It has experienced so many important points in history. For example, as we all know Grand Theft Auto, the game, was developed by Rockstar North. And Rockstar North use to be known as DMA Design. And DMA Design was a game developer that started on the revolutionary Amiga computer (which was the most powerful system by far -- well ahead of Macs and PCs) who's critical hits included Lemmings and Walker. This Amiga 3000 was used to develop those two games. And it was those hits that saved Rockstar, allowing them to grow and to soon after begin work on the Grand Theft Auto series. And the rest is history.
The development of Grand Theft Auto started on the amiga:
"The game was originally intended to be named Race'n'Chase and to be developed for the Commodore Amiga, starting in 1996.[" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Although you required a new top range PC to play Doom when they were released, ID software made a comment in an interview they would not be able to port it to the Amiga. They probably meant to say a bog standard Amiga 1200 with 2 MB of RAM as Doom (and Wolfenstein3D and even Quake) is now ported to 68k Amigas and runs without problems on Amiga setups available at the time.
But John Carmack's original statement caused much confusion. You can play Doom decently on a 25 Mhz 040 Amiga for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
BestWB is an unofficial new workbench pack: "much like BetterWB. It aims to be much like an enhancement, an updated extension to AmigaOS 3.1.4, without all those hardware penalties typically associated with these kind of packs."
WinUAE has become overly complex, I agree. I once wrote an Amiga emulation tutorial for OSNews.com, step by step, but since then so many new features and options have been added (even AmigaOS4 for classic PPC upgraded amigas!).
The solution I think is to get Cloanto's Amiga Forever package instead, it includes pre-installed scripts for games/workbench, ROMs and a GUI frontend: https://www.amigaforever.com/
I think it's good to include some more light-hearted news items from time to time. Sam's Journey on the Commodore 64 is IMO newsworthy as well, it put a smile on my face just like Worthy.:-)
Retrogaming is still big. I would really love to see a new Amiga home computer which covers such games, maybe using SDL/AmigaOS4/PPC like A-Eon is working on (A1222/Tabor). http://blog.a-eon.biz/blog/
Games that followed Commodores programming guidelines works on A1200 but commercial companies wrote hacky crap back then too. Sometimes it helps switching to OCS-mode and turning off CPU caches in the boot menu but if there is a lot of cycle timed stuff you might be screwed anyway.
To get the bulk of Amiga 500 games to work on the Amiga 1200, you could use a bootdiskette with ReloKick/TUDE (aminet.net) and afterwards put in the game to boot.
Alternatively there are WHDLoad installs for nearly all Amiga games, which takes care of this transparently (amongst bug fixes, high score savings, adds a HD icon, etc): http://whdload.de/
Such parties should IMO not be compared to Amiga fairs. These are just some nice gettogethers events where Amiga supporters can talk about their favourite platform. Have a friendly chat at the bar or having a barbecue are somethings some Amiga users like to do.
Have a look at this video of a Swedish Amiga party earlier this year, to get the idea: http://www.mhd.mh.se/shoe/os4-party/
As you see it's just people getting together, eating barbecue food, eating AmigaOS4 cakes and truly enjoying themselves. However there are also bigger Amiga parties too like the Alchimie in France or News fYaNICA parties in Hungary. The Alchimie parties have almost as many visitors as real fairs with hundreds of visitors, however the main focuss of these parties is mainly on food and fun and less on selling computer equipment like fairs.
For instance that Swedish party isn't anything like the Swedish AmiGBG fair which was held earlier this year, which also includes after-parties and gettogethers next to the main event: http://amigaworld.net/modules/features/ind ex.php?o p=r&cat_id=1&rev_id=51&sort_by
You should be able to buy these boards just with Linux in the future as well, which would then save you the cost having to buy AmigaOS4, but obviously those boards would be branded Amiga.
The reason for the relatively high cost is that the companies are initially dealing with a low volume market. That's why Alan Redhouse has been demonstrating the AmigaOne and AmigaOS4 to Chinese officials and important business representatives.
For the long run higher volume hardware sales would be very important for the survival of the AmigaOne platform. More sales also means that development / testing costs could be better spread amongst a larger pool of customers and would also allow larger volume component deals to be made (thus being cheaper for the developer)! Also I believe that success of the Linux platform with for instance the MicroA1 / Mini Teron may pave the way or just allow for interesting oppertunities with regard to AmigaOS4 as well.
Although that the AmigaOne-XE is currently relative expensive compared to PC hardware, this is mainly due relatively low expected volume sales as the AmigaOne-XE board is mainly targeted at the current Amiga communnity of powerusers and developers. Therefor sales aren't expected to reach more than a few thousand. There are significant development costs for designing the hardware and well as the software which comes with it (such as the 30 months of hard work for AmigaOS4).
Also any hardware company can negotiate a license for AmigaOS4 (however currently PPC only) and offer an Amiga branded product. The classic Amiga market has been moving to standard mainstream hardware for more than a decade now and so this process seems to be just a natural continuation of this.
There are hardware offerings in the pipeline designed by Eyetech and Mai Logic which will be targeted at larger markets, opening up the possibility of cheaper solutions. First up is the MicroA1 which is a Mini-ITX (17cm - 17cm!) form factor board and is already being demonstrated running Linux and AmigaOS4.
The AmigaOne-XE and AmigaOS4 Developer pre-release is already an excellent product for developers to start developing for AmigaOS4. As a development platform the current AmigaOne-XE solution is relatively cheap (especially compared to Mai's Teron evaluation boards, the boards Seehund likes to rave about as being so "cheap" (also coming without an AmigaOS4 license).
The new Amiga platform is already gaining widespread coverage. Yesterday AmigaOS4 was the highlight of a German TV show (3SAT/ZDF) demonstrating the product. You can download the show from here or go here for more information.
Because there is still an active user and developer user community. Many of these people prefer the way AmigaOS handled things, such as its transparency, responsiveness and flexibility of the system.
Is someone putting money into this company?
Alot of time and effort is being spend on the project both by fulltime commercial and enthusiastic parttime developers and designers.
I mean, they've been working on version 4.0 of their OS for what, 8 years
AmigaOS3.9 was released in December 2000.
The current AmigaOS4 development management team started managing the project since 2002. In the meantime the project has grown and more enhancements have been implemented than orginally planned for the initial release.
Thanks for all this comments - the positive and the negative ones!
They will hopefully help to make the next release more perfect. Your suggestions are allways appreciated!
This is the icon set for the pre-release CD and nothing more!
If you have a look a the older OS 3.9 preview screenshots you will notice that the design of the icons has changed in many points - the same with OS 4.
Just wait for the next release...;-)
Kind Regards, Martin "Mason" Merz
The AmigaOS4 Pre-Release/SDK will be available to all AmigaOne owners and is currently undergoing final beta-testing.
AmigaOne-XE boards have now been available in volumes for some time now. Miffy has reviewed a pre-built system in combination with Linux here. Also here's another article about building a system yourself.
The last couple of months AmigaOS4 has been demonstrated at special 'AmigaOS4 Tour events' around the world on classic systems equiped with PPC boards. At various events in Slovenia, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Austria, US Westcoast (Sacramento), US Eastcoast (New York), Sweden, Italy, France, Denmark, etc. The Tour will also go DonwUnder.
At the Italian Pianeta 2003 fair AmigaOS4 was demonstrated on AmigaOne hardware for the first time! More screenshots of AmigaOS4 can be found here at the AmigaWorld.net community portal.
Hyperion will also be present at the upcoming Benelux Amiga Show which is planned for the 4th and 4th of October in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. I plan to be there as well.:-)
There seems to be some confusion with regard to which OSes/solutions this effort is directed at. Currently there are 4 main 68k Amiga compatible solutions DiscreetFX would like to see supported. For two first one listed below PPC native versions would be preferable:
1) AmigaOS4
This is the official new AmigaOS developed for classic Amigas upgraded with PPC accelerators and new AmigaOne computers which are being sold with G3 and G4 processors.
Its ABOX environment is a re-implementation of version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system. The re-implemted Exec kernel is hosted on top of a Quark microkernel. The OS is fast and responsive and currently runs with G3 Pegasos motherboards. Interested people will have to wait for the Pegasos II, which is planned for release in September. An interesting review can be found at OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3589
3) AROS
An open source project intended as a multi-platform re-implementation of version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system. Most of the development takes place on x86 computers. Much of the source code was used for MorphOS.
http://www.aros.org/
Well, I did state "probably". It's just a personal judgement based on all the high profile game licenses they we able to acquire.
But I believe the Amiga and Mac markets are likely far more important to Hyperion. Mac as a good sales platform and Amiga for their future ambitions and passion.
Hyperion is the company who is leading the AmigaOS4 project. They are very passionate about the Amiga platform.
After the demise of Loki Games, Hyperion is probably the most important commercial Linux game developing company left on the market today. They now have a really impressive list of Amiga (and Linux/Mac) licenses and released products (Heretic2, Descent Freespace, Shogo, SiN, Soldier of Fortune, Majesty, Worms Armageddon, etc, etc!), but have been pretty quiet lately due to their top programmers leading the AmigaOS4 project, as well as being hired by Mai Logic for developing the AmigaOne/Teron firmware ROM.
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?s to ryid=278
Considering their expertise in many different fields the "Entertainment" part of Hyperion's name is a bit misleading though. For instance they also have a AmigaOS4 license for porting Real3D, a great professional 3D Raytracer. They changed their name from Hyperion Software to Hyperion Entertainment simply because there was another company with the same name already.
Pekka Nissinen had recently updated his AmigaOne (and Pegasos) benchmarks comparison webpage, providing information on various benchmark performance tests for AmigaOne-SE and AmigaOne-XE motherboards.
Do note however that the G4 benchmarks do not include any Altivec optimised software tests, in which case the overall performance can be significantly improved, depending on the software type used and degree of optimisation.
But anyhow I would agree that the original news submission is quite misleading as currently G4 powered AmigaOne-XE boards are also available. For Alan's take on TerraSoft and information on new AmigaOne boards have a look at Alan's presentation.
I am planning an interview with Jeri and Jens for OSNews.com with regard to the c-one and Catweasel board (targeted mainly at AmigaOne/Pegasos/AmigaOS emulation users) today. If there are any questions anyone would like to see answered, then you can suggest them here or send me an email.
I am planning to publish this interview somewhere next week. My interview/article will likely emphasize that the c-one is a reconfigurable solution, not solely for c64 fans. So stay tuned.
For the people who understand German, here's an interesting piece regarding the c-one by a German Mag.
Here's a video of an Amiga show where a prototype c-one was being demonstrated by Jeri. Also the Pegasos and AmigaOne were being sold at this event.
Some more pictures of Jeri and some interesting Pegasos demonstration video can be found here.
And MorphOS'reimplemented Exec and ExecSG believe they run on a PPC "Amiga". IMO it is really sad that you present yourself as mister know it all, despite all the clarifications.
> Calling Sassenrath a god, when on other posts > you go on and on about how his work is > obsolete
Nonesense, I think that Carl is great and that REBOL is great. (Note that a link to REBOL Technologies's homepage resides on my favorite Amiga links at my AmigaRing). Please give me some links to your wild claims.
BTW REBOL is also available for the AmigaDE.
> Exec no longer interfaces the hardware.
Neither in the case of Amithlon, do you now start to see the parallels of my example which you so eagerly try to attack?
Slashdot Mirror
It has experienced so many important points in history. For example, as we all know Grand Theft Auto, the game, was developed by Rockstar North. And Rockstar North use to be known as DMA Design. And DMA Design was a game developer that started on the revolutionary Amiga computer (which was the most powerful system by far -- well ahead of Macs and PCs) who's critical hits included Lemmings and Walker. This Amiga 3000 was used to develop those two games. And it was those hits that saved Rockstar, allowing them to grow and to soon after begin work on the Grand Theft Auto series. And the rest is history.
The development of Grand Theft Auto started on the amiga:
"The game was originally intended to be named Race'n'Chase and to be developed for the Commodore Amiga, starting in 1996.["
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Although you required a new top range PC to play Doom when they were released, ID software made a comment in an interview they would not be able to port it to the Amiga. They probably meant to say a bog standard Amiga 1200 with 2 MB of RAM as Doom (and Wolfenstein3D and even Quake) is now ported to 68k Amigas and runs without problems on Amiga setups available at the time.
But John Carmack's original statement caused much confusion. You can play Doom decently on a 25 Mhz 040 Amiga for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
BestWB is an unofficial new workbench pack: "much like BetterWB. It aims to be much like an enhancement, an updated extension to AmigaOS 3.1.4, without all those hardware penalties typically associated with these kind of packs."
http://lilliput.amiga-projects...
WinUAE has become overly complex, I agree. I once wrote an Amiga emulation tutorial for OSNews.com, step by step, but since then so many new features and options have been added (even AmigaOS4 for classic PPC upgraded amigas!).
The solution I think is to get Cloanto's Amiga Forever package instead, it includes pre-installed scripts for games/workbench, ROMs and a GUI frontend:
https://www.amigaforever.com/
I think it's good to include some more light-hearted news items from time to time. Sam's Journey on the Commodore 64 is IMO newsworthy as well, it put a smile on my face just like Worthy. :-)
Sam's Journey release trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Retrogaming is still big. I would really love to see a new Amiga home computer which covers such games, maybe using SDL/AmigaOS4/PPC like A-Eon is working on (A1222/Tabor).
http://blog.a-eon.biz/blog/
Games that followed Commodores programming guidelines works on A1200 but commercial companies wrote hacky crap back then too. Sometimes it helps switching to OCS-mode and turning off CPU caches in the boot menu but if there is a lot of cycle timed stuff you might be screwed anyway.
This game works out of the box on the Amiga 1200:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
To get the bulk of Amiga 500 games to work on the Amiga 1200, you could use a bootdiskette with ReloKick/TUDE (aminet.net) and afterwards put in the game to boot.
Alternatively there are WHDLoad installs for nearly all Amiga games, which takes care of this transparently (amongst bug fixes, high score savings, adds a HD icon, etc):
http://whdload.de/
Such parties should IMO not be compared to Amiga fairs. These are just some nice gettogethers events where Amiga supporters can talk about their favourite platform. Have a friendly chat at the bar or having a barbecue are somethings some Amiga users like to do.
d ex.php?o p=r&cat_id=1&rev_id=51&sort_by
Have a look at this video of a Swedish Amiga party earlier this year, to get the idea:
http://www.mhd.mh.se/shoe/os4-party/
As you see it's just people getting together, eating barbecue food, eating AmigaOS4 cakes and truly enjoying themselves. However there are also bigger Amiga parties too like the Alchimie in France or News fYaNICA parties in Hungary. The Alchimie parties have almost as many visitors as real fairs with hundreds of visitors, however the main focuss of these parties is mainly on food and fun and less on selling computer equipment like fairs.
For instance that Swedish party isn't anything like the Swedish AmiGBG fair which was held earlier this year, which also includes after-parties and gettogethers next to the main event:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/features/in
You should be able to buy these boards just with Linux in the future as well, which would then save you the cost having to buy AmigaOS4, but obviously those boards would be branded Amiga.
The reason for the relatively high cost is that the companies are initially dealing with a low volume market. That's why Alan Redhouse has been demonstrating the AmigaOne and AmigaOS4 to Chinese officials and important business representatives.
For the long run higher volume hardware sales would be very important for the survival of the AmigaOne platform. More sales also means that development / testing costs could be better spread amongst a larger pool of customers and would also allow larger volume component deals to be made (thus being cheaper for the developer)! Also I believe that success of the Linux platform with for instance the MicroA1 / Mini Teron may pave the way or just allow for interesting oppertunities with regard to AmigaOS4 as well.
Since the release of the developer Pre-release earlier this year there's already a steady growing list of native AmigaOS4 software.
The central AmigaOS4 download portal can be found at:
http://www.os4depot.net/
A majority of freely distributable OS4 files can be found at OS4Depot.
Although that the AmigaOne-XE is currently relative expensive compared to PC hardware, this is mainly due relatively low expected volume sales as the AmigaOne-XE board is mainly targeted at the current Amiga communnity of powerusers and developers. Therefor sales aren't expected to reach more than a few thousand. There are significant development costs for designing the hardware and well as the software which comes with it (such as the 30 months of hard work for AmigaOS4).
Also any hardware company can negotiate a license for AmigaOS4 (however currently PPC only) and offer an Amiga branded product. The classic Amiga market has been moving to standard mainstream hardware for more than a decade now and so this process seems to be just a natural continuation of this.
There are hardware offerings in the pipeline designed by Eyetech and Mai Logic which will be targeted at larger markets, opening up the possibility of cheaper solutions. First up is the MicroA1 which is a Mini-ITX (17cm - 17cm!) form factor board and is already being demonstrated running Linux and AmigaOS4.
The AmigaOne-XE and AmigaOS4 Developer pre-release is already an excellent product for developers to start developing for AmigaOS4. As a development platform the current AmigaOne-XE solution is relatively cheap (especially compared to Mai's Teron evaluation boards, the boards Seehund likes to rave about as being so "cheap" (also coming without an AmigaOS4 license).
The new Amiga platform is already gaining widespread coverage. Yesterday AmigaOS4 was the highlight of a German TV show (3SAT/ZDF) demonstrating the product. You can download the show from here or go here for more information.
Because there is still an active user and developer user community. Many of these people prefer the way AmigaOS handled things, such as its transparency, responsiveness and flexibility of the system.
Alot of time and effort is being spend on the project both by fulltime commercial and enthusiastic parttime developers and designers.
AmigaOS3.9 was released in December 2000.
The current AmigaOS4 development management team started managing the project since 2002. In the meantime the project has grown and more enhancements have been implemented than orginally planned for the initial release.
The AmigaOS4 Pre-Release/SDK will be available to all AmigaOne owners and is currently undergoing final beta-testing.
You can find a large dealer list on AmigaWorld.net's frontpage.
LOL, always interesting to see Amigas rivals, like Genesi employees making such trolling statements.
The fake Mike BouRNa handle isnt used by me.
The last couple of months AmigaOS4 has been demonstrated at special 'AmigaOS4 Tour events' around the world on classic systems equiped with PPC boards. At various events in Slovenia, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Austria, US Westcoast (Sacramento), US Eastcoast (New York), Sweden, Italy, France, Denmark, etc. The Tour will also go DonwUnder.
:-)
Personally I have been to Switzerland to report on one of these events. You can read it here:
Swiss 'AmigaOS4 on Tour' presentation in Basel (29-Jul-2003)
At the Italian Pianeta 2003 fair AmigaOS4 was demonstrated on AmigaOne hardware for the first time! More screenshots of AmigaOS4 can be found here at the AmigaWorld.net community portal.
Hyperion will also be present at the upcoming Benelux Amiga Show which is planned for the 4th and 4th of October in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. I plan to be there as well.
There seems to be some confusion with regard to which OSes/solutions this effort is directed at. Currently there are 4 main 68k Amiga compatible solutions DiscreetFX would like to see supported. For two first one listed below PPC native versions would be preferable:
o ryid=560
1) AmigaOS4
This is the official new AmigaOS developed for classic Amigas upgraded with PPC accelerators and new AmigaOne computers which are being sold with G3 and G4 processors.
Some of the latest but still unfinished screenshots of AmigaOS4:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?st
AmigaOne motherboards can already be bought in combination with Linux at the following dealers (AmigaOS4 will be delivered for free as soon as it is finished): http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/dealers.php
With MOL MacOS X can also already be used with this system (as well as with the Peg below):
http://www.anythingamiga.com/XEPics/x2.jpg.html
2) MorphOS
Its ABOX environment is a re-implementation of version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system. The re-implemted Exec kernel is hosted on top of a Quark microkernel. The OS is fast and responsive and currently runs with G3 Pegasos motherboards. Interested people will have to wait for the Pegasos II, which is planned for release in September. An interesting review can be found at OSNews:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3589
3) AROS
An open source project intended as a multi-platform re-implementation of version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system. Most of the development takes place on x86 computers. Much of the source code was used for MorphOS. http://www.aros.org/
4) UAE, Amithlon and other 68 AmigaOS emulators
AmigaOS XL: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=604
Amiga Forever: http://cloanto.com/amiga/forever/
Well, I did state "probably". It's just a personal judgement based on all the high profile game licenses they we able to acquire.
But I believe the Amiga and Mac markets are likely far more important to Hyperion. Mac as a good sales platform and Amiga for their future ambitions and passion.
Hyperion is the company who is leading the AmigaOS4 project. They are very passionate about the Amiga platform.
s to ryid=278
:)
After the demise of Loki Games, Hyperion is probably the most important commercial Linux game developing company left on the market today. They now have a really impressive list of Amiga (and Linux/Mac) licenses and released products (Heretic2, Descent Freespace, Shogo, SiN, Soldier of Fortune, Majesty, Worms Armageddon, etc, etc!), but have been pretty quiet lately due to their top programmers leading the AmigaOS4 project, as well as being hired by Mai Logic for developing the AmigaOne/Teron firmware ROM.
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?
Considering their expertise in many different fields the "Entertainment" part of Hyperion's name is a bit misleading though. For instance they also have a AmigaOS4 license for porting Real3D, a great professional 3D Raytracer. They changed their name from Hyperion Software to Hyperion Entertainment simply because there was another company with the same name already.
Keep up the excellent work Hyperion!
Pekka Nissinen had recently updated his AmigaOne (and Pegasos) benchmarks comparison webpage, providing information on various benchmark performance tests for AmigaOne-SE and AmigaOne-XE motherboards.
Do note however that the G4 benchmarks do not include any Altivec optimised software tests, in which case the overall performance can be significantly improved, depending on the software type used and degree of optimisation.
No this wasn't me. I never post anonymously.
But anyhow I would agree that the original news submission is quite misleading as currently G4 powered AmigaOne-XE boards are also available. For Alan's take on TerraSoft and information on new AmigaOne boards have a look at Alan's presentation.
I am planning an interview with Jeri and Jens for OSNews.com with regard to the c-one and Catweasel board (targeted mainly at AmigaOne/Pegasos/AmigaOS emulation users) today. If there are any questions anyone would like to see answered, then you can suggest them here or send me an email.
I am planning to publish this interview somewhere next week. My interview/article will likely emphasize that the c-one is a reconfigurable solution, not solely for c64 fans. So stay tuned.
For the people who understand German, here's an interesting piece regarding the c-one by a German Mag.
Here's a video of an Amiga show where a prototype c-one was being demonstrated by Jeri. Also the Pegasos and AmigaOne were being sold at this event.
Some more pictures of Jeri and some interesting Pegasos demonstration video can be found here.
> BEEP! Wrong... ExecPPC and ExecSG are coded to
> be hardware independent.
Wrong neither "ExecPPC" nor ExecSG will be hardware independent, but instead easy portable (HALs). There's a great difference here.
And FYI an Amiga is an Amiga branded platform, just like a Macintosh is a Macintosh branded product. That will be all from me.
And MorphOS'reimplemented Exec and ExecSG believe they run on a PPC "Amiga". IMO it is really sad that you present yourself as mister know it all, despite all the clarifications.
The low level stuff is done by Linux, that's the only reason why Amithlon can take advantage of the large pool of Linux supported hardware devices.
> Calling Sassenrath a god, when on other posts
> you go on and on about how his work is
> obsolete
Nonesense, I think that Carl is great and that REBOL is great. (Note that a link to REBOL Technologies's homepage resides on my favorite Amiga links at my AmigaRing). Please give me some links to your wild claims.
BTW REBOL is also available for the AmigaDE.
> Exec no longer interfaces the hardware.
Neither in the case of Amithlon, do you now start to see the parallels of my example which you so eagerly try to attack?