Surprise Amiga Workbench 3.1 Update, 20 Years Later | Hacker News Reader

Surprise Amiga Workbench 3.1 Update, 20 Years Later

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185 pointserickhill71 comments

Does anyone here still use Amiga for actual work? I ask for two reasons:

1. I'm always interested when very old systems are still in production for one reason or another and how you are doing it.

2. I wonder what motivated Hyperion to release this bug fix or, indeed, how they even managed to muster resources to do so. I can't quite figure out how they stay running.

My story is that in a small cable access TV station, they had an Amiga for Video Toaster and I think some automated PSA type announcements at certain hours. Fun to see it there, though it's been some time since I visited. I can't imagine with the shift to HD that it's running any more. I also know a small local radio station that uses Tune Tracker on BeOS for radio automation, which reminds me that I should check on Haiku's progress.

Depends on what you count as real work.

This was written for the Amiga Demo Comp at Revision 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvKAq3tq_LE

It got first place: http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=1550&when=2016

That's very cool (although I did spot some of their tricks --- you can hide a multitude of rendering sins behind a nice noise filter!) --- thanks.

Do you know what that was written with? i.e. was it developed on an Amiga, or cross-compiled from a PC?

Edit: I'm mainly interested in knowing in whether people are still using the Amiga as a first-class development platform, or else treating it solely as a development target. I'd also be interested to know whether Amiga emulation technology is good enough to allow this kind of thing to be developed using emulation, rather than having to refer to the hardware all the time.

(I actually have a PowerPC code generator in the window over here...

<----

...currently producing largely broken PowerPC code as I type; I'm familiar with cross development. Also, also I think my liveness calculator is broken, and I have a horrible cold, but that's not very relevant.)

I can't speak to this particular demo, but this may give you some insight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demo_%28computer_programming%2...

I know that several Demoscene programmers work on Windows, MacOS or Linux PCs, simply for comfort, and demos often have platform independent parts, but often need to have platform specific optimizations. The Amiga has the additional advantage of coprocessors, which makes me guess this might even be in assembly.

I don't know, but you can get a download link for the code and data files here:

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67182

Maybe you can find hints in there? Been scrolling through it and found references to MorphOS and " @2010-2011 by Michal Wozniak"

Those who still make Amiga demos do so with an emulator like UAE, often without access to real hardware at all.

At least that was how it was mostly done ~10 years ago.

A lot of TV stations used them, but i think you're right. They probably all got replaced with the shift to HD.

I'm pretty sure Fatboy Slim still uses an Atari ST as part of his setup.

If its an Atari Falcon then it could have been made by C-Lab. The Falcon had the same 56001 DSP that the NeXT hardware had but with MIDI ports.

That DSP is good enough for running Quake 2 on Falcon, no joke:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNs6Jw4V4vlvafSs0H3Ww...

there is also writeup here http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=26775

We (Norman & I) stopped using the Atari in the studio about 10 years ago (it sits in the corner unloved). Ableton & Protools these days.

Simon.

I've always wondered what guys like you did for a backup strategy. Is the "master" for Renegade Master or I'm Alive only on some shitty DD floppy somewhere?

What about Liam Howlett? Aphex Twin?

Tracks got bounced (ie. rendered/recorded/exported) to DAT tapes.

The record wasn't just stored in the sampler and computer, it was in the state of the whole studio, at a minimum the mixing desk the sampler was plugged into but also likely various external effects units. Digging out the floppy wouldn't recreate the record as it was released.

A little sad to hear, but still! It made it to the 21st century!

This is why I love reading HN comments. On some random Amiga post, the guy that worked with some of my music heroes just pops up and drops a comment like this. Thanks for sharing!

Pretty sure dev Paradox still tours with his amiga:

https://vimeo.com/10383653

(I love that video)

Cool, never heard of him before.

https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/2781

A friend of mine deployed a small FM radio station in Bethlehem ~10 years ago using a commercial radio product that was built around yellowTAB ZETA. I thought it was great, since I've always had a soft spot for the BeOS, but I did find it odd that they were building a commercial product around an OS that was basically unsupportable.

I assume it was Tune Tracker. The thing with Tune Tracker is that it was really good, really cheap ($200 as of right now, but I recall seeing it for $99 when I was managing a college station) and how often do you need to update something that's not online?

It actually runs on Haiku now, according to their website, which makes is more supportable in the long term.

That's a really fascinating niche. Seems like because it is so specialized and falls under "equipment", people will put up with what most computer users would not. It looks like they also sell a preconfigured hardware/software bundle so you don't need to mess around with installing an OS.

In 2015, someone did: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a1...

I have often wondered this as well. How can they possibly be generating enough revenue to stay in business?

I think they have other revenue streams.

It's not an amiga but I know of a person still using an NTSC character generator for a public access station. They just threw an analog to digital converter in front of it and moved on to different tasks.

I find that kind of stuff interesting as well. I thought about creating an Ask:HN thread to bring the subject up but I have the feeling that most HN readers probably keep up to date on their hardware and software.

Amiga still powering school district heating system (2015): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9707420

Commodore 64 (Amiga's daddy) still used in auto shop in Poland (2016): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12604414

Also, the top comment in the C64 thread is priceless ;-)

People who still use AmigaOS day to day are today more likely to either run it emulated or use AmigaOS 4.x on an AmigaOne (PPC) rather than run a "classic" M68k Amiga.

It's mostly a hobby either way, and an expensive one. The PPC AmigaOne's can mostly (all?) run Linux as well.

> 2. I wonder what motivated Hyperion to release this bug fix or, indeed, how they even managed to muster resources to do so. I can't quite figure out how they stay running.

While they're a company, most of their "employees" are unpaid or paid very little, and are pretty much volunteers.

Why expensive? The best Amiga, the 500+, is still very cheap on eBay.

I loved the 500+ but the A2000, A3000 and A4000 were legendary.

I got my A500+ suped up with a 68010. That'll get you 5% in a tight loop.

You say that. But then you start on the slippery slope to this:

http://obligement.free.fr/gfx/trevordickinson_amiga_collecti...

That's part of Trevor Dickinson's collecton. The guy then went on to start a company to produce new PPC Amiga(One)'s:

http://a-eon.com/

Which from all accounts is also more of an expensive hobby than a majorly profitable business, at least when factoring in his time.

(The image is from an interview: http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwdickinson_e... )

Are you sure about Hyperion employees being unpaid or paid very little?

Fairly. There has been comments about it from insiders on various forums over the years. Note that I'm suggesting that Hyperion is exploiting them in any way - I'm sure if the money had been there that they'd have taken people on full time, but the market is miniscule at this point.

Amiga was a pretty cool system, and the fanbase had a devotion matched perhaps only by the lispm people.

By the way, if you're interested in the Amiga, go watch Stuart Brown (aka XboxAhoy)'s excellent documentary on FPS on the Amiga: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A

Actually, just go watch his whole backlog if you have any interest in computer history whatsoever: It's all quality work (and I do mean quality: well researched, and polished enough to go on television), and absolutely fascinating.

If you want a good documentary on the Amiga (and also another one on 8/16 bit gaming) you can't go wrong with From Bedrooms to Billions:

http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this, just a paying customer (totally worth it!), but I do know the Producers.

Thanks! I can always use another good documentary.

In return, I can recommend The KGB, The Computer, and Me, based on the excellent book The Cuckoo's Egg.

I can also recommend all of the documentaries done by Jason Scott (Get Lamp, BBS: The Documentary, Going Cardboard (although he only edited that: He's director on the rest), and DEFCON: The Documentary)

I love AmigaOS, so I find disgusting that they're still holding the VCS repository of this 20yr+ code hostage, and selling pointless updates to it.

Also, I much prefer the old logo to that stupid boingball.

The Boing ball is a long-standing Amiga icon; IIRC a lot of the early promotional photos of the system sported a badge with it instead of the rainbow checkmark.

(This is from dusty memories of being the spoilt kid who owned the third Amiga sold in New Orleans. I no longer have any of those old issues of Commodore/Run/Ahoy/Compute's Gazette/Amigaworld that these would have shown up in.)

The rainbow checkmark was one of the rebranding initiatives after the assimilation by Commodore. It was a nod to the five colour rainbow stripes next to the company logo on the C64/Vic 20 case and on all peripherals, monitors and drives included. The logo on the C64 packaging also was a full rainbow gradient, but in the case of the Amiga it was a reminder of the 4096 colour palette.

> The Boing ball is a long-standing Amiga icon; IIRC a lot of the early promotional photos of the system sported a badge with it instead of the rainbow checkmark.

It is, but I've never liked it.

Didnt the whole codebase leak few years ago?

Such an amazing contrast between the Amiga and the Atari ST community.

In the Amiga community, which is larger and more fanatical in general, it seems like people figure they're going to get rich or famous. So there's a bunch of balkanized not-profitable companies creating bizarre ventures and trying to claim the Amiga name or lineage. And so here we have a company owning the OS assets and trying to sell them 20 years later.

The Atari ST by contrast has a completely open source operating system stack now in EmuTOS. While it's not directly from the original Atari sources it is based on the GPL'd sources of the original GEM/GEMDOS from Digital Research and then modified until it is super compatible with the original OS. On top of that there is MiNT, a Unix-like multitasking OS extension, open source since its creation in the late 80s. And open source desktops, task managers, terminals, etc. And the Firebee, new hardware which implements the Atari ST/TT platform over the Freescale Coldfire, and while the hardware is expensive the design is open and the VHDL etc in it is open source. Oh, and there's open source VHDL implementations of the whole original Atari ST design.

Is AROS not similar to what EmuTOS is?

It looks somewhat similar, though I don't get the impression that AROS is aiming to be a 100% compatible native OS like EmuTOS is? It looks like AROS has aimed to be a kind of next-generation Amiga OS for new hardware platforms?

AROS is a bit of both. It runs native on a bunch of hardware, including x86, PPC, ARM. It also runs "hosted" on several OSs, with Linux the most common, where it takes advantage of the host OS filesystem and drivers. But it can also run, for some values of run, on real Amiga hardware. With the caveat that it's a bit heavier than original AmigaOS.

It has a lot of additional features, but also lacks some parts of the original still.

I wish it would ultimately get open-sourced. The companies that make money off of it (Cloanto, Hyperion, etc.) could continue to package things and burn them to EPROMs or disks and sell them for profit, but the community could manage the code base going forward. Drives me nuts the legal side of things has become so freaking stupid.

What is it that makes these people hold on to the source code of AmigaOS? It's not lucrative: probably the costs of making these updates are much higher than any possible revenue? It must be economically practically impossible to hire engineers to do this sort of work. It sounds like some kind of hobby for some people.

Not everything is about money.

In this case it seems to be.

What do you suppose the rationale is here?

I didn't say it was about money. It most probably isn't "about money". I was asking what is the motivation since there are some obvious costs.

It may just be too expensive to release. There may be all kinds of third-party licensed code in there, and someone will have to go through and audit everything to find out. If there is some, it'll have to be removed from any external release.

...and if you're releasing a VCS dump, then it's not good enough to just look at the current state of the files: any third-party code that ever got committed will still be there, and will need to be purged.

This is going to be a lot of work, and it may simply be infeasible to do so.

Those older systems were moddable and programmable by the end user. Newer machines have to deal with security, and complexity has increased by orders of magnitude.

The lack of memory protection on the Amiga is one of the things which made the operating system so incredibly extensible and hackable.

Reading through the trove of documentation, I'm so confused:

if I have a Motorola 68030 accelerated Amiga, what is the latest AmigaOS which will run on my hardware (A1200)?

The post references the release, which mentions fixes for 68020/30 processors and the scsi driver for the A1200 -- so I assume this would be it?

Vanilla Amiga OS 3.1 has a scsi.device (think hardware driver) that can only talk properly to storage devices up to 4GB in size. Disks bigger than that will get corrupted as any sector offset bigger than the 4GB boundary rolls around back to zero.

For a long time there has been patched unofficial scsi.device files and in Amiga OS 3.9, an official scsi.device that doesn't have this limitation.

Hardly any real[1] Amiga fan runs stock Amiga OS 3.1 - most of us have loads of patches in our startup-sequences to overcome modern day issues.

---

[1] There is a large segment of the Amiga community who only game on their Amigas using 4GB CF cards on the IDE channel and a product called WHDLoad (http://whdload.de/), they do not care about the OS so don't fiddle with it.

Version 3.9.

You have to install 3.1 first. Then get a [legal] copy of 3.9 and install that. On every cold boot up, it patches a newer kickstart ROM image into RAM, and then does a soft reboot, so that the newer stuff on 3.9 works properly.

More info here -> http://www.vesalia.de/e_os39.htm

Thank you for the information. How does one install it, if it's on an optical medium? I don't have a CD-ROM or a DVD drive on my Amiga, only network and NFS.

Why now all of a sudden?

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