldoctorwho]

I love all my Amigas

I'd imagine your Amigos are jealous.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[uradu]

Well said! I was with you in those trenches of Amiga fanboihood in the late 80s, preaching Amiga religion to anybody who would listen and hating on those who wouldn't. Let's face it, it was the only "modern" consumer OS at the time, with proper preemptive multitasking and coprocessing subsystems and a proper driver system for external hardware and message queues. Plus it had a very powerful UNIX style CLI with advanced scripting beyond anything outside of UNIX, a power user's wet dream. And you could open as many shells as you wanted and run simultaneous scripts. So yeah, it didn't have memory protection, but hey :) Oh, and until AmigaOS 2.0 with its Motif look the GUI looked like total shite, like something a bunch of Crayola wielding preschoolers came up with. I still loved that A500 with all my heart though, wouldn't have switched to a PC for anything. I still had the ROM Kernel Manuals sitting around until recently, pounds and pounds of them. Ah, the memories...

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[HarrySquatter]

Linux is the perfect example of API compatibility with AmigaOS? Huh?

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[HarrySquatter]

They want it most lkely so software developers doesn't need to rewrite any code written against the APIs. It makes it more likely you ony need to recompile not rewrite.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Lussarn]

Couldn't agree more with what you said. The Amiga was a breeding ground for technologies and programmers. For its day it had it all. Altough I was more of a "Hardware reference" guy, I still remember my first copperbars, spinning cube or a screen full of bobs in glorious 50fps like it was yesterday. But it was a short trip, the OS or hardware never evolved much inside Commodore. A lot of what made it great was third party. And when Commodore went bust the tech was already outdated, and really no way to fix things without starting over, something that never was going to happen. The speed and UI of the Amiga much came from the fact that it was a hack, a very polished prototype for things to come. Great memories indeed, and that's where I like to keep it.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[equex]

Yeah AREXX and the CLI was great. My favourite command was ASSIGN.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux doesn't even retain API compatibility with itself, never mind with other systems. It's just about the worst example of API compatibility. There's no such compatibility with Unix, not SVR4, nor any descendant of it, all it shares with Unix is a suite of userland tools which have the same names and do more or less the same thing, in general, with plenty of Linuxisms to break things with.

Linux isn't Unix, it has no relation to Unix other than trying to mimic it and having a certain level of POSIX compatibility (but then again, Windows and QNX have POSIX compatibility, so it doesn't mean as much as you think it does).

And using Linux for the purpose of retaining API compatibility with AmigaOS is just pointless, AROS exists already, it does the job already, why reinvent the wheel and duplicate all kinds of effort, not to mention having to essentially maintain their own fork of Linux, just for the sake of satisfying some random guy's Linux fetish?

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Bert64]

At the time, dos, macos, early versions of windows, atari tos etc also didn't have memory protection...AmigaOS was still a better os on similar spec hardware.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Bert64]

And the legacy lives on in some respects... When i interview someone, if they started out on the amiga they are in 99% of cases much better at the job than someone who started out on windows... I put this down to a system that encouraged you to learn about it, vs a system that discourages you and makes you fearful of breaking things (dont look at this dir, it contains system files and you might break something!).

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[uradu]

And gamers, don't forget gamers! Because in the 80s the Amiga wasn't just an awesome development platform but also by far the best gaming platform. No telling how many of today's avid gaming Gen-Xers started on the Amiga. For me it was the other way around though--I got to the Amiga because of the games and flash and it dragged me tooth and nails into the programming world, making my future career all but inevitable. I will confess that before getting the Amiga I was actually seriously in love with the Atari ST because it LOOKED like a more polished product with its crisp monochrome screen and no-nonsense and clean GUI, plus of course that built-in MIDI interface that beckoned to a budding musician. But after endless pouring over magazine articles and learning more about the technology behind the two platforms the choice was clear. While both the ST and the Mac (which I sure as heck couldn't afford anyway) had more polished UIs, their underlying OSs were quite primitive compared to the Amiga. Few non-technical people realized just what a quantum leap that OS was. It really took until Windows 95 and its new 32-bit code base (disregarding its legacy 16-bit support crap) for a mainstream OS to replicate what the Amiga had since 1985. The Mac only got there with OS X. What's most amazing though is that the original Amiga 1000 did all that with a paltry 256K of RAM. It's fascinating to look under the covers and see the memory efficient design of the ROM, with much of the OS executing in place in ROM, the shared linked-list based data structures that were used for anything from memory maps to sprites to sound maps. You could so easily see the various subsystems independently at work when the OS went belly-up with a Guru Meditation while the sprites still merrily moved across the screen and the sound still played (provided those data structures hadn't been trashed). Oh, and who can forget the Amiga tracker scene of the day, with all those cool MODs? Anyone remember the Axel F one? Fire off some of those for your friends and they'd be all gobsmacked--wow, a computer can do THAT?!

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[dammy]

AROS team didn't want to use Linux (although the AROS Developers use Linux to develope AROS), but Commodore USA is using Mint called CommodoreOS Vision (currently in Beta) for their new Commodore Amigas: http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_OS_Vision.aspx

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Soporific]

Wayne Bell? ;)

~S

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory protection creates sloppy programmers!

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[KingMotley]

Nah, I was around long before Wayne Bell. By the time he hit the scene, I was already out.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love all my Amigas; I fought on the epic frontlines of the Amiga versus Atari BBS flamewars before most of you were an ache in your daddys' groins.

Do you really think most slashdotters are teenagers?

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Anonymous Coward]

While both the ST and the Mac (which I sure as heck couldn't afford anyway) had more polished UIs, their underlying OSs were quite primitive compared to the Amiga. Few non-technical people realized just what a quantum leap that OS was. It really took until Windows 95 and its new 32-bit code base (disregarding its legacy 16-bit support crap) for a mainstream OS to replicate what the Amiga had since 1985. The Mac only got there with OS X. What's most amazing though is that the original Amiga 1000 did all that with a paltry 256K of RAM.

I'm not sure you do justice to the original MacOS here. As much as AOS was ahead of MacOS in some areas, MacOS was way ahead in others. And some of that was pretty key to why the Mac survived and the Amiga didn't.

Specifically, I'm thinking of the design and feature-richness of Apple's GUI toolkit. It was way ahead of every other mass market GUI design in the 1980s, even things like GEM (the GUI Atari used).

Much like AmigaOS, some MacOS design decisions turned out to be unfortunate in the long run. But they were simultaneously brilliant. For example, the OS could dynamically load/unload code and data resources behind an application's back without needing a MMU. The low level details actually ended up being a major reason why it was hard to add true MMU based virtual address spaces and preemptive multitasking to MacOS, but in the short and medium term, the architecture was sheer wizardry which permitted Apple to cram a dramatically better GUI than Amiga into fewer resources. (just 64K ROM and 128K RAM in the original Macintosh)

In the medium term, Apple's OS design was much better at adapting to new hardware without breaking applications, and thus permitted the platform to grow. One giant weakness of the Amiga was that so many programs banged the metal directly, bypassing the OS because there were either no services to abstract that piece of the metal, or none worth using. This made it hard for Commodore to freely update the original HW design without breaking most applications on the market. On the Apple side, they did such a good job of attracting programmers to do things the Official Way (by making the Official Way really good), and evangelizing this attitude, that it wasn't as hard for them to jack up the house and slip in a new foundation underneath.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[uradu]

You're right of course, in terms of the GUI the Mac was better thought out and more flexible. Frankly I preferred its look and feel to the Amiga until 2.0 arrived. I also remember its movable memory architecture where each memory access happened relative to a dynamic offset that the OS could change at any point, which allowed it to move chunks of memory around as it saw fit without upsetting their owner apps. I'm not really sure the actual design of the OS had has much to do with the success of the Mac though as did the marketing machine behind it. Commodore was self destructive in every way imaginable, they couldn't recognize a good thing if it bit them in the ass. They could have easily taken the Mac OS and turned it into the same failure as the Amiga if given the chance. We loved the Amiga despite Commodore, while many people love the Mac because of Apple. It was a great machine for its time, the Linux of the day for us renegades back then. But when the writing was on the wall that it was going nowhere, around 1992, I swallowed my pride and bought a PC. While Windows 3.1 did suck majorly, with Windows 95 it became good enough to where one could finally concentrate on the apps rather than fight the OS. Nowadays it seems the OS is becoming less and less relevant with so much moving online. I routinely swap between Windows and Ubuntu, and may even give the Hackintosh a go. But this new wannabe Amiga? Nah...

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not fully correct. Icaros Desktop is a standalone operating system which runs on the bare metal, like every other else. It comes in a package which includes the ISO for the boot DVD, a readme file and QEMU for Windows, to allow laziest people to try the live mode in a protected environment (Icaros in a box). When standalone, Icaros Desktop (and AROS in general) runs native on the hardware and doesn't need any other OS hosting it. You can, indeed, host it under Linux, BSD or Windows, copying all files from the DVD into a dedicated directory and replacing AROS system files with the ones of a hosted version. Have a look in the download section of www.aros.org to see how many flavours of the system already exist, and choose the one that fits your need. =)

kind regards

p.bes

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[paolobesser]

"Specifically, I'm thinking of the design and feature-richness of Apple's GUI toolkit. It was way ahead of every other mass market GUI design in the 1980s, even things like GEM (the GUI Atari used). ... in the short and medium term, the architecture was sheer wizardry which permitted Apple to cram a dramatically better GUI than Amiga into fewer resources. (just 64K ROM and 128K RAM in the original Macintosh)" Sorry, having used both Amiga and Mac in the late '80s, I have to disagree here. Call them personal tastes, but I felt the 1-button interface of the Mac quite bulky, if compared to full right-menu 2-buttons paradygm of the Amiga. Both AmigaOS (pardon, Workbench, at the time) and MacOS had their examples of wizardry - after all, hardware resources were scarce at the time - but in the end the Amiga was the platform which got the most of them. The evidence is the *fact* that Amiga could emulate the Mac and even run its software full speed, while the contrary was not possible at all. There were many advantages with Amigas: public, draggable screens for instance (I saw that latest version of MacOS X has something similar... good thing to see, 25 years after), the ability to choose what files had a icon and what hadn't, the ability to switch without issues from a graphical to a shell-driven way of doing things... The Mac always gave me the feeling that it could somehow "understand" what I would have liked to do, and it was really amazing, but it also gave me the sensation that all my possibile actions were previously decided by Apple, and that I couldn't hack very much about them. The Amiga, on the other hand, was the total freedom of expression. Great times, the Eighties...

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[mrbugjacobs]

Just to correct: AROS is not like WINE. Its more like a OS that can be run directly on x86 hardware or inside a VM like VirtualBox. It is correct that native hardware support is limited though.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[mrbugjacobs]

And to correct myself, It apparently has a PPC port as well - I believe however the ARM version runs in a VM. There is also a guy that wanted to integrate AROS with Linux - Aeros, somewhat like some people here suggest should be done.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[mrbugjacobs]

And to doublecorrect myself: Im not sure if Aeros actually might run native, with Linux running by the side.

Re:Why not use a Linux distribution?

[Anonymous Coward]

I must beg to differ, on a few points. Firstly, the 128k macs were nearly useless, and much stuff from the early eras didn't really work well--or at all--under later System/Finder combos, and it was supposedly impossible to update one generation of hardware to match the later ones. Also, the CPU did /everything/, including put dots in the screen--this took up about half the CPU cycles, making it /way/ faster to run your Mac software on an Atari or Amiga emulator.

The Amiga also had an official set if guidelines, and /most/ hardware followed it--as a result, I'm still using some software that was written for a MHz,512/K/ memory A500, on an emulated 1GHz,64 MB, '060 running OS3.9, 2.5 'Boing Bags' (think 'service packs'), and a lot of other patches. (Games were the main exception, of course, but a few serious apps fell into the trap, 'Brilliance' being the one I had the most problems with.)

But the thing that /really/ made the machine what it was was an attitude that it was the machine's job to do what the user wanted, and not the other way around.

OTOH, the management sucked so badly it was creating positrons and electrons from the Higgs vacuum....(grin)

pgf

Re:First Post

[drdaz]

I've got a feeling the AC was saying that Amiga OS is 'only used by hobbyists in lala land'...

FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Viol8]

It was a superb machine (arguably the best personal computer) in the 80s and early 90s, but its now 2012 and things have moved on. Why are people still intent on trying to resurrect it like some festering computer zombie? Its making a mockery of the Amiga name and of the time and effort the original designers put into its HARDWARE - because it was the hardware rather than the OS which really made it what it was.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[squiggleslash]

No, it was the OS. The OS was fantastic. I'd have been much more comfortable jumping to ix86 back in the mid 1990s if AmigaOS had been available then.

The hardware was fantastic in 1985. In 1990, it was OK but looking a little odd. By the time AGA finally rolled out, there were serious concerns amongst many in the Amiga community that the Amiga hardware was already way behind the PC and Mac. And, of course, infamously, it was about that time that Carmack made it clear that Doom would never be ported to the Amiga due to hardware concerns, despite it running on the lowest end PCs of that era.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

"despite it running on the lowest end PCs of that era". You make it sounds like it was an arbitrary decision. The Amiga didn't have enough power for drawing images that needed per-pixel calculations. The planar screen format is the big performance killer here, it made per-pixel operations very expensive due to all the bit fiddling required. The miggy's graphical strength was in pushing sprites with its blitter chip.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[BitwizeGHC]

No, it was the OS. The OS was fantastic. I'd have been much more comfortable jumping to ix86 back in the mid 1990s if AmigaOS had been available then.

IBM peeled off some Amiga developers to work on the Workplace Shell for OS/2 2.x and later. That OS also had some enthusiasts (and still has a few).

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

You make it sounds like it was an arbitrary decision.

No, you made it sound like I was suggesting it was an arbitrary decision. Try reading the whole of a comment rather than a sentence fragment next time.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[KermodeBear]

Not being familiar with the Amiga OS at all, could you explain what made it so good? Is there anything about it that is better than what we have today?

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Hatta]

it was about that time that Carmack made it clear that Doom would never be ported to the Amiga due to hardware concerns

Apparently, Carmack was wrong. It won't run on an Amiga 500, but the A500 was 6 years old at that point. The Amiga 1200 was current at the time Doom was released. And you can obviously run Doom on it now.

What Carmack really meant was that it wasn't worth the effort to port Doom to the Amiga hardware.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[squiggleslash]

Well, kinda. The Amiga 500 was 6 years old, but the 500 and 600 were the most popular brands of Amiga ever made and there were tens of millions of them. The 1200 was sold towards the end of Commodore's life and didn't sell at anything like the same rate.

Could the 1200 run Doom? Well, yeah, just about, but that wasn't what Carmack was getting at. He was looking forward, saying "Look, mainstream Amigas have this bitplane architecture. It's nice, and flexible, but when it comes to 3D games, it's just never going to pan out. Sorry." Unbelievable levels of assembly-level optimization would be needed to get Doom to work at an acceptable framerate on a 1200, and as for a popular model of Amiga, forget it. What would that say about Carmack's next big project?

Commodore knew it was a problem at the time too, and the CD32 actually had a bizarre hardware hack thing in it that would copy data in a chunky forward optimally to a planer format so the CPU didn't have to do that work, but...

The point I'm making is that the Amiga, in the early nineties, just wasn't something you bought for the hardware. It was nice hardware, but you could get better, and what's more, if you knew where the industry was heading (in terms of hardware requirements to support the software that was coming), the Amiga architecture was on its last legs.

Commodore knew that. Actually, they knew that in the late eighties, but various projects to fix it were either cancelled (AAA) or came too late (Hombre - which arguably was an attempt to create a post Amiga system, rather than a next generation Amiga.)

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[pipatron]

I use Amiga OS almost every day. Technically, Linux have almost every capability that Amiga OS have.

I write "almost" because the Amiga OS is more or less a true "microkernel", so you could replace most everything in the system live. Normally you don't do this though, and it's pretty insignificant.

What it excelled at during the days was that it had true multitasking with a fast message passing functionality, and it took something like 5-10 years until other desktop operating systems had that (windows, macos, atari etc). In combination with hardware that could have different resolution and colours on different parts of the screen it meant that you could easily work with multiple programs at once without anything being sluggish.

All of this is easily done today, and I don't see the point of running Amiga OS on an x86 except for the "because I can"-reason. I use my Amiga because it has cool hardware and I like to code for it.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[uhuru_meditation]

Apart from multitasking, lots of colors, very small kernel and speed, hundreds of smart and cool features, graphical beatifications, smarmy and small programs - it was always safe to turn off or turn on computer by - pressing on/off button - without waiting for the shutdown crap. It booted in few seconds - well below 10. It had 4 channel stereo sound. There was an ecosystem of add-on cards, pushing it way beyond anything out there. Apart from all that - in the very early 90's the only animated thing on a PC was green blinking cursor, while Amiga run video productions and myriad of graphical editing and manipulation imaging programs. Do I have to mention games? TV connectivity, composite video, RGB video and various simultaneous display and video overlay possibilities. All that at max speeds of 50 MHz - mind you. So ..not really better, but different.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[squiggleslash]

Over time, there probably isn't a lot that's better than what we have today, beyond efficiency and a look and feel that I just felt comfortable with - which itself is somewhat subjective... hey, take a look here: http://home.datacomm.ch/mrupp/TAWS/WB.html

At the time however, these were considered radical:

- Pre-emptive multitasking
- A shell that was half way between Command.com and Bourne. Had some very nice user friendly aspects, such as named parameters and a shared command line parsing system.
- The file system supported mixed case, long, filenames.
- An automatically-managed multiple desktop system. Larger apps would have their own desktops. Each could be a different screen mode if necessary (important in the days when there was a resolution/colour tradeoff)

Everything was patchable and extendable. Utilities were encouraged to intercept standard library calls for all kinda of stuff. The file system had some extremely nice features such as an assignments system that allowed you to assign symbolic names to directories - you didn't have drive letters or a single file system, but something more partitionable. From Workbench 2.0 onwards it had an extremely pleasant look and feel (older versions, not so much.)

It's hard really to describe how radical and better it was at the time to anything else mainstream. Unfortunately, it became obsolete the moment MMU support (and other security features) became important, which is to say, as soon as the Internet proper came on the scene.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Jeremi]

Not being familiar with the Amiga OS at all, could you explain what made it so good?

It had extremely efficient and lightweight pre-emptive multitasking, such that multiple programs could run simultaneously and respond to the user very quickly even on very modest hardware (e.g. 7MHz 68000 CPU, 512KB RAM).

The downside of that was that there was no memory protection -- all programs ran in the same memory space. While that made efficient data sharing trivial (any program could just get a pointer to any system data it needed to access, and read it), it also made things very insecure -- one buggy program could (and often did) crash the entire OS.

Is there anything about it that is better than what we have today?

For today's users, no. Given today's vastly more powerful hardware, modern OS's do a better job of meeting the user's needs, especially in the aspects of stability and security. (OTOH if you for some reason needed an embedded OS to run a snappy GUI on a very lightweight CPU, AmigaOS wouldn't be a bad way to go, if it had the appropriate hardware support)

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Cyberax]

Doom used planar display mode on x86, so it was NOT a problem. In fact, it allowed several important optimizations.

The first Doom-based game to use true 'flat' 13h mode was Hexen.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[anss123]

The Amiga 1200 was current at the time Doom was released. And you can obviously run Doom on it now.

Running Doom on a stock Amiga 1200 would be a painful experience. If it's upgraded with a 030 CPU and 4MB memory is another matter, but there wasn't many of those. You could also run Doom on an upgraded Amiga 500, as there were 030 upgrade cards for them too.

But I strongly doubt a stock A1200 would be anything but epically slow on Doom. First you need to run it straight from a floppy drive, as most owners didn't have a hard drive. Then you'd have to squeeze the game into half the memory, and that memory is quite slow as it was used by both the chip-set and the CPU (On the stock Amiga 1200 Commodore had in their infinite wisdom neglected to add fast ram). And even with fast ram the CPU itself is a good bit slower than a 386, which only ran Doom okayish as it was.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[toejam13]

At the time, the Amiga had a very good blend of processor, graphics and audio performance tied together with a multitasking OS (rare at the time) for a reasonable price. But the OS was admired because it had a very small footprint and was very fast. It was also easy to use.

The only major benefit you'd get out of it today is that it is incredibly lightweight. But that is because it uses a very simple memory management subsystem. There are a lot of benefits of using a more complex memory subsystem, which is why the one used by the Amiga has been abandoned outside of all but the most basic embedded systems.

One feature that would have been nice to bring to a modern OS was the datatype system. It was essentially a universal codec subsystem that could handle not only the different encoding systems (codecs), but the containers as well. And it wasn't limited to video - it could also handle audio, text and images. The closest thing Windows has today is the ffdshow codec package for the DirectShow subsystem.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom was always chunky mode. The optimizations it has are actually based on the fact it's chunky - using columns of pixels, for example.

Hexen used the Doom engine. If Hexen's version of the Doom engine was planar, and the Hexen version wasn't, then they wouldn't be same friggin' engine!

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[cpu6502]

>>>Not being familiar with the Amiga OS at all, could you explain what made it so good? Is there anything about it that is better than what we have today?

It had the same power as Windows98 or MacOs 10.0, but back in 1985. It had preemptive tasking, near-photographic level images/videos, and near-CD quality sound. So in other words in 1985 it was over a decade ahead in technology (and now it's about a decade behind). There's really no reason to use AmigaOS today, except to experiment with a different system..... same reason I downloaded Puppy Linux. Just for fun.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Nutria]

The downside of that was that there was no memory protection

Replacing a non-protected OS with a protected version while retaining app compatibility is impossible. That's why Apple had to ditch the original Mac code base and replace it with OSX.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[squiggleslash]

BTW, quote from Dave Haynie (who posts here occasionally. Originally a C64 engineer but moved on to the Amiga group and later chipset design work):

And while ads might have helped, additional interfacing with Marketing might not have done much in those days. Amiga engineers were better in touch with the buyers than Marketing. Because most of us WERE the target market - we were making our own new toy, within the financial limits accorded.

That's what's missing from modern computing.

Ubuntu is about cornering the desktop and tablet market.

Mac OS X / iOS is about "user experience" and purity.

Windows is about controlling the market and adding the features users are demanding.

Android is about keeping mobile devices open.

Who's sitting down any more and saying "The computer we're going to build is the one I want to use"?

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

Others have covered a lot of the general stuff (though I didn't see anyone mention the split-screen ability, which I used a lot), but here's one specific feature I miss: Assigns. We can do half-assed substitutes with symlinks and the like, but actual assigns were awesome. Say you had three different directories where you had fonts.

>DIR SYSFONTS
  one.font
>DIR LOCALFONTS
  two.font
>DIR DOWNLOAD/FONTS
  three.font

You could create an assign named FONTS: like so:
>ASSIGN FONTS: SYSFONTS DOWNLOAD/FONTS LOCALFONTS
>DIR FONTS:
    one.font two.font three.font

and then
>COPY four.font FONTS:
>DIR FONTS:
    one.font two.font three.font four.font
>DIR LOCALFONTS
  two.font four.font

  This happened because it would do the write operation to whatever the last directory in the assign list was, and assigns could be added or changed on the fly. No mucking about with multiple layers of symlinks and such nonsense. It was really handy, and widely used through the system for abstracting various important system directories.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the early 90s PCs were already running windows 3.0, or OS/2, there was NT by 93, and by the mid 90s there were tons of free *nix clones running graphical interfaces on said PCs.

One thing that has never ceased to amuse me is the capacity for self-delusion of the Amiga community.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[toejam13]

The point I'm making is that the Amiga, in the early nineties, just wasn't something you bought for the hardware

Yes and no. The Amiga 3000 and Amiga 4000 were the cheapest 68040 workstations at the time. Amiga Unix (System V Release 4) and NetBSD could be loaded onto them, making them more cost effective than anything from Sun.

The problem was that the rest of the system was suffering. The Enhanced Chipset (ECS) was little more than an incremental upgrade of the Original Chipset (OCS). It should have looked more like the Advanced Architecture (AA/AGA) that came out in '92.

Commodore was just never able to smoothly move their architectures forward. They had the same problem back in the 8-bit days. But with the Amiga, it sounds as if they'd start designing a new chipset only to backtrack and then release some quick fix as a stop-gap. I'm curious if they were bad at estimating fabrication and support chip costs or if they were bad at coming up with a target price and sticking with it. I mean, near the end you had AAA then AA/AGA then AA+ and lastly Hombre. Sounds very chaotic.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

"Look, mainstream Amigas have this bitplane architecture. It's nice, and flexible, but when it comes to 3D games, it's just never going to pan out. Sorry."

Doom on the PC actually used a planar mode for its graphics, informally called "Mode Y". It's a 320x200 pixels mode that allows for double buffering, you didn't get double buffering with Mode 13h (which was chunky).

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Belial6]

No. It isn't. They would just need to virtualize every non-protected app so that they had their own memory space.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Belial6]

The one thing that Amiga had that still isn't in modern OSes is DataTypes. On the Amiga, if a new graphics format came out, a new DataType could be written, and every well written application on your system would instantly be able to use the new format. It was like device drivers for data.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Belial6]

They didn't as if the OS was better, but if there was anything about it that was better. I would say that DataTypes was an awesome feature that is still not in modern OSes, and we would all be better off if it was.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is the general plan for AROS to do memory protection. (Eventually, they're not feature complete or fully stable yet.) Legacy apps will live in their own space where they can fandango all over each others' memory space, (and do the funky/cool interprocess memory finagling) but not the OS or the apps that use the new memory system.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Belial6]

To be fair it wasn't Windows98 that the Amiga matched. It was closer to Windows95, and even then it was a little behind. The day before Windows95 came out, the Amiga was well ahead of it's peers. The day Win95 hit the streets, it was a little behind. Of course, at the end of the day, I am quibbling over whether Amiga was 10 years ahead or 13 years ahead of the rest of the industry.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[squiggleslash]

There's a hell of a lot of Amiga stuff that relies upon tasks all seeing a single, unified, memory image. IPC for example. And even stuff like drawing graphics is done in an environment in which processes assume they'll be able to address the screen directly.

Now, before you go "But that's OK, because you can just..." and then explain the obvious solutions, yeah, I know. The problem here is that I've yet to hear solutions that do not fundamentally result in an OS that has no resemblance to the original, an OS that loses just about everything that made it interesting to begin with.

Which is what sucks about the situation. Pretty much the only way I can think of to implement security in a unified memory model OS, short of having the world's most complex MMU, would be to use managed code. Yeah. I don't like that idea either. And that wouldn't add security to older apps.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[antdude]

I find it interesting that fans released an Amiga port based on DOOM's source code. It seems to run well too.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[squiggleslash]

I'm curious if they were bad at estimating fabrication and support chip costs or if they were bad at coming up with a target price and sticking with it. I mean, near the end you had AAA then AA/AGA then AA+ and lastly Hombre. Sounds very chaotic.

Neither. From the Interview with Dave Haynie I linked to earlier, this gives some insight into the day to day problems the Amiga team had to deal with.

How to you feel about the A4000 in relation to the A3000? It's allways felt like a rushed system to me, which is the reason I never got one. AGA didn't do much for me wich was another reason not to get that A3000+

AA was a good solution for what it did, it just wasn't enough to satisfy most people by that time. But hey, it did get finished, and that's an achievement in itself.

There's an A4000 story, which I'll relate. The story begins in 1991, when Sydnes took over as VP of Engineering. I was working on the _real_ A3000+, the first prototype of which was the first AA machine ever, back when we called it "Pandora". This machine was using mainly A3000 parts (I planned to revise it to the '040 bus once the AA stuff had been proven - custom chip lead times are many times that of gate arrays; we had the in-house gate arrays at the time that be turned over in about a month), though it had the AGA, and an AT&T DSP3210 subsystem. This would have delivered 16-bit audio I/O, software modem, number crunching 5x-10x faster than a 68040, etc. Not too shabby.

Ok, so Sydnes some in, and his first mission is to destroy the appearance that the former administration (Henri Ruben and Jeff Porter) were as organized and far along as they were. So he cancels all products, and turns the A3000+ into just a development system for programmers (Jeff Porter is able to keep the DSP development alive, I'm able to kludge two working DSP systems even with the DSP control logic, in one of the new custom chips, flawed).

Somewhere down the road, Sydnes and Ali, or perhaps their pet chimpanzee for all I know, decide they need a new computer, something more mid-level. Rather than revive the "A1000+", which was Joe Augenbraun's project to build an $800 AA-based, 25MHz entry-level machine for April 2002 release, he gets Greg Berlin to build a scaled-down A3000. This is dubbed the A1000jr (Sydnes claim to fame at IBM was that he was the manager in charge of the PCjr, the greatest failure in IBM PC history), and is basically an A3000 with 68EC020, two Zorro II slots, and ECS.

Now, this is ready to go in April. You have to understand Commodore's working to know what happened here, but basically, C= was run like a cellular company. Each cell did it's thing, and ran fairly independently of the parent (CIL, Commodore International Limited). This is why every company did marketing differently; different independent marketing companies. So now, to get their product, each marketing company places orders, and C= fills them as best as they can. But guess what absolutely no one ordered. If you said the "A1000jr" (real name as Amiga 2400 or something like that), you win the LBM Effigy, to be burned later. Nope, no one wanted a stripped down A3000 without AA graphics (or SCSI, or flickerfixer, or Zorro III, etc).

So now Sydnes is in a panic. So he calls on Greg again (Greg's a good guy, one my oldest friends, just not in the best situation then) to start up the next thing, the A4000. Fast. This command came in May, they wanted to ship in September. So Greg takes the A2400 design, drops in the AA stuff from my A3000+ design, gets me in to fix it to run Zorro III, etc. Sydnes mandates IDE (ATA-1, I think is all you get), so that's done, poorly, with a PAL (you couldn't do good ATA in a cheap programmable part back then; you can today), so goodbye SCSI. Anyway, no joy, but there's an A4000.

The '040 board, too, was a left over. Scott Schaeffer was our '040 expert (I had been the CPU guy, but had too mu

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[toejam13]

Running Doom on a stock Amiga 1200 would be a painful experience

I agree. There was just too much overhead doing chunky to planar conversion. Even with the CD32 and its Akiko chip where you could do the conversion in hardware, the results were mediocre at best.

The question is, what was the choke point? The MC68EC020/14, the Akiko or the AGA chipset? Would the stock 020/14 have been enough if AGA included an 8-bit chunky mode, or would an 020/20 or 030/16 been needed?

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[squiggleslash]

I've tried to find some evidence for this on the net and I can't find a damned thing. It contradicts pretty much everything that was said at the time, said since, and, for that matter, makes any sense. If Doom used a planar mode, then frankly, the question arises why even use the algorithm they did?

Do you have a citation?

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[anss123]

The c2p stuff wasn't too much of an overhead, the big perf. killer is simple lack of memory bandwidth. The game would have to be scaled down to 64 colors at the very least, as 256 colors used up pretty much all the bandwidth. Add 4 MB of fast ram and the AGA (or ECS) chipset is free to consume all the membandwidth it needs without hurting CPU performance.

As far as CPU goes, any 020 is likely too slow (unless there's lots and lots of room for optimization in the Doom engine). A 16MHz 030 is better, but is still slower than the 25MHz minimum requirement of PC Doom (a 030 and a 386 is roughly equivalent clock for clock). So if you get it running it means playing in a tiny low rez window, playable I suppose but hardly a joyful experience.

A quick YouTube search shows doom running well enough on 040 Amigas, while even 50MHz 030s seem to be struggling with choppy slow frame rates. IOW the choice point is likely the CPU, as even the ECS chipset manages a convincing enough version of Doom (colors are naturally reduced there)

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[peppepz]

despite it running on the lowest end PCs of that era.

It required a 386 with 4 MB of RAM, and ran miserably slow on such a machine. In fact, I reckon that Doom marks the starting point of that era during which PC games became closer to tech demos rather than something funny to play; and to be properly played, they required a computer that costed twice the amount one could afford, and which would be worth one quarter of that price after a couple of months.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

When Googeling, it helps to put stuff like "Mode X" in quotes.

Link: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/57861-have-you-ever-run-doom-below-system-requirements/

Now, here's a bunch of posts where they discuss how Doom does its graphics. They even do a disassembly, concluding that the game uses "Mode Y". I.e. a planar graphic mode. Quake also uses Mode X/Y, as it allows for stuff like double buffering.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[zardozo]

It was a superb machine (arguably the best personal computer) in the 80s and early 90s, but its now 2012 and things have moved on. Why are people still intent on trying to resurrect it like some festering computer zombie? Its making a mockery of the Amiga name and of the time and effort the original designers put into its HARDWARE - because it was the hardware rather than the OS which really made it what it was.

it was the OS and the HARDWARE!! the two made the whole greater than the sum of it's parts. no oher OS/hardware combo before or since has ever come close to that kind of synergy. The OS is still more intuituve and user friendly than anything else out there. with Amiga you could just plug your sound card in(if you even needed one) and your audio software of choice could use it. with Linux you have to deal with the trioka of terror known as ALSA, PULSE, JACK and god only knows what else. there always some tweaking & confgging to be done especially with usb audio stuf. thankfully you can go online and get answers but inux is still pretty much for power usrs and hobbyists. It is way to unwieldy in it's complexity because it was designed from the start by geeks for geeks and noone else untill 10 or so years ago. and yes by god we had the right to laugh at the pc and mac users of the day. i fell sorry for those that didn't experience the amiga.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

> It required a 386 with 4 MB of RAM

Similar requirements to Windows 3.1, there were millions of office computers which met this spec. Doom sold a lot of copies for lunch hour deathmatches.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Bert64]

It was slow even with an 030, it was just about playable on a 68040, and the only amiga to come with a 68040 by default was the A4000... Also the default 68040 card in the A4000 was quite slow, the one i played it on was significantly faster than a stock A4000.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[toejam13]

The problem C= had with producing the chipsets, etc, was almost 100% politics.

I see two surprising things. First, that the board of directors would have allowed Sydnes to kill the A3000+ project without anything else in the pipeline. Second, that Commodore was so seriously decentralized. For a company as small as Commodore, you'd think that board of directors would have been more involved in calling the shots.

I'm NOT surprised by the price constraints with the A4000. Commodore was never able to shake Tramiel's mantra of "for the masses, not the classes". It is rather sad that we didn't have an A3000p-derived 68040 AGA system. It would have still been significantly cheaper than the [68040 equipped] Mac Quadra 700, Mac Quadra 900 or the [SuperSparc equipped] SparcStation S10. They could still have had the A1200 to match the Macintosh LC. Too bad they didn't include an EC020/20 option in addition to the EC020/14.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[squiggleslash]

Thank you, that's interesting.

Very surprised by it actually, pretty much everyone insisted at the time it was the lack of chunky graphics! I'm guessing that it probably was, but Carmack saw it was worthwhile to do the work for the PC given the PC's marketshare.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the Amiga 3000/4000 market was quite small. Though Carmack did port Doom to the Atari Jaguar, and that wasn't exactly a huge market either. All other Doom ports were done by other companies.

Today you can play Doom on 030/040 AGA and ECS Amigas, so c2p wasn't a show stopper.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[toejam13]

As far as CPU goes, any 020 is likely too slow ... a 16MHz 030 is better, but is still slower than the 25MHz minimum requirement of PC Doom

True, but I don't see Commodore releasing a 68EC030/25 as their entry level processor in 1992. Even over at Apple where Gassée was busy pushing high-end systems, they still released the Mac LC with only a 68020/16.

I guess a good question to ask is how much more would it cost to have produced an A1200 with a 68EC030/16 versus a 68EC020/16. More expensive chip and socket, an extra eight memory bus lines on the motherboard and so on. Also, would they have run it at its native 16MHz like in the A3000 or a NTSC colorsync multiple of 14.32MHz.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from multitasking, lots of colors, very small kernel and speed, hundreds of smart and cool features, graphical beatifications, smarmy and small programs - it was always safe to turn off or turn on computer by - pressing on/off button - without waiting for the shutdown crap. It booted in few seconds - well below 10.

A clean install of AmigaOS 3.1 on a semi-modern HDD or a flash card takes less than 5 seconds. A modern TV takes slightly longer to boot.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, before you go "But that's OK, because you can just..." and then explain the obvious solutions, yeah, I know. The problem here is that I've yet to hear solutions that do not fundamentally result in an OS that has no resemblance to the original, an OS that loses just about everything that made it interesting to begin with.

But that's OK, because you can just... write applications that aren't buggy as hell and tries to access memory they don't have right to.
Memory protection creates bad programmers. Get rid of them and lack of MMU isn't really that big of a deal.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[anss123]

With the Amiga 1200 being such a low cost system, adding a 030 in 1992 was perhaps not a realistic option. But Doom was released in December 1993, and Commodore could perhaps have had a cheap 030 machine ready for early 1994 with a decent port of Doom.

However, by that time Commodore was bankrupt.

If you're going to get Doom on the Amiga I think you need to go back as far as 1986. C= was in financial difficulties back then, and the Amiga was yet to become a runaway success, and therefore they didn't invest as much in Amiga development as they could have. With some focus they would have had ECS ready by 1987, AGA by 1989 and been more competitive against VGA and SVGA.

However they're still faced with the problem that the 68k is on its way out. 486 PCs will be cheaper than 040 Amigas, no way around that, and a CPU rendered Doom needs the grunt of a 040 to look truly impressive.

If C= is going to have a low cost system that can run Doom they'll probably need to make a 3D accelerating chipset. The Atari Jaguar ran Doom despite having just a 68K CPU, so it's certainly possible. Imagine C= and Amiga being on the forefront of 3D gaming =)

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[damnbunni]

DataTypes survive in a limited context; audio and video codecs do much the same thing.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Belial6]

True. It is pretty sad that they are still handled in such a limited fashion.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[uhuru_meditation]

Back in the early 90s PCs were already running windows 3.0, or OS/2, there was NT by 93, and by the mid 90s there were tons of free *nix clones running graphical interfaces on said PCs.

Comparing Windows 3.0 to Amiga is like comparing Commodore 64 to Silicon Graphic. WinNT? That was the crappiest thing ever to run though chip's veins. Mind you that one of the first ever commercials for PC was a fat guy carrying huge box while his wife answers: "Why PC? To shop, of course!" Amiga commercial was featuring Buzz Aldrin and dewds who flew to the Moon, Andy Warhol and tons of other interesting ppl. That was the difference and it shows where are we today - still same old crappy dominance of retarded tech, run and produced by seriously demented characters acting as software managers "making the decisions"..

One thing that has never ceased to amuse me is the capacity for self-delusion of the Amiga community.

This can only write really sad computer user with no computing history, probably owning "all Apple" things ever produced and a gaming PC. Coding VB or C# for a sad living, most likely. Self-delusion was just a wish that others get educated and knowledgeable in software and hardware at the time by keeping and pushing Amiga to a real mainstream, or even better analogy - the one can compare (and understand) today - Amiga was Google while PC and Apple were Bing way back then.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Dwonis]

Not being familiar with the Amiga OS at all, could you explain what made it so good?

It was a bit like having a Pentium machine running Windows 95, with hardware-accelerated video and sound, but it was elegant and---probably most importantly---it was released 10 years earlier. It also happened to be able to be synchronized to an incoming NTSC/PAL signal, so it gave you a lot of interesting video production features an order of magnitude cheaper than the alternatives.

Imagine what it would be like if you had an iPad when the original BlackBerry was first released. That's what it was like to have an Amiga back then.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[toejam13]

Commodore could perhaps have had a cheap 030 machine ready for early 1994 with a decent port of Doom

Maybe. But Commodore had entered a joint venture with HP to use PA-7100 processors by that point. Entry level machines might have used a PA-7100/33 rather than a MC68030/25.

If you're going to get Doom on the Amiga I think you need to go back as far as 1986

I think you need to go back a few more years than that. Commodore might have done better had their board of directors ousted Tramel and his sons earlier than they did. Tramel's business strategy of selling deeply discounted low-end computers kept it out of the much more lucrative business computer market. It also resulted in a number of home computers that had no market. An earlier ouster might have also prevented him from spinning up Atari after Warner dumped it, lessening the fragmentation of the home market with the Atari ST.

I mean, imagine if Commodore had released the Commodore 900 in 1982 instead of the CBM-II series. Things might have been very, very different.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be careful because planar in a VGA context doesn't necessarily mean planar in the same way Amiga graphics were planar.

If I recall correctly, Amigas used proper bitplanes. Each pixel's component bits were always scattered across multiple bitplanes.

256 color VGA mode X or mode Y is planar in the sense that frame buffer data is distributed across four 64KB planes. However, the pixels are still chunky. Write one byte to offset 0 of plane 0 and you have fully updated pixel location 0,0. The "planarity" of the mode is that Plane 0 contains all pixels in columns 0, 4, 8, 12, etc., Plane 1 contains columns 1, 5, 9, 13, etc., and so forth. The way to think about it is that It's four 64KB chunky frame buffers interleaved at pixel granularity.

http://www.brackeen.com/vga/unchain.html

The difficulty with adapting software 3D rasterizer engines designed for VGA video modes to the Amiga framebuffer format was that Amigas had no modes which were chunky at the pixel level. (I think.)

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

Atari Jaguar ran Doom despite having just a 68K CPU, so it's certainly possible.

Jaguar also had a pair of 32-bit RISC CPUs at a much higher clock rate (that's how they justified calling it a "64-bit" console, because clearly 2x 32-bit RISC equals 64-bit, right? Right?). The 68K was the "main" processor in that I believe it's the one which booted the boot ROM, but the intent was to use it mostly as glue to coordinate the efforts of the other, much more powerful processors.

It was of course possible to write a game which only used the 68K, and in fact some games did that. But that seems unlikely for Doom.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

What the flying fuck are you talking about.

MS-DOS real-mode applications run under OS/2, Win32 and on Linux with DOSEMU in protected mode. retaining app compatibility.
Win16 programs, run on Windows 3.1 in EMM386 enhanced mode (protected mode) and on Win32 operating systems, despite the win16 api being originally a 16-bit real mode api.

The Amiga likewise has protected memory support, which is even easier to implement as the 68k is virtualisable (that is, all Supervisor mode instructions trap in User mode, and all user mode instructions have the same action in both user mode and supervisor mode).

The reason Apple chose to ditch the original codebase was not because adding protected memory support to the Macintosh was impossible, since they added Virtual Memory, which is essentially all you should need. It was because it was totally ad-hoc, with no thought put into OS design principles, in short it was just a flashy UI. Also the internet being the unix ghetto that it is, it made sense to move to a unix based system, as the internet has an annoying tendency to treat anything foreign to unix with contempt.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[peppepz]

Windows 3.1 required a 286 with 1 MB of RAM. Full disclosure: I had exactly that and wasn't happy for not being able to play Doom.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[gl4ss]

This can only write really sad computer user with no computing history, probably owning "all Apple" things ever produced and a gaming PC.
Coding VB or C# for a sad living, most likely.

Self-delusion was just a wish that others get educated and knowledgeable in software and hardware at the time by keeping and pushing Amiga to a real mainstream, or even better analogy - the one can compare (and understand) today - Amiga was Google while PC and Apple were Bing way back then.

how stupid. just reminds me how amiga fanbois were like apple fanbois of today. totally delusional, by the time we on pc were playing uw the game was over for amiga. pc was the android of the day back then, do anything you want, attach what you want.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

...or the Windows fanboys, or fanboys of anything in particular that you don't actually like. Hey, what do you know? It works for anything!

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[squiggleslash]

If I'm reading http://fly.srk.fer.hr/GDM/articles/vgamodex/vgamx1.html correctly, then this isn't quite true.

Each byte of each plane apparently represents four pixels, with two bits of each byte going into each pixel. So four planes gives you 256 colours (8 bits per pixel.)

Which is kinda ugly, but no more, I guess, than a lot of 1980s computer graphics technologies.

Unfortunately it also adds to the reasons why just because Carmack worked on a planar version of Doom for the PC doesn't mean his decision to ignore the Amiga was entirely inexplicable. Leaving aside the market share, and the fact I assume to get this to run at any speed, it would have to have been done in assembler (which would be different for the PC and Amiga), code that manipulates double-bit planes is going to be slightly different to that that manipulates single bit planes, and will probably be around twice as fast.

If the Amiga had a chunky mode, I suspect it would have been a no-brainer to port Doom. It would have worked on more models, and only the interactions with the API would have had to be recoded. Oh well.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[squiggleslash]

That's a great argument in 1990. In 2012, where every computer is connected to every other computer in this great big network we call "The Internet", and people often need to download software from the Internet... not so much.

This, incidentally, is what Java and other managed code environments, are/were trying to solve, and would probably work great if it wasn't for inevitable unpredictable stutters caused by garbage collection.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[mrbugjacobs]

Id say the tight integration of the hardware and the OS made it great - and you know, some people still like classic american cars and T-fords etc STILL, even though there is FERRARIs available ... :-)

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Cyberax]

Hexen used flat display mode (the famous 13h mode). It's not a big change, actually.

The biggest advantage of planar mode was page flipping - Doom could compose image on backbuffer and then just flip it with the foreground buffer. In contrast, 13h mode doesn't support page flipping and Hexen had to do actual memcpy to copy image from the backbuffer. That required more powerful hardware.

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[jedwidz]

Agreed, add 'fast RAM' to the A1200 and Doom away. There was a Doom-alike on the Amiga called Gloom, complete with motion sickness.

I recall Mac emulation on the A1200 with an after-market 68030 and RAM expansion card. It performed fine in 256 colours, whereas Amiga OS itself would choke. Going easy on the chip RAM bandwidth more than made up for the overheads of the chunky-to-planar conversion and the loss of hardware acceleration (the blitter).

Re:FFS let the Amiga rest in please

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon, but U swore at every WinDon't version from 3.0 to Vista, and even W-7 falls a little short of 3.9 with the latest updates. If course, I'm a command line user from the PL-1 days, so I notice that the Windows command prompt suffers greatly compared to the Amiga Shell. Current version has a CL length limit if--well, how much memory do you have? Fact is, I often go to my UAE emulator to do shell tasks--like renaming every file in a directory in a systematic way, or a recursive change of attributes,i.e., making every file read-only--because it's faster than trying it in Windows. One thing not mentioned is that whereas Windows still relies on the file extension tho tell it what to do with a file, the Amiga looks for a header--present in most non-text files--first, for guidance. so rename "DDD.jpg" to xyz.txt, feed it to an Amiga--and you'll be looking at all 3 D's in full color.

Now, I prefer the way Windows handles the right-click. So I have a patch installed to do that. In fact, I have almost more parches than O/S, and it /still/ fits on a 3.5" floppy. Barely, but it's the whole O/S, not the painful thing you get with the Win recovery disk. (yes, I cheat. A /lot/. But it still turns....)

pgf

Still inspires? It doesn't.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> why Amiga continues to inspire people today

Um...not really. I owned two Amiga machines and worked on two different Video Toaster rigs. Fun at the time, but I'm very, very happy that the Amiga's best features (graphics, sound and text-to-speech) went mainstream. I haven't plugged in any of my old systems in more than five years.

Let it rest - RIP.

Re:First Post

[jythie]

Hobbyists are more then enough to justify it. If they get a kick out ouf playing with AmigaOS then good for them. Some people play games, some people read, some people waterski, and some people enjoy playing with old tech. Not sure why people get so butthurt over what other people do with their free time.

Why the animosity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the animosity to Amiga enthusiasts? Im willing to bet that a significant portion of Linux users on Slashdot were once Amiga users and for various reasons moved on - maybe like myself - a reluctant windows user in the late 90's before discovering Linux and dumping windows for good eventually! Initially Linux - for me reminded in many ways of Amiga OS which is why it was so easy for me to fall in love with it.

Although Linux will for the moment remain my primary OS I've been keeping an eye on AROS. Over the years and as of late the system is becoming really polished with different distro's including one for 68k that can be run on classic hardware - as well as a port currently underway for the Raspberry PI. So you will see that this is not just about running AmigaOS on x86 but creating an OS that eventually will run across different processor architectures. There is also a very interesting Aros / Linux hybrid which opens up the world of linux applications to use inside AROS ... Aeros / Broadway X .

How quickly we forget that Linus Torvalds was scratching an itch to build a minix clone for x86 which has led to the incredibly widespread and varied use we see today. So to AROS which started albiet more recently than Torvalds effort which has similar but humble beginnings.

AROS and the work that has been done are enabling things like replacement , royalty free Kickstart's that can be used with emulation software - free of the chains of licensing. Its open source nature will ensure that the operating system can be free and modified by all.

I for one applaud the efforts that have gone into the project particularly since they have so few active developers. (Anyone interested should probably dig in)

Re:Why the animosity?

[jedidiah]

> Why the animosity to Amiga enthusiasts?

There's plenty of people here that will screech and point at anyone they think isn't part of the herd.

I suspect that's not the old 68K users acting like pod people here.

Re:Why the animosity?

[squiggleslash]

Because back in the early nineties, we were obnoxious.

I'm not kidding. We'd bring in the Amiga into every discussion. How it was the best computer in the world. How you suck for having a PC or Mac. How Bill Gates sucks because he won't support our wonderful computer system.

We were basically the early nineties equivalent of Apple fanbois. Except worse, if you can imagine such a thing.

And I suspect there are a few Team Amigans out there who are still like that. The rest of us are old farts who post to threads like this and reminise, which makes us easy pickings both for trolls, and people who just didn't like us back in 1992.

That's not all of it of course. There's also always the MBA-who-thinks-he's-a-geek type who, on hearing someone has created a 6502 entirely out of discrete soldered together transistors, or out of Lego, posts here demanding to know WHY ANYONE WOULD MAKE A 6502 in 2012?!! And they're posting here thinking "Amiga?! But why would we want anything other than {"Linux"/Windows 8/Mac OS X}"

That's why. My advice. Ignore it. Enjoy the fact geeks are doing geeky things. And try the OS if you have a chance, you might find a use for it, and you'll certainly learn something from it.

Re:Why the animosity?

[Anonymous Coward]

People hate hipsters. Amiga enthusiasts are considered hipsters and even worse... geeks.

Re:Why the animosity?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you can't be a hipster if the entire world looks at you with pity for your nostalgia. Only children and amnesiacs know little enough to assume otherwise. As a general rule, Commodore and Amiga fans are much too dedicated to their platforms to qualify, anyway.

Re:Why the animosity?

[Picass0]

>> "Because back in the early nineties, we were obnoxious....I'm not kidding. We'd bring in the Amiga into every discussion. How it was the best computer in the world. How you suck for having a PC or Mac. How Bill Gates sucks because he won't support our wonderful computer system. "

Very true. I was an Atari ST guy. Man, you guys pissed me off so much. And what REALLY sucked was I knew deep down the Amiga was the better machine. I carried a stupid torch for Atari that looking back was completely unjustified. The Amiga could do things that the Atari "will do soon". And that "soon" eventually defined the whole experience of owning an ST. One empty promise after another. It was always an experience in "good, but it will soon be better than Amiga". And it never happened. Jack Tramiel and his idiot son ran the company into the ground.

By the time I purchased my next computer ('92) I went with a 486. Every once in a while I would look at the ST collecting dust in the closet and consider just how stupid the whole thing had been.

Re:Why the animosity?

[paolobesser]

"Because back in the early nineties, we were obnoxious." Yes. Sure to be the owners of the best machine around, and totally unwilling/unable to see world around us started spinning at a faster rate. I stopped using Amiga machines in 1995, but still missed AmigaOS habits and responsiveness for the years to come. That's why I joined the AROS project really soon: because having a port of AmigaOS to PC was my dream and AROS' open source nature would have provided some warrantees that other commercial alternatives couldn't. We needed a lot of years to have an acceptable degree of reliability, stability and features. But now we are at a good point of the walk. Funningly enough, if we took so long to get here, it's due mainly to the low acceptance of the project in the Amiga community. The same obnoxious people who survived to Commodore death and the first step of Amiga Inc' odyssey just couldn't accept the idea of an Amiga environment running on the x86 platform and started bashing us every way they could. Most of them just preferred to believe in little companies that repeatedly announced new products, new features and new Amigas that never came to reality. While BeOS survivors re-organized themselves and helped as they could the Haiku project, making it a promising alternative niche OS, Amiga fanactics just dreamed for ages about new incledible PPC machines and new amazing releases of AmigaOS 4.x. The end result is AmigaOS 4.x running on the X1000, a netbook-like grunt PPC machine which costs 10 times a good netbook. AROS would have been far more advanced, if only Amigans would have understood its importance for the survival of the platform - or, at least, its philosophy. But blaming people for what's been is not my cup of tea. I am just happy I can now provide a funny OS for people's spare time. Maybe an amusing geek's toy, but that's OK to me. If you like Icaros, download and use it, otherwise don't. It's free, after all. kind regards p.bes

Re:Why the animosity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Near as I can tell it's the slashdot way for people to belittle things they dont understand properly. If it doesnt exist in thier usual limited view on computing they dismiss it. The need to sound clever seems to be so overwhelming that the majority here wont simply leave something alone that's not for them, but rather they'll be negative towards it.

It's like a playground with kids arguing which is the best console. Something that doesnt matter at the end of the day, but the desire to be right (even on things that there is no right or wrong) makes them carry on like clowns.

The thing I find funny when it comes to amiga and amiga derived systems here however is that people here (often *nix users) will say to leave it in the past, that its time has passed and that its too dated to be valid these days, and other such nonsense, and be completely unaware of the hypocricy of such statements.

To each his own as they say, but really what business is it of anyones what someone else chooses to use and/or enjoy? Perhaps there's some sort of insecurity complex involved? :)

ex-Amiga fan

[Rik Sweeney]

I used to be a die hard Amiga fan and I still dip into the scene every now and again to see what's going on.

They seem to have a fairly decent browser in the form of a Firefox port called Timberwolf, but it's quite sad to see the amount of effort they have to through just to watch a video on YouTube.

Likewise, USB support is still quite lacking (I'm not even sure they have USB2 support yet), and most of the software is just ports of Linux software (Blender etc.)

It's interesting to see what's going on, but it'll only ever be a hobby. Some of them still seem to think the Amiga will take over the world one day.

Re:ex-Amiga fan

[Anonymous Coward]

Once timberwolf is done it will be no problems watching youtube using html5. So luckily that issue is soon gone.
And I think OS4.1 got usb2 in one of the latest updates.

Re:ex-Amiga fan

[LoadWB]

I'm running USB2 in my 4000D with OS3.9. With this, I have a multi-card reader, 10/100 Ethernet adapter, and wireless keyboard and mouse. It can also handle USB wireless adapters and I connect USB flash drives and hard drives frequently. Not bad for a dead system. And, yes, it's a hobby and it's fun. I can't explain it any more than anyone can explain why it's fun to tinker with old cars, planes, stamps, etc.

Re:ex-Amiga fan

[BigSes]

I posted this above, but you seem like another in-the-loop Amiga fan to ask, so I am reposting below:

For the collector / new to Amiga market, what would you recommend? I want to get a complete Amiga system, for gaming exclusively, but I always get tripped up in the model numbers (500, 1200, 3000, etc). Just something new to toy around with for a few months and add to my collection of gaming equipment. I had a Commodore 64 since it was released in the "C" format, and still have all of my equipment and software, but I was so jealous of the back-of-the-box screenshots for Amiga titles (we really couldn't afford an Amiga when they were new). I'd love to experience that first-hand, especially from some of the better houses such as Cinemaware. I'm just completely unsure what model to invest in.

Re:ex-Amiga fan

[LoadWB]

You'll probably get a few different answers, but IMO if you want to experience the Amiga gaming platform on a real Amiga machine, you'll want to start with an Amiga 1200. It's AGA (the last generation Amiga video chipset,) 2MB Chip RAM, hard drive capable, and a PCMCIA port. There are a fair number of AGA games which will run on this setup stock. Pair it with an inexpensive 68030 accelerator and you can play older games which require the older chipsets using WHDLoad (http://whdload.de). As well, you can install a CF card on-the-cheap and have a low-power, low-noise hard drive-like system with PLENTY of storage space. (http://alan2.rateliff.us/a1200flash). Mind you, vendors like AmigaKit (http://amigakit.com) have all-in-one packages ready to go.

I encourage you to check out the various Amiga forums, starting with Amiga.org (http://amiga.org) and the English Amiga Board (http://eab.abime.net).

Good luck and welcome aboard!

Re:ex-Amiga fan

[BigSes]

Sweet man, thanks for the links! I'll check those out when I get out of work.

Re:ex-Amiga fan

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga community has split into many tribes.

AORS tribe = Open Source, no binary compatibility
MorphOS tribe = The one that never believed AmigaOS was dead
AmigaOS4.x tribe = the resurrected AmigaOS.
WinUAE/UAE tribe = Windows/Linux users that like run some old games.
Classic tribe = hard core geeks, spend lots of money on ebay to get perfect collection of nostalgia.
Traitors tribe = Linux User, Mac User, Windows Users, and every one else that can be trusted.

And as Key Developer where spreed out different Operating Systems based on AmigaOS3.1, there in spirit or 3rd parity development, or from the source code and it self, some parts where only available to one tribe not the other and weal head to be reinvented over and over again, taking in count the size of community left, development is not going too bad, but split has not helped progress.

AmigaOS4 and MoprhOS has Integrated 680x0 CPU emulator for legacy apps, and in so doing to can take advantage of many library’s and applications that not PowerPC native.
AORS is open source runs on many CPU's tries to embed UAE to hide that fact that not native to AORS.

In resent years MorphOS, AmigaOS4, AROS tribes have been helping etch other out on developing WebKit based browser.

MorphOS is one that takes the lead, AmigaOS4.x is one step behind, AROS is kind all over the place, that's way has depend on Linux, more then the others.

AROS on Raspberry Pi

[snowball21]

Pascal Papara's Broadway AROS project has been brought to the Raspberry Pi by Stephen Jones. There's also an ARM6 hosted version of the AROS project available.

Re:AROS on Raspberry Pi

[snowball21]

A video of AROS on the RPi in action...

Re:AROS on Raspberry Pi

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the post, you saved me the trouble after reading the article over at their website this morning.

Why the inspiration?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the animosity to Amiga enthusiasts?

Why indeed? BTW the article never really answered is own question, "why does it [Amiga] continue to inspire people"? Nostalgia only goes so far. I've picked up AmigaForever to play with, but that "solution" obviously doesn't answer the question because "alternatives" like the article mention's are still being created.

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

whoosh to both posts above this one. i bet you're fun at parties.

Re:First Post

[samoanbiscuit]

Not sure why people get so butthurt over what other people do with their free time.

Amen! This is an incredibly common reflex, found in all walks of life, and in relation to almost any area of human behaviour imaginable.

Re:First Post

[divisionbyzero]

They were referring to AmigaOS not x86.

Did you feel a little breeze in your hair? Yeah, that was the comment going over your head. He intentionally switched them up for effect.

Woohoo!

[Pf0tzenpfritz]

Another undead "Amiga". Hooray...

I seem to recall the last time

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

something was named Icarus, it went down in flames.

Re:I seem to recall the last time

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm aware of this. So I put a warning in Icaros' readme:

"Please don't use our distribution on the Aegean Sea. It
might fly too high and crash really hard on your computer. ;-)"

kind regards

p.bes

Re:I seem to recall the last time

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously haven't been to the site. It include a warning not to fly too close to the sun....

Other techie nostalgia ideas with similar value

[SgtDink]

A) Retrofit my car to eat oats and shit it onto the street. B) Write Lil Wayne to 8-track tape. C) Add sail to X-37B. D) Make a vacuum tube amplifier for the "perfect sound" E) Reverse genetic engineer the placenta into a Homunculus genesis organ

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, just the joke you didn't get.

AmigaOS 4.1

[tracius01]

you all know that if you buy a modern MB with a PowerPC in it you can run the true AmigaOS http://www.amigaos.net/

Re:AmigaOS 4.1

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be spelled "Teh True"

Re:AmigaOS 4.1

[Bert64]

Modern? I don't think any of the hardware available to run amigaos qualifies as modern... It seems the fastest they have is a 1.8ghz dual core from pa-semi, who got bought by apple and are no longer developing powerpc processors.

It also seems to be very expensive both for the hardware and the os.

AROS/Icaros on the other hand is available for free, and runs on hardware that most people already have. It's easy for anyone to try, and risk free.

Re:AmigaOS 4.1

[Anonymous Coward]

But...but....it's not TEh R33l Amoooga !!!

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to spend my free time on slashdot pointing out then/than errors.

You butthurt bro?

Why the history?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because back in the early nineties, we were obnoxious.
I'm not kidding. We'd bring in the Amiga into every discussion. How it was the best computer in the world. How you suck for having a PC or Mac. How Bill Gates sucks because he won't support our wonderful computer system.
We were basically the early nineties equivalent of Apple fanbois. Except worse, if you can imagine such a thing.

OS/2 fans have you beat there. And of course, much like Amiga, OS/2 still lives.

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFY ::

I like to spend my free time on slashdot pointing out those errors.

But you haven't said what the errors are that you're pointing out?

CAPTCHA = subset

YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because UI design from 30 years ago is SO AWESOME and INTUITIVE!

Re:Still inspires? It doesn't.

[Samantha Wright]

I think the weight of "people are inventing entire operating systems built in the manner of AmigaOS" outweighs your "I never turn on my video toasters any more."

Amiga was about the tech (to some)

[Sloppy]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I recall from the Amiga back then (a friend had one), and what I have seen here so far, this "Amiga Experience" is all about the GUI, not so much about the underlying tech.

Everyone had a different idea of what the "Amiga Experience" was, because the machine was so striking in so many different ways.

I don't remember talking to many people who thought Intuition and Workbench (the GUI) were all that special (right-button fixed-position menus, and "screens" being the only "cool" Amiga-exclusive GUI features that I can think of off the top of my head), but OTOH in the mid-1980s there weren't that many GUI competitors, so I guess it's not far-fetched that at least some people thought that was special.

To some people, it was just the games. The Amiga had its day in the sun where it was, for a brief period, the game machine. When that day ended, those people moved on.

To me, it was all about the tech. And even within the tech, there were at least two camps and lots of people with a mix of membership in both. The custom chips were excellent -- by mid/late 1980s standards (by 1996 I had installed a graphics card and by 2000 the case was truly stuffed to the gills with replacements for nearly everything on the mobo, every Z3 slot filled and some cards with other weirdo connectors which connected to other sub-cards!).

Exec was excellent (if you ignored the issue of memory protection) and simple, and I still sometimes wish on Linux I could "nice" processes with absolute priorities. (But it doesn't matter as much, these days.)

Even AmigaDOS (!) (when's the last time you heard that part of the system praised?) had some very nice things about it, or easily added onto it. Linux finally got equivalent ramdisk tech with 2.4 but I still don't see a pipe device as awesome and convenient as APIPE. ;-) Linux finally got diverse filesystems (on of my favorite things about it) and has pulled ahead by a huge margin (I'll admit that; Linux is now the world leader in this regard) but Amiga people were plugging in, and playing with, and benchmarking different ones, years before anyone ever heard of Hans Reiser. When x86 people were working around fdisk partitioning, Amiga people had RDB -- equivalent tech is just now hitting becoming widely deployed with GPT. Some of its features seem very dubious by today's standards (I can't explain to anyone in 2012 why they would want "assigns" and not sound like a moron) but compared to AmigaDOS' comtemporaries .. oh, those people knew why someone would want a feature like that, and envied the Amiga even if they had to do it in secret.

The Amiga was plenty loved for its tech. Maybe by different people for different reasons, but the techlove was there, and I think critical to Amiga lingering after Commodore's death, for as long as it did.

One thing, though. For all the Amiga tech we don't have today, we still get by. Some of it got improved on (FFS seems so quaint now), some of it got the need for it bypassed by either new paradigms or brute force (you don't need copper lists, or to tell APIPE how much memory to use for its queue, or decent partitioning system when you have LVM), some of it is now seen as a bad idea (e.g. reading the the code which implements a filesystem, from the inserted media), and whatever we all still lack today, is mitigated by the other advantages of being the mainstream (e.g. Core i5 for $200 instead of a Cyberstorm 060 for $1000). The tech was damn fine, but it's still 1980s tech that we're talking about. It still impressed in the 1990s, but mainly because the 1990s were a semi-dark age.

Re:Amiga was about the tech (to some)

[Bert64]

What was special about the amiga gui, was the way it was extremely responsive and fully multitasking, competing systems of the time usually couldn't multitask very well if at all, and were generally very sluggish even on considerably faster hardware.
This is also why the amiga stuck around for quite a while, although the hardware was getting dated the user experience took longer to seem slower than the underlying hardware would have suggested.

Re:Amiga was about the tech (to some)

[amorsen]

I still sometimes wish on Linux I could "nice" processes with absolute priorities

You can, you just need to use the realtime priorities instead. However, you need privileges to do so because it is trivial to crash Linux that way. Just like it was trivial to crash AmigaOS that way, of course.

Re:Amiga was about the tech (to some)

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't explain to anyone in 2012 why they would want "assigns" and not sound like a moron

You can use it to create a "composit" folder of several others. For example if you have different folders for all your vacation images you can use assign to create a virtual folder where you can access all of you vacation pictures without having to look trough all of the folders. (Just use the ADD keyword.)

Re:Amiga was about the tech (to some)

[Sloppy]

Good answer; I'm glad someone remembered and stepped in there.

How ironic that I've forgotten. I happen to be going through some Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 migration drama, and the loss of aufs and trying to make the seeming-inferior overlayfs do the same job, ought to have put the value of additive assigns in the forefront of my mind. I wouldn't have tolerated this crap 15 years ago, because on the Amiga it all Just Worked. Meanwhile, some very smart people are still struggling with just what is the right way to do a union filesystem on Linux.

Re:Amiga was about the tech (to some)

[jedwidz]

Hardly cutting edge... Windows has had 'libraries' for *years*.

Re:Amiga was about the tech (to some)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and Billie Boy stole a lot of other stuff from the Amiga--if you compare W-7 to ADOS 2, or even 1, you find that an awful lot looks familiar, including the character set. There've even been rumors of a daring new concept in O/S design; a bare-bones kernel that loads the other bits as you need them. Again, all versions if ADos are built from scratch around this concept. Dynamically Linked Libraries? Amiga had 'em from the first or second 'pre-alpha' version of the O/S, in 1983.

  Many of you people don't seem to remember just how primitive 1985 /was/, compared to today. Many may not have even been there /to/ remember. Cell phones cost thousands of dollars, and a dollar per second to use. They were those /bricks' they had so much fun with in the 'Wall Street' sequel. American color TV was just getting reasonable color and a single speed CD writer--if you could find one--ran about $5,000.00. NO PC had hardware-based memory protection, partly because the hardware just wasn't there, and partly because, with a mono-tasking system, it was just not a big deal, and everyone seemed to think that a software-based one--like the Amiga's--would be adequate, anyway. o0ps. Funny thing is, that my current W-7 box has a built-in hardware MMU--and it /still/ gives me a corrupt memory crash about twice a month, slightly more often than my last Real Amiga dud (YMMV, of course)

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Because some people like to spend all their free time trolling...

Re:Still inspires? It doesn't.

[BigSes]

For the collector / new to Amiga market, what would you recommend? I want to get a complete Amiga system, for gaming exclusively, but I always get tripped up in the model numbers (500, 1200, 3000, etc). Just something new to toy around with for a few months and add to my collection of gaming equipment. I had a Commodore 64 since it was released in the "C" format, and still have all of my equipment and software, but I was so jealous of the back-of-the-box screenshots for Amiga titles (we really couldn't afford an Amiga when they were new). I'd love to experience that first-hand, especially from some of the better houses such as Cinemaware. I'm just completely unsure what model to invest in.

Re:Still inspires? It doesn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I want to get a complete Amiga system, for gaming exclusively, but I always get tripped up in the model numbers (500, 1200, 3000, etc).

I'd get BOTH a 500 and the 1200; both of these are CPU-under-the-keyboard models, but the 1200 has the built-in HD (120MB or so). Try to run your games on the 1200 first, but in my experience, you'll need the original 500 for a few of them. (The 3000 series and what-not are separate tower/keyboard affairs.)

Like sailing the Atlantic in the Santa Maria

[gelfling]

The good old timey feeling of the late Renaissance

UAE

[DrYak]

According to the article, Icaros plays nicely with a variant of UAE.
UAE provide the emulation and Motorola-to-Intel JIT.
While Icaros provide the Amiga OS API (thus, for example, the clip board is shared between x86 and motorola applications).

The screen shots also feature windows with amiga games running in them.

Now, it's another question how perfect this UAE+Icaros stack is for games and demos using bat-shit crazy copper effect running self-modifying code monstruosity triggered by in-sync CPU event ....

The fascination with "Amiga"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Amiga" is the feminine form of the Spanish word that means "friend", hence "amiga" means female friend, and is often interpretted as having the same connotation as the word "girlfriend", even though it may not mean that literally in standard usage amongst Spanish speakers.

Having an Amiga computer, however, was the closest thing many of those who owned them could ever come to having a "girlfriend", hence the attraction.

Re:Still inspires? It doesn't.

[BigSes]

>> I want to get a complete Amiga system, for gaming exclusively, but I always get tripped up in the model numbers (500, 1200, 3000, etc).

I'd get BOTH a 500 and the 1200; both of these are CPU-under-the-keyboard models, but the 1200 has the built-in HD (120MB or so). Try to run your games on the 1200 first, but in my experience, you'll need the original 500 for a few of them. (The 3000 series and what-not are separate tower/keyboard affairs.)

Damn, I wish you didn't post AC, I was going to ask if I can use one monitor for both or if they use different monitors. Sorry if I seem uninformed on Amiga, its new to me in almost every sense.

link to the project

[paolobesser]

Maybe someone would like to download Icaros Desktop and see what actually is. Here's the link to the project page. Thanks to all visitors, http://www.icarosdesktop.org

Re:Still inspires? It doesn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cant go too wrong with an a1200. There can be a little bit of incompatibility running games off floppy disc that way, but there's something called WHDLoad, which lets a person install games to harddrive that normally couldnt be run from harddrive, and fixes some incompatibility issues along with it.
Additionally I wouldnt buy an a1200 without at least adding some fast ram, as it not only loosens the usually tight memory, but speeds the system up twofold (cpu gets access to its own ram this way instead of sharing bandwidth with the custom chips). Was crazy for commodore not to add fast ram to the a1200 such is the difference in speed. I'd also add a cpu card as again it enhances the experiences considerably, plus offers options to add fast ram (you need to add a ram card normally anyway).

Be warned though, amigas are pretty pricey these days due to demand outweighing supply. There was recently a batch of 1500 "new" (old stock, but unopened/wrapped in plastic/boxed/etc.) or so a1200's tracked down though, so you could get ahold of a "new" system if youre interested.

Brief rundown though:
a500/a500+/a600/a1000/a2000 = 16 bit machines machines based on the 68000 cpu (externally 16 bit, but internally 32)
a1200/a3000/a4000 = 32 bit machines based on 68020/68030/68040 fully 32bit cpus. Apart from the a3000 these system also feature enhanced graphics hardware.