Reviews of AmigaOS 4 are hard to come by, due to the rare nature of the operating system as well as the hardware it runs on. So, whenever a review does pop up, no matter how short, it’s worth a look. This review, posted in the forums of Amigaworld.net, takes a quick (very quick) look at the classic version of AmigaOS 4, released early December 2007.AmigaOS 4 comes in two variants. The first variant is the normal version, and is made for owners of the AmigaOne – which means three men and a cow can run this version. The other version is called AmigaOS 4 for classic machines, which means the Amiga 1200, 3000(T) or 4000(T) with a PowerPC accelerator board can run this version. This review is about the latter; the reviewer ran AmigaOS 4 on an A4000 with a CyberstormPPC 604e/060 233/50 MHz, a Voodoo4500 graphics card, an X-Surf network card, a Terratec512i-soundcard, and a SpiderII USB card.
The author likes the screen dragging features (which did not work on AmigaOS 3.9), its stability, speed, and the new look. He is fairly satisfied with the 68k emulation, which works at a reasonable speed. He misses a better shell and several applications (“Okay, there are a lot of things you can download from OS4Depot, but it would have been nice if the most useful things would have been preinstalled.”). Some things flat-out do not work or work badly. There are graphical remnant issues, the network card driver crashes quite often, screenblanker fails, and the Grim Reaper appears too frequently.
The review can barely be called as such, but as I said, with such a small operating system you have to make do with what’s handed to you.
Seems to me than an A1200 (or higher) with a suitable PPC card as a minimum requirement hardly constitutes ‘classic Amiga’ as most of us know it.
Oh well, at least now four men and a cow can use it 🙂
It was a horse AFAIR 😉
I cut my teeth on Commodore computers and I remember them fondly. I owned a C64, C128D, Amiga 500+, and Amiga 2000. I personally believe that had Commodore better managed its own affairs and stayed in business, the Commodore Amiga would be the computer of choice amongst today’s scientists and graphics / multimedia professionals. The Amiga was head and shoulders above the competition when it was in its prime and this trend would only have continued. What a great machine!!
WORD UP!
Impressing collection. I’ve still got some Amigae (what’s the correct plural?) around, 2 x A500, 2 x A600 and an A1200. Furthermore, 2 x C64 two C128 (a normal one and a D type) around, and I’d like to revive them (plug them in) in order to do something impressing, just like as it was in their era.
As it has been mentioned, the Amiga computers were impressing: 12 V input, video and audio (stereo) output, silent, standard connectors (parallel, serial) – great. And introducing “movie like” graphics while the PCs were still beeping stupidly and showing 80×25 characters on a monochrome screen… 🙂
Well, maybe. But NB that SGI introduced modern and powerful machines in this field of use, too. But maybe the standard of what users do like to have at home would have gotten towards Amiga computers.
Well said. In some regards, they still have advantages (“are superior”) to PCs that call theirselves “modern”.
Amiga 500 was probably the last computer to give me the WOW! factor. Were all so used to having PC’s around now it’ll never happen again. Shame!
I have often wondered if the “been there done that” feeling is responsible for the discontent to towards todays hardware, software.
No, it’s because you’re getting older.
Happens to everyone.
I’m definately getting uglier but older nah
Well, I wrote this comment on AOS4. Yes, it was not really a review due to the lack of time (for writing a real review) and due to the lack of abilities to write in (good) english.
But just for completeness, i want to point out here, that all interested users should read all comments to my “review” as i was wrong in some observations.
So, e.g. the x-surf network card device doesn’t crash anymore if you install the latest library updates or use the right settings, respectively.
EDIT: Thus, the speed and stability is amazing compared to AOS3.9
The thing, one can complain about is, that those libraries (and settings) should have been installed by the latest OS-Update (in february). If I never had written this little review in the amigaworld.net forum, I had never found out why my system crashes here and there
greetings,
nexus
Edited 2008-04-22 20:06 UTC
screenshots?
screenshots?
ask your favorite image search engine .
example screenshots: http://www.vesalia.de/e_amigaos4.htm
I sometimes check for vintage computers on eBay… and it’s amazing the prices that some Amigas can go up to. AOS4-capable machines reach the prices of a new computer, just because they can run this “new” OS, and I can’t understand why. Or better, I can understand why, but I can’t understand why people refuse to admit the truth 😉