Amiga Inc has made available Ben Herman’s AmigaOS 4 presentation from AmiWest 2003. Also interviews with Ben Hermans of Hyperion, Alan Rednouse of Eyetech and a panel speech/discussion with various Amiga community leaders who attended this event are now available in MP3 format.
Yeah …Great interviews .. Thanks for the coverage Tekmage
Yep bill does great work
Whilst AmigaOS 4 does seem to be an interesting product, the question that I still have is concerning the machine which it runs on?
I gather that it will be a PPC based AmigaOne(is it even out yet) of some kinds, but will I need my old A1200 board too and where is the hardware on sale (UK)? Will it be from small dealers like the Amiga accelerator cards from a few years ago, or from major PC online distributors?
That’s a lot of questions
If anyone could point me to a guide to building a modern Amiga then I’d be greatful
thanks
Dave
Nice show!
@ Turrican
> but will I need my old A1200 board too
No, but there was a company called Escena which at one time was planning to release an A1200-bridge. But AFAIK that company ran into trouble and nothing has been heard from them publicly for a long time.
AmigaOne computers are currently available with 700 MHz G3s up to 800 Mhz G4s. Dual 1 Ghz+ CPU modules have also been shown and a lite motherboard version should soon become available.
If you want to buy an Amiga like System with stable future then you should really consider throwing an eye on Pegasos and MorphOS. The majority of people from the Amiga community already bought such a system or playing with their mind to buy one. Reasons are easy. The System is available already. The Operating System is quite mature, is uable and already sold together with the hardware. Finally the majority of active developers already ported their applications to use MorphOS. From the AmiWest show’s stream I figured out that Ben Hermans himself said that OS4.0 isn’t ready for production now and that they still require a lot of polish and cleanup before it makes it to the AmigaONE. So basically if you buy an AmigaONE yet then the only OS you can run on it will be Linux for an unknown amount of time.
AmigaOS4.0 is not ported to AmigaONE yet and probably won’t this year. AmigaONE only runs Linux as main OS right now and for an unknown amount of time.
Pegasos from Genesi on the otherhand already offers MorphOS, with development tools and a wide build up community of active developers who brought the major Amiga applications to MorphOS already. They managed to build up a community with developers who went off of the Amiga long time ago. Yes they got them all back to the Amiga philosophy.
Well I have nothing against AmigaONE or AmigaOS4.0 but it’s kinda illusionary to publish comments and articles like this on all sort of places without even offering a solution that can compete with what Genesi has reached.
> The majority of people from the Amiga community already
> bought such a system or playing with their mind to buy
> one.
Genesi sold (or given away) 600 units to developers and users. Eyetech has already sold (many) more units despite AmigaOS4 still not being available.
> AmigaOS4.0 is not ported to AmigaONE yet and probably
> won’t this year.
The expectation is to have a Cyberstorm version available by late-September and an AmigaOne version ready before the end of the year.
> articles like this on all sort of places without even
> offering a solution
Some people want MorphOS and already most people seem to want AmigaOS4 instead (Eyetech does not give away their hardware for free). For such people these documents and interviews are of more value.
Both Amiga OS and MorphOS seems to be kind of cool, but what is the point of spending a lot of money for this platform that is so obscure? And in this case, I can’t get yelled for not realizing that it’s a “hobby” OS, because I don’t consider a “hobby” OS one that you have to dish out hundreds of dollars to buy the hardware to run it. So how good are these apps for these two OSes? If I could get a decent priced Pegasos board, I would consider buying one sometime in the future, given that there are a decent amount of apps and that these apps are good. Does anyone even use MorphOS right now?
“Both Amiga OS and MorphOS seems to be kind of cool, but what is the point of spending a lot of money for this platform that is so obscure?”
call us geeks.
DK wrote: “Genesi sold (or given away) 600 units to developers and users. Eyetech has already sold (many) more units despite AmigaOS4 still not being available.”
Are you sure about that? While it wouldn’t surprise me that quite a few AmigaOnes have been sold, since it is the official Amiga-brand product, I haven’t seen any firm sales figures (other than for one particular shop), although I’ve seen people making claims. Do you know of any URLs that give authentic figures?
— gary_c
I have to agree w/Zentisboy here.
You modded down his post when he realistically was offering a very well-informed and well-worded opinion.
Just because it appears it went against your “Pro-Amiga” stance is no reason to mod it down and make it appear that he doesn’t know his facts (when realistically he had numbers and background to back his opinions up. Your reply was… Just a reply based on your opinion it would seem).
I’m not trying to start a flamewar, but rather to point out that stifling the feeling frustration that we users have against OS4 and it’s long history of delays and fabrications is in no way going to make us converts.
In fact such censorship only fuels the debate about “Amiga Zealots”, and their slanted take on reality.
I for one would rather have intelligent responses such as Zentisboys over the endless “Why is Amiga still around”, and “Will it ever be released” responses that your Amiga related posts generally elicit.
My opinion…
has anyone thought about trying AROS (Amiga Research Os) it AmigaOs and morphOs both use features and code from AROS, visit http://aros.sourceforge.net for the AROS site
@ gary_c
Just listen to the interviews (this news item actually links Alan’s interview), Eyetech sold far more than 600 AmigaOne boards. Exact sales figures are yet to be released.
Regardless the demand is still very high. IMO this is already very promising as many people are still waiting for AmigaOS4 to be released, before buying an AmigaOne (i.e. me included, as my wife don’t agree with me bringing more computers into the house without ridding myself with some!).
The problem is that Amiga Inc. has broken to many promises.
They even failed on easiest tasks. They couldn’t solve problems with their landlord, they couldn’t make t-shirts. They still can’t release os4.
So why anybody should still believe in what they say? “OS4 by the end of a year” – We’ve heard that LAST YEAR!
So don’t be surprised that people turn to MorphOS. OS4 is promised to be something great and is (slowly..) moving forward, but don’t forget that MorphOS and Pegasos evolve too. And they’re available NOW, 3rd party software is already being developed for it.
Claiming the majority of Amiga users back one product or another is spurious considering we do not really know how many Amiga users there are.
IMO if you want a Pegasos buy a Pegasos. If you want AmigaOS4 then buy an AmigaOne. Now please get back on topic and note that OS flamewars is not at all in the spirit of OSNews.
Then be stricter with your moderation. Anything that is not strictly on topic or liable to cause a pointless OS war flamewar should be moderated down.
Its this kind of stuff that makes me wonder why I bother with the Amiga at all. Here i am prepared to spend lots of money on decent hardware/software, and people can’t even decide what OS to use with their Amiga. I find the OS4 argument better formed than MorphOS, christ, the MorphOS guys at the show seemed half asleep, Mr Hardware tho made some great points about OS4.
I will wait this one out, if things don’t improve by end of this year then I will have to struggle on with Windows. I can’t stand Linux it is soo unfriendly so I won’t go there. Windows XP seems the dog B****ks really compared to Linux. And OS4 from what I have seen is better than all the others, period.
> Just listen to the interviews (this news item actually links Alan’s interview),
I got a 404 error at that link; you might want to check into it.
> Eyetech sold far more than 600 AmigaOne boards. Exact sales figures are yet to be released.
I did just have a listen; in case anyone wants his exact words, this is from the telephone interview of Alan Redhouse done at AmiWest over the weekend:
“I think it’s fair to say that in terms of sort of standard ATX boards we’ve shipped far more of those than anyone else in the history of the world, as it were. [Presumably he’s talking about PPC boards here, but I still wonder if this is actually true given the production of PowerComputing Mac clones, etc. back in the late ’90s.]
“I can only go for the sort of numbers that have been released for the Pegasos, but we’re well in excess of that in terms of products shipped.”
http://polarboing.com/amiwest/amiwest2003/redhouse.mp3
So, “well in excess of 600,” which is reasonable, all in all (though perhaps this is less than “far more than 600” — although that’s getting into semantics 😉 ).
— gary_c
@Youlle
If I remember correctly, AmigaOS4 does not contain AROS code.
@porneL
Notice that AmigaOS4 is not being done by AmigaInc but by Hyperion.
@Zentisboy
I agree that MOS&Peg are now in more stable state than A1&AOS4, but…
This is not true: “The majority of people from the Amiga community already bought such a system or playing with their mind to buy one.”
Amiga community is a lot bigger than than 1200 people, so, a lot less than half of the community have pegasos.
And… “The System is available already.”
Is it available? I thought it was sold out untill pegasos2 HW is ready?
“The Operating System is quite mature, is uable and already sold together with the hardware.”
The operating system seems to be usable but it still is in beta state and needs some tweaking before it is as usable as AmigaOS3.9. And it is available only to existing Peg1 owners.
“Finally the majority of active developers already ported their applications to use MorphOS.”
Absolutely not true. There’s still rather small amount of native MorphOS apps.
IMHO: AmigaOS4 seems a lot more advanced ON PAPER while MorphOS exists for people to try out themself on new HW. Both are REALLY unavailable for larger audience to buy.
For people looking for their chance to buy next gen amigas I would say “hold back” untill systems become available and mature a little bit.
In the meanwhile one might want to try old Amigas or Amithlon/WinUAE on x86 PCs…
By the way, is Hyperion going to do BPPC version of AmigaOS4? They were investigating this issue some months ago. Any news?
All I know is that Ben Hermans said that it was “wery likely” that thed do a BPPC port when he was interviewed on AmiWest2003.
But first the Cyberstorm version, followed by the AmigaOne version and then likely a Blizzard version.
@ Mike
You are doing a great job!
Actually Ben Hermans and I got to discussing this very thing while at AmiWest. Ben claimed that 1200 boards have been ordered. Note the word he used: ORDERED
For shipped, he skipped around that a bit. Based on the combined G3 and G4 shipping statements, the Pegasos and AmigaONE are probably neck and neck for units in peoples hands at the moment, with the A1 probably a bit in the lead at this point. However, Genesi just produced more units a few weeks ago that have yet to ship, so the future is not set, not by a long shot.
Is software binary compatible between morphos and amigaone? If not do you see developers backing one system or the other?
whoops, I meant to say morphos and AmigaOS4