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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 Powe

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.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    > 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.
  - erikj 11y ago
    >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.
- stinkytaco 11y ago
  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?
  - balls187 11y ago
    Not a direct answer to your question, but I believe there are still A/V shops that use Amiga Hardware.
    - stinkytaco 11y ago
      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.
      - balls187 11y ago
        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.
        A_COMPUTER 11y ago
        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.
- brudgers 11y ago
  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.
  - orionblastar 11y ago
    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/ 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.
- vidarh 11y ago
  > 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.
  - bane 11y ago
    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 http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2015-02-00027-EN.html
    - vidarh 11y ago
      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).
      - orionblastar 11y ago
        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.
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.

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.
- vidarh 11y ago
  > 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.
- erikj 11y ago
  >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.
stinkytaco 11y ago
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?
- balls187 11y ago
  Not a direct answer to your question, but I believe there are still A/V shops that use Amiga Hardware.
  - stinkytaco 11y ago
    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.
    - balls187 11y ago
      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.
      - A_COMPUTER 11y ago
        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.
brudgers 11y ago
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.
- orionblastar 11y ago
  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/ 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.
vidarh 11y ago
> 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.
- bane 11y ago
  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 http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2015-02-00027-EN.html
  - vidarh 11y ago
    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).
    - orionblastar 11y ago
      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.

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.