Amiga & AROS Archive

"Hyperion Entertainment is very pleased to announce the immediate availability (for registered AmigaOne customers) of Amiga OS 4.0, The Final Update. Originally released in May of 2004, Amiga OS 4.0 is the most stable, modern and feature-rich incarnation to date of the multi-media centric operating system launched by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) in 1985 with which it still retains a high degree of compatibility. Amiga OS 4.0, The Final Update is the culmination of 5 years of development and takes the form of a stand-alone ISO image which contains a full installation of all Amiga OS 4.0 components. A list of new features can be found here. Availability of PowerPC hardware suitable for operation with Amiga OS 4.0 will be announced by third parties early 2007." Together with Microsoft selling Linux and Apple switching to Intel, this is the definitive proof that hell is now officially frozen. I sure know I'm taking ice skates with me to the grave.

The AROS team has published a new status update. "Our latest status update is about three months old, but in the meanwhile we didn't sit somewhere doing nothing. Lots of improvements and bugfixes have been made to several components of AROS, in order to make it work better."

Amiga Inc, thought to be dead after stopping all communication with the Amiga community, have reappeared. The long spell of silence was broken when they answered 25 questions from the readers at Amiga.org. In the answers, the CEO of Amiga Inc, Bill McEwen revealed some information that once again brought back some hope in the Amiga community. Hyperion Entertainment and their partners have been busy working on Amiga OS4, which has been in available in pre-release form since April 2004. The final release is held back by the lack of suitable PPC motherboards to run OS4 on, but this seems to be finally resolved, and a final release is expected this year. The Amiga.org interview left a lot of questions unanswered, especially with regards to Amiga Inc's plans for OS5. So to get a clearer picture of where they are headed, I asked Bill McEwen to answer some questions."

On 23rd and 24th September 2006 at Empoli's (near Florence) Palaesposizioni building the 2006 edition of Pianeta Amiga will take place. The convention, which gathers Italian Amiga users but also hosts alternative systems such as MorphOS and BeOS/Zeta, will celebrate its 10th birthday. Among the events: an Amiga Developers Conference, demo of the latest Amiga OS4 version, the Sputnik web browser, and the 'Samantha' project: new Amiga OS-compatible hardware.

It was 1997 and in these dark ages of the Amiga history, a few brave ones have embarked on a seemingly impossible journey. It is difficult to start from a clean slab, but complete rewrite of the AmigaOS Application Programming Interface (API), in open source domain, was the only option for Amiga community to gain control over destiny of the beloved platform. The Amiga Research Operating System (AROS) was born. Under, at times slow but steadfast progress, the vision is nearly complete. Not only is AROS almost feature-for-feature complete when compared to AmigaOS 3.x, but it has excelled many of the original design specifications.

A lot of hardware-related news today, but this one will probably mean the most to us alternative OS fans: it seems AmigaOS 4 has found hardware to actually run on. The board will have an IBM 750GL at 800 MHz with 1MB of L2 cache, and will support processors up to 1Ghz. Also: "One of the biggest changes to the Amy05 design from our first released specification is the addition of the AMD Geode CS5536 companion device. For Project Prometheus/Amy'05 this becomes Amy’s Southbridge." The current board is is a development board, and will be made available in a limited quantity for hardware testing/OS4 development.

The Amitlon Kernel Project has released new versions of its software. Amithlon is an emulation-based system allowing users to run AmigaOS 3.9 on regular x86 PC systems, without the overhead of having to load an underlying operating system, unlike WinUAE, UAE, Fellow, or AmigaXL.

The Amiga changed the computer industry. It was based on a multitasking operating system, rivaled the graphics power of some workstations and was affordable enough for home users. Unfortunately, Commodore struggled to maintain Amiga's lead, and through a number of bizarre business decisions (refusing to license the Amiga design to Sun), went bankrupt. Read about the history of the Commodore Amiga at Low End Mac.

The AROS team posted its latest monthly update. Foremost, a new version of the hosted AROS-PPC has been released: "This release depends on glibc 2.3.2 or newer. You need to give AROS some more RAM than the default allocation of 16 MB (leaves about 4 MB for applications). Start it using: ./aros -m 64 This will allocate 64 MB. As with all X11 hosted AROS versions you need to add Option "BackingStore" to the Device section of xorg.conf." The other news is that the website has been translated to German.

Cloanto has released its 2006 version of Amiga Forever, an all-in-one package for emulating the AmigaOS (1.x as well as 3.x) on any standard PC; OSNews reviewed the previous version. This release includes about 200MB of new Amiga games, as well as enhanced support for AmigaOS add-ons such as AmiKit, AmigaSYS, and AROS for Amiga.

The AROS team posted its latest monthly update. Several applications were ported or updated, including Lunapaint (read an interview with the developer, or take a look at some screenshots), a Commodore 8bit emulator, and various CD/DVD burning tools. Other than that, various bugfixes and such have also been implemented. For some screenshots of new applications and AROS features check the AE Gallery.

The AROS Show has an interview with AROS Developer Hogne T. "AROS Native gives me no troubles with compiling anything. I use it for the whole development process. I do not even run Linux Hosted at the moment. AROS Native with SFS has some problems with unix ported apps, and I have to compile in RAM:, but other than that, I use Native without any problems." Screenshots included.

It was a nice departure last week, to write about not so serious matters, in order to make fun of everything and everyone (including myself). Today, however, it's back to more serious matters (if you can call computer matters 'serious', of course): Amiga OS4. Or how it will fail utterly if Hyperion/Amiga Inc. don't get their heads out of the sand. Note: Sunday Eve Column.

Hyperion, the company behind AmigaOS 4.0, has found at least one way to generate revenue from AmigaOS 4.0. "Hyperion Entertainment VOF announces that it has licensed its 3D driver technology for ATI Radeon 9000 chipsets to Smiths Aerospace LLC. Hyperion's 3D driver technology is OpenGL ES compatible and was originally developed for Amiga OS 4, Hyperion's multi-media centric, small foot-print embedded OS."