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.""

Better?

[nurb432]

and no i didnt read the story.. cant get to it.

1 - what hardware does it run on, generic PC's? Generic Macs? If its still on custom hardware, its DOA at this stage of the game.
2 - software: is it all custom, or can i run Word, Acrobat, etc? If it cant run commodity software its also DOA as far as the big picture is concerned. ( X11 will help.. )

While it may be great technology, there are 100s of 'good' OS's out there that are niche markets. That doesnt make them 'better'. Even when they had a chance like Be. You just hve to have a level of compatiblity of both hardware AND software of the 2 big players to really make it and be 'better'.

I stoped caring a long time ago.

[emj]

When BeOS came along 95 I think I understood that AmigaOS would never be good enough again. So I switched to Linux, there has never been any reason to switch back even though the Amiga workbench is still a lot better than KDE/GNOME are, and Final writer [pisle.com] kicks Open Office writers ass any day.

Amiga fanboy forever.

Re:Who cares?

[Threni]

> What is Amiga going to bring to the table?

Perhaps this is the rose tinted spectacles talking, but I seem to remember Amiga games having a little more variety than today. It all seems a bit corporate now. Marketing and the quest for the next amusingly expensive generation of graphics card seems to have replaced the fun games. I've checked out a lot of the "indie" games but the trouble with them is that they're all a load of shit - more on a par with the "public domain" games of the Amiga era then its commercial ones.

Smoke and mirrors

[LoadWB]

None of the questions presented here matter, even if they are serious. Amiga has produced nothing of value since OS3.9 several years ago. Bill McEwen went on the record a while back saying that he put a great deal of his own personal money into making sure that OS3.9 was released. If that is true, then that is the last act of heroism we have seen from the Amiga camp. OS4 is working but stuck in litigation. OS5 will be free from the shackles of hardware dependence, so they say. But we all know that nothing from Amiga ever materializes.

Why ...?

[suv4x4]

I don't want the technical details if he can't share. I want him to give us use cases. Why would we go buy their computers and OS when I can run OSX, Windows or Linux?

Who's the target, business users, video producers, prosumers, gamers, developers, mythical moms and dads, and how will Amiga make a difference to those people compared to OSX, Windows, Linux.

I must definitely not be the target, since "Better than OSX" means precisely nil to me. OSX runs my desktop software, Windows runs it as well. Hell, Linux runs some of it. I don't just install an OS and marvel at how good it is, I run apps on it.

Amiga doesn't run anything right now, but they have a checkerboard sphere. They better have made this the best checkerboard sphere in the world ever.

Don't believe a word

[tmk]

I don't trust Bill McEwen more than Steve Ballmer.

• He announced to sponsor the new Kent Events Center with 10 million dollars - but he could not pay.
• He sued the developers of Amiga OS 4 and announced a new hardware solution - which was not delivered.
• The only product Amiga Inc has released in seven years were mobile phone versions of old Amiga games.
• ...

No apostrophe on 1000s

[Anonymous Coward]

No apostrophe on 1000s. If you were to say, "The picture of my girlfriend's vagina via my 1000's GINA chip is a nice looking one" then all right. If you were to say, "The picture of my girlfriend's vagina via the other four 1000s' GINA chips is a nice looking one, too", then that, plural and possesive, is all right. "On their 1000's (sic)" is not all right. It is plural, not possesive.

If anyone could build an Amiga, it would be AMD

[tjstork]

I bought the Amiga Hardware Reference Guide before the computer was even released, read it cover to cover, many times, all about the sound, video, and other hardware, and I knew had to have this hardware. The Amiga legend was really born because of absolutely the best documentation any computer system has ever had, and, then fostered by the execution. I read the documentation. I walked into a Sears, saw the King Tut image in Deluxe Paint, and I so blown away that I literally shook in my shoes. It all came together - great documentation, beautiful hardware, and an ok operating system, in one moment, where I could see the demo, understand completely what it meant, and I had to have one. I opened up a credit card that I couldn't possibly pay for and I bought the thing. It was one of the best days of my life and I feel fortunate to have lived solely to have been there for that moment.

But, those days are gone. If anyone could make anything like Amiga, it would be AMD (Apple is more marketing than any real hardware expertise on its own) - but AMD would also have to hire not just good, but great writers, and document everything the way the Amiga was documented. You would have to have AMD rolling out with a pretty good CPU, next generation hardware, all in a consumer friendly case with a completely new operating system. Part of Amiga's appeal was that the whole thing was different. For AMD to pump that kind of money into some new consumer / geek box would almost certainly demand that it run Windows or Linux, and we already know enough about both to not really get excited over either. A souped up / updated version of BeOS is what that kind of hardware needs - really, the coolest new OS ever made, and I doubt seriously that AMD could take that risk.

But, a man can dream.

Re:If You Can't Trust a PR guy....

[Junta]

On Vista, it's more applicable to consider the whole Windows environment. You forget that for the people who would've bought Vista, the reason was not so much it explicitly sucking, but that XP suits their needs fine and they don't see the point of going to a slightly different setup and spend money to do so when they have a working solution today. For the Windows people that took the time to evaluate it and declare that it sucks, it's generally because either drivers for Vista were lower quality than XP, and the resources the Vista fluff takes up drags the system down more than XP. So in essence, Vista if anything is losing to XP, not driving people significantly to non-Windows systems. The people blowing it up in the media and declaring Vista sucks are these people plus the people who dislike Windows no matter the incarnation, but are there to revel in what failings they can.

On Linux, I disagree that for most common non-gaming people, that Linux has to be too geeky anymore. There is the great potential on a Linux system to geek out to extraordinary degrees, but if you don't elect to and the hardware vendor providing your platform explicitly tries to work with Linux, the experience can be quite straightforward to people who never want to 'pop the hood' so to speak. Claiming Linux is too geeky is to an extent like claiming OSX is too geeky because of the BSD core, the fact you can start terminal and get a *nix shell, and it uses the NeXT defaults system for configuration. A vast majority of OSX users may never realize these facts (or if they do, what they mean except to bring up to defend their platform), and the same can be true for desktop linux users. The exception is when trying to use hardware whose drivers are off the beaten path, and the way the Linux market goes, it's far more common to have the system vendor not paying attention to Linux, and therefore pushing this evaluation to the consumer I have seen in the x86 world system vendors switch components because the Windows drivers the hardware vendor wrote not be able to perform reliably. That's a huge part of what's biting Vista today (people ugrading their systems may have components where someone couldn't have possibly known the Vista driver quality for). I can pre-select a set of hardware, assemble it barebones, and hand the install disc to a non-technical person, and they can be up working with documents and surfing the web without significant assistance.

Re:If anyone could build an Amiga, it would be AMD

[NeoTron]

Indeed.

I still have an Amiga 1200. Still very much alive and kicking, and a bit riced up too (monitor adapter/flicker fixer, 68040 accelerator card giving the Amy a whole 40Mhz of Insane Demonic Superpowah - wooo - IDE doubler so I can run the internal hard drive AND attach the cdrom drive, an NE2000-compatible pcmcia network card, and AmigaDOS 3.9. Oh and I had to ditch the Commodore power supply in favour of using a PC PSU in order to power all that extra stuff, heheh). The ultimate Amiga box - if only it were 15 years ago ;) I can even dual-boot it to Debian too, though, really, it runs better with AmigaDOS 3.9 - it seems to run like molasses when booted to Debian.

I only boot it up from time to time, though, and since I moved to Japan I haven't touched it, simply because I haven't the time.

But every time I boot it up for a nostalgia trip I still to this day wish Commodore's execs and management hadn't completely managed to flush the whole concept down the drain like they did. Damn their interminable hides! I still remember the very first Amiga Demo I saw and heard shortly after I bought an Amiga (A500 at the time) - I literally could not believe what I was experiencing - you have to remember that at the time of the A500, PC's were still stuck in VGA-land, with very poor graphics and sound capabilities. The Amy just blew everything else out of the water. I can only dream now what current multimedia experiences would be like if the Amiga technology/hardware concepts were allowed to have evolved. When the Amiga went down the tubes, multimedia experience development and evolution was, in my opinion, basically stalled for at least a decade. Only now are graphics cards beginning to reach the stage where multimedia and games experience are beginning to impress me. I wonder what that experience would be like if the Amiga's hardware technology had been further developed and evolved since those halcyon days.

Regards.