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AmigaOS 3.1.4 For Classic Amigas Released (hyperion-entertainment.com)
Mike Bouma shares the announcement from Hyperior Entertainment, which holds exclusive rights to AmigaOS: The new, cleaned-up, polished Amiga operating system for your 68K machine fixes all the small annoyances that have piled up over the years. Originally intended as a bug-fix release, it also modernizes many system components previously upgraded in OS 3.9. Contrary to its modest revision number, AmigaOS 3.1.4 is arguably as large an upgrade as OS 3.9 was, and surpasses it in stability and robustness. Over 320K of release notes cover almost every aspect of your favorite classic AmigaOS -- from bootmenu to datatypes. Some of the highlights mentioned include: Over 20 Kickstart ROM modules and many more disk-based core OS components were fixed, updated, or added; Support for large hard disks; A modernized Workbench; and A colorful, professionally designed icon set is included, along with the traditional four-color icons.
Haage & Partner released AmigaOS 3.9 in the 90's which definitely was an upgrade to 3.1. It had a much better version of the formatting and partitioning tools. It also had a few updates to the user interface and the text to speech voice phonemes were updated. So, it sounded different when you told it to say "This is Amiga speaking." Now, this update is from Hyperion. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm highly suspicious (but nonetheless curious). They have a fairly shady and shaky claim to rights to AmigaOS and Kickstart. However, they are very *loud* about those claims. Notice even in the announcement they want you to know they are the *sole* IP holder. I'm not a lawyer, but Hyperion has always seemed like a jumped up small-game company grabbing for lost Amiga glory. It's rumored that they bought the IP for Kickstart for $1 between a couple of friends. There are several other IP holders such as Cloanto in Italy and a few ex-licensees (or so they claim) in the USA too. One more colorful guy was an ex-trucker who wanted to resurrect the Amiga as a PC (the horror! and no 68k - blasphemer!). Who knows what lost legal deals ESCOM and Gateway did when they owned, the IP, too. The Amiga historical landscape is littered with people claiming to own the various critical trademarks such as AmigaOS, Amiga, Kickstart, and so forth. Nobody will know for sure until there is a knock down drag-out lawsuit and somebody goes home crying. The problem is, there is so few bucks left to make it's not worth the hassle. The Vampire Amiga folks are doing amazing things with their FPGA Apollo 68080 core. I run one in an Amiga 500 and it takes all comers. Not everything is perfect or stable, but it gives you RTG, upgraded sound, HDMI output, half a gig of RAM (a lot for Amiga apps), wifi, MicroSD storage, IDE, and a smoking fast processor that will eat the 68060 alive many times over. Highly recommended.