OSNews

Parts of Amithlon was released after it "died" - and IIRC the kernel portion was available from the start.

It's nice to see that it's being updated but it's sad that it's so difficult to install. The strength of Amithlon was that you could pop it in a cd drive, boot off it and have a working Workbench in front of you. When you have to install on a harddrive it it's a very, very different story though.

Bernd Meyer was the original Amithlon dev and IIRC the project died after licencing issues with H&P and Amiga Inc.

Edited 2006-09-05 22:15

Not everyone likes chocolate. Some people like strawberry or vanilla. Amiga isn't dead though. Did you ever use it? Relative to Windows or other platforms it might seem dead but many people have very fond memories of Amiga long before Linux. Amiga was doing what MS Windows didn't do until 10+ years later.

Yeah, like pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory!

...wait a minute.

In all seriousnesss, I have never used an Amiga, I hope to one day though, but it is true there are some ideas from the Amiga that were years ahead of their time and it hardly surprises me why former users would feel such a strong attachment to the platform, not everyone wants to work on linux. I tip my hat to the developer(s) of this project for working to bring a piece of computing history (and possibly future) to all of us.

Edited 2006-09-06 09:32

Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking. Not protected memory though.

Yes, I used the Amiga for many years and I love it. It was a really great computer for it's time. That time has passed though. I spent a lot of time hoping someone would revive the platform, until I realized it was not going to happen. I still have my A1200, but I never use it because it can't compare to what my PC can do now. I can understand people spending a little time on dead platforms as a hobby for nostalgia, but I think it would better serve the computer community as a whole if they spent their time on Ubuntu, Haiku, ReactOS, SkyOS, and others. That's just my opinion.

I still don't understand why people keep extending dead platforms
because these platforms are fun to use, in contrast to typical geeky linux distribution

I've never used it myself, however I believe the special thing about Amithlon is that it allows AmigaOS, though emulated, to have direct access to the graphics, sound etc hardware of the host PC. I think there's also a way to compile programs to run directly for x86 (eg for CPU intensive plugins). All this makes it the next-best-thing to a native x86 port of AmigaOS.