Amiga & AROS Archive

Troika Releases Details on New AmigaOS4 Board

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.

Amiga on Your PC: AmiKit 1.2.0 Released

AmiKit 1.2.0 has been released. AmiKit is a freeware compilation of more than 300 of the finest Amiga programs (free/shareware). To be brief, AmiKit is the way to experience a high-end Classic AmigaOS on your Windows system. You need ROMs of the AmigaOS, which can easily be obtained by buying Amiga Forever. My take: I have used AmiKit myself, and I can attest it is the one of the finest, if not the finest, among its kind. Definitely recommended if you have AmigaOS ROMs.

History of the Amiga

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.

AmigaOS 4.0 New Memory System Revisited

"In a previous item, we described how the AmigaOS4.0 memory system works in terms of managing memory allocations from the top. However, there is more to allocating memory than that. The object caches of course work on memory that has already been mapped into the virtual memory space. But both the virtual address ranges, as well as the physical memory has to come from a source, too."

AROS Update: June

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.

WinAros Light Released

WinArosLight is a preinstalled AROS on a HD image, that runs under Windows using QEmu. WinAros Light targets developers, using AmiDevCpp to develop AROS programs. WinArosLight in combination with a program like ultraiso is a nice test environment for those programs. WinArosLight uses the latest AROS snapshot. Other than all that, it's just a really easy way of testing AROS. Download it from this page, 'WinArosLight.exe'.

Hyperion Licenses 3D Technology to Smiths Aerospace

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."

AROS January Update

The AROS team has posted their first update of 2006. "Georg Steger has fixed input preferences for mouse, in order to improve mice tracking and pointer precision on the screen. Mathias Rustler has updated documentation for users and developers, adding some nice hints and removing obsolete informations. You'll find signs of his work through this site. Mathias has also commited ExecuteStartup, a little tool that executes whatever application you'll copy in the SYS:WBstartup drawer. Thanks to Nick Andrews and Jack Patton AROS has got IRC and Telnet clients. In order to enable networking on hosted version of AROS, Michal Schulz has commited a .tap interface hidd for all Unix targets."

Apple Licensing Excess Hardware for AmigaOS4?

Just as the discussion surrounding the Pegasos II and AmigaOS4 is settling down, a new possibility for hardware for AmigaOS4 has arisen. PPCNux reports about an Amiga-branded G5 board- which is basically the motherboard of the iMac G5 without the AirPort slot, but with an Amiga sticker slapped on. Another reason why this is a fake is that the board lacks legacy ports, heresy for Amiga fans. PPCNux speculates that with the switch to x86, Apple might be left with excess stock on PPC hardware, and will be licensing them as Amiga hardware. This is supported by Hyperion's statement that they "are working with several hardware companies that want to provide hardware for AmigaOS4.0." Another possible indication is that Hyperion states that AmigaOS4 runs on the PPC 9xx series-- the G5 is the 970. Speculation, and probably a prank at best, but an interesting idea nonetheless.

Could Genesi Be the Solution for Hyperion’s Problems?

There is kind of a stir in the Amiga community. As Hyperion employees explained in an IRC chat, Hyperion suffers from a lack of hardware for the development (and thus sales) of AmigaOS4. However, what about Genesi? Genesi is the company behind the ODW, a PPC workstation that could potentially be the solution to Hyperion's lack-of-hardware problems. However, friction between the two companies is preventing them from coming to an agreement. More from the community here, and here. My take: I find this a rather silly situation. It is quite clear that Genesi is one of the few companies capable of offering a steady flow of PPC hardware for the AmigaOS, yet things in the past are preventing a financially interesting cooperation. And who suffer? Exactly-- Amiga fans.

Hyperion IRC Session Transcripts

Yesterday, Amiga-fans could participate in an IRC Q/A session with Hyperion Entertainment, the company behind AmigaOS4. You can read several transcripts, both edited as well as unedited, here. The main news is that AmigaOS4 will not be released this year; with the main reason for this being the lack of available hardware (which is being worked on). An update will, however, be released in January.

AROS Updates

"AROS has finally got a new, faster and smarter file system: Michal Schulz has ported SFS to the Amiga Research Operating System, so opening and saving lots of files won't take ages anymore, but just few seconds. Neil Cafferkey has written a Intel Pro/100 NIC driver, allowing support for i8255x family of network adapters. Marcel 'Frostwork' Unbehaun has created an AROS/PPC Live-CD for Pegasos computers."