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:2005-07-06
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:
2005-06-29
Their best bet has always been to try and work for a release that supports Apple's PowerPC machines.