Amiga Inc. Reveals Further Info About Amiga OS5

Amiga Gamer writes "Amiga Inc. Acting President Bill McEwen has given an update to Amiga OS5 of sorts. In a previous interview Bill had said of OS5: "The product that we are going to ship is going to be much better than OSX from Apple". "OS 5 is ahead of schedule, and we will be making public announcements concerning the product in the 4th quarter of this year.""

Who cares?

[hal9000(jr)]

There are three dominant OS's out there. Windows is the most dominant desktop, followed by OSX and then Linux. What is Amiga going to bring to the table?

Hell, IBM resurrecting OS/2 would make more sense.

Summary of the interview:

[Gadzinka]

"I can't answer any of your questions due to pending litigation and NDAs, but keep the faith, Amiga is and will be the best platform, ever. Oh, and 20yrs old sources to historic versions of AmigaOS is our core intelectual property asset, so the release of them is never going to happen."

Robert

The best new feature would be...

[Jugalator]

Improved hardware independence?

So far, AmigaOS 4 is a bit like OS X being built for special hardware, just that this one lacks the hardware. :-p

I can understand if Apple doesn't want to let go of OS X like that, because they after all sell a lot of hardware this way, but isn't AmigaOS 4 is in such a horribly sorry state that Amiga Inc would only win on having it support other hardware platforms better?

Re:Sales of the new Amiga...

[Andrei D]

Actually, they intend to get the Amiga system sounds from Chinese Democracy [wikipedia.org], the long-awaited Guns n' Roses new album. Axl said it will be released only when he feels it's better than everything GNR did before. "It won't take long, really", said Axl Rose in an interview back in 1997. So keep your faith folks.

Amiga.......good old days...

[zelik]

Yes, I remember my Amiga.. I started a bit late...picked up my brother's old Amiga 1000 when he left it for the MacIIfx (I believe he paid 2k or 4k for that? wow!) and I was in love with Defender of the Crown, Marble Madness, Battlehawks 1942, etc. WOW!

Then, I upgraded to a 2000 and the 8mhz CPU just wasn't enough. I had to upgrade it with a 68030 running at *gasp* 25mhz and wow things were great. I ran a 2 phone line BBS (using C-net) with my prized USRobotics HST modem and a regular 2400 baud on the other line. Sure, it was a warez bbs but wow those were some great memories! I could multitask the BBS (with 2 users uploading/downloading/posting), write my homework using Scribble!(a wordprocessor), print my homework and have Monkey Island running at full speed while printing. No slowdown. It was amazing at the time, esp. compared to Windows (3.11? Or 3.0? Not sure, barely remember those things then).

The full screen program multitasking, which let you pull up and down a full screened program like slides, was quite amazing and powerful. The games, the sounds, all amazing. Of course, this is compared to AdLib soundcards and CGA/EGA. At the time, there was no reason to "game" with your dad's expensive PC other than the fact that it was "all that is available at home."

But now? C'mon! I soon had to let go of my Amiga when no further developments came along. When Doom came out for the PC along with Wing Commander, Strike Commander, etc., the Amiga just started to look antiquated. Sure, the multitasking element was nice, but it just lost the gaming advantage when no advances in the graphics department were forthcoming. There was just so much potential but the management just took the potential and threw it down the drain. The only graphics update I got was a ...... "Flicker fixer" which allowed me to connect a RGB PC Monitor and run things at a higher resolution without "flickering". Remember Newtek's Video Toaster [wikipedia.org]? I heard (not confirmed) that Babylon 5 space scenes were done on it. Amazing stuff I tell you!

Anyway, sorry for the nostalgia. Back to topic: Workbench (the Amiga OS) 3 looks about Windows 3.1 level still, maybe a bit better. It's pathetic. I don't know about Workbench 4 and good lord how could a BRAND NEW market untested and long development dormant OS be better than OSx? C'mon! That's like creating a new model of the DeLorean and saying "This is better than a Ferrari. Trust me!"

More progress with AROS?

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Sounds like the AROS Project is making more progress than Amiga Inc. is.

Re:All 5 amiga users jumped for joy until

[mdwh2]

I was seriously wondering if maybe the Amiga community(or what's left of it plus any fans, etc.) couldn't just buy out what's left of that company and then open source the OS(hardware?) so we could then adapt it to be used on today's commodity hardware.

The AROS project looks promising but doesn't work with my hardware and this would be just the thing to move them forward.

I was just about to mention AROS until I saw you did :)

To be honest, despite AROS's limitations, I'd have thought that it's far along enough that the original source code wouldn't help them much - after all, the original source code only runs on either 68k or PPC.

The whole Amiga bankruptcy scene was a comedy of horrors and the new Amiga, Inc. is the twisted punchline.

I agree, it's sad really, it would have been nice to have more choice in computing today, as opposed to just Windows or still-not-ready-for-the-desktop-Linux, or niche-player Apple (which many of us just don't like). It's especially insulting as the companies that did most damage were PC companies - Escom and Gateway - and the way it seems to damage the image of the Amiga (at least on Slashdot). Imagine if a PC company bought Apple, then raised all the prices, and hardly ever bought out new models? Would that mean Macs are crap after all? Of course not.

Hell, rather than trying to build a new platform from scratch, I think I'd find it more pleasing for someone to just release some decent modern PCs, with WinUAE installed as standard, and branded Amiga (I mean, they'll be just as close to the Amigas of 10-15 years ago, as modern Macs are to Macs of the 90s...) Then people can happily run 4GB quad-core machines and smugly call them Amigas if they so wish :)