7 ms·

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 offici

by 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.

by jug 11y ago

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.