7 ms·

Find it amazing that my thirty-year old A2000 is still being developed for, both software and hardware. Here's hoping AmigaOS 3.1 developers somehow get Firefo

Find it amazing that my thirty-year old A2000 is still being developed for, both software and hardware. Here's hoping AmigaOS 3.1 developers somehow get Firefox (or another HTML5 browser) ported once these FPGA accelerators become more common. Would love to watch Netflix with my son from my childhood Amiga.

erickhill 9y ago
> Here's hoping AmigaOS 3.1 developers somehow get Firefox (or another HTML5 browser) ported once these FPGA accelerators become more common. I think the honest problem is 3.1 is locked down, really. It's not ever been open sourced, just reverse engineered (see AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4.1). I've not heard of a single instance where the 3.9 or 4.1 users feel they have a viable, modern system they can realistically use. 4.1 works on PPC hardware for goodness sake. How old is that? Just being real. Much of this has to do with software support (lack thereof) as well as driver support. Hang on to that 2000. And enjoy it. But I wouldn't try and push it into "modern" daily driver use. Ideally I think the OS(es) in dev today would all work together with the hardware teams and go the route Linux took. Let Hyperion et al continue to package up software and sell it commercially (like RedHat). But open source the Amiga OS and let the community run with it. Make it a "real" and a viable alternative. It's just a complete and utter mess in the meantime. And getting all of the current parties to talk and work with each other...
- rvense 9y ago
  3.9 and 4.1 are actually based on the real Amiga sources AFAIK.
  - cable2600 9y ago
    I heard there was some lawsuit between companies over AmigaOS. The AROS is based on AmigaOS 3.1 API calls and some version of AmigaOS 3.x or 4.x used source code from AROS etc. I am not 100% certain of that, the websites that reported it are down. The guy who wrote the AmigaOS 3.x API calls got upset that someone scanned his book into a PDF file and pirated it. So he didn't make an AmigaOS 4.x API calls and without knowing them it is hard to make Amiga 4.x apps. AROS made their own Kickstart ROM for Classic Amigas to run AROS on Classic Amigas. Since AROS supports networking it is possible to rig up some sort of Internet connection and port a web browser to it. Amiga Forever is worth it for the ROM images and Kickstart disks to run Workbench and other things.
    - lproven 9y ago
      I think a few [[citation needed]] comments are required in there. :-)
    - kingmanaz 9y ago
      In regards to the author who was upset his book was scanned; I believe you're referring to Babel and his "The Amiga Guru Book". Currently on my bookshelf.
- lproven 9y ago
  There are, or were, 4 forks of AmigaOS around. From memory, here is the breakdown… * AmigaOS 3.5-3.9. By Haage & Partners. Proprietary. Runs on original 680x0 hardware. Based off the original binaries, with many added components and some bug-fixes & updates. * Amiga OS 4.x. By Hyperion, originally licensed by Amiga Inc. Proprietary. Based on officially-licensed original sources, rewritten for PowerPC. Runs on some recent licensed PowerPC-based Amigas & some PowerPC accelerators for original machines. * MorphOS. Proprietary. a 3rd-party recreation, sponsored by Genesi, natively for PowerPC, with rumours of an ARM port. No original sources used. API-compatible with AmigaOS 3.1. Runs on unlicensed, non-official more recent PowerPC machines. Rumours of developers not being paid. No development in a while. * AROS. FOSS. Runs on x86, with ARM, PowerPC and 680x0 ports available. All are API compatible with Commodore AmigaOS 3.1. AFAIK, all include emulator(s) so they can run original binaries. Nothing is very compatible with 3.5-3.9 as they were 3rd party extensions. None of the successors are very compatible with each other. AmigaOS 4 and AROS are experimenting with multiple-core support. Personally, I don't see a lot of future for any of them. The original AmigaOS was something of a triumph, but it achieved its small size and good performance because it targetted the 680000 -- yes, it does full pre-emptive multitasking, but there's no inter-process memory protection, no virtual memory, and poor hygiene between OS and apps or between different apps, making it hard to adapt to more modern hardware. AIUI the communication mechanism between the kernel and apps uses shared memory, meaning that even Commodore itself was unable to enhance it to use the MMU of later 68030-based Amigas, because that would have broken backwards-compatibility. If anyone fixes that, that will make it less Amiga-like and less compatibile with the old OSes. I have the demo version of MorphOS running on an Apple Mac mini G4. It works fine and it's fairly quick (until the demo version times out after 20min and slows down.) But there's no Wifi or Bluetooth support. It looks and feels like, well, a fast Amiga 1200 (the only original hardware I own.) In other words, very retro and a bit clunky. The Mac mini is a machine built to run Mac OS X 10.3 or 10.4, glossy modern 21st century OSes with transparency, scaling, versatile networking and filesystem support, and some high-profile commercial apps. MorphOS feels like a 1980s OS with some bells and whistles glued on. AROS probably has the brightest outlook and I can see a niche for it as a low-resource graphical OS for low-end ARM machines such as the Raspberry Pi. But the capabilities of such machines are improving fast - the RasPi 3 has 4 x 1-GHz cores, a capable GPU (which need restrictively- proprietary drivers), a gig of RAM, Wifi and Bluetooth. AROS runs under Linux -- the native port isn't finished -- supports 1 core and no wireless. It hasn't caught up with the hardware as the hardware evolves to leave it behind, becoming more capable of doing justice to a modern graphical Linux desktop.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
You can watch YouTube on your A2000 if you get a Vampire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-etjB8JoNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-etjB8JoNQ There are a few browsers for Amigas. The most modern is OWB which is WebKit-based, and there is a 68k build, but I'm not sure how well it runs on classic Amigas. The browser shown in the video above is Netsurf, which is a decent lightweight browser (originally developed for Risc OS), but missing a few of the features you'd expect in a modern browser (IIRC there's no JavaScript engine): http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

erickhill 9y ago

> Here's hoping AmigaOS 3.1 developers somehow get Firefox (or another HTML5 browser) ported once these FPGA accelerators become more common. I think the honest problem is 3.1 is locked down, really. It's not ever been open sourced, just reverse engineered (see AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4.1). I've not heard of a single instance where the 3.9 or 4.1 users feel they have a viable, modern system they can realistically use. 4.1 works on PPC hardware for goodness sake. How old is that? Just being real. Much of this has to do with software support (lack thereof) as well as driver support. Hang on to that 2000. And enjoy it. But I wouldn't try and push it into "modern" daily driver use. Ideally I think the OS(es) in dev today would all work together with the hardware teams and go the route Linux took. Let Hyperion et al continue to package up software and sell it commercially (like RedHat). But open source the Amiga OS and let the community run with it. Make it a "real" and a viable alternative. It's just a complete and utter mess in the meantime. And getting all of the current parties to talk and work with each other...

rvense 9y ago
3.9 and 4.1 are actually based on the real Amiga sources AFAIK.
- cable2600 9y ago
  I heard there was some lawsuit between companies over AmigaOS. The AROS is based on AmigaOS 3.1 API calls and some version of AmigaOS 3.x or 4.x used source code from AROS etc. I am not 100% certain of that, the websites that reported it are down. The guy who wrote the AmigaOS 3.x API calls got upset that someone scanned his book into a PDF file and pirated it. So he didn't make an AmigaOS 4.x API calls and without knowing them it is hard to make Amiga 4.x apps. AROS made their own Kickstart ROM for Classic Amigas to run AROS on Classic Amigas. Since AROS supports networking it is possible to rig up some sort of Internet connection and port a web browser to it. Amiga Forever is worth it for the ROM images and Kickstart disks to run Workbench and other things.
  - lproven 9y ago
    I think a few [[citation needed]] comments are required in there. :-)
  - kingmanaz 9y ago
    In regards to the author who was upset his book was scanned; I believe you're referring to Babel and his "The Amiga Guru Book". Currently on my bookshelf.
lproven 9y ago
There are, or were, 4 forks of AmigaOS around. From memory, here is the breakdown… * AmigaOS 3.5-3.9. By Haage & Partners. Proprietary. Runs on original 680x0 hardware. Based off the original binaries, with many added components and some bug-fixes & updates. * Amiga OS 4.x. By Hyperion, originally licensed by Amiga Inc. Proprietary. Based on officially-licensed original sources, rewritten for PowerPC. Runs on some recent licensed PowerPC-based Amigas & some PowerPC accelerators for original machines. * MorphOS. Proprietary. a 3rd-party recreation, sponsored by Genesi, natively for PowerPC, with rumours of an ARM port. No original sources used. API-compatible with AmigaOS 3.1. Runs on unlicensed, non-official more recent PowerPC machines. Rumours of developers not being paid. No development in a while. * AROS. FOSS. Runs on x86, with ARM, PowerPC and 680x0 ports available. All are API compatible with Commodore AmigaOS 3.1. AFAIK, all include emulator(s) so they can run original binaries. Nothing is very compatible with 3.5-3.9 as they were 3rd party extensions. None of the successors are very compatible with each other. AmigaOS 4 and AROS are experimenting with multiple-core support. Personally, I don't see a lot of future for any of them. The original AmigaOS was something of a triumph, but it achieved its small size and good performance because it targetted the 680000 -- yes, it does full pre-emptive multitasking, but there's no inter-process memory protection, no virtual memory, and poor hygiene between OS and apps or between different apps, making it hard to adapt to more modern hardware. AIUI the communication mechanism between the kernel and apps uses shared memory, meaning that even Commodore itself was unable to enhance it to use the MMU of later 68030-based Amigas, because that would have broken backwards-compatibility. If anyone fixes that, that will make it less Amiga-like and less compatibile with the old OSes. I have the demo version of MorphOS running on an Apple Mac mini G4. It works fine and it's fairly quick (until the demo version times out after 20min and slows down.) But there's no Wifi or Bluetooth support. It looks and feels like, well, a fast Amiga 1200 (the only original hardware I own.) In other words, very retro and a bit clunky. The Mac mini is a machine built to run Mac OS X 10.3 or 10.4, glossy modern 21st century OSes with transparency, scaling, versatile networking and filesystem support, and some high-profile commercial apps. MorphOS feels like a 1980s OS with some bells and whistles glued on. AROS probably has the brightest outlook and I can see a niche for it as a low-resource graphical OS for low-end ARM machines such as the Raspberry Pi. But the capabilities of such machines are improving fast - the RasPi 3 has 4 x 1-GHz cores, a capable GPU (which need restrictively- proprietary drivers), a gig of RAM, Wifi and Bluetooth. AROS runs under Linux -- the native port isn't finished -- supports 1 core and no wireless. It hasn't caught up with the hardware as the hardware evolves to leave it behind, becoming more capable of doing justice to a modern graphical Linux desktop.

ZenoArrow 9y ago

You can watch YouTube on your A2000 if you get a Vampire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-etjB8JoNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-etjB8JoNQ There are a few browsers for Amigas. The most modern is OWB which is WebKit-based, and there is a 68k build, but I'm not sure how well it runs on classic Amigas. The browser shown in the video above is Netsurf, which is a decent lightweight browser (originally developed for Risc OS), but missing a few of the features you'd expect in a modern browser (IIRC there's no JavaScript engine): http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/