AmigaOS 4.0 released

tmk writes "After five years Hyperion announces the availability of AmigaOS 4.0: 'Amiga OS 4.0 is the most stable, modern and feature-rich incarnation to date of the multi-media centric operating system launched by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) in 1985 with which it still retains a high degree of compatibility.' But there is a snag: the new OS supports only the AmigaOne, which is not available anymore. According to Hyperion, the new hardware platform will be announced by third parties early 2007."

In related news...

[cmang]

The next release of MorphOS [powerdeveloper.org] is planned to support hardware that's actually shipping [genesippc.com]. :)

AmigaOS on PPC Mac

[IL-CSIXTY4]

The main obstacle to getting AmigaOS ported to anything other than the AmigaOne is Amiga, Inc's licensing program. They license out the right for a board to carry the Amiga name and run AmigaOS, by virtue of a ROM "dongle" that gets integrated into the motherboard. This means that anything running AmigaOS has to be specifically designed to run AmigaOS. According to messages on the AmigaWorld.net and Amiga.org forums, the company hasn't been very good at getting back to the few people who have emailed them asking about licenses. I can't see value they see in holding such tight reigns on something with such a small market.

Then, there's the matter of developer documentation. The folks at Hyperion who are coding the OS want solid documentation for the hardware they're targeting. They don't want to just look at the Linux Mac code and just trust it works the way it should.

But that second point is largely irrelevant, as they'll never get the chance to do it given the current situation with Amiga, Inc.

Re:Funeral ceremonies were held today for the Amig

[Elevator_Inspector]

Just going from memory I think Sid was a C64 chip and Paula actually handled the sound on the Amiga. Recovering Amiga addict with an A1200/060 in the closet to prove it. Anyone know where I can find a clean 3000 to put my Phase V Cybervision64 card into?

Re:My refrain...

[kabdib]

Of *course* I worked for Atari (on the ST . . . and other things). We had the Flying Tramiel Brothers Invasion Corps and Marching Band and an OS scraped together over a weekend by Digital Research. The Amiga guys had multitasking, blitters, bouncing beachballs, compilers that didn't suck . . . and Kiki Stockhammer. My living God, we were jealous.

Ah, but who went out of business first? [Actually, I couldn't tell you. Don't bother me with facts; my false sense of superiority works best in a vacuum]

Funny how later I ended up working for one of the guys who shipped the first Mac. Silly Valley is small, *way* small: Don't piss anyone off unless it's really worth it. And when you ship, make sure you have a beachball.

Re:Revive the Old Amiga?

[vidarh]

There is already an open source attempt at reimplementing AmigaOS sort of: AROS [sourceforge.net]. It's been around for years.

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[91degrees]

Indeed. And the OS was only a small part of it.

What the Amiga was was an inexpensive machine with fantastic graphics and sound (for the mid 80's), the ability to be plugged into a television, and a pretty good multitasking OS was a neat bonus. The only other company to make such a cool general purpose computer were Silicon Graphics.

A new OS is quite nice, and there were aspects of the Amiga's UI that I'm still fond of, but unless you have a complete machine, I'm not at all interested.

Re:Ooh

[milatchi]

Well Serenity Systems released eComStation 2.0 Beta 3 this month. So you shouldn't have to wait too
much longer for an update to OS/2 Warp ;-)
eComStation is an IBM licensed version of OS/2 Warp. The last version of IBM OS/2 Warp was
4.52 (I think). So when eComstation 2.0 comes out it should technically be OS/2 Warp 4.54 or 5.0

Re:He's dead, Jim.

[YttriumOxide]

You currently can't... nor will you be able to unless someone adds PPC support to "your favourite Amiga Emulator" (I assume you mean UAE here...) as well as hacking it to make it look like it has the hardware license key (AKA "annoying dongle chip on the motherboard that everyone hates since it forces you to use that proprietary hardware where otherwise you could run the OS on pretty much any appropriately specced PPC system, but is actually a good thing because it prevents piracy, which is what damn near killed Amiga in the first place")