AmigaOS 4.1 has seen another update; we’ve hit update 3 already. This one’s got all sorts of fixes and updates, including updated PATA and SATA drivers, updated Intuition and GUI components, updated USB stack with USB 2.0 (EHCI) support, updated and improved Warp3D support, faster 2D graphics support, various kernel fixes for increased stability, and lots more.
ok this is knitpicking
Should Hyperion entertainment create a dedicated Amiga website
16 month for a handful of bug fixes and minor improvements.
gotta love closed-source fringe projects
not that being open source would help much given that all the programmers still existing in the amiga community are probably already employed by hyperion
can anyone remind me why amiga os is suposedly not completely stupid and irrelevant? It’s always a good laugh
I’m more surprised someone has managed to build a commercial venture around it.
Given that the die-hard Amiga users grew up with Commodore in charge of their computing experience, anything an Amigan WON’T put up with generally falls under the Geneva Conventions.
Yeah, no kidding. Out of curiosity i checked out the price on those ep4x0 boards with AmigaOS 4… the higher model is almost 900 freaking euros (with VAT)! For a motherboard! I understand it’s a niche product, but my 8 months old core i7 system is worth way less than that…
I used to own two amigas back in the 90s and would love to play with amiga os again but at those prices it’s just not accessible for me.
Scumbag readers…
http://qkme.me/3526ao
Edited 2011-08-30 22:51 UTC
I’m not complaining! I’m absolutely thrilled by the entertainment value potential of amigaos related news.
I’m kinda disappointed that no amiga fan showed up to tell me about multiple screens or lack of memory protection or about some obsolete 20 years old software that they still use today, though
Edited 2011-08-30 23:22 UTC
Hey, I have an Icaros 1.3 VM in KVM I use somewhat often. The more I learn about Amiga history, the more I think Linux got off lightly with just Microsoft and SCO as the main opponents.
To be sure, Amiga faced stiff competition, but frankly the worst enemy it faced was Commodore itself. Poor (European market) or non-existent (North American market) marketing, failure to keep pace with the competition in terms of hardware and the failure to create any sort of system to really fill the gap between the low-end “game console with a keyboard” A500/600/1200 systems and the high-end workstations (A1000/2000/3000/4000) are all problems of Commodore’s own making.There was no “shadowy cabal” that stood in opposition to the the Amiga. Bad corporate decision making killed it without any outside help.
Indeed. And remember the CD32? It had Liberation, one of the most rich, deep and immersive games ever written — a true classic. It also had Dangerous Streets, an appallingly bad beat ’em up that scored a deservedly low 3% in Amiga Power.
Which game did Commodore make a CD32 pack out of? Yes, Dangerous Streets.
Commodore was a terrible, shockingly incompetent company. I loved my Amigas but with such poor management, the machines were always going to suffer.
Ha ha. So true, Thom, so true..
Hey, I haven’t seen any of the Atari Cold Fire Project posts on here, there’s an alternate niche OS for ya.
http://acp.atari.org/
They have hardware actually!
I tend to agree with some, AmigaOS 4.x is even niche of the niche. Not enough hardware to run it. AmigaOS 3.x is more exciting to me (and I think most Amiga users). For other hardware or next-gen AmigaOS I would tend to think Aros is the most interesting, MorphOS needs more hardware support, and then it’ll be cool. But Aros is awesome ’cause it’s a recreation using open source.
http://natami.net/
ColdFire’s not the only one! They’re writing drivers for AmigaOS 3 and AROS m68k, and there are boards being built now.
This all looks nice, but the hardware needed to run it is looking decidedly underpowered and overpriced in these days of $25 ARM motherboards. If Hyperion had any brains at all, they designed the AOS4 kernel to be at least moderately portable. Assuming this to be the case, I’d think that now would be a great time to start an ARM port.
Apparently USB 2.0 support is still broken for many users with this update. The “fix” from Hyperion is to go into your hardware settings and just disable your USB ports. For cyin’ out loud, the rest of the world has had USB 2.0 since 1998. Now here we are in 2011 and the Amiga STILL can’t work properly with USB 2.0. Oh, but hey, there’s this new over-priced, underpowered Amiga X1000 on the horizon and it only costs $3000 USD for the motherboard. And it’s only 18 months behind schedule. And the USB ports probably won’t work…….
Actually, it was USB 1.1 that was released in 1998. USB 2.0 was released in 2000, but didn’t become ubiquitous till a few years later. That’s not to say that USB 2.0 support in AmigaOS isn’t overdue though.
Seriously. Hyperion should make a quick update on the USB support.
Is the world getting larger, or are a few of you just getting smaller?
At the height of the Amiga’s popularity, did they actually have more market share than Apple, or did Apple have more?
And Yes, go on bringing us news about alternative OSes !
I’m using AmigaOS 4.1 Update 3 on 2 computers : one AmigaOne G4/1Ghz and one Sam440/733 Mhz. All is working flawlessly.
As for any system, if it is badly configured, it may lead to strange behaviours.
Yes, it is expensive hardware (and yet, as is Apple’s and they have by far a larger market) but it is quality hardware. Furthermore, AmigaOS 4.1 is not as demanding in power as can be Linux, Mac OS X or Windows 7.
And you can also find used hardware on various sites with enough power to please you (or just wait for the AmigaOn x1000 wich will be expensive too).
I think that what the Amiga was all about was applying forward-thinking hardware design for multimedia, before most of us knew what multimedia was, and utilizing it to the best effect. The industry has reached a point where the Amiga style of design should be the inspiration to do things that are revolutionary now.
There’ve been some interesting platform concepts under the Amiga name, and some really dull ones, but I don’t get too excited about these PPC designs. Honestly, the CPU ought to be commodity at this point. Many of us ex-Amigoids had a 7MHz processor when the rest of the computing world laughed at anything under 20Mhz, and then got puzzled at the wicked demos we had. CPU – big deal. The Amiga had hardware acceleration beyond the desktop industry’s norms. It had system bandwidth that the PC industry didn’t surpass until AGP and PCI became common.
The LLVM (low level virtual machine) project shows how the CPU particulars can be abstracted away in the style of TAOS, the operating system which used “nanokernels” to virtualize processors of widely divergent families and make them able to process in parallel. Demo machines had a 486, MIPS, DEC, and Sparc processor all running in parallel on 3D rendering. Incidentally, ex-Amiga engineers were on its design team. LLVM can do that now. Virtualize the legacy platform.
What’s really exciting is that you could pair together general-purpose GPU processing, FPGA chips, and CPUs and use them to terrific effect. Imagine using other chips built around paradigms like clockless computing or computing with merely “good enough” precision which requires a fraction of the silicon of standard high-precision hardware, and using each type to its best effect.
If FPGAs are standard and you hardware-accelerate to a degree not seen before, you carry on the Amiga spirit. It just so happens that an FPGA also produces some of the best hardware recreations of legacy Amiga platforms, so, why not?
To me, that’s truly in the spirit of the Agnus, Paula, and Denise chips.
Edited 2011-09-02 16:44 UTC