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Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

The AmigaOS and Kickstarter code doesn't work with PCs or Intel Macs. So there is nothing to be gained unless you have a 68K or PowerPC Amiga or one of the PowerMacs that could be hacked to run AmigaOS.

Besides there is AROS for PCs and Intel Macs: http://aros.sourceforge.net/

It is a rewrite of AmigaOS 3.1 that uses the same API calls.

The link was temporary and was deleted already.

Hyperion and Amiga had been at odds with each other over AmigaOS 4 and other things. Amiga has changed ownership many times and AmigaOS was only designed to work on Amiga computers. Had they ported it to Intel PCs it would have been a different story and been like BeOS then.

If you have a Kickstart 1.0 Floppy disk for an Amiga 1000 it has the source code on the floppy because someone grabbed the wrong disk to write the Kickstart 1.0 file to and instead of grabbing a blank disk grabbed one that had source code on it.

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The Amiga world has not aged gracefully. It's hopelessly fractured with something like half a dozen OS efforts all built around various philosophies of ideological purity to the old Amigas each capable of addressing markets that might number in the hundreds of users.

It's kind of insane that all the various parties just haven't decided to open source everything and try to grow the community instead of taking smaller and smaller slices of a very tiny and shrinking pie. I really can't figure it out. It's just a niche hobbyist thing and charging for the software and rom images isn't ever going to make any money back for the people who put the effort in.

This is really one of the cases where I think properly open sourcing everything and just running it like a mature open source effort would be far more productive.

It all ended in the early 1990s when Commodore went out of business. Amiga got sold and then resold, etc.

Whomever is doing AmigaOS or MorphOS or whatever wants to be another Apple with hardware lock in, and following the old Apple business plan of the PowerMac instead of the new Apple business plan of merging with a Unix OS and going open source ala Darwin.

My Amiga 1000 broke apart, first the keyboard failed and then the floppy drive. Replacements were expensive so I got a 386 clone and ran DOS and Windows for less than the cost of fixing the Amiga 1000. I later got an Amiga 500 at a convention for a good price but gave it away to a friend later who was making a computer museum.

I use Amiga emulators, you can set the floppy drive speed to a faster speed to speed up the loading of programs.

Most of the golden age AmigaDOS stuff was Kickstart 1.3 or 1.2 when EA and others made games for them. The 2.0 era kind of killed compatibility, and by the time AmigaOS 3.0 came out the big names stopped writing software for it. AmigaOS 4.0 was contracted out to Hyperion and there were lawsuits over the rights to it.

I agree open sourcing it and porting it to Intel PCs would get more users and they could then focus on writing apps for it and make money on an app store.

The number of Amigas has shrunk over time because they wear out. But people are still wanting to use them and pay for a modern operating system or hardware upgrade for them. Commodore only made so many Amiga systems, and Amiga only made so many Amiga One systems and they are expensive.

> merging with a Unix OS and going open source ala Darwin.

So basically let the "community" do the grunt work, then slap some UI libs on top and tie it to an expensive dongle (sometimes called a laptop or desktop).

Apple could not program their way out of a paper bag to make a modern day OS as Mac OS9 failed and Copeland was vaporware and a big failure. They had to buy out Next to get Steve Jobs back and base the OS on Unix and open source projects.

What is known as Apple now is basically what Next used to be the old Apple is dead and the new Apple is based on Next. Steve Jobs canceled all of the projects that lost money, and made new projects that earned more money that the ones that got canceled.

Darwin is the open source part of OSX, the GUI is not a part of it. Apple uses open source code and the community to save money on R&D of the OS.

> I agree open sourcing it and porting it to Intel PCs would get more users and they could then focus on writing apps for it and make money on an app store.

This space is already taken by AROS or emulators with AmigaOS 3.x. The people who want to move to x86 already have at this point. It's not clear that an official AmigaOS port would get any users at all - it's all very emotionally driven at this point.

>following the old Apple business plan of the PowerMac instead of the new Apple business plan of merging with a Unix OS and going open source ala Darwin These plans were orthogonal to each other. Darwin would still run on top of PowerPC if it didn't fall behind x86-64 in performance per watt.

Someone needs to explain the whole Amiga thing to me, because I've lost the thread. When you say markets might number in the hundreds, I have a hard time believing even that. Perhaps I'm just ignorant (as I said, I've lost the thread), but why would anyone run Amiga OS any more other than for the novelty? Are there still applications that are worth spending money on?

Not a direct answer to your question, but I believe there are still A/V shops that use Amiga Hardware.

I used to work in video production and I never spoke to a person that currently used Amiga anywhere. I realize this is totally anecdotal, but the Amiga hardware must be pretty tightly integrated into your workflow if you're still using 20+ year old hardware that's a tiny fraction of the speed of more flexible and standardized desktops now, with software that you can easily and cheaply hire someone out of college to operate since they probably have already trained on it.

Perhaps a few TV news outlets are still using it since the turnaround there is so tight that everything needs to be "just so" to meet your deadlines, but even then, I have difficulty believing with the move to digital and HD that you could even get your footage onto an Amiga and work with it. I can't believe the hardware could handle HD.

My comment was also purely anecdotal as well, and biased towards public access and small market TV stations (ie high school run A/V Productions).

Regardless, your point is probably valid, but I have to imagine there is at least a handful of A/V enthusiasts taht swear by the RGB based computers.

I personally saw an Amiga still in use in a public access studio in 2005. It was being used to show announcements. The function of it today could be trivially replaced with a raspberry pi and a bit of custom software, but I can say that the reason it was still in operation in 2005 was because it was set up by an employee in 1990's who had since moved on and there was no longer anyone with sufficient knowledge/motivation to replace it.

It's like classic cars or motorcycles or woodworking exclusively with hand tools: it is not the fastest, most efficient, most comfortable, way from point A to point B, but it is a unique experience of its own that is not easy to replicate, even with emulators.

Why would a 1968 Camaro SS be a sought after thing that anyone could want in a world with Tesla? There's no good reason, it just is.

If you do an eBay search, you'll find they are quite sought after. At this point Amigas sell for almost what they sold for new, if they are in very good condition. There is a revived demo scene (just as the C64 has seen a resurgence in recent years), and even new software is being written.

It's not sensible, it's just fun.

Edit: I own a C64, and would likely buy an Amiga, if I came across one in good shape at a reasonable price. I enjoy the old machines. Tinkering with something so simple is a very different experience than tinkering with a modern computer.

You'd be surprised at how big the retrocomputing/retrogaming enthusiast market is. I know in the U.S. that there are several shows alone that pull in north of a thousand people.

It really is mostly for the novelty/nostalgia factor. Most of the Amiga OSs run on ancient PowerPC hardware and aren't useful in a modern sense for much more than simple web browsing and IRC.

While there are certainly people who make things for the various scenes and sell them, usually they're just trying to cover manufacturing cost of physical product. Software is usually freeware/opensource. The Atari 8-bit computer scene, for example, produces lots of weird custom hardware that the makers usually sell for parts + labor + shipping, but I can't recall ever hearing of license fees for a new DOS (there are many DOSs for the old 8-bits).

What's particularly weird about the Amiga scene is how locked down the IP still is and how that seems to permeate the rest of the scene. It's like the IP owners think that somehow they'll suddenly come across hundreds of millions of dollars in VC money and will reignite the Amiga fire with new hardware and software that will sweep the world...if only they hold on to the licenses for 30 year old ROM images a little bit longer. Or that they'll somehow sell enough licenses to make up for millions of dollars of development investment.

No joke, AmigaOS 4.1 is actually 30EUR today -- in almost 2016 -- and it only runs on bizarro PowerPC hardware that's built out of weird industrial control system motherboards or something and sold by yet other hopeless companies. [1][2][3]

If they sell 1,000 licenses a year, their revenue is 30,000EUR.

So I mean, Hyperion Entertainment is supposedly a company and there's probably more than one person hacking away at the OS, but there's no way they're coming close to covering costs on this. If I wasn't convinced of the earnestness of Amiga enthusiasts, I'd almost believe the entire thing is some kind of complex money laundering operation.

There's even commercial software still developed and licensed: [4][5][6][7]

and even an entire app store! [8]

I really admire the enthusiasm and passion, but I just can't figure out the money angle or what the point is.

1 - http://www.amigaos.net/

2 - http://www.a-eon.com/

3 - http://www.acube-systems.biz/

4 - http://www.pagestream.org/

5 - http://www.amigaos.net/software/100/amidark-engine

6 - http://www.hollywood-mal.com/purchase.html

7 - http://www.codebench.co.uk/

8 - http://www.amistore.net/

Wow, Pagestream. Now there's a piece of software I haven't seen for a few years... I actually bought the original of that, for my own DTP projects as a teenager - on my Amiga 3000 I think it was (which had replaced a 500).

PageStream was truly fantastic stuff. I managed to create quite a few newsletters and even school projects with that. Oh the good old times.. :-)

Too true! I loved Pagestream, and thought MS Publisher was so clunky compared to it.

I lived in Juneau, Alaska when the Amiga scene peaked and ran a 4 line BBS on my Amiga 3000. I had purchased a laser printer at the state surplus.

I was given a 300mb SCSI HD by a friend who worked at an architectural firm. The HD had some bad sectors in the middle of the drive and was unusable for IBM's, but I was able to create partitions around the bad area and use the majority of the drive. Truly, the AmigaOS was revolutionary!

What's particularly weird about the Amiga scene is how locked down the IP still is and how that seems to permeate the rest of the scene. It's like the IP owners think that somehow they'll suddenly come across hundreds of millions of dollars in VC money and will reignite the Amiga fire with new hardware and software that will sweep the world...if only they hold on to the licenses for 30 year old ROM images a little bit longer. Or that they'll somehow sell enough licenses to make up for millions of dollars of development investment.

What I always thought was really weird is, the community helps them with this. Like, the Amiga scene for some time was about the only retro scene I know of that self-policed for infringement. Regular Ami fans would take it upon themselves to scour the web for people hosting the Workbench ROMs and disks and report them, and would get very very cross about requests. It was as if they thought if they could only shut down emulation people would just start rebuying real hardware in droves just to play ancient games. You can't even practically build an actual high-end Amiga anymore like you can get up and running in WinUAE with a few clicks, because the accelerator and graphics add-on hardware is all mostly rarer than gold these days.

It really is the case that there's this hardcore of really obsessive Amiga fans who're convinced they can somehow force the world to once again go Amiga. No one else is like this; there's no hardcore Risc OS fans out there waiting for the day when Acorn arises again and slays Microsoft or something.

It's bizarre.

> "It's bizarre."

I agree, but I can see two good things that came of the actions taken to protect the ROMs.

1. A company that supports the Amiga could sell the ROMs for use in emulation.

http://www.amigaforever.com/

2. It helped to push for an open source version of the ROMs (AROS 68k).

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=56211

>No joke, AmigaOS 4.1 is actually 30EUR today -- in almost 2016 -- and it only runs on bizarro PowerPC hardware that's built out of weird industrial control system motherboards or something and sold by yet other hopeless companies. [1][2][3]

This is what amazes me, really. I get the novelty factor, but who's dropping $500 on new PPC Amiga hardware still? It's one thing to go out and find an old amiga on ebay and run some retro apps or games for fun, but buying new hardware for an OS that could probably barely browse the web these days (is there a modern web browser for Amiga?) and doesn't even really meet the standard of "classic car like hobby" seems odd to me. I just assumed there was something critical that still needed to be propped up.

I'll try to explain a little bit of the history of the OS, to help explain the various factions in the Amiga community...

When Commodore was producing Amigas, the Amiga OS that ran on top of them ran from the Amiga OS 1.x series to the Amiga OS 3.x series, with Amiga 3.1 being the last version that was produced before Commodore went bankrupt.

After Commodore went bankrupt, the future of the Amiga was uncertain. Some Amiga users began debating how to take the platform forward. After a lot of debate, this culminated in the decision to start by creating an open-source OS based on the design of Amiga OS 3.1, which could be used as a platform for future improvements. This became the AROS project.

Ownership to the official Amiga assets (OS, patents and hardware) changed hands a number of times. The common pattern seemed to be a purchase by a PC manufacturer, who would then outsource the development of the platform through a dedicated subsidiary. First owners were Escom. Second owners were Gateway. Gateway was purchased by Acer at one point, so I believe the current owners are Acer. However, as mentioned previously, official development of the platform was managed by subcontractors, that went under names like 'Amiga Technologies' and 'Amiga Inc'.

Another OS split would happen because of the lack of new hardware coming from official sources. During the time when the official owners of the Amiga appeared increasingly incapable of bringing new hardware to market, a series of PowerPC accelerators appeared for classic Amigas (classic Amigas are based on the 68k family of processors). At first, these PPC accelerators would run on software designed to work alongside Amiga OS 3.x, but in time this evolved into a dedicated PPC-based OS for Amigas. This became MorphOS.

What about the official developments? So after Amiga OS 3.1 there were two additional releases in the 3.x series, 3.5 and 3.9. IIRC of these releases were developed by a company called H&P (Hauge & Partner, or something like that). At one point, it looked like MorphOS would become AmigaOS 4.0, however a couple of the H&P developers formed a new company called Hyperion and convinced Amiga Inc to let them develop the PPC version of Amiga OS, which became the Amiga 4.x that exists today.

There were various other twists to this tale that I've glossed over, but notable mention should go out to Amithlon (sp?), which was an unofficial AmigaOS port/emulator for x86 hardware. At one point there was some hope that this could've been used to pushed the Amiga forward, but it never got the official backing it needed.

So in terms of the remaining factions, it's arguable that four remain:

1. Classic Amiga (68k-based AmigaOS, running on either real or emulated hardware).

2. AROS.

3. AmigaOS 4.x.

4. MorphOS.

In terms of software releases, there's still a small amount of new releases, but killer apps that would be worth investing in the platform for are thin on the ground. Closest to that you'll probably find is Hollywood, but it's available for non-Amiga platforms now too:

http://www.hollywood-mal.com/

Wasn't part of the appeal of Amiga its unique hardware? The dedicated co-processors? In some ways, it was very ahead of its time in this. Is the PPC version able to replicate this somehow?

Yes, the big draw was the hardware acceleration, and the software this enabled. There were many Amiga users who barely used the OS, and just played games instead (the OS was split over two parts, the Kickstart that would run from a ROM chip, and the Workbench that was run from floppy disk or hard drive. If you played games, you only needed the Kickstart). However, as the competition caught up to the hardware of the Amiga, the importance of the OS in setting the Amiga apart increased.

The PPC Amigas don't really have custom co-processors. One or two of the PPC Amigas has an embedded microcontroller or FPGA, but they're not very powerful. You're also able to use some dedicated PC GPUs.

With regards to the future of Amiga hardware, what interests me more than the PPC machines are the FPGA computers/accelerators. For example, MiST board is able to recreate Amiga hardware in FPGA, along with a number of other classic computers.

http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96

Good explanations. What's more interesting is the Amiga model of CPU + accelerators is becoming the new default in high-performance applications. There could be a revival of OS's natively supporting accelerators of a niche market that cares about that sort of thing. My favorite example is Cavium's Octeon's that basically nobody has heard of:

http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON-III_CN7XXX.html

The Octeon II's often go for around $200 on eBay. They have 16 cores, multi-Gbps network acceleration, onboard crypto, Linux support, and use little power. That's the kind of shit that has potential. Maybe that plus a good FPGA for high-end model where main SOC is multiplexed like usual but one app at a time gets FPGA and/or GPU. A bunch of simple cores, the right on-board accelerators, and FPGA could combine in performance-critical apps to blow Xeons out the water despite being on older process nodes.

My old prediction and dream gets even closer to reality with the rise of the "semi-custom" businesses of AMD and Intel that do this on a case by case basis for their x86 lines. And Intel's acquisition of Altera w/ likely FPGA circuitry in future Xeon's. You can already buy a FPGA desktop from Pico Computing in small form factor. I envision something a bit more integrated into OS API and management systems.

> "Good explanations."

Thanks.

> "What's more interesting is the Amiga model of CPU + accelerators is becoming the new default in high-performance applications. There could be a revival of OS's natively supporting accelerators of a niche market that cares about that sort of thing."

It's possible, though I'd like to see an OS designed from the ground up to support this type of heterogeneous architecture. A few years back I wrote a few notes about how to make better use of reconfigurable computing (on an Amiga forum, funnily enough), still think the basic ideas are sound, though there are plenty of details left to work out:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=679874&postcount=...

> "The Octeon II's often go for around $200 on eBay. They have 16 cores, multi-Gbps network acceleration, onboard crypto, Linux support, and use little power. That's the kind of shit that has potential. Maybe that plus a good FPGA for high-end model where main SOC is multiplexed like usual but one app at a time gets FPGA and/or GPU. A bunch of simple cores, the right on-board accelerators, and FPGA could combine in performance-critical apps to blow Xeons out the water despite being on older process nodes."

The Octeon III sounds like quite a high end device, I'm sure it'd be a beast with regards to performance, but do you know of anything similar at a lower price point? Does $200 get you an Octeon II evaluation board on eBay?

The Amiga post is interesting but too much on memrister. I avoid speculative stuff. For FPGA's, what's proven so far is integration into embedded/HPC and automated partitioning of apps to FPGA's. So your idea of an OS clean slated for that with Kay style DSL's is possible, maybe even with current hardware. Also, their LISP work could turn to hardware easily with SHard Scheme-to-hardware compiler or an improvement to it.

Re octeon

Yeah, it's high-end but that's due to its market & low volume. Probably custom, too. I got the price by various boards that show up on eBay with Octeon II's priced from $150-300. Example:

http://m.ebay.com/itm/Interface-Masters-Quad-1GbE-PCIe-Ether...

Far as cost, a standard cell design with a few accelerators should be straight-forward. I also just got half a dozen papers on transistor-level optimization techniques that are automated and get a bit closer to custom performance. So potential there.

People run Amiga computers as a hobby like many others legacy plataforms.

> but why would anyone run Amiga OS any more other than for the novelty?

Because it feels very, very different to the mainstream options, and if you stuck with it long enough to get invested in the PPC versions, why not? At that point you got hardware that if not competitive is at least fast enough to be reasonable. It's an extremely lightweight OS, with a culture of minimalism, so while things will be slow if you try to do stuff that's actually CPU heavy, most Amiga software is responsive on very slow hardware.

I doubt there are many Amiga users today that use it as their only system, though there might be some diehard people doing even that, but for many of the remaining users AmigaOS is the OS they enjoy using, and they'll "resort" to Windows or OS X or Linux as a fallback when they have to.

Today its nostalgia driven hobby consisting of tens of people collecting accelerator cards in order to run sysinfo :(

Considering it has been about two decades since the Amiga platform endured Commodore's collapse, that it exists in a way that people care enough to fight over it is pretty amazing.

Most of those people using an Amiga don't like Apple or Microsoft and want an alternative that is not Linux or used with a modern computer that might have an NSA backdoor in it.

https://prism-break.org/

Even if they used Linux the BIOS might have some sort of backdoor in it.

Some people use DOS machines with a Pentium 1 or 486 chip because they were made before backdoors got added. George R. R. Martin uses a DOS machine with Wordstar because he finds it more reliable than Windows.

The old Amigas were very reliable, and the Guru Errors got fixed as of Kickstart 2.0 and up. The more modern AmigaOS 3.1 and up have more apps for them via open source and shareware.

These people love their Amigas because they don't have the bloat or crap that modern systems have. AmigaOS runs on a low memory footprint and uses low CPU cycles.

There are CPU accelerators for every Amiga out there to replace the 68K CPU with a PowerPC or 68040 emulated custom chip. Even if the Amiga One uses that SAM440 chip used in Microwave Ovens it runs very fast because of the low overhead of AmigaOS.

There is still a niche market for retro tech.

> It's kind of insane that all the various parties just haven't decided to open source everything

It's not at all clear how to resolve the copyright issues around that. Hyperion has the rights to continue to develop and release AmigaOS 4, but it's never been resolved whether they actually own the rights they'd need in order to open source everything even if they wanted to.

> It's just a niche hobbyist thing and charging for the software and rom images isn't ever going to make any money back for the people who put the effort in.

You say that, but surprisingly several people are making a living of sorts where the Amiga market makes up a substantial proportion. Mostly hardware sales for various replacement/expansion boards.

It's certainly not making anyone rich, though.

From what I can tell, in 2012-ish Amiga Inc. transferred all copyright to Cloanto, which is why they're able to sell kickstart rom images. [1]

This puts them in the position where they're pretty much the gatekeepers to making UAE legally usable, and they benefit from probably millions of man-hours of emulator development while demanding payment for 30 year old IP they never developed and a front-end UAE launcher that's not needed.

1 - http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2015-02-00027-EN.html

Personally I'd rather Cloanto sits on those rights than Amiga Inc. in any case, and while it's annoying that the kickstart images aren't legally unecumbered, few people care about distributing them...

Worth noting also, that UAE can use AROS kickstart images, so increasingly an unencumbered, fully open source, UAE setup is possible (compatibility still needs a lot of work, though).

Archive.org has the Amiga TOSEC collection of Kickstart ROMs and Floppy images. I won't link to it but it can be found via Google.

> So there is nothing to be gained unless you have a 68K or PowerPC Amiga or one of the PowerMacs that could be hacked to run AmigaOS.

Or, you know, an emulator, which you could likely run in a browser now that MESS has been compiled to Javascript.

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