The Amiga is alive - sort of, and AmigaOS 4 is finally out. Ars takes AmigaOS 4 out for a spin to see where the once-popular platform stands these days. "The release of AmigaOS 4 proves one thing: you can't keep a good platform down. But is AmigaOS merely a fun hobby OS to play around with, or does it offer real value? My answer is that it is a little of both. As a fan of alternative platforms, you won't find many that are more esoteric than AmigaOS. But beyond being different for the sake of being different, OS4 provides something more interesting: a chance to experience a whole new way of computing."
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Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-07-06
5 years ago, they should have dropped the PPC in favor of tieing AmigaOS 4 to the VIA EPIA series of x86-motherboards. Cheap, small, all-in-one hardware not unlike the old A500/A1200 Amiga computers. The added economics of scale would have helped the Amiga quite a bit back then.
Obviously having a generic x86 operating system would have been nicer for us consumers, but given the very small resorces available to the OS 4 developers, I think the VIA EPIA series had made great sense - much more so than the very expensive AmigaOnes that no longer are available.
That said, I'll buy the first reasonably priced (not expecting wonders here, just not the insane prices of the AmigaOnes) OS4-compatible piece of hardware that gets churned out (if any, time will tell).
Member since:2006-03-13
Apparently experimental builds of both OS 4 and MorphOS (a similar updated AmigaOS for yet a different set of PowerPC boards) were made for Mac hardware, but the people involved decided not to release them for some sort of legal reasons.
I'm still routing for AROS as the next-gen AmigaOS though. It's open source, runs on x86 and is written in such a way as to be easily portable to anything with a VESA framebuffer available.
Member since:2005-07-06
Actually, that's the one part of the article that was inaccurate. OS4 also runs on older Amiga systems that have the CyberStorm PPC card installed.
...not that it would probably make a difference to the average person. Still, it's misleading to claim everyone needs to buy this new hardware when I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who will be installing this on their ancient systems...
Member since:2005-11-15
Alas no, OS4 has not been released for Amiga Classics with PPC co-processors, although there has been some beta releases that work on them, it's not been officialy, or as far as I know unofficially released for anything other than Amiga One(s).
I think the hardware situtuion is a crying shame, as it's a great little OS. I use it as my primary system.
edited to add, as far as I know no ones got it to work on Pear, and although I would never condone Piracy, I could see that being- no on second thoughts, I'll shut up now.
Edited 2007-01-22 23:24
Member since:
2005-10-12
"OS4 will only run on AmigaOne motherboards, which are specially customized reference PowerPC designs that use UBoot as a BIOS. Unfortunately, OS4 will not install on any other PowerPC hardware, including older PPC Macintoshes. The OS is sold as a bundle with AmigaOne hardware, much like Apple does with OS X, and Amiga, Inc. wants to limit the operating system to licensed hardware only.
"This would not be such a big deal, except that the single company that produced AmigaOne motherboards and systems in the past, UK's Eyetech, has ceased production of the systems. So for the moment, one cannot buy new AmigaOne hardware anywhere."
It does seem like a bit of a showstopper? Its the same crazy idea of tying the OS to a particular brand of hardware, and this case shows the limiting case of the disadvantage of this policy, when you do not buy the OS because you can buy no hardware at all, not just no hardware you particularly want, to run it on. They need to cut the thing loose if they want to make anything of it.
Edited 2007-01-22 07:57