Hyperion Entertainment has released another update for AmigaOS 3.2 for classic Amigas, coming with a number of improvements and bug fixes. I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this, though, since the drama around the ownership of the Amiga operating system, the trademarks, and more, as well as continuous accusations of Hyperion not paying any of its developers, have reached a fever pitch, as documented in this elaborate piece. As much as I would want to dive into all this and properly vet every single source in that article, for the sake of my sanity, I am just not going to.
The soap opera around the Amiga has been going on for so long, and has jumped the shark so many times, I just don’t know where to start. I’ll leave you all with the detailed piece and its sources, and let you decide for yourself what to make of it all.
I ain’t got the patience for this.
Ha, this drama hasn’t been going on for a while…
1) Hyperion and Cloanto have settled at some point.
2) AmigaOS 3.2 is basically being developed by volunteers. (At least last I had read, they were unpaid developers working on it out of love).
I’m not so sure it has been settled, more tied up in legal nonsense that means months can go by as additional documents are requested or some such. In the meantime, an uneasy status quo remains, where Hyperion publish and licence the OS 3.2 release and host its updates, but don’t offer the original OS for download (they did for 3.1.4 and Cloanto / Amiga Corp. had the server pulled), so you need to buy a physical copy from one of several Amiga dealers instead.
Yes, the developers are volunteers who wanted to update the OS and in some cases bring in their own code from OS 3.9 and OS 4. Hyperion provided them with the licence and source code for this.
Yeah, in the meantime, Cloanto just keeps on reselling 3.X (as opposed to 3.$) along with Amiga Forever. The details of what is in 3.X eludes me at the moment, but it is basically 3.1 with some patches. It is so weird how many companies have hovered over the bones of the Amiga…
Hardly. a LOT of 80’s home computers have suffered the same fate. Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum… Even the Humble Beeb couldn’t stop the BBC from reusing it’s legacy for the BBC MicroBIT.
While there’s a lot of information and many sources referenced in those documents, much of the text feels like it’s based on a (quite biased) personal opinion, and reflects the strong opinions and personality of certain active members of the Amiga scene. To me, this detracts from the quality of the article because it seems that the references, while valid, are only being included to prove a point and not for objectiveness.
One thing you can do is review the OS, if you have the required hardware obviously. You see, the real AmigaOS won’t run on an old PowerPC Mac like MorphOS can, it needs its own hardware (which is either the uber-expensive AmigaOne x1000 and X5000 or A-cube’s Sam boards).
What are you talking about? It doesn’t require any of the hardware you listed. Have you actually read the system requirements?
It runs under classic Amigas equipped with a PPC board, but those are ever rarer than the hardware I mentioned above.
https://www.amigaos.net/content/72/supported-hardware
No, it doesn’t.
You are thinking of AmigaOS 4.
This is AmigaOS 3. It does not need or use PowerPC.
@minuous is right.
I meant AmigaOS 4.
Seems you’ve confused OS3 and OS4 there in your haste to try and get a dig in. FWIW, OS4 can also be run under emulation which, while limited, would be more than enough to try it out without buying expensive hardware.
What software can emulate AmigaOS4?
He did not say emulating OS4, but running OS4 under emulation.
Meaning WinUAE can emulate an Amiga with PPC-card, which can run OS4 (and/or MorphOS, PowerUp, WarpOS)
This article is about the new AmigaOS 3.2.2 and not the older AmigaOS4.1. This is MK68 based OS. And yes, they are both real AmigaOS.
Being a musician, I of course the Atari ST at the time, because of the midi ports. And because it was gorgeous. But I was impressed by the abilities of the Amigas. I followed all the drama since Commodore’s demise and sometimes laugh at it. Then, the ST scene isn’t very interesting nowadays whereas there are still people so passionate That AmigaOS, one way or another, is still being worked on, MorphOS still exists and is updated and there is AROS. What’s also very impressive for me is that a machine like the AmigaOne X5000 actually exists.
It was not the MIDI ports…. It was the software that made it possible to use an ST as a music tool. The good software simply came first on the ST, and because of those 1 or 2 years headstart, the Amiga had no chance of catching up. The ST were already the defacto goto machine at that point. I am pointing the software factor out, as the Amiga had plenty of MIDI ports in the form of cheap dongles that were connected to the parallel port.
Simply saying the ST won the battle for the studio because of build in midi ports, are not true and wont cut it. It would never have happened if there had not been any software for this. Or if the software had been released on the Amiga, two years before it were released on the ST. They key here, are the software and not the hardware. Both had MIDI options. One with build in, the other with cheap parallel dongles.
Well, you’re not completely wrong. Cubase on the ST became a de facto standard for musicians at some point. But if many developers of music related software started on the ST it was because of the midi ports amongst others.
I actually had to learn how to use an Amiga just a few years ago because a musician friend used Bars and Pipes and had some unreleased music on his old Amiga 2000 and wanted WinUAE on his laptop. It was a fun experience.
I wish all the “polish” of AmigaOS and MorphOS would go into AROS somehow. It’s the only Amiga-like OS that can run on modern hardware and is open source.