Amiga & AROS Archive

The AROS Show has interviewed AROS and MorphOS developer Pavel 'Sonic' Fedin. He talks about his work on VESA, parallel.device API and more. When asked about AmigaOS 4, he replies: "Don't know what to tell here, my opinion is split up. At the one hand it's nice to see that someone develops something, and it's just interesting by itself. At the other hand their politics seems very aggressive to me, they tend to 'close up' their community and ditch everyone else."

The AROS Show has interviewed Marco van den Heuvel (also known as Blacky Stardust). He offers his thoughts on AROS, other VICE ports and what led him to become a VICE Developer.

A new version of WinAROS has been released. "WinAROS is a preinstalled AROS Environment that runs under Windows, using QEMU. WinAROS is a way to use AROS under Windows and try your programs, made with AmiDevCpp. The new Version comes with Themes and GhostScript installed."

AmiKit 1.3.0 has been released. "We are very proud to announce the AmiKit now supports modern icon formats. This is the first time the OS3.x based environment is able to show and use PNG, dual PNG and OS4 icons. Moreover, Directory Opus Magellan II (included in AmiKit) is able to use them too." Indulge yourself in the screenshots, boys and girls.

The new AROS Developer Robert Norris has been interviewed by the AROS Show. "One of the original goals for AROS was 100% compatibility with AmigaOS 3.1. This is a noble goal, but it's not particularly forward-looking. AmigaOS has moved on since then, and there will be no new m68k hardware, yet many AROS developers are intent on making sure everything they do can be made to work on the older systems. That's their perogative of course, but my concern is that by constantly looking backwards we're missing the opportunities in the future."

Genesi has 'announced' it is going to release AmigaOS4 for their EFIKA motherboard as soon as the next release of MorphOS is released. "We have clearly indicated in this thread, we don't need Hyperion's support to port OS4 to the EFIKA - legally or technically." True to the Amiga scene of the last few years, a discussion spanning 300 posts ensued. My take: I actually advocated 'porting' AmigaOS4 to Genesi hardware last year, but I do hope it all happens within the boundaries of the law and that the developers get what they deserve. Update: The latest post asks an interesting question.

"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.