7 ms·

Amiga OS Kickstart and Workbench source coded leaked

99 points by Audiophilip 11y ago

jug 11y ago
The timing makes it seem like it may have been an insider leak to let AmigaOS live on. Either without Hyperion's support, or with their support, only not officially and so that they have no accountability.
- orionblastar 11y ago
  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/ 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.
  - bane 11y ago
    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.
    - orionblastar 11y ago
      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.
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        > 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).
        orionblastar 11y ago
        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.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    > 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.
orionblastar 11y ago
Link is Slashdotted. Here is another link to the story: http://www.osnews.com/story/29023/Amiga_OS_Kickstart_and_Workbench_source_coded_leaked http://www.osnews.com/story/29023/Amiga_OS_Kickstart_and_Wor... Apparently the file says 3.1 but it is really 4.
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  3.1 was apparently leaked few years ago http://www.pagetable.com/?p=34#comment-3434 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=34#comment-3434
- white-flame 11y ago
  Talking with people from "the scene", this is a snapshot from the 90s. It was leaked before, and now resurfaced for some reason in a more public view. Nothing from the more recent 3.5, 3.9, and 4.x versions are in there. Those were developed by external companies long after the vintage of this leaked snapshot. There's some mention of newer versions, but they're incomplete implementations from the Commodore Amiga team, not the actual developers of the newer versions. It also doesn't compile, isn't 100% complete, and includes a number of internal business documents, not just code & tech.
- bhaak 11y ago
  I peeked into the GitHub repository and I haven't seen anything that seems to confirm that this code is part of AmigaOS 4.0. There might be confusion because of the directories named v40 and v42 but this would be the internal version number of the OS. 40 would be 3.1 and 42 would be an unreleased internal version. IIRC 44 was again released as 3.5 but contained only Workbench changes (so you could just update your system by using the newer libraries).
wslh 11y ago
Finally...
rmtew 11y ago
There are <a href="http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875">comments http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875">comments on</a> one of the Amiga communities most popular forums by a Olaf Barthel, a developer who modernised a more complete version of the 3.x source code. He relates that you need several different C compilers for different parts of the OS, from one that needs to run on a Sun OS to various Amiga-based compilers (Aztec/Manx).
- i336_ 11y ago
  Oh :( Here's the quote: > Like kamelito already said: this stuff hasn't been leaked now, it's been leaked in the late nineties. Rumors have it that Tyschtschenko handed out the sources to a whole bunch of people in Germany (in addition to Phase5, which already had them) to make sure they don't get lost during the next bankruptcy. > These sources were all over the warez boards in 1997 or 1998. > It's the original 3.1 sources from Commodore, they require quite an exotic setup to compile (an obscure SunOS/Solaris based Cross-Compiler amongst other things, IIRC), Olaf Barthel had to spend quite a few hours to make them compile/assemble with modern tools before they could be used as the base for OS 3.5+. Heh. -- I love this one from further on in the thread: > AmigaOS is not designed and implemented in a manner which would facilitate testing. -- Also, HN (Arc) doesn't use HTML, and got completely confused by the URL. Worth reading! http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875 http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875
amigasource 11y ago
Mirror here: https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/ https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/
- i336_ 11y ago
  Yay! Thanks. :D This is undoubtedly going to disappear pretty quickly though. To anybody reading this: The original .tar.bz2 would be the ideal source to mirror, because then the checksums match up and you know you have the copy everyone else has without verifying each file manually. FWIW, MEGA repos let you make directories. They can be up to 50GB so you have plenty of space to upload the original file along with an unpacked copy to browse. Then we just need somewhere resilient to put the link to the latest working repo. I can fairly easily push this onto MEGA if I can get at the .tar.bz2. My email is in my profile if you don't want to reply here. One question though: at https://archive.is/2TTKO#post1058888 https://archive.is/2TTKO#post1058888 someone mentions a small but confusing date issue. Was this file released more than once?
  - amigasource 11y ago
    The one linked to from that forum is still exists on Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025031/http://home.eversberg.eu/temp/amiga%20os%20source%20code%203.1.tar.bz2 https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025031/http://home.evers... It has a date of 20-Aug-2013 13:35, and the download on rol.im, which is also on Wayback Machine, was identical. So perhaps the date has been modified or this is a copy of a two year old release? I did not catch the FTP server releases - which were on the CCC IP address range, I guess part of the 32C3 guest network - before they went down, so I do not know for sure.
    - i336_ 11y ago
      Hah, I'm out of touch with finding software... I should've thought of that. I've done that kinda of thing before. (Incidentally, I reckon the reason Archive.org isn't globally indexable is that it would abruptly cease to exist all at once if everything out there was discoverable...) As for the date thing, one of the Amiga threads linked here mentions that this leak is actually incredibly old and dates to 1997 or so. So... yeah, there's that. This definitely goes in my tiny software leak collection next to NT4 and Mac OS 7 though :D
jdangu 11y ago
Devs talking about fixing bugs in narrator, the earliest TTS engine in home computers: https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/blob/master/v40_src/workbench/devs/narrator/readme https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/blob/master/v40_src/w...
- Tloewald 11y ago
  MacinTalk predates the Amiga release (it was released alongside the Mac in 1984, but not officially supported -- it worked fine; Plaintalk became an official component of the Mac in the early 90s and included [terrible] speech recognition).
  - vidarh 11y ago
    Macintalk and narrator.device are both incarnations of SoftVoice's TTS, and descendants of SAM. Since they were both developed on contract, and both for M68k, I'd hazard the guess that the internal TTS engine is substantially the same, and that they both follow SAM's structure fairly closely (I know narrator.device does - it explicitly lets you set formant parameters that mirror SAMs pretty closely)
- emptybits 11y ago
  SAM (the Software Automatic Mouth) was available in 1982 for Apple, Commodore, & Atari 8-bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth
  - vidarh 11y ago
    And it was developed by the same company. SoftVoice's website still exists, but no idea if the company is still alive: http://www.text2speech.com http://www.text2speech.com
Tloewald 11y ago
Given that, at least back when I still used the Amiga, the community Amiga Resource Project (ARP) was free, open source, and superior in all respects to Commodore's "official" AmigaDOS, so much so that it was adopted by Commodore at one point, why would one want this? I find it hard to believe Commodore got better at writing system software as it got worse at everything else and then went bankrupt.
- bhaak 11y ago
  Correct me if I'm mistaken but ARP was patching only 1.2/1.3 and when 2.0 came along, most of the complaints that started ARP had been resolved. I remember patches that patched ARP so it would use the new 2.0 (i.e. standard file requester). I always thought ARP had been obsolete with 2.0?
- vidarh 11y ago
  ARP provided an exceedingly tiny set of additional APIs. It's not in any way a replacement for AmigaOS. AROS is closer, but while it's vastly superior in some aspects (not least: it runs on pretty much every modern platform you might care about in some form or other - either native, or hosted under Linux or other), it's also still not a complete replacement in others.

99 points by Audiophilip 11y ago

jug 11y ago

The timing makes it seem like it may have been an insider leak to let AmigaOS live on. Either without Hyperion's support, or with their support, only not officially and so that they have no accountability.

orionblastar 11y ago
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/ 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.
- bane 11y ago
  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.
  - orionblastar 11y ago
    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.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      > 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).
      - orionblastar 11y ago
        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.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  > 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.

orionblastar 11y ago

Link is Slashdotted. Here is another link to the story: http://www.osnews.com/story/29023/Amiga_OS_Kickstart_and_Workbench_source_coded_leaked http://www.osnews.com/story/29023/Amiga_OS_Kickstart_and_Wor... Apparently the file says 3.1 but it is really 4.

rasz_pl 11y ago
3.1 was apparently leaked few years ago http://www.pagetable.com/?p=34#comment-3434 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=34#comment-3434
white-flame 11y ago
Talking with people from "the scene", this is a snapshot from the 90s. It was leaked before, and now resurfaced for some reason in a more public view. Nothing from the more recent 3.5, 3.9, and 4.x versions are in there. Those were developed by external companies long after the vintage of this leaked snapshot. There's some mention of newer versions, but they're incomplete implementations from the Commodore Amiga team, not the actual developers of the newer versions. It also doesn't compile, isn't 100% complete, and includes a number of internal business documents, not just code & tech.
bhaak 11y ago
I peeked into the GitHub repository and I haven't seen anything that seems to confirm that this code is part of AmigaOS 4.0. There might be confusion because of the directories named v40 and v42 but this would be the internal version number of the OS. 40 would be 3.1 and 42 would be an unreleased internal version. IIRC 44 was again released as 3.5 but contained only Workbench changes (so you could just update your system by using the newer libraries).

wslh 11y ago

Finally...

rmtew 11y ago

There are <a href="http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875">comments http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875">comments on</a> one of the Amiga communities most popular forums by a Olaf Barthel, a developer who modernised a more complete version of the 3.x source code. He relates that you need several different C compilers for different parts of the OS, from one that needs to run on a Sun OS to various Amiga-based compilers (Aztec/Manx).

i336_ 11y ago
Oh :( Here's the quote: > Like kamelito already said: this stuff hasn't been leaked now, it's been leaked in the late nineties. Rumors have it that Tyschtschenko handed out the sources to a whole bunch of people in Germany (in addition to Phase5, which already had them) to make sure they don't get lost during the next bankruptcy. > These sources were all over the warez boards in 1997 or 1998. > It's the original 3.1 sources from Commodore, they require quite an exotic setup to compile (an obscure SunOS/Solaris based Cross-Compiler amongst other things, IIRC), Olaf Barthel had to spend quite a few hours to make them compile/assemble with modern tools before they could be used as the base for OS 3.5+. Heh. -- I love this one from further on in the thread: > AmigaOS is not designed and implemented in a manner which would facilitate testing. -- Also, HN (Arc) doesn't use HTML, and got completely confused by the URL. Worth reading! http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875 http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875

amigasource 11y ago

Mirror here: https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/ https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/

i336_ 11y ago
Yay! Thanks. :D This is undoubtedly going to disappear pretty quickly though. To anybody reading this: The original .tar.bz2 would be the ideal source to mirror, because then the checksums match up and you know you have the copy everyone else has without verifying each file manually. FWIW, MEGA repos let you make directories. They can be up to 50GB so you have plenty of space to upload the original file along with an unpacked copy to browse. Then we just need somewhere resilient to put the link to the latest working repo. I can fairly easily push this onto MEGA if I can get at the .tar.bz2. My email is in my profile if you don't want to reply here. One question though: at https://archive.is/2TTKO#post1058888 https://archive.is/2TTKO#post1058888 someone mentions a small but confusing date issue. Was this file released more than once?
- amigasource 11y ago
  The one linked to from that forum is still exists on Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025031/http://home.eversberg.eu/temp/amiga%20os%20source%20code%203.1.tar.bz2 https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025031/http://home.evers... It has a date of 20-Aug-2013 13:35, and the download on rol.im, which is also on Wayback Machine, was identical. So perhaps the date has been modified or this is a copy of a two year old release? I did not catch the FTP server releases - which were on the CCC IP address range, I guess part of the 32C3 guest network - before they went down, so I do not know for sure.
  - i336_ 11y ago
    Hah, I'm out of touch with finding software... I should've thought of that. I've done that kinda of thing before. (Incidentally, I reckon the reason Archive.org isn't globally indexable is that it would abruptly cease to exist all at once if everything out there was discoverable...) As for the date thing, one of the Amiga threads linked here mentions that this leak is actually incredibly old and dates to 1997 or so. So... yeah, there's that. This definitely goes in my tiny software leak collection next to NT4 and Mac OS 7 though :D

jdangu 11y ago

Devs talking about fixing bugs in narrator, the earliest TTS engine in home computers: https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/blob/master/v40_src/workbench/devs/narrator/readme https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/blob/master/v40_src/w...

Tloewald 11y ago
MacinTalk predates the Amiga release (it was released alongside the Mac in 1984, but not officially supported -- it worked fine; Plaintalk became an official component of the Mac in the early 90s and included [terrible] speech recognition).
- vidarh 11y ago
  Macintalk and narrator.device are both incarnations of SoftVoice's TTS, and descendants of SAM. Since they were both developed on contract, and both for M68k, I'd hazard the guess that the internal TTS engine is substantially the same, and that they both follow SAM's structure fairly closely (I know narrator.device does - it explicitly lets you set formant parameters that mirror SAMs pretty closely)
emptybits 11y ago
SAM (the Software Automatic Mouth) was available in 1982 for Apple, Commodore, & Atari 8-bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth
- vidarh 11y ago
  And it was developed by the same company. SoftVoice's website still exists, but no idea if the company is still alive: http://www.text2speech.com http://www.text2speech.com

Tloewald 11y ago

Given that, at least back when I still used the Amiga, the community Amiga Resource Project (ARP) was free, open source, and superior in all respects to Commodore's "official" AmigaDOS, so much so that it was adopted by Commodore at one point, why would one want this? I find it hard to believe Commodore got better at writing system software as it got worse at everything else and then went bankrupt.

bhaak 11y ago
Correct me if I'm mistaken but ARP was patching only 1.2/1.3 and when 2.0 came along, most of the complaints that started ARP had been resolved. I remember patches that patched ARP so it would use the new 2.0 (i.e. standard file requester). I always thought ARP had been obsolete with 2.0?
vidarh 11y ago
ARP provided an exceedingly tiny set of additional APIs. It's not in any way a replacement for AmigaOS. AROS is closer, but while it's vastly superior in some aspects (not least: it runs on pretty much every modern platform you might care about in some form or other - either native, or hosted under Linux or other), it's also still not a complete replacement in others.